Friday, July 22, 2011
Indigenous self-empowerment
The problem with indigenous lobbying is that it requires indigens to unite under a common cause. The indigenous, when denoting comparatively primitive social models, are a group 'frozen in time', and as such have not moved past small tribal units. Clearly larger populations require more administrative work and more social organisation than small intimate units, and one might even propose that rapid population growth reflects an institutionalisation of birth and death. As most indigenous cultures are parochial, decentralised and nomadic, there is a natural struggle against, or active resistance against, homogenisation. Their failure to organise makes them redundant in the political arena.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Pause for effect
There are some who pause for effect
and others who talk in unbroken, free-flowing sentences
for effect
do not listen to the smooth talkers, because what they have to say
are not words, but memories
and others who talk in unbroken, free-flowing sentences
for effect
do not listen to the smooth talkers, because what they have to say
are not words, but memories
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
There's too much to tell you all. I say this because I sometimes think about the past, but what I mean to say is that 'the past' as I remember it has a terrible dissonance when the memories you collect start competing with each other. There is this sense that every individual memory you still have is at arms with all the others, just trying to find some common theme to explain their existence.
I have become instantly certain of my imminent death at the merciless hand of coronary artery disease, and the rate of my typing this letter has slowed as a result of intermittent breaks to check my own vital signs. My chest feels like it's going cold and I am more conscious of the dull ringing in my ears, the one that never goes away unless you drown it out with loud music. They say the developers of the first iPod cut a deal with the Ear Doctors Union of America. Under the terms of the contract, Apple would increase the max volume of the device to an obscenely high decibel count in exchange for a lucrative sum. It makes me angry, but as the Evangelical musician/millionaire assures me of, is that they will answer to God for blowing out the eardrums of millions.
I feel a strong urge to write something of substance before I pass out from this deliberative state. I will begin now, but I will stop if it becomes trite.
The train left the station several hours ago, and it is already not long until we shall be in the big city. We fall asleep ruefully, awkwardly rushed and contorted, often in middle of the carriages. We became obstacles to anyone wishing to move around without restraint, as one so often yearns to do on a voyage. I find one of the worst things about being an adult is not having an excuse for acting out on airplanes, looking in the bathroom mirror at that decrepit figure and not even being allowed to yell out how much it fucking sucks. That just makes it suck more.
Like every other time i've caught the train to the big city, I am awoken by the irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance, each driven into the coastline like darts landing on different indicators of value. The irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance makes me fancy that the train line is is a tiny blood vessel in the eye of the dormant giant Urbania, a lazy brute constituted almost entirely of bottleshops and cement. I wind down the window, inviting in thick wisps of smoke from the engine room of the train. This annoys my compatriots greatly, but I see it as an important submission to the ever-present coarseness and flippancy of the big city. The smoke fills the cabin and the Winter air makes everyone's teeth rattle in chorus with the shrill train on the tracks.
I arrive in the city with my friends and one suggests we all pay a visit to someone he knows in the area. I express disinterest, imagining an apartment practically identical--furniture and all--to the cabin of the train, but add that he should come out and show us around. 'A local will able to things about this city that we as tourists would otherwise never be allowed to see, and will never so much as notice in our own lives, where we get on much as likepeople do', I would say, being of the opinion that locals, acting in any capacity, are indispensable. I am hardly of the opinion that you should accost and pester locals in the hope that they will strike at you and spit a word at you that doesn't mean anything, that you might recount it to people as one of the memorable moments of the trip. Instead, just enjoy the locals like a theatregoer enjoys the escape from their lives to watch actors pretend to act out their own. And while their problems will seem mundane, the tragecy will not be something you can set your watch to as in the final act of a tragedy, their unwinding is acted out before you in every moment. The bus driver sweating a puddle and having his arms pulled around by the steering wheel as he navigates through the trafficjaded student thinking only of future eminence, wearing a blindfold of anticipation as the world goes by. The affected disinterest in the boundless the beauty of their city never fails to depress me.
