The Day of Water

Spring Cleaning: Vegas

Last week I was in Las Vegas and I realized that--counterintuitively--it's a place of wild emotion. Vegas vibrates with manic-depressive waves, up and down. Exhilaration flies and despair plummets throughout the strip like ghosts in a movie. Truly a city of sin, Vegas normalizes things that are prohibited elsewhere. Vegas sells sin, wraps it up in "free" drinks and pushes constantly. Corruption coats the floor, tripping one up trying to find the way through labyrinthine casinos.

Like a deceptively tempting oasis, the strip rises out of waste drawing moths to its brilliance. Vegas’s global field of attraction accumulates here at the massive core of indulgence, a place unbound.

I was there for the Association of American Geographers annual meeting.

Many geographers were unhappy with such a happy/unhappy place, surrounded on all sides by the false glory of winning and the grinding emptiness of loss. Dollars flew through the air, fluttering to the sex-paved concrete. Vacuous gazes conducted flashy lights directly through scorched optical nerves to the frontal lobe. That's where prediction drives the chase brain endlessly around one more short corner. There is never anything around that corner. But third-eyes squeeze ever tighter to see around that corner. They focus further into the spinning future of imagined wealth and power and luck.

Sweet, capricious luck.

Calloused Hands

I'm am glad the next president mentioned these. They are certainly metaphorical for work in a time of hardship. I think they are also quite literal. Physical labor may return to the United States. I suppose it depends just how difficult the recession becomes.

But for now, I am glad for a president who inspires, who calls us to action, and whom we must continue to make accountable for his power. Obama has a chance to be great. Let's make him great by doing the work for him.

Peace.

History, Capitalism, and Culture

I am reading Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov." The piece is--as the title implies--concerned more with The Storyteller as a changing character in human history than with the particulars of Nikolai Leskov, a storyteller who bears the exemplary burden here.

It occurs to me on page 4 of the essay--at the first mention of capitalism--that there is a rich history of cultural interpretation available to EuroAmericans. It's primary subject is their own history. This is not to suggest that there is not such--or a very different--form of autointerpretation elsewhere. It is only significant because it is the shared cultural history of which I am both the flora and the fertilizer.

I study Asia, South Asia, the Himalaya, Nepal, Kathmandu and the cultural history as living culture that makes its home there. The kind of cultural interpretation that Benjamin and Habermas write about Europe may have something to offer analysis in Asia. But it may not. Not directly, at least. Many have used cultural interpretation to study Asian ways and ideas. It is not impossible, and it may not even be hard, but is it a good fit?

Being a theory head, my first response is to say, "Yes! Ideas are meant to be interwoven and interbred." And I will conclude that still. However, before going there, it is important to figure out how it is that EuroAmerican frameworks can help us in understanding what is going on elsewhere.

While I am admitting biases, I might as well also reveal that I am both a humanist and a constructivist. Based on my own experience, informed by reading a bunch, and--primarily--talking to people; I think that social forms are all contingent. (Note the universal claim to contingency!) They are contingent on many things. In fact, I would say that they are contingent on all things. Everything that has happened worked to created everything that is now. Perhaps you can see where I am going with this.

Difference is rife but comprehensive.

I diverge. The point is to say that Benjamin and Habermas may not be able to tell many anything about Himalayan cultural and political economic history, but they can tell me something about the history of the lens I use to understand Himalayan environments. What's more is Kathmandu--indeed most of the globe at this point--has been touched by that invisible, yet apparent, hand of capitalism. Thus their insight is doubly useful to a geographer interested in contemporary spatial practices even in a non-EuroAmerican place. Because there is no such remaining place. Just as there are no places untouched by cultural forces emerging elsewhere. With a good sense of deep history, it is increasingly hard to justify naming places with polar pure categories.

This can lead towards archaelogical questions concerning the birth place of culture. I have no comment on that. I aim only to be clear that the set and setting for this research is not separate from the history, capitalism, and culture characterized by Benjamin, Habermas, and a list of others.

Nepal Declared Republic Today

The first meeting of the Constituent Assembly (CA)--the body charged with writing Nepal's constitution and forming it's new government--was today, May 28th. Mere hours ago, the 601 member CA unanimously voted to declare Nepal a republic just before 11 PM Kathmandu Time.

This was the first step to real change in Nepal as it has the effect of stripping the King of his superhuman rights. While the declaration of a republic at this moment seems to be the birth of a new Nepal, it is actually a destructive moment for the old Nepal, the King's Nepal. Now amidst the rubble, the CA has the herculean task of lifting a new state out of those fallen edifices of monarchy and feudalism.

