Restless, restless.

Stuart McKenna

I am leaving for Oxford soon, and I am restless. What does one do before one's whole life changes? Nothing seems even close to appropriate, precisely because it feels as if every single gesture ought to have some significance, while in fact I am just waiting, most of the time on my own. I have packed most things, I have been with some friends, I have looked at lecture lists, I have unfriended all the people I barely know from Facebook (just because it felt that my personal space was cluttered), I have obsessed over vacuous details, I have felt by turns uncomfortable and giddy. I don't seem to have enough concentration to study any maths or philosophy right now; my nerves are pressing against my skin all the time. It is both anticlimactic (no teary goodbyes, parties, or anything you would see in a film) and unfamiliar: this kind of feeling - nagging anticipation, restless isolation, waiting, waiting, waiting - goes ignored in every single book/film/song I know (if you know an exception, please do tell, I would love to pick up pointers and feel part of some common experience). It's no wonder I am also unable to describe it, or pull anything productive out of this.

The Dream of Despair

When I was little, I used to have dreams which repeated themselves. I thought of them as the same dream, but in a rather hazy sense: the setting, the storyline (if I may call the succession of sensory images which composes dreams so), the ending - all changed. Still, in some sense I inhabited the same world, revisited the same themes, felt the same emotions and sensory states. 

Of these recurrent dreams, this was probably the most poignant one.

I am in a pearly white landscape extending in all directions. I am as clean and at peace as the landscape: the crystal whiteness is both within and outside me, filling me with a light that is at exactly the same level as the one outside. This is boundlessness: I don't know if in power, but surely in satisfaction and peace. There is no desire here, nothing but a pale glow of star-like joy. 

And then suddenly it all goes wrong.

The landscape was a paper leaf left unwritten; now it's scrunched up and torn apart and inked black and viciously stabbed and cut, as if someone was drawing messy, scrambled lines all over the paper (isn't it funny that, to talk of dreams - the purest of metaphors - we have the need still to lay a further layer of metaphors so as to be able to transmit them to others?). There is no one to be seem doing it. There is a hollow scream throughout the air, and suddenly people running everywhere, buildings collapsed, limbs and blood and fear made solid in an earthquake.

Fear, hate, loss, grief, despair. I am sure there will never be anything further, anything else. This is what the world has become, both inside and outside: there is no hope because there is nowhere to escape to.

I no longer dream, or at least I almost never remember my dreams. Reality seems to have grown much less transparent; it's presented in a block of certainties, not as a veil of possibilities. The white sheet of that world can, in clear-skied, clear-eyed days, be seen floating over the river.  

Bat for Lashes' lovely new single

Laura, you're more than a superstar

Isn't it a sweet song? It holds so beautifully on the fine edge between camp-ness and stark poignancy. It fills my chest with a bubble of diffuse pride and affection for random friends, those whose worth seems to go unnoticed by most, most of the time, so much that even they forget it, and then lose their brand of shine and light. 

On Inspiration

Usually, I find "inspiring" aphorisms/tales/images corny, irritating, and insincere, displaying a childish - and rationally untenable - belief in mystical coincidence (why should the Universe be conspiring anything relatively to a specific individual? The Universe doesn't care.). 

On the contrary, this article by Jeffrey Eugenides - one of my favourite authors, with three extraordinary books to his name which you should definitely read - about his personal struggles to finish novels and about the bizarre mental events that gave him strength to do so is very honest, filled with self-deprecating humour, and a clear awareness of the way we are, in the end, responsible for our own strength. I find our human ability to create dreams to chase, to select and organise events in a coherent whole, to construct a meaning for ourselves to hang on to, a source of endless wonder. 

As Eugenides puts it, inspiration

was me, breathing into myself, in order to breathe out again in a flow of words. 

A beautiful corollary of this is the gracious gift of inspiration - the self turns into itself, but eventually projects a new light into the world. Out of our fundamental solitude, maybe bonds with others can be built.

(though I seem to have forgotten how - but then again, I must be the one to build my own inspiration)

It is curious how much of this humble, generous attitude surfaces in Eugenides' books. Probably his fundamental kindness and humanity towards his characters, giving them roots in an imperfect emotional reality which rings so true, are what make his novels so absorbing and relatable. But there is more to his books than the joy of identifying with the characters and of his restrained, but powerfully atmospheric, use of language. They breathe love. 