I am woken from momentary stupor by what appears to be a party. I don't see anyone that I know and begin to panic, so I breath in semi-quavers and calmly towards the bowl of fruit punch that sits half empty on the table, orange wedges floating around like unused inflatable pool toys. 'I wasn't expecting to see you here', I hear from behind me spoken incredulously, and turn around. It's Urilla, a girl I know from university; I sometimes bump into her at the coffee stand, and perhaps for this reason she has always struck me as a person who needs coffee to affect interest, in people and ideas.
'I don't know how I got here', I reply.
'I saw you come in an hour ago with a group of people. Since then you've kind of just been here'. This is, at least, my best guess at what she said. The music bounces off the walls of the apartment like a caged animal. She asks if I want to go for a walk with her.
'Somewhere quiet', she says. I nod my head ironically, almost begrudgingly, as though i'm not suffering even more than she is.
Walking to the door, I take the opportunity to appraise Urilla. She is pale and strikingly beautiful, in an aenemic sort of way, but everything else about her attempts to conceal her attractiveness as though it were a burden. Her black hair hangs over her eyes like decaying flower petals, and it looks as though she has not removed her eyemakeup since she first applied it as a teenager. Nonetheless, as we walk to the door every guy on the room gets the same idea--that he might win her over by treating her a little nicer than she treats herself, which is not at all.
END
The tourist represents a state of being in which I becomes overwhelmed by all the different ways of handling this situation--freedom from employment, physical freedom, from the people you know, and the places you frequent. Some tourists can't handle freedom that isn't ideological, freedom you can touch and know to be present in yourself. I hold out my hand in front of me and make basic some gestures, clenching my fist, counting to ten on my fingers, the same gestures I saw being made by an amputee with his bionic hand on television.
To truly enjoy himself, the tourist must not spend a second of his time on the phone to his loved ones giving stock of all the exciting activities which gave shape to his day. He must positively disassociate telephones and computers with people. They say the adoration of portraits and artistic likenesses represents a tragic flaw in the human species. By 'they', I am referring of course to the people who are able to imagine their idols in non-physical or semi-physical form, like justice or adventure. With this group the tourist is affiliated.
The image of the tourist himself changes depending on who you're talking to; the traveller is only one of the possible identities of the tourist. The insatiable traveller sometimes sees a dramatic shift in his own personality when he is travelling. He sleeps with a few women, more perhaps than he would have living at home, and arrives at the asinine opinion that he doesn't want to go back to the way things were before the departure date of his return ticket.
He travels relentlessly all throughout his life, but never actually discovers that he was unhappy with it. This was incidently the reason developed a partiality to his travel self over his unhappy life self, as most people with unhappy lives do. When the traveller runs out of money he is forced to return home, where he has a monumental decision about his identity waiting for him: select a reason you will endure a life you otherwise wouldn't endure living. It seems awfully melodramatic, but this is honestly what the traveller contemplates when faced with the mundanity of a normal life.
One option, the more popular option, is to work for a living like my parents did. The colonist fills his timetable with engagements and disavows travel for distracting him from the 'important things in life'. Really he has come to know the only important thing in life, attempting to align your everyday lifestyle as closely as possible to that of the luxurant traveller, who uses money instead of opportunism to gain enjoyment. He is horribly lazy and gives his credit card to anyone willing to subordinate themselves to him in any way that he wishes. Fortunately there are billion dollar industries set up solely to contain him like a dam contains water. In doing so they keep him and his kind away from the rest of us, for he is insufferable and wholly incapable of conversation.
Fantasize about quitting your job on a whim and backpacking for years, but never ever actually do it
The first thing I have discovered and the first thing worth discovering about travel is what people see in it. I have ridden this train with my family many times and every time I discovered to my delight that they are much more affable when they take time away from their lives. I came to the naive conclusion that 'life' was good, but that they lacked scenery and perhaps culture, two things I have since become reliant on.
'Holiday life' was just us taking advantage of our ability to fly around the world, or rather that is how I saw it at the time. I have no doubt that even from that young age I had some rudimentary understanding of money, how it is possible to make lofty assumptions of a person's wealth by the car that they drove and the clothes that they worth, and that money was roughly equivalent to enjoyment. Perhaps I hadn't yet learned that it must be exchanged for hours of your life, but if someone had told me this I would only have been more excited, possessing a fortune of the stuff myself.
