Trapped in Time

We are so trapped, the trappings have become us

We wear it, speak it and have become it

Children of history, yet it is the now that has its stranglehold on us

The trappings woven so many times over

Glued to the skin, and penetrating beneath

No difference between the trappings and the trapped

It’s like the scaffolding that has folded into the building

If being thus trapped is the human condition

And every attempt to escape only tightens the web

And the best of human intentions

With rhetoric of escape and freedom

With vain repetitions and rituals

Present only mirages of liberation

Then how is one to live? How is one to get out?

With no religion, no ideology, no state, no god able to detrap!

What should the self do? How should it be free?

What about the self’s journey inwards

Penetrating, piercing, meticulously making past every layer of trapping

Reaching beneath to touch one’s skin, one’s flesh, one’s very bone

And even the marrow below!

Flesh meets flesh – the touch, touched and the toucher merge

Don’t let any fool’s rhetoric confuse you, nor be foolhardy

It is only in that moment of self-touch can one see the beyond

The beyond of the self and the trappings

And in that sight, one flies, leaving the trappings behind

Transforming Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing

‘If someone gives you a present, what do you say?’ is an oft-repeated question that parents pose to their young kids. Soon after the third or fourth time of finding oneself in this situation and being asked the same question yet once again, the child, with a blush covering her face and her eyes capturing a hint of shame, replies, ‘thank you’ first to the parent and then, turning, repeats ‘thank you’ once again to that ‘someone’ who had put that beautiful toy in her hands. You, the generous bearer and giver of that toy, lean down to her and smile back a reply, ‘you are welcome!’ Hearing that, the little girl takes the cue and flees, clutching possessively her new toy and running to her favourite corner, where she is away from those loving prying eyes, eager to look at the gift, the beautiful doll now securely in her hands. Watching the child run out of their horizons, everyone else, standing nearby and witnessing this happy-ritual, turn to one another and break into small talk. Of course the talk is not about the weather, which incidentally should have been the focus of the conversation, even as heavy storms gather without a sound outside the double-glazed windows, but the conversation is centred upon the ritual that was just performed. ‘What a well-behaved, lovely girl!’ remarked an aunt. ‘Did you catch that joy on her face when she opened the present?’ murmured another. ‘I do like how Pete and Jane bring up their kids. Her “thank you” conveyed such genuine gratitude’, claimed the giver of the present. These social rituals not only perform the rite of giving within modern societies, but also function as sites of training of acceptable social norms and mores, particularly the expression of ‘gratitude’, for the next generation.

At first blush, the vignette painted above appears flawless, rather a model of how gratitude must be negotiated within any social space. However, while the rite of giving taught the little girl to say ‘thank you’ it did not in any way explore for her what ‘gratitude’ entails leave alone its significance. Probably, if you or I were asked the significance of ‘gratitude’, we too as well might fumble for words. ‘Of course gratitude is being thankful’ you would retort, but then that is just replacing one term with another. What does it mean to be thankful or grateful? Albeit, there is a difference even between these two terms and the meanings they embody. However, my interest here is not to indulge merely in linguistic or conceptual gymnastics, rather to interrogate the mantra of gratitude that accompanies the rite of giving within social life.

My argument here is that the understanding of gratitude has been reduced to a civil and moral value by a liberal ideology for which ‘thank yous’ and ‘sorrys’ are necessary to maintain the façade of secular well-being. Most of us are soaked within liberalism to such an extent, like a fish in water, that we are unable to even articulate it as a form of life, one tradition among many, leave alone critique it. These terms are used regularly within our liberal societies often as a mantra, performing a speech-act, within the performance of the larger rituals of giving and reparation respectively. These terms have been commoditised and perform as objects of social transaction through which social equilibrium is maintained. In the bargain the underlying processes and significance of a term like gratitude is lost to a generation that venerates the language of ‘thanks’.

‘Enough critique, come on, spill out the processes and significance of gratitude that you mention and yet continue to shroud’, you remark acidly. Of course you don’t believe that I have anything profound to add to the existing common understanding of ‘gratitude’. But, it’s my turn to retort, ‘my work is half done, if I have made you think critically about the term gratitude, something I am sure you have not done in all your voicing of thanks!’ I exclaim. Without giving room for derision, I start rambling about ‘gratitude’, of course, hoping, believing, that as the rambling progresses, new understandings will emerge, evolve, and become articulated. If there were other ways of renewal and transformation, books would be written on them, or maybe those books are indeed written and do exist. But even those works can hardly miss the fact that ramblings are precursors to revelation. I think it would be wise to cite some evidence for suggesting that one discovers what one wants to say amidst rambling about it, and that without rambling or writing out, one has nothing to discover, as there is precisely nothing to discover prior to the act of discovering which I claim here to be the ‘skill of rambling or writing’. Let me cite what the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the present Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University, had to say about something similar to rambling or writing in pursuit of revelation or discovery:

Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written! But I think, again, it will ring bells in some of those who are trying to write. Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head. I hope we never get to that point and I very much doubt that we ever will. But meanwhile writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being and so it is true of prose as with poetry. - 

See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1998/rowan-williams-on-writing

Of course, I have gone on a tangent, to talk about the ‘act of writing’ while I should be writing about gratitude! However, this detour is not merely to justify my method or justification for how I aim to think about gratitude, rather, I claim that in this detour is found insights with regard to the processes underlying the language of gratitude that I would like to explicate. I would like to claim that there are three insights in the above quote about the ‘act of writing’ that reveal the mechanisms underlying the mantra of gratitude, which has unfortunately been forgotten in our liberal society that instructs on showering platitudes.

The first insight draws attention to the posture of enquiry preceding and enveloping the act of writing. Williams, elaborating the point made by the Welsh poet, Lewis, in ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ writes, ‘in writing…the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is.’ The insight here is about the posture of enquiry that is begging a discovery or a receiving or a reception. The stress is on the posture of ‘wondering’ in other words enquiring. I claim that writing is the most evident site of enquiry. When one picks up a pen to write, or settles one’s fingers over a keyboard, the primary posture one is adopting, often unconsciously, is the posture of enquiry. For words to appear and sentences formed, different strategies that come to horizon begin to articulate, different strands of thought take form, and even as ink meets paper or keys strike, these strands converge and an enquiry takes shape. I want to claim further that this posture of enquiry must be treated as an ontological posture, in which human life is lived. It is a certain way of being human, and perhaps one could say, that the primal human posture, irrespective of one’s waistline, is the posture of enquiry.