Jai Nepal.

An Epistemology of Hope

What if our way of knowing the world--our epistemology--were based more on what we would like to have happen in the world than what has happened? What if the way we thought about the world and the tools we used to access it were encoded with an implicit--or explicit--moral order? It wouldn't have to be too overbearing or specific. It might be as simple as: "do no harm" or "be nice" or "look for good." To some degree we already do this, but it seems that focusing on the historical record and the materially observable present limit what we can know about the world.

In the first, a historical perspective reveals the long cycles and processes of history--change in the past. There is nothing inherently unhopeful about this view. However, inertia is a powerful thing and there are several massive gravities flying quickly through our long and short histories. Primary among them I think of war. Certainly war is not a single lump of stuff like a planet or a simple Newtonian body. However, it is a vast collection of those things, among others. This leaves us with a plethora of conventional wisdom that says that war is inevitable and inexorable as it has characterized human history for quite a while. This strand also allows the sloppy slide into social darwinism which elevates--or demotes--social processes to the level of biological mutation and selection. For our more aggressive neighbors, life and history is a process of the strong surviving. To be fair to the historians I love and respect, history is also way of seeing what has worked and what has not in order to figure out how to do things better in the present and future. For radical historians, it is about figuring out how the stories we know about the past are nasty ways of hiding oppression, violence, and abuse. Worse, those stories may perpetuate the nastiness. History is fantastic for what it tells us about our past and about what we think about our past. For many history is a chronicle of facts. It is this view that I cannot countenance. It is this view--by far the most common way of thinking about history--that leads to me to condemn the hegemony of looking backwards.



So that brings us to the present. Here we are, kind of. Things are good; things are bad. Things are. How do we know these things? Well, we have very powerful instruments for knowing the world. First, we have our senses--are there five or six? Then we have microscopes, telescopes, orthoscopes, and a bunch of other scopes for seeing the world closer and in better focus. There is direct perception like so. Then there is the cascade of inferential knowledge that we have built on the regimentation of that direct perception. Inference is the principle best expressed by the old saying, "where there is smoke, there is fire." For a long time we have known that fire makes smoke. We also know that nothing else makes smoke. Therefore, when we see smoke--even if we cannot see the fire--we know the fire is there. Another example is a piece of iron in a lab or anywhere for that matter. If we see a piece of iron that has rusted we can infer that there is oxygen. We can't see the oxygen, but we know it is there because we know that oxygen and iron make rust. Thanks to microscopes, we can actually see that happen. We don't have to infer anymore. But what about those things that we cannot see directly and cannot infer based on previous direct perception? How do we know those things? Perhaps they don't exist. However, I would like to argue that there are many things that we don't see--and perhaps can't see--that do exist.

There are a bunch of questions that pop out of this one and I invite those questions from regular or occasional or even random readers.

The first one that I will bring up--and then let this thread go where it will--is the question of who? This shocks me as much as it does you, I am sure. Recently, I have been working on Where in a big way and continue to do so. Where--in this case--is perhaps best answered by who. In the case of the nagas, there is a being--an existant--known directly and inferentially in South Asia that is seemingly inaccessible by our ways of knowing the world. Traditional "Western" (god, i hate that term) empirics--ways of experiencing--are not capable of knowing that nagas exist.

It may be logically impossible to know something that is neither directly perceived nor inferred. But, what if it is only one group of people that fails to do so? What if there is another group of people who does one or both of those things? How would we go about knowing what is going on in that group's knowledge system?

For all this talk about existence, etc. I have to admit that the existence of nagas or any other being--for that matter--is only as interesting as it says something about our world and how we live in it. It is more important that nagas exist as a category of practice for some folks than that they exist as magical beings in the water that surrounds us everywhere.

So this is where I would like to suggest an epistemology of hope. History and Science try their best to be fair and balanced--like FOX News, I hear. This is wonderful. However, as far as accounting for our future and for the depth of humanity and the world we inhabit, I far prefer to think a bit broader. Why exclude ways of thinking about the world that may lead us somewhere happier, healthier, with a bit less suffering?

Willful Ignorance

It's a phrase I have been dropping like bombs over Baghdad since I have returned to the US. It is a common affliction among people--humans that is. I suppose it is possible for nonhumans to be willfully ignorant, but I have little to go on with that possibility.

The phrase might be interpreted to be oxymoronic. You know: Military Intelligence and all that. But, I don't think it is. I think it describes a subtle loop that feeds itself its own waste. In a way its widespread practice is a violation of that very old taboo that humans have built into their second nature: don't eat where you shit.

How can we be willfully ignorant? Doesn't ignorance preclude choosing to be ignorant? Time--as we know--heals quite well. Each small moment of awareness that we abandon for a return to nasty habits of ignorance slices through pre-existing ignorance. But the cut hurts a little bit and so we back away from the blade of knowledge and let the wound heal a bit so that we can continue on with whatever daily lives we lead without looking into the laceration to see the rich crimson blood that might leak forth.

This is all to reiterate the tired platitude of cultural studies: it is historically contingent! We can be willfully ignorant because in small moments of insight we see the extensive damage our very mundane lives do to the environment and to other people. But, given the difficulty of changing habits we have developed over years of months of weeks of days of hours of minutes of momentary replication, we slide back into them. The knowledge-wound still hurts, but we heal and/or bury it in order to carry on.

Awareness of all our transgressions, violences, and wounds is too much to fully realize. Reluctantly, I must admit to Freud's insight on this front.

I shant leave you with no hope, though. This is the challenge. To hope in the face of the dreadful realization that each American is responsible for scores of killings and even more dispossession around the world.

The hope is this: the hidden wounds of ages of violence are all forgivable. In fact, they are the sources of enlightenment themselves. In the wounds are the seeds of compassion, the kind that gives us the capacity to understand the suffering of each person upon which we have delivered pain and from which we have received it.

Thank G...er...

Things Gone Change

Things are looking exciting and different in Nepal as the Maoists are doing increasingly well in the gradually returning election results. This election is about forming a group of representatives to create a state, to write a constitution.

The success of the Maoists is predicated on many things. Topping my list, however, are two items:

1. Nepal is full of poor rural folks who have been neglected for a long time by the ruling elites in Kathmandu.

2. The Maoists are violent. Yeah, that's right: power comes from the barrel of a gun. One of my favorite Mao quotes. Brilliant man, wasn't he? This is a bothersome bit here: the Maoists have used violence to secure power. Admittedly, they could have done worse. Admittedly, a good portion of the 13,000 some deaths over the period of their revolution were carried out by the government's army and police. But, Maoist violence--threats and attacks--continued up to election day. Bad news.

Let's hope they can put a cork in it as they try to form a civil government.

Let's hope for Nepal.

Nepali Elections

Things are a bit tense here. They are also quite relaxed; it is Nepal after all. Tomorrow is the Constituent Assembly election. This is the political poll that will--hopefully--determine the appropriate group of representatives to write a new constitution for this fair country which used to be the world's last remaining Hindu Kingdom.

To facilitate this polling the UN, the Carter Center, the EU,and many other foreign organizations have flooded the country to watch, help, and lend some witness this historic event.

Man-on-the-street is a bit less than optimistic, unfortunately. I know many people who will not vote. Some because they think it will change nothing and some because they can't; they are not citizens. A good number of Tibetans living in Nepal are not citizens.

Most dramatically, there will be a curfew from midnight, the beginning of Thursday, April 10, for twenty four hours, I believe. The cops are already out and the traffic is already light. A week long drought of alcohol combined with a week long government holiday has resulted in an odd sense of calm before what might be a storm of recounts, cheating, stealing, violence, etc. It also might be a calm before a calm in which some semblance of legitimacy is conferred on the process and it all comes out alright.

Keep Nepal in your prayers. This gentle places needs some loving these days.

On Ends and Beginnings

Cessation and Arising.

The constant flux of being that has come to be called becoming, but which still does not cut it. Arising and Falling. Things fall apart. Things grow up and are born. Things are not really things in that thingy way we think of them as being things.

What do we do with this? How do we know and talk about a world that is constantly moving and changing, growing and dying? How do we exist in such a world? Perhaps most importantly, how do we make such a world a better place to be, live, grow and die?

Well, these are the nuts, as they say in poker. These are the questions under all the other questions, I reckon. These are the questions, who, by their very asking, make the world a better place. That is the way I want to change the world. Asking these questions and all the questions that precipitate them and all the questions that cascade from them is one step to awakening ourselves and our world to the reality of themselves.

I can't say that reflexivity, recursive understanding, self-knowledge, or awareness is the end of everything, the soteriological goal, but I can say they make a damn good next step.

That is all I can ask for: the next step; a move towards peace and away from suffering.

Good luck, Nepal. Good luck, World.