I turn into the The tourist looks back on the variable formula for holiday enjoyment with regret.
I have become instantly certain of my imminent death at the merciless hand of coronary artery disease, and the rate of my typing this letter has slowed as a result of intermittent breaks to check my own vital signs. My chest feels like it's going cold and I am more conscious of the dull ringing in my ears, the one that never goes away unless you drown it out with loud music. They say the developers of the first iPod cut a deal with the Ear Doctors Union of America. Under the terms of the contract, Apple would increase the max volume of the device to an obscenely high decibel count in exchange for a lucrative sum. It makes me angry, but as the Evangelical musician/millionaire assures me of, is that they will answer to God for blowing out the eardrums of millions.
I feel a strong urge to write something of substance before I pass out from this deliberative state. I will begin now, but I will stop if it becomes trite.
The train left the station several hours ago, and it is already not long until we shall be in the big city. We fall asleep ruefully, awkwardly rushed and contorted, often in middle of the carriages. We became obstacles to anyone wishing to move around without restraint, as one so often yearns to do on a voyage. I find one of the worst things about being an adult is not having an excuse for acting out on airplanes, looking in the bathroom mirror at that decrepit figure and not even being allowed to yell out how much it fucking sucks. That just makes it suck more.
Like every other time i've caught the train to the big city, I am awoken by the irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance, each driven into the coastline like darts landing on different indicators of value. The irridescent glow of the buildings in the distance makes me fancy that the train line is is a tiny blood vessel in the eye of the dormant giant Urbania, a lazy brute constituted almost entirely of bottleshops and cement. I wind down the window, inviting in thick wisps of smoke from the engine room of the train. This annoys my compatriots greatly, but I see it as an important submission to the ever-present coarseness and flippancy of the big city. The smoke fills the cabin and the Winter air makes everyone's teeth rattle in chorus with the shrill train on the tracks.
I arrive in the city with my friends and one suggests we all pay a visit to someone he knows in the area. I express disinterest, imagining an apartment practically identical--furniture and all--to the cabin of the train, but add that he should come out and show us around. 'A local will able to things about this city that we as tourists would otherwise never be allowed to see, and will never so much as notice in our own lives, where we get on much as likepeople do', I would say, being of the opinion that locals, acting in any capacity, are indispensable. I am hardly of the opinion that you should accost and pester locals in the hope that they will strike at you and spit a word at you that doesn't mean anything, that you might recount it to people as one of the memorable moments of the trip. Instead, just enjoy the locals like a theatregoer enjoys the escape from their lives to watch actors pretend to act out their own. And while their problems will seem mundane, the tragecy will not be something you can set your watch to as in the final act of a tragedy, their unwinding is acted out before you in every moment. The bus driver sweating a puddle and having his arms pulled around by the steering wheel as he navigates through the trafficjaded student thinking only of future eminence, wearing a blindfold of anticipation as the world goes by. The affected disinterest in the boundless the beauty of their city never fails to depress me.
I am woken from momentary stupor by what appears to be a party. I don't see anyone that I know and begin to panic, so I breath in semi-quavers and calmly towards the bowl of fruit punch that sits half empty on the table, orange wedges floating around like unused inflatable pool toys. 'I wasn't expecting to see you here', I hear from behind me spoken incredulously, and turn around. It's Urilla, a girl I know from university; I sometimes bump into her at the coffee stand, and perhaps for this reason she has always struck me as a person who needs coffee to affect interest, in people and ideas.
'I don't know how I got here', I reply.
'I saw you come in an hour ago with a group of people. Since then you've kind of just been here'. This is, at least, my best guess at what she said. The music bounces off the walls of the apartment like a caged animal. She asks if I want to go for a walk with her.
'Somewhere quiet', she says. I nod my head ironically, almost begrudgingly, as though i'm not suffering even more than she is.