In The Virgin Suicides, the distant, adolescent love which tragically leaves the girls untouched, frozen forever in their youthful deaths; in Middlesex, the bonds and knots of family love of love as basic life supports; in The Marriage Plot, love in tension with independence and with social structures. These are inspiring portraits of the power - and weakness - of human connections, and they make me hungry to seek their presence.

Against Scientism

Yesterday, The Guardian ran a piece called 'Philosophy v Science: which can answer the big question of life?'. This is an interesting debate between the philosopher Julian Baggini and the physicist Lawrence Krauss on the differences of approach - and of the questions - of philosophy and of the natural sciences.  Obviously, they are both intelligent thinkers, but their attitudes - Krauss boisterous and proud of his subject, Baggini much more cautious and defensive - are revealing of the dominant reverence towards science and its extraordinary practical results and tendency to dismiss philosophy as senseless bickering. This is only natural: after all, science has produced a wealth of results with successful practical application leading to vast, radical improvements in the length and comfort of our lives, while the abstract problems of philosophy remain unsolved. The result is an uncritical idolisation of science, an act of blind faith on the power of the scientific method to produce answers - scientism, the prevailing ideology of industrial societies. However, this stance is fundamentally wrong, encapsulating a strong component of irrationality which, paradoxically, goes against the spirit of the science.

The catch-22 here is that you need a philosophical approach to grasp why scientism is both wrong and harmful to science in particular, and to knowledge in general. It is extremely naive to suppose that we have direct access to the outside world and unlimited power to change it, as scientism encourages. Even if that turns out to be true, we can only know after careful rational reflection - and that is where philosophy inevitably comes in. 

But what is this philosophical approach? 

I think it is best described as relentless rational criticism, i.e. the rigorous application of self-evident logical principles on the way we ourselves view the world. It implies a brave self-consciousness and commitment to fighting against dogmas of all sorts; it also incorporates a willingness to go to the root of our understanding of the world, in particular to the way language is employed (which is at the very core of our thinking). In particular, a large component of philosophy is the rational criticism of different methods of acquiring knowledge, which should lead to the improvement of those methods and, thus, to the possible construction of a clearer picture of the world. 

If you wish, you may picture the full body of human knowledge as an ocean, with philosophy as the waves hitting uncharted shore and leading to the expansion of the ocean in all directions. Philosophy probes at the unanswerable - once a method is fully formed and questions are circumscribed in such a way that they are answerable by its application, the problems cease to be philosophical and become part of the piecemeal practice of scientific investigation. In the meanwhile, philosophy has advanced to new formulations, and considers them until they are similarly circumscribed. In this way, philosophy contributes immensely to science. Discarding philosophical thinking - which I believe to be impossible, so deeply rooted is it in our humanity - would thus eventually lead the end of science.

But the clarification of the body of scientific truths and expansion of the scope of science is not the single task of philosophy. As an all-encompassing form of probing the world, philosophy also comprises an enquiry into our very own humanity (based on the same rational principles that have already been mentioned), into questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' or 'How are we to live?'. These questions - the ones we must strive to answer both in theory and in practice, the ones that are concerned with the value we place in our own lives - transcend science, because, in science, the human being may be studied as an object, but not as a subject. 

For example, even if science provided us with a description (with predictions) of human behaviour in biological terms (and thus in chemical and physical ones), that still wouldn't give us the reason for a person's behaviour, - only an explanation - and it certainly wouldn't include ethical judgement. That explanation would certainly be interesting and illuminating in relation to the functioning of our organism, but, if mistaken as giving us the subject's intentionality, it would lead to a dangerous objectification of the human being.

It is, of course, an open question - a philosophical question - whether such a determinist reduction can be made. Even if it can, there is space for free will - the agent causes the action, using reason, verbal ability, and human empathy, which may be described in simpler terms (the ones of science; I speak of simper as in more fundamental). In other words, the fact that we are physical creatures, that is, based on a physical hardware, doesn't make us any less human in the sense we use in our interpersonal dealings - i.e., in the sense in which we consider each individual as an end in himself, possessing a special dignity that comes from the possibility of communication and understanding between interlocutors.

Thus science is compatible with an infinite within us, the infinite that keeps us alive and searching for more (sometimes through science, others through art, others even through religion), the infinite that makes us look into each others' eyes and seek a way of tempering our loneliness in the other's infinite potential, the infinite that underlies the freedom and dignity that make us equals in our humanity.

But science does not explore that infinite. Science has nothing to say about the human nature of love, of beauty, of goodness; but these are still necessary concepts which mean something - the meaning coming from the way we employ them and do them justice in our actions. 

