Back From Blog Haitus - Passions

I recently read "On Stories" by Richard Kearney that began my mind working in all sorts of directions. I was captivated by his discussion of the limits of storytelling. This refers to events so awesome and singular that they resist a narrative framework that contextualizes them - to narrate them somehow diminishes their importance or their factuality. The example Kearney uses is the Holocost. One of the problems for these events is how do you integrate them into larger histories if you cannot transform them into stories that place them within a historical continuum. How do you represent unspeakable horror in storytelling?

And from here I started thinking about passion paintings - paintings representing the pain and suffering of Jesus. Depending on your belief system this may or may not represent unspeakable horror - but it does share an element with Holocost retellings - the idea that we must remember this event. In the Holocost we must remember so that it never happens again, in the case of the Passion we must remember the foundations of Christianity (the belief that Christ suffered for the sins of man kind) .

Kearney sort of reaches an impasse however in that there are certain atrocities - in the case of civil war it seems - where we want to forget. To paraphrase Alan Watts, just as we need a memory we also need a forgettory. That to hold on to certain events prevent the building of a healing narrative and dooms a people to live in constant turmoil - or to live in their turbulent past. Narratives, historical narratives, allows the past to become history rather than persist as current events. I am not quiet sure what Kearney's criterion for forgetting versus remembering, really where is the limit of storytelling?

So I have been thinking about what modern passion representations would look like. Representing the singular suffering of an individual in an attempt to both memorialize and historicize and communicate.

Finally this sort of singularity of human suffering and the horizon of storytelling reminds me of another horizon of representation - Kant's notion of the sublime (In the Critique of Judgement). The sublime is the pleasure that comes from 1) something we understand with our mind but cannot experience with our senses (what does it really mean that the earth is 238857 from the moon - how can we comprehend that - how can we experience that) 2) something that we experience with our senses but not with our mind - i thing of meditation or spirtual experiences, or extreme physical exertion (bikram yoga).
How do we represent these things?

Apologies for bad Kantian interpretation you Kant scholars out there.

The Triumph of Video

This morning I have been watching some ted conferences while working on my social software projects:
Some enjoyable ones were: Taryn Simon, Theo Jansen, and Hans Rosling

I also like watching concerts on youtube - I dont look for audio anymore i look like video.
It is an evolution that I am watching/listening to video while working because I used to watch/listen to audio tapes/lectures. Now I am moving from audial to video.

So what is going to happen when everyone has a video camera? Is everyone going to make little narrative fictions? I dont really think so, rather I think there will be lots of 'instructables' . I wonder though if fiction is at a lull right now? The new media/democratized media in a sense is creating a fiction itself and the challenge is to find the reality in that narrative rather than the unreality in that narrative. Once we figure out what is true we can then create fictions. People have always told stories, but what is the content of those stories? Histories, mythologies, philosophies, fictions. At some level they are all instructables - telling people what to do, what they ought to do, what has been done, etc. We no longer couch most of our instruction in narrative frameworks. I dont know if this matters. The reason to include a narrative framework is to probably improve recall. Recall is now unnecessary because everything is on the web (I dont believe this but this is the prevailing view)

I just started reading Madame Bovary right now, and Charles is disparaged for his memory. He is a mimic not an original, or i suppose he is re-acting not acting. What is with the western war against memory??!?

I am listening to some Rexalls which I really enjoy - it reminds me of The Doors- Very cool stuff!

Saturday in Lilongwe

Today was my first saturday in lilongwe. I celebrated it by sleeping in till 9:30. Today I took care of some errands - bought a wifi card, got some basic necessities from the supermarket (shoprite). I also took the opportunity to walk around old-town Lilongwe (it is like 2 streets). I made friends with a tchatcha salesman - fantastic - who took me through all of his paintings. I wandered in an out of shops and stalls. Mostly I wandered and took pictures. I would like to go on a hike somewhere, or visit lake Malawi. Maybe next weekend. I still have not had any local Malawian cuisine. All the food here is european or indian. I had indian tonight in fact. I think Anthony Bourdain should do a No Reservations Malawi - to help foodies who travel here.

Today I also met with Josiah, a researcher at Mzuzu University. He stopped by Lilongwe on his way back from Blantyre (Malawi's capital). Sadly, we had an electrical outage in the middle of my RapidSMS demo and I blew the ac adaptor for my cell/modem. Damn you belkin power surge protector - you are worthless! The good news is that this will force me to integrate RapidSMS with a usb phone (like an ericsson). Josiah and I decided that I should o Mzuzu U and hold a lecture on RapidSMS, Django, and Python - so students/profs and use the system for their own projects and for data collection in the field. He's setting up a system for me and I'll be going there early Sept.

Thats about it - I wish I could upload the pictures, but the network connection is a bit slow. I attempted to ftp the pictures earlier, but I am blocked on everything but port 80.

Time for some reading, movie watching, some meditation, and a beer. These nightly beers cant be good for me - but it is helping me stay vegeterian - at least that is the excuse I am giving myself.

I have put down Development as Freedom and I'm now reading Globalization edited by Arjun Appadurai. It is a collection of essays about... Globalization - I am currently on the 3rd essay. The first two seemed a bit meandering, the high point was a colorful map of the vectors of movement and influence in Africa. I love maps. The third essay, though, is a lot of fun. Its by Andreas Huyssen on the contemporary obsession with memory - basically he is discussing modern obsession with museums/memorials and the creation of the Holocaust as a supra-national atrocities trope (where as the Rwandan Genocide for example is national - it is not used as a universal symbol for attrocities nor are there memorial museums around the world - as there are with the Holocaust). The essay just started to discuss the modern complaint that the art of memory is no longer taken seriously - people don't have to remember anything they just need to know how to access a memory (or piece of information).

I am totally obsessed with memory, and memory and the construction of meaning, memory and the construction of experience, memory devices like memory palaces, people with incredible memories - and of course, with the Alan Watts quote "Just as you need a memory, you also need a forgettory." The forgettory - also the name of my interminable novel ( a novel that I will now have to change to include a museum theme)