The second insight consolidates the posture of enquiry into a visible act of questing, and this is revealed in the Williams’ idea that ‘writing is an act’. This translates the ‘posture’ of enquiry into a ‘process’ of questing. The process begins with (a) an acknowledgement that there is nothing ‘inside your head’ that can be ‘neatly typ[ed] up’. It begins with the recognition of a lack. Recognizing a lack is not easy, particularly within a liberal tradition, which has neatly packaged knowledge and truth into ‘propositions’ that can be easily ‘transferred’ from one to another, accompanied with platitudes. But human life is a life of lack, a nothingness which seeks to discover and to receive, thus gravitating towards a gift. But this acknowledgement of lack must immediately be led or channelled into (b) an ‘act’ of quest, or as Williams puts it, an act of writing. But how is the act of writing an act of quest? Here Williams gives us a warning about the first four pages of everything he writes. He reveals that in them one would find the quest for discovery for the argument or proposition, for the assertion that he aims to make in his text. In other words, writing is the act of articulating and clarifying the quest. But how does this happen? The quest happens in the act of sifting through ideas, thoughts, being brought forward in memory, finding being even as fingers bang on keys, and thus questing takes place in the very act of writing. In the beginning of sentences, and the searching of words, and finding the appropriate words that complete sentences is an example of a quest in operation. This can be said of the beginning of paragraphs or even of articles and books, matter of fact any piece that is being written that they are driven by a quest that regulates the flow of thoughts and whose immediate satisfaction guarantees the completion of the piece. Perhaps that is why it is often said that books, be it theses or of any other genre, are never finished but have to be abandoned, and their endings have to be artificially constructed as the ontological questing continues to go on and is never exhausted by the written piece. There is a third element to the mechanism of questing, which is not explicit in Williams, but implicitly there by its mention. I am referring to the content of the ‘first four pages’ of what he writes. The content of these pages would reveal the (c) tradition of enquiry within which the quest takes place. The interlocutors and the concepts that are articulated and connected together, fabricated and constructed into Williams’ text reveal the ‘world of literature’ to which Williams’ own quest belongs and extends. It reveals the tradition which is not only inhabited by Williams but the tradition that is working itself out through Williams’ act of writing. It is both the tradition’s quest as well as a quest beyond the tradition, but only through the paths laid out by the tradition embodied in the ‘first four pages’ enacted out through the body of Williams. I am reminded of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s more or less ‘four-page’ Preface to his acclaimed work, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, which neatly lays out the questing reformed tradition, and Wolterstorff’s own quest embodying that tradition. It is worthwhile to cite here what he says about writing this book: ‘There is another reason as well for this emphasis [the emphasis on the Reformed tradition of Christianity] in this discussion. The Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity is my own, and these lectures represent for me an attempt to appropriate its social vision.’ Thus, we find that Wolterstorff reflexively writes that his questing or ‘attempt’ happens within the tradition of Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity. He cites a key Heideggerian/Ricoeurian mechanism in operation in questing: the mechanism of appropriation. He writes, ‘Appropriation of one’s tradition implies neither uncritical acceptance nor total rejection; it entails a discriminating adaptation of its features to one’s own situation.’ Appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ of one’s tradition in one’s ‘situation’ of quest is the key insight in Wolterstorff. There is a dual process in progress in ‘discriminating adaptation’ – on the one hand the act of ‘discriminating’ which resonates with the idea of quest that we have been elaborating above and on the other hand, the content of ‘adaptation’ refers to the tradition that quests and through which the quest is embodied. Now, to summarize the three stages of the act of questing – it begins with (a) an acknowledgement of a lack, followed by (b) the act of articulating the quest, which in turn occurs through (c) the mechanism of appropriation within a tradition of enquiry.

The third and final insight is about the reception of the gift which Williams articulates as ‘an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being’. If we began with the posture of enquiry, of wondering, which translates into an active questing within a tradition of enquiry driven by the recognition of a lack then appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ must culminate with a finding. If the lack is truly felt, and the quest is authentic in its search, and the mechanism of appropriation is sincerely followed, then of course, there must be recompense, a satisfaction, a finding. This finding on one hand has to be a self-finding, because it is the self that is questing and therefore the discovery and the finding has to be made by the self. It is a discovery that the self makes or ‘self-discovery’. But where does the content of the discovery come from? This is where Wolterstorff’s ‘adaptation’ kicks in and therefore it is equally about bringing ‘something into being’. The being of the ‘something’ is the content of self-discovery. To make some sense of this we will have to at least for this moment discard the subject-object divide that we are trained to think within and see the integrality of ‘self-discovery’ as the ‘being of something’. The being is of course the self’s being in the discovery, although the ‘something’ that is discovered and gained being has come from elsewhere. I would like to call it the ‘gift’ – a gift that has been received in the questing and discovering by the self. The constraint of the gift is the tradition within which one is questing and the adaptation of the tradition through multiple processes of dialogue brings the gift into one’s horizon. The gift is both within the self and without. It is the conjoining of the inside and the outside due to the nature of our ‘porous’ self, a la Taylor, thus the reception of the gift and also the limit of the present gift as the gift itself is contingent on appropriation and indeed future cycles of appropriation and adaptation are yet to come. I have mentioned the idea of dialogue which I would like to claim as the deeper mechanism underlying appropriation and adaptation, but the mention alone would suffice for our purposes here.

I hope I will not be asked – what has this meditation on a piece of text from Williams, on writing, got anything to do with the rite of giving and the mantra of gratitude – precisely because, I hope, one has been able to recognize the inferences that I have already been drawing albeit implicitly between act of writing and the act of gratitude. But of course, the implicit will have to become explicit and take being. Therefore in conclusion, I will revisit the problematic of ‘gratitude’ in light of these three insights from Williams, with a hope that we can transform gratitude even as authentic gratitude transforms us.

What the opening vignette failed to reveal was the state of affairs after two days or after a week of the performance of the ritual of giving. The evidence of this can be attested by any parent. The doll, however pretty, is now lying in a corner or under the bed, and the child is waiting for the next gift, a new toy, a new wonderment to be beheld and embraced. Now, this is not just about children, we can recognize this boredom with toys, however expensive or beautiful, in our own selves. What does this ultimately mean – in spite of the rite of giving and the rituals of gratitude, the gift has not satisfied one’s quest and longing. Here is where I claim that the liberal teaching of gratitude in our societies enacted in our vignette cheapens gratitude and plays a negative role by making invisible the larger process of questing in which the reception of gifts plays only a minor part. The reception of the gift has to be seen as an end to one performance, one cycle of questing, a cycle that will have to be repeated a million times during one’s life time, and each time with a hope of receiving a better gift. The easy language of gratitude keeps invisible both the posture of enquiry and the act of questing that precedes the reception of the gift. So what am I saying? Simply this – No quick ‘thank yous’, rather a focus on enquiry and quest and probably even an evaluation of the gift received and its ontological worth. I claim that this will be an antidote to the superficial gratitude our social exchange is so full of, while often accompanied with the cheap gratitude is the simultaneous despise for what is received, precisely for the lack of fulfilment and satisfaction the gift brings; and no wonder soon, the gift finds its place under our beds. But if the reception of the gift aligns itself with our enquiry and quest, then even if the gift has only provisional value, it plays a powerful intermediary through which the quest progresses, a tradition lived, and life discovered and perhaps it would be worthwhile for our social rites and rituals to train our children in precisely these skills which precede the reception of the gift so that the gift in turn would fulfil its intention in the receiver’s life journey which itself ought to be seen as a quest of a greater life, a life that is indeed lived beyond death.

16^th November, 2013

Brainerd Prince

New Delhi

The Business of Giving

No, this is not a rant against capitalism and how the modern industry of charity is its accomplice, a sort of a safety valve, like the pressure relief valve that is necessary to keep the system from crashing.

This line of critique is put forward rather vehemently by none other than the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek in a 10-minute RSA animate (Zizek on Charity) titled First as Tragedy, then as Farce uploaded in 2010. Although Zizek successfully reveals the nexus between capitalism and charity, it is more of a description rather than an analysis. Furthermore, one cannot wholesale reduce charity to be an arm of capitalism, albeit there are definite connections. Finally, although the critique of capitalism, by the self-proclaimed neo-communist, is spot on in many places, he too acknowledges that the modern liberal capitalist structures, both economic and political, have indeed benefitted more humans than any other form of economic-political ideology in the history of the human race.

But this is not the line of enquiry I wish to pursue – mine is of a much more humble nature. I am interested in interrogating and analysing the very ‘act of giving’ and hopefully discover a few insights in the process of this interrogation.

First, everyone gives! Yes, everyone gives, and it is not restricted to the philanthropists and the religious. All we have to do is look at our credit card statements or our monthly expense lists. We will very quickly find out that we have given out a lot, sometimes more than we should have, leaving us in the bright red. Giving constitutes the primordial ontology of humans, to use a Heideggerian phrase. But all that is meant by this fancy phrase is that to be human is to give, in other words, humans are givers by constitution and giving is an intrinsic component of being human.

Secondly, if giving is a basic constituent of being human, then, why is there all this fuss about charity and capitalism? Yes, there is space for legitimate fussing here, I suppose, because although giving is a condition for being human, there are different forms of giving. In my view, the quarrel is here! Let’s get back to our credit-debit card statements and our monthly expense lists. We have already established that all humans give and these expenses are our immediate evidence. Now, what we need to do is look at the ‘particulars’ against the amounts we have given. The question that needs to be raised here is - to what have we given? I think it might be a useful exercise to analyse the particulars of our giving and maybe even categorize them. I think here I can make a bold assertion – irrespective of the particulars towards which we have given, all our giving can be traced to a person who benefits through our giving. The easiest to trace is the entry on buying that wretched iPad, which I am still trying to learn how to use – of course, I am the beneficiary of that giving, that is very simple and straightforward. Similarly, it won’t take too long to put a beneficiary against each of the particulars. Suddenly, we will have a list of people to whom we have given through the whole month by spending on different particulars. Now we begin to get a different understanding of our expenses, they are actually our giving to different people. We can play interesting games with these figures and names of beneficiaries now. For instance, we can rank these ‘individual beneficiaries’ in a descending order (highest to lowest), and one can safely speculate that the top ten in that list are the people we really love and care about. We can do other interesting things with these figures, for example, even among the top ten, we can find out the proportions of our giving to each of them. All we have to do is to add the amounts of the ten persons and take individual percentages of that whole. We might be surprised to see the difference in the proportions of our giving even among the top ten we love and cherish. Perhaps we might want to do this exercise privately, lest the numbers get us into trouble.

Thirdly, to take this line of enquiry further in a very ‘everyday’ view of life, we can ask another question, slightly different, about the top ten. How much of our giving to the top ten do we consider as an investment? What I mean is, what returns do we anticipate even as we give? Maybe an immediate answer would be, ‘No! Of course not, we don’t expect any returns!’. That is understandable, but let’s be honest and a bit ruthless about it, the iPad I bought could have been for pleasure or for business, but in both cases, it was meant to give me returns – entertainment or profits respectively or at least some sort of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ value! Now, you could say, that of course this is common sense! Who would spend any money without thinking about any returns? Whether we spend money on or give to our family, other loved ones, or even ourselves, we do it with the knowledge of returns – in other words, giving and expectation of returns go hand in hand. It would appear foolish to spend or give without thinking through or at least knowing the value that giving would generate! The interesting bit here is that it is not intuitive to associate ‘acts of giving’ with knowledge of returns, at least in an intentional manner. Perhaps this is not really so interesting and rather a naïve view in our modern economically driven world!

Fourthly, let’s explore a little more the relationship between ‘knowledge of returns’ and ‘acts of giving’. Does our knowledge of returns condition our acts of giving? Does knowledge of sure returns influence positively our giving? What happens to our giving when returns fail? The mother of all questions could be – would we give when we have sure knowledge that there will be no returns? This seems to be an absurd situation! Why would I give when I know there is no return? In our everyday living we would call that foolish spending and we are taught from childhood to be wise with our money, to spend carefully, in other words, make sure there are returns. What does knowledge of returns entail? Knowledge is not an innocent accumulation of facts rather it is a knowing of a process, a process which when invested in, brings about a desired result.  In our case, the stimulus of giving would initiate a whole range of actions all of which work together in a coordinated way to produce the desired result. This knowledge is powerful knowledge. It controls the process so that desired results are obtained. Within the charity industry, millions are spent to ensure that desired results are obtained. The language often used is that of transparency, accountability, sustainability et al. Thus, giving becomes controlled giving. If this is what giving is, then the question one could ask is, is it giving at all?

Finally, this brings us to the issue of giving and acts of giving, particularly about giving without expectation of results, without control over the processes that are initiated through our acts of giving. I am already squirming at this thought, how can I give without any control, without asking for any knowledge of what is going to happen to my hard earned money. How can I trust even as I give? Paradoxically, although we are talking about giving, these thoughts reflect that what is at stake is ‘me’ and I use the language of ‘responsible giving’ to keep ‘myself’ in the centre of the act of giving – if this be the case, then how is it really a giving? This is to question the foundational structures of what we understand by giving and its relationship to returns and knowledge. Imagine giving in ignorance, complete ignorance of what is going to happen with our giving. Giving cheerfully, because there is joy in giving. Letting go of all controls and the need for knowledge and returns – enjoying and basking in the very act of giving rather than what giving accomplishes. Of course we do not let go of our cognitive and intellectual abilities in performing these acts of giving. When it comes to giving, I do not want to treat any one as stupid, I am sure none of us are. But it is more than being an intellectual it is about having the wisdom to recognize in the presence of the other, our very being in the world, how we should be and how we should give. It is being sensitive to the world in which we live, the sheer reality of the world around us. Of course there is indeed a place for knowledge and even the idea of returns that inform us in our acts of giving, but giving that is front-loaded not by these other subsidiary processes, but rather by giving itself.

I am sure this is a rather inadequate analysis of the act of giving, and I have more questions now than I had before I began writing these thoughts down. Hopefully, this will merely provide us an opportunity to begin a conversation, on actions of giving which fundamentally define our very posture in this world.

P.S. I recently read a quote that stimulated this piece, and here it is – ‘But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’.

Reading to Write: The Mechanics of Writing an Academic Paper - Draft One

Writing academic papers is all about reading. It is all about reading what and when, in the process of writing, and yet there is writing to be accomplished different from reading. So, what role does reading play in writing? I would like to claim that there are three kinds of reading in the process of writing.

First, reading to narrow down on the title or theme. Let's call this Cursory Reading, a reading widely, that often uses the tool of speed reading. We begin with a pre-understanding, informed by our past readings, of a potential theme to work on. Cursory reading, confirms the theme within us, even as it ensures that writing on that theme is a viable academic project. Here the reading enables the writer to know the material that is available on the theme, as well as how deeply has the theme been thematized in existing literature within disciplinary bounds. Cursory reading gives confidence to the writer, that she is indeed investigating a theme that is important, one that has been engaged by others, and hence has a history of engagement, which will provide her dialogue partners and finally confidence that her script will definitely take this line of enquiry further and make a meaningful contribution to a body of knowledge.

Secondly, once the theme is finalized, the next goal is to get a structure of the paper. Of course we are taught from our early time of education that a good piece has three parts - Introduction, Body, Conclusion. Guess what, it is still great advise, albeit, all these three parts or sections maybe differently understood now than then. The body is what academic writing is all about. It must have three to four main sub-sections. Each section providing evidence, engaging an argument, in support of the central claim of the theme of the paper. Now, there are no rules about how each sub-section must be related to another. This is one reason we talk about internal rationality. The rationality of the piece evolves from the inside of the piece being conceived to be written. This relating and connecting is done by the author, and hence authorial rationality. The quality of paper depends on how deeply are these sub-sections connected to each other as well as to the central argument propounded in the script. Often writers string together rather superficially sections containing similar/different ideas, but not really interconnected. That would be an example of a weak paper. What has reading to do with this? Everything! It is here that the writer begins to do what I call as Committed Reading. This is the long trudge of the night. It is reading deeply, about the sub-themes. Now, one does not have a sub-theme to begin with, these sub-themes, or the different arguments being put forward will appear to one's horizon even as one committedly reads on the theme. They come upon the reader. Let's try and put a method to this madness. When we did cursory reading, we got a theme, and also a list of bibliography that we surveyed. While sifting through texts, we identified the semantic dense texts for our project and had already made note of the central interlocutors in our paper. All of this has been accomplished through cursory reading. With committed reading, we have three aims: first, to identify the main debate upon the selected theme and the history of its development. I would say that focus on the twentieth century, and use eighteenth and nineteenth century for grounding and locating the debate. Secondly, to find the different points of views or positions of that debate and the scholars holding those positions. This is again done historically, in a sense, you can't pit Hegel against Habermas in a horizontal sense, on two sides of the debate. Having a historical sense is of extreme importance. Finally, to identify your position, and argument. This is called the central argument. An argument consists of an assertion or a claim, which is supported by premises. The evidence one provides for the premises, and the validity of the premises determines the strength of the argument. Now, these different premises and evidences, must be correlated and must possess an internal structure. Each of them provides a part to the whole argument. It is these interconnected parts that form the sub-sections of the body of the paper. Committed reading is not cursory, it reads both exhaustively and extensively on these different points. The main texts of the main interlocutors are read completely, so that you can represent their positions confidently. The conceptual structure of the script develops within yourself during this phase of committed reading. At the end of this season of reading, you should be able to put out a conceptual framework, clearly outlining the development of the argument. This is the real grind. There are absolutely no visible marks for how exhaustively and extensively you read, no one sees your hardwork, but your final script will bear the marks of your hard work. It is here that the writer would be highly tempted to take short cuts, to read summaries, to read introduction and relevant chapters, et al, and to all these devious schemes of the devil that may tempt us, I say, stand fast, don't give in. Read with commitment. It is here that boys are separated from the men.

The third phase of writing a script is to simply write the damn script out! By now not only do you know clearly the theme located within a body of literature that you are going to address in your script, but you also know the argument you are presenting, the different positions or schools of views on the theme, which you might critique positively or negatively, and you also know the premises/evidences that coherently form the structure that embodies your argument. Now to put flesh to this skeleton is the articulation of your script. It is the easiest as well as the hardest thing to do. Here there is a general misconception, that once we have the idea in our head, writing out is merely a verbalizing of the idea. It is merely putting into language what we already know. This is an epistemological issue about the relationship between idea and its representation and the role of language in it. The crucial question is can there be ideas without words? Furthermore, what do we mean by putting ideas into words. I am not going to address this issue head-on except to say that writing takes the place of an author's intent to discourse. I follow Ricoeur in this. Writing is not transcribing an already existing speech, rather takes the place of speech. Hence writing is like speaking. It is an art that is informed by both cursory and committed readings, but is a different act altogether. To construct a sentence, and to construct a paragraph requires a set of skills that are different from those required for reading and speaking. Before I talk a bit about the skills involved in writing, the question I want to address is, is there a form of reading relevant to this final phase of scripting the piece. Yes there is, and let us call it Critical Reading. Now, this is not really reading in either the cursory or committed sense. It is reading in the service of writing. Reading here plays second fiddle to writing. You read to support, to evidence, to critique. The written text bears on you to read more, in order to write and develop the script. If your cursory and committed readings have been done well, then often it is the revisiting of those texts that you have already read and underlined, or taken notes of. However, it might also be a new path that your writing forges out with, for which new readings have to be done, in support of an argument, or to clarify a point you are making. This is strictly business-reading, you have to be swift and ruthless. This is paid work, every minute counts in this reading that is called upon to serve writing. The temptation here is to read to enquire further, or your self will tell you that you need to read more to know more, but you have to resist the temptation to be carried away by reading. These temptations to read are distractions, where reading itself becomes a distraction in the composition of the script. Here the devil is on the other side. Earlier the devil didn't want you to read, and to cut corners, now the devil wants to take you on the long garden path, a wild goose chase. So keep critical reading close to the script you are constructing.

With this we have seen the three forms of reading - Cursory, Committed, Critical - that are in operation in different stages of the act of writing. I will end with a few thoughts on writing and the skills it requires. In writing, the key is to write out a single coherent piece with all the various parts/sections embodied in paragraphs clearly relating and connecting together coherently. There are no points for empty descriptions that do not serve any purpose. Every paragraph must advance the central argument creatively. A good paragraph has four sections - (a) state clearly and simply the particular point it is making in other words describe the point being made, (b) discuss the point, by showing the different positions on it and by bringing together the divergent schools into a conversation, (c) evidence your position/point by debate, and (d) finally, deploy the point made towards the extension of the larger or central point/thesis/argument you are advancing in the piece. It is here in (d) that all the hard work of (a), (b), (c) will pay off if the connection to the larger thesis and argument is made strongly. This is YOUR contribution. How you connect is YOUR creation of knowledge. I must also mention about writing styles here. Each writer must develop a style unique to one's own style of discourse. However, just as everything one's own begins with imitation and only much later brings about a certain uniqueness through innovation, I suggest, that it is the same in the act of writing - imitate the styles of authors you respect. When you read don't read for substance alone, but read to understand their methodology and also styles of writing. Imitate them. Use their styles of writing and meticulously learn from them. Be an apprentice to their skill of writing. As you write fluidly, then bring your innovation to it. Make changes and create a new style for others to imitate. Finally, the skill of writing lies in re-writing. Often one can have 12-15 drafts before the script begins to make sense. But the more you write, the rewriting becomes less. But still there is rewriting, lots of it. It is like chiseling the sculpture so that it is smooth like butter. Ironing out knots, holes, straightening out unnecessary twists and turns - bringing about clarity, simplicity, and thrust.

The goal of writing is to be read, and the underlying goal of being read is that your text will give new insights, directions, and energy to the reader, so that her action in the world will imitate the structures you have laid down in your script with a hope that they will act better in the world. Thus writing is a powerful means to change the world, by changing the actions and decisions of readers. Perhaps it can be said that investing in learning the skills of writing is indeed investing in the transformation of the world. So it would only be appropriate to end by saying - read to write and write to be read.

Is Conversion still Valid?

The act of converting people to one's own religion and tradition is as old as humans when they began to organize themselves into communities and lived in the presence of 'other' communities. In olden times it was pretty straightforward - you either killed every other, or at least the males, so that the other women could bear your own children, or at least you made slaves of the other and forced migration on them, ensuring distance from their own, and thus the other was masterfully eliminated or sublated. But this swallowing up of the other brought about ontological changes to the self (within whom the other continues to live, quite literally) which was not often acknowledged. In our modern time, with increase in sophistication and tact, this form of brute power is reserved only for epochal wars or for situations where none see, however, in regular modes of living, hard power has been traded for soft power. Now it is not the guns but the goodies that power produces that are used as instruments to convert the other into one's own - education, economics and politics are three key modes of conversion. If we take education as an example, how is it used as a means of conversion? The Latin ēducātiō means 'a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing'. Different communities possess not only different methods but also different knowledge and skills in and through which the younger ones are bred or brought up or reared. However, with the use of soft power, a particular powerful tradition's knowledge and skills are (a) first of all affirmed to be universal and beneficial for all, (b) then, it is taken to the other as a goody (often with a bit of force, through international policies, world bank, etc) that is beneficial to make the other as oneself. (c) This results in the other accepting the powerful tradition's education, thus one's own tradition is lost, often forever. The other is transformed, often without understanding the deep, irreparable implications their acceptance of the goody has brought with it.

But I would still like to argue that converting is a valid act, as long as it is mutual conversion in a dialogical encounter, in which the self and the other sit together and eat at the table. Another image can be that of mutual incarnation, mutual becoming of the other, so that both embody the other within themselves. It is only this swallowing of the other that creates a new self which entails both the self and the other.

Samvada Centre for Research Resources

Samvada – The Rationale

While traditions are embodied and lived out in the different societies of our contemporary world, they need to be deeply reflected upon with a view to address the incommensurabilities and rivalries that develop between them. Therefore Samvada Centre for Research Resources seeks to make a contribution to contemporary life in our modern global societies by addressing critical issues that structure contemporary life by working with students and researchers from across the globe. Contemporary research within the Human Sciences is largely dominated by methodologies of the Natural Sciences. These methods, working out of a modernist and enlightenment epistemology of a ‘single universal frame’, focus on providing causal explanations for human phenomena through reductionism and reification of human data. These approaches, while having produced incredible results in the Material Sciences, have been unable to give appropriate accounts of human life and society. With the rejection of the scientific paradigm within the Human Sciences, new methodologies have to be evolved within the Human Sciences that are able to take seriously the indeterminacies that are constitutive of human society and human agency. Samvada chiefly focuses on addressing methodologies and conceptual frameworks that provide the ‘how’ of research programmes within the Human Sciences.

The successful functioning of any society depends on the success of its educational system, therefore education and research are the institutional vehicles through which society trains itself by theorising, modifying and transmitting the practices and knowledge that it has inherited from its past even as it engages with the practices and knowledge originating from other societies. The practices and knowledge about humans, as individuals and collectives, are generally studied under Human Sciences and particularly through the disciplines of politics, economics, religion, theology, history, philosophy, psychology etc. Therefore a healthy society necessitates the study of the Human Sciences at the highest levels.

In our contemporary world, the various social domains of most, if not all modern societies, are resourced by the modern educational system stemming out of the Western academic tradition which has been universalised within an Enlightenment understanding and has been passed on to societies around the world through the processes of colonialism and globalism. Therefore the study of the Human Sciences in any society, for example in the Indian society, is borrowed from the Enlightenment-informed Western Academia.

In the modern West, ‘protest’ against traditional religion (Latin Christianity) and subsequent quests for reforms, swung to their logical conclusion in achieving a ‘disenchanted’ worldview driven by exclusive humanism. In the new era of modernity, human life was imagined purely within an ‘immanent frame’ without reference to transcendence. Religion became bounded as irrational, mystical and private, and hence it has been displaced from pre-eminence in the public sphere. Thus the academic study of the Human Sciences in the public sphere is limited to a material understanding of the Human self and society while relegating the non-material, spiritual or religious, either to the private sphere or to a narrow bandwidth within the university. This paradigm of secularised Human Sciences has not only informed Educational Institutions in the West, but also has formed the basis for setting up modern Educational institutions in other parts of the world, such as in India. This has resulted in an exclusion of the knowledge and practices belonging to historical traditions which were termed as 'religious', only to allow them currency in the private sphere, in that they entailed an enchanted discourse without the separation of the material from the spiritual.

However, with the postmodern turn, intellectual enquiry, particularly within the Human Sciences in the Western academia, structured as it is by the ‘objectivity’ of secularity has been seriously challenged on two counts: (a) validity of material explanations for human self and society, and (b) the universalism of its objective claims. Thus, enquiry in the Human Sciences has reached an impasse through a postmodern deconstruction of the universal and secular liberalism of modern inquiry, and the insufficiency of opstmodern enquiry to provide an alternative viable proposal. Western academia is currently responding to this impasse through the proposal of a dialogical mode of enquiry within the Human Sciences, informed by the Continental philosophies of Existentialism, Phenomenology and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

However, this dialogical form of enquiry has parallels in different eras of the pre-modern West, such as in the works of Thomas Aquinas (13^th century). What is interesting is that dialogical enquiries are precisely the hallmarks of traditions of enquiry in other parts of the world such as South Asia, where intellectual enquiry has historically progressed against the backdrop of dialoguing traditions, known as Samvada - 'discoursing together'.

Samvada is a tradition of enquiry that has dialogued different intellectual enquiries such as Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu thought, with each other in South Asia. Although the Samvada tradition of enquiry is uniquely located in history, its presupposition of diverse traditions of enquiry is representative of most forms of enquiry, formal and informal, in South Asia. The Indian vāda tradition was developed in the methods used to delineate the boundaries of the discourse between the rival schools of Vedic textual exegesis in ways that clarified difference and debate.

Therefore, Samvada Centre for Research Resources will integrate modern hermeneutical tradition with a revival of the Samvada dialogical tradition of enquiry (a) to make a critical contribution to the Western academic tradition by enabling it to go beyond the modern-postmodern impasse that it is faced with currently, (b) to offer a conceptual framework to enable dialogue between traditions of enquiry arising historically from different societies, (c) and particularly to enable these societies to articulate their self-traditions within their own internal categories. This threefold aim arises out of the core beliefs of the Samvada Centre for Research Resources, which emphasises that all research enquiries must be dialogical in nature. Therefore the Samvada tradition and the modern hermeneutical tradition of the West, rather than being rival traditions of enquiry, can mutually inform each other. The researcher is required to Know oneself to identify the tradition(s) informing her view of the world, to Understand the ‘other’ within the historical traditions by which the other is constituted, and to respond Dialogically in speaking the language of another as one’s own, even as differences are clarified, paradoxes resolved and Human Sciences advanced in our predominantly global societies.

Check Samvada out HERE

A Holiday from Myself – A Walk into the Wilderness

Even before I wake up

I am already someone

Some I want to be, most I don’t

I am a father, a brother, a son

A wife, sister, mother

Roles I was born with

Promotion I didn't demand

Doctor, Architect, Lawyer

Banker, florist, cabdriver

A character in a drama

A drama I didn’t consent to play

A script I didn’t write

But time keeps turning the pages

And the story continues

Roles I am forced to play

Even when I resist and refuse

All I do

Crawl into another story

The plot again is already set

Little change I can bring

Not just the plot of the dramas I play

But the master plot, the mother of all plots

The plot of the story itself

It is tiring to play these roles

Enact all these parts

Scripts to voice

Rituals to play

Practices to perform

Tiring, exhausting, all-consuming

I need out, I need a holiday

I need a place to recuperate

But if I am the parts I play

And the roles I perform

Even if the parts and roles exhaust

How do I escape and run

I need a holiday from myself

From all parts and roles

Stories that give significance

Narratives that provide meaning

But how can that be?

How can one flee from oneself?

Even death does not provide a way of escape

As long as the story continues and the drama plays

I live on and continue to perform

Even after death in the memory of time

If even death cannot set free

How else can I fly?

Move past the constraints

Placed by the characters

Roles I am forced to play

Into the wilderness I must go

Into the wilderness I must disappear

The blackhole of narratives

The death of the story

The oblivion of meaning

I yearn for the wilderness

To strengthen, to refresh

To help me understand

To be beyond me

In order to be me

Idols: Material and Conceptual

When one thinks of idols, the image that immediately comes to mind is an image of a material thing. Hence those traditions that 'appear' not to have any material idols (I say 'appear', because on careful inspection, every tradition can be said to have its share of material idols) claim superiority over those who do. But then the question one must ask is, what is so abominable about 'material idols'? Simply put, the idea that any material form can have the arrogance to stand in place of the immaterial divine! But this view entails a certain understanding of what is material and divine respectively. This view draws a distinction between matter and spirit and holds them as mutually exclusive and thus in opposition to one another. While this view represents the best of 18th and 19th century western intellectual tradition, which exalted the matter-spirit binary, it needs to be radically updated for those of us living in the 21st century. Matter was then seen in a substantialist sense and opposed to spirit, a view which has since been discarded. 20th century Science and Philosophy has long gone past this opposition. Therefore the real critique of material idol lies in the critique of material substances that claim to stand in place of the divine who is seen as formless and non-material. This view has to be now radically challenged and updated given the contemporary critique of the matter-spirit binary. however that is not what I am particularly interested in this morning.

My interest lies in the idea of 'idol' itself which is seen in a material sense. At the heart of the critique is the view that idols limit and bound that which is infinite and unbounded. If this is what an idol is then I want to assert that not only material idols accomplish this, but equally conceptual idols. The assertion can be seen to have legitimacy because concepts too cannot escape the critique that is advanced against material idols. Concepts limit as much as material idols. One could even say that underlying every material idol there is a conceptual idol, or perhaps even argue that ultimately all we have access to are conceptual idols. But those traditions that oppose material idols do not cease to possess concepts and thus conceptual idols even if they do not have corresponding material idols. For example, the concept 'God' can be seen as a conceptual idol. But this leads to further questions about the nature of language and the delimiting function that appears innate to all language, although this view of language itself can be challenged. But that is another debate.

However, the point being made here is that the distinction that is made between material and conceptual idols is a false opposition and that the onus is particularly on those who believe they do not possess material idols, to examine the conceptual idols to which they give their allegiance. Examples of conceptual idols are identities, institutions, structures, definitions et al. If this be the case, then the larger question for us is to ask ourselves, if we can ever escape idols, and if not then how should we view idols - conceptual and material? A reasonable response could possibly be to begin (a) by accepting the reality of idols and not be naively opposed to the idea of idols. (b) But then to quickly recognize that since they are idols, they do not have the power to stand in for the divine. (c) All concepts and material idols are limited and bounded and hence are unable to represent the unbounded and the beyond, thus even the best of idols, conceptual and material, need to be held provisionally with a willingness to kiss them goodbye when encountered with a deeper revelation.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

...many in the past have attributed success to 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Although this metaphor can be traced back to Bernard of Chartres, the twelfth-century French philosopher, it is Newton who made it a household metaphor with his 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'. However, as John of Salisbury noted in his Metalogicon (1159), Bernard of Chartres' use of the metaphor is fascinating and insightful - 'Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.' Therefore, according to Bernard of Chartres, the secret of success begins with (a) realizing that one is a dwarf, a dwarf without any 'sharpness of sight' or even 'physical distinction', something that some of us would rather die than admit. (b) Secondly, to know that success comes only in following after giants. This requires one to bend one's knee to climb the giant even as one submits oneself and be dependent on them. (c) But if we allow ourselves to realize our dwarf stature and diligently follow after the giants, Bernard of Chartres argues that we will 'see more than they and things at a greater distance', in other words we will become more successful than even the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Following Bernard of Chartres, Newton became both successful and a household name; maybe we too should and by that could and would...

A Stereotype about Stereotypes

The image one inadvertently has of a ‘stereotype’ is definitely not positive. If stereotype is understood as a clichéd view of something, or simply as a fixed simplified notion, then stereotypes are something that one would want to avoid in our thinking about anything, be it – a person, vocation, culture or even about abstract concepts. At first glance, yes, we must fight stereotypes! But let’s pause and ask why? What advantage is there in fighting stereotypes? We want to get at the truth, we claim – we want to know what is behind the stereotype, to know what it is, we reply. But then what guarantee is there that what one gets behind today’s stereotypes, that ‘true’ view which our struggles ultimately succeed in getting will not succumb to the same process of stereotyping in time and produce a stereotype soon after? In other words, can we escape stereotyping at all? On one hand, stereotypes are the dominant views that have survived time even if as a parody or a bad representation. They have survived and thus are given to us – similar to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ in terms of ideas. On the other hand, our daily living and experience challenges these ‘fittest’ stereotypes at every point and every moment, challenging precisely their claim to be the fittest representations of what they seek to represent. In turn we produce new views, new ‘truth’, often unaware that these too have the full potential of becoming stereotypes given time, when something ‘more truer’ will replace them. Is this not the history of knowledge? If there is anything that the philosophy of science has taught us, it is precisely this – the changing paradigms of knowledge. If all the three ingredients that constitute a stereotype – language, the subject who stereotypes, the object being stereotyped – are constantly undergoing change then although we inherit stereotypes from a past time, they will necessarily be altered in time to produce new stereotypes that too will be altered in time, and this process goes on ad infinitum. Thus it appears that it is the stereotyped notion of a stereotype, that stereotypes are 'fixed notions' that needs to be challenged. We will just have to live by negotiating the stereotypes our age has bequeathed upon us even as we create our own stereotypes for posterity, although, we would never, even in our humblest of moments, term our findings as stereotypes.

Polysemy and 'Israel'

Although humans are primarily defined as language-beings, language-skills do not come naturally to humans, it has to be intentionally developed. Language makes invisible as much as it reveals.

Consider the term 'polysemy' which refers to 'words' having the capacity to possess multiple-related meanings, due to the common application of pre-existing words to new situations. Understanding this characteristic of language is vital for our meaning-making capabilities.

Take for example, the word 'Israel' - It is a 'sign' that possesses many inter-related meanings. Among many meanings here are a few: It began as a proper-name given to Jacob in the OT; it then became the name of a group of tribes that lived in the Middle-east; in the NT the word is used metaphorically to refer to the church as 'New Israel'; from 1947 it is the name given to a newly formed nation-state. Finally, today's headlines uses the word to refer to an army in operation in Gaza. The term possesses many more usages.

Thus 'Israel' is a polysemous term with multiple-related meanings. Understanding polysemy will enable one to not conflate these different usages and thus enable one to draw careful and wise distinctions between what one supports and condemns.

But why is this polysemous characteristic of terms and signs not self-evident? It appears as though language actively hides its polysemous nature, and thus in turn hides the complexities of the world we live in. Understanding polysemy can be seen as one way of harnessing language and subduing it and not allowing it to dictate our existence.

Would not then overcoming-language be a necessary part of being human?

Playing Hard!

Taking life seriously is to take ourselves seriously. It is to take our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our exterior, our interior, our skills, our thoughts, our ideas, our appearances, our speech, our relationships, our money, our spirit, our beliefs, our dreams, our passions, our food, our health, our sexuality, our homes, our surroundings - our everything seriously. 

Taking life seriously, is NOT to be serious, or boring, or stuck up, or rigid, or narrow, or fundamentalist, or closed. It is being serious about taking life seriously and that can sufficiently happen when life is seen as a 'play'. Games, Drama, Dance, Plays are great illustrations that bring together life in all their fullness and make it worth living. No wonder ancient texts talk about creation and the world in terms of a dance, or a play and the idea of delight or bliss  (ananda) is so central to conceptions of the good life.

To play is not to be unserious, rather it is to be serious of the highest order, so serious that it is no longer constrained by our normal understandings of seriousness. The Gita calls this world as Lila or as the play of the divine. So let's play at the highest levels, nationals, internationals and 'universals' and make this short-spanned life beautiful.

Let's play hard!

beautiful example of playing hard

Don't! don't read any further, Please

Don’t

Don’t read any further

Stop

Stop reading I say

You don’t want to know

You really don’t

And yet you read

But why

Why do you read on?

Why can’t you just stop?

STOP! Stop reading, I beg!

I am sure you are NOT reading this

Alas, I am wrong

You still are reading!

What can I do to make you stop?

Make you give up, abandon

Move on as if you have not read

I say don’t but yet still you do

But you can’t help yourself, can you

Because it’s not really you

it's actually not even about you, really

Its the words seeking their whole

Semantic unity, they say

Half in your consciousness

The others in the lines below

Condemned to meaning

Its tyranny not a travesty

Memes says Dawkins with a glee

But it’s the mother of memes

The one who bore them

The eternal goddess

道 λόγος शब्द Word

Call what you may
She lives on forever

In and through you

And of course beyond you
Humans come, humans go
She lives on

Ancient of days

Creating, destroying, recreating

Forming, reforming, multiforming

Tower of Babel, mustn’t forget

Nor the Pentecost

Regaining regal power

In her being

The universe came to be

She lifted her voice

And the walls came tumbling

She has seen the beginning

And in her is the end

You and I

Her playmates in time

Must stop now

Can’t let her always...

obsession: an obsession with obsessions

I presume that most of us have our pet obsessions. For some it is cricket, for others romance, while for most success, but the list can go on endlessly for sure. It could be some gizmo, certain people, or cultivated activities, just about anything by which we are profoundly influenced. But immediately, we must make a correction to our claim that humans have obsessions. We call things obsessions not because we have them at will, but precisely because they have us at their will. They invade our privacy at their whim and fancy, and destabilise our lives with a laugh. They make us take decisions that we would not normally have taken and force us to a variety of actions that would not have been if not for them. So calling them our obsessions is a lame attempt to domesticate what in fact controls us. They can ruin a really great day by toying with our fragilities, or shine light on a depressing day with their ecstasy. These obsessions definitely have a life of their own! Come to think of it, humans come and go but they live on – live in and through us, and continue with their existence even after they are done with us.

So how do obsessions work? It is as if one is possessed and made a slave of, tossed about like a boat by stormy waves. Of course, the proverbial boat represents the poor ‘us’ – the humans, who are always at the deep end, in high seas and left to the mercy of these storming waves. But interestingly, the obsessions are not the waves, doing all the hard work of tossing, but can be compared to the moon, whose gravitational force works the waves that is laboriously doing the tossing of the boat. So now we have a mechanism of three – three things in connected operation – the moon exerting her force, the waves energised by the moon’s force and finally the boat seated on the waves, driven to and fro by the ecstatic waves. Imagine this picturesque sight, maybe on a postcard – the moon’s beams shining down at dusk on a near-empty sea, seeking out as it were hidden treasures lost at sea. And behold they find your boat, the only object for horizons. As you zoom down on the postcard, the waves that looked calm begin to reveal the contours of their excitement, even as they leap up and down, forward and backwards, in complete insanity. You lift your gaze from the waters and look hard at the boat. You thought it was a peaceful ride this boat was having. But close inspection proves otherwise – these waves are sure rocking your boat! No gentle rocking like that of a mother rocking her baby in a cradle, but this is indeed hard stuff, similar to the vibrations that send a crowd into frenzy at a rock concert. Poor you, clinging on for dear life! You think it’s going to stop now, and yet another tirade of waves hit the rain-soaked sides. Of course the boat has a captain! It is you! You wear your ironed uniform, prominently displaying your ranks. Hat in place, you hold the steering, yelling orders to the mates. But what good is anything – the maps strewn on the table, hands on the deck or even the flask of rum tucked tightly at the hip. You are helpless, powerless, purely at the mercy of the waves. She makes you dance, hop-step-and-jump, throb violently, and there you lie sheepish, watching, rather painfully, the wicked grin on her face.

What to do with obsessions? The ancient adage has been to overcome them, to fight them till one’s last breath, to practice rituals of self-control that will strengthen one’s resolve against the obsessions. It will maybe be meditation, or some freakish mind-game or perhaps a recitation of texts, incantations supposed to possess magical powers, powerful enough to break the power hold of these obsessions. The whole idea is to fight back, fight against. But wait a minute, what are we fighting against? Let’s slip back into our picture, now dark and grotesque, with the lives of the sailors in great peril. Are we to fight the waves? What does that even mean? We are on the waves, the very ground of our existence and being is the waves, so how are we to fight it?

I think this ancient piece of wisdom is just as useful as the Ptolemaic view of the location of the earth as the centre of the pre-Copernican universe. We have to improvise and maybe even radically revise this wisdom of the old. The problem with the wisdom to fight obsessions is that it naively takes the waves to be the obsession. So obsessions are seen to be what occupies our time, for example, cricket, alcohol, a satisfying job or a certain habit. So the advice is kick the habit, don’t be over-ambitious in your work, control your drinking if not stop it, but cricket - can’t live with it, can’t live without it! Come on, get a grip of yourself! Domesticate these obsessions! Dusk has turned to night. With the sun completely vanquished, the moon rules the skies. She definitely looks more pronounced now. She is still, quiet, simple, silvery and beautiful. You can’t detect any motion about her. But it is her power that makes the waves dance. It is her force that rocks your boat.

The question is what does the moon represent in the human experience of obsessions? Are humans ever going to be able to eliminate the moon? Should that even be the objective? Or maybe we have to re-configure how obsessions actually function and find new ways of coping with them. Maybe new wisdom is required to learn to dance, a change in perspective to understand rocking as a form of enjoyment. Maybe we will have to learn new skills, innovate new technologies, not to lessen the force of the waves or to fight better, but to make the most of it, to put it to good use – to consume it and in consuming, gain mastery over it. To be able to look at the moon in all her glory and be grateful for the light she sheds and the beauty she brings – she is definitely worthy of being an obsession.

My Mother's Son

I have never seen her

Although her eyes I have, they say

Her voice too I have never heard

But I was told, she sang like a bird

I was told she was very beautiful

Her skin soft as snow

Her form that graced a thousand stars

Defined beauty for us, you know

She had to leave however, one night

They came and took her away

In the middle of the night

They packed her out

Left my father in a pool of tears

And while she grabbed my brother

I was left behind

I haven’t seen them for twenty-five years

My father long passed by

Neither did he ever again

See his other son and wife

We got her regular letters for sure

And growing pictures of my brother

But of her face we never got to see

Not in a postcard nor a picture

I grew up in Damascus

The oldest city that ever was

As Syrian as one could get

Yet I was both Muslim and Christian

Speaking Arabic, French and English

Never crossed the Mediterranean Sea

Nor into the Iraqi desert

Lebanon kept me hemmed in

While Israel watched my borders

A true Arab I told myself

I was born to live and lead

To help my people live in the desert

And not necessarily to cross over

In the land of my ancestors

We loved our music and our women

We are an old people, you know

So a lot to learn, in order to live
Even if we are stubborn

And then my brother did come to visit

But not alone did he come

He came with schools, cars and education

Lack of knowledge, he said, was our sin

I showed him our ancient cuneiform

And treasures rivalling the very best of old Egypt

The land that groomed Cicero’s teacher

And the writings out of Apamea

He persisted that we need to be civilized

With genuine concern and a dismissive hand

With our protests, came out his planes and guns

The warning was clear and loud

You better heed, it’s only for your good

Then one day he came to visit me

To my village, and to my home

I made a feast to welcome him

And invited the village in

With their Dabkeh they greeted him

And their sword dances sought to woo

The food was spread with splendour

The houses adorned with lights

It was magical yet not mystical

As real as any summer evening can be

My neighbours showered their love

Total strangers hugged and kissed him

They made him feel so much at home

He forgot he was the other

He began to move and shake his leg

And forgot he was near Aleppo

I took a step backwards
Away from the dancing crowd

To watch my mother’s son dance

His movements not dissimilar to mine

Although it’s been twenty and five long years

I was seeing him for the first time

He was not so other

In spite of all the difference

Our views of our worlds in which we live

And the stories we tell each other

May seem as far as east is from the west

But in our bodies, and in our movements

In our quests for life, in our very existence

We had a lot more in common

I took his hand, drew him from the dance

We walked into the setting sun

Without a word on our lips

Twin brothers were we

Our beloved mother’s womb we had shared

Under our father’s watchful eyes

We had entered this world together

The time to speak has at last come

To open our mouths in utterance

The power lay in the language we use

As we seek to understand the other
To kill or to live and to let live

The pen is mightier than the sword, it’s said

And words more mightier than the pen

All we have are our words

Words that conjure up our realities

Words that create meaning

The very worlds in which we live

And so we hope and desperately hope

That the words of our mouth

Would become a home

And that we will live together
For better or worse
For richer for poorer
In sickness and in health
To love and to cherish
Brothers, sons of the same mother

Brainerd Prince

20 May 2012, Oxford