Wittgenstein wrote that "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all". Science contributes to human life in many ways - from the pure joy of discovery and understanding to the great technological advances that allow us to live longer and better - but it is not enough. Attempting to reduce all the questions to hard-nosed scientific enquiry equates to jumping over the infinite within ourselves, the luscious gaping mouth of our humanity, the endless blossoming rose of our freedom.

...

As I get closer and closer to leaving home, I find myself going more and more inside myself. I had not expected these last weeks at home to be spent in such a quiet way, immersed in hazy daydreams about the next three or four years (that, for now, is the duration of my life: further down the road I will be another, a stranger in a strange land), and in the abstract overlapping worlds if mathematics and philosophy. The past seems to be dissolving, leaving just a thin layer of dust and salt on my skin. I have not built any self-narrative - the story we form by stringing select memories into a coherent whole, thereby picturing our life as a story with the self as the protagonist, whose features are defined precisely by those of the selected memories - of the past three years. It somehow seems unimportant: they flew by in disconnected strands and alternating periods of throwing myself into the world and receding into my own head. The only visible result of high school is precisely launching me into the future via getting into Oxford, which is perhaps the reason why that is all I am now able to focus on. I marvel at how perfect the surgery separating me from my recent past has been: I feel white and scrubbed and fresh and clean, all ready to start anew.

In my mind, I'm inside a plane, looking out the window as it goes higher and higher, with all the figures becoming smaller and smaller, becoming mere dots, and then nothing. 

...

...

...

Reading log - August 2012

I have read voraciously during these holidays - in fact that is pretty much my definition of holidays, as long as the books chosen are not too difficult or depressing. These are the most interesting novels I have read lately: 

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

A gripping mafia thriller about a teenager, Pinkie, ruthlessly rising in the ranks. He is the character that keeps you glued to the paper: revolting but fascinating, with his unnatural lack of emotion and catholic gravitas. The contrast between him and Ida, amateur detective of solid positive character, leads to a stark comparison between two opposite moral conceptions: the heavy, otherworldly notions of good vs evil against the common sense view of right vs wrong. It is an excellent illustration of how the concepts we apply to reality have the power of determining the way we act: they aren't passive descriptions but active guiding principles. Greene also produces extraordinary descriptions, resembling impressionist paintings, of the town of Brighton, focusing both on its shiny touristic face and on the seedy underworld, letting you feel the heavy, impending doom through the presence of the uncontrollable sea. Though the story is, in its details, somewhat clumsy, it is both very involving and thought-provoking.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

This tale of an eccentric teacher and the influence she has on her pupils throughout their lives seemed a bit frothy and shallow while I was reading it, but it has in the meantime grown on me. It is written in a deceptively simple style, which is actually very smart, precise and witty - the book is constantly putting a smile on your lips. Miss Brodie's grandiose behaviour, fetching for hr students, seems pathetic, almost demented, to the reader. The everyday nature of the scenes described makes it hard to see anything but a collection of amusing vignettes on growing up, role models, female sexuality, friendship, and power dynamics; however, once you mentally connects the dots, you can appreciate how masterfully she interweaves memories of different periods, leading to an understated reflection on the twisted effects of intense personalities on young people, and on the soft edge between truth and fancy. 

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

I thought I should get to know the Oxford stereotype before going (less than one month to go now!!), so I picked up Brideshead Revisited expecting plenty of luscious descriptions of student life as a rich aristocrat in the early 20th century. There are, in fact, plenty of those here, and I found reading about the characters' colourful, careless, sophisticated fun a very pleasant experience (like watching Gossip Girl, only far cooler, with a finer irony and an elegant writing style). However, the book is not vacuous at all: those descriptions put in stark relief the subsequent decay of the aristocracy and of their aesthetic way of life, which basically leads them to self-destruction. The social portrait here is masterful.Waugh also attempts to persuade the reader of the value of Catholicism, which leads to a rather disappointing, even preachy, ending. On the other hand, the depth the religious aspect brings to the characters' inner lives must not be undervalued: it sets them apart from others perhaps even more than money.

All in all, despite the slightly uneven details, this is a brilliant work in social satire and it manages to capture a full way of life.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles
I read A Separate Peace just after Brideshead Revisited, and the novels have striking similarities: both deal with the effects of World Wars in society, both are set in exclusive academic environments, both are centred in the (heavily homo-erotic) relationship between two young men and its lifelong consequences, both are unreliably narrated