Walking to the door, I take the opportunity to appraise Urilla. She is pale and strikingly beautiful, in an aenemic sort of way, but everything else about her attempts to conceal her attractiveness as though it were a burden. Her black hair hangs over her eyes like decaying flower petals, and it looks as though she has not removed her eyemakeup since she first applied it as a teenager. Nonetheless, as we walk to the door every guy on the room gets the same idea--that he might win her over by treating her a little nicer than she treats herself, which is not at all.
END
The tourist represents a state of being in which I becomes overwhelmed by all the different ways of handling this situation--freedom from employment, physical freedom, from the people you know, and the places you frequent. Some tourists can't handle freedom that isn't ideological, freedom you can touch and know to be present in yourself. I hold out my hand in front of me and make basic some gestures, clenching my fist, counting to ten on my fingers, the same gestures I saw being made by an amputee with his bionic hand on television.
To truly enjoy himself, the tourist must not spend a second of his time on the phone to his loved ones giving stock of all the exciting activities which gave shape to his day. He must positively disassociate telephones and computers with people. They say the adoration of portraits and artistic likenesses represents a tragic flaw in the human species. By 'they', I am referring of course to the people who are able to imagine their idols in non-physical or semi-physical form, like justice or adventure. With this group the tourist is affiliated.
The image of the tourist himself changes depending on who you're talking to; the traveller is only one of the possible identities of the tourist. The insatiable traveller sometimes sees a dramatic shift in his own personality when he is travelling. He sleeps with a few women, more perhaps than he would have living at home, and arrives at the asinine opinion that he doesn't want to go back to the way things were before the departure date of his return ticket.
He travels relentlessly all throughout his life, but never actually discovers that he was unhappy with it. This was incidently the reason developed a partiality to his travel self over his unhappy life self, as most people with unhappy lives do. When the traveller runs out of money he is forced to return home, where he has a monumental decision about his identity waiting for him: select a reason you will endure a life you otherwise wouldn't endure living. It seems awfully melodramatic, but this is honestly what the traveller contemplates when faced with the mundanity of a normal life.
One option, the more popular option, is to work for a living like my parents did. The colonist fills his timetable with engagements and disavows travel for distracting him from the 'important things in life'. Really he has come to know the only important thing in life, attempting to align your everyday lifestyle as closely as possible to that of the luxurant traveller, who uses money instead of opportunism to gain enjoyment. He is horribly lazy and gives his credit card to anyone willing to subordinate themselves to him in any way that he wishes. Fortunately there are billion dollar industries set up solely to contain him like a dam contains water. In doing so they keep him and his kind away from the rest of us, for he is insufferable and wholly incapable of conversation.
Fantasize about quitting your job on a whim and backpacking for years, but never ever actually do it
The first thing I have discovered and the first thing worth discovering about travel is what people see in it. I have ridden this train with my family many times and every time I discovered to my delight that they are much more affable when they take time away from their lives. I came to the naive conclusion that 'life' was good, but that they lacked scenery and perhaps culture, two things I have since become reliant on.
'Holiday life' was just us taking advantage of our ability to fly around the world, or rather that is how I saw it at the time. I have no doubt that even from that young age I had some rudimentary understanding of money, how it is possible to make lofty assumptions of a person's wealth by the car that they drove and the clothes that they worth, and that money was roughly equivalent to enjoyment. Perhaps I hadn't yet learned that it must be exchanged for hours of your life, but if someone had told me this I would only have been more excited, possessing a fortune of the stuff myself.
I turn into the The tourist looks back on the variable formula for holiday enjoyment with regret.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Seeing the world from behind the veil of self-awareness
The trees swayed violently in a single direction and gave the impression that they were hairs on a human head being combed by a rushed barber. It was not a time to leave the house, the wind was so strong; the people feared leaving the houses, and so they became swollen with people who lit fires inside of them. They lit fires and they brooded as people often do in the home. Some were forced to interact with their families--in the room where the fireplace was. Some just chose to lie naked on their heated tile floors. They gradually repaired the family's structure while rubbing their hands together and breathing into the space between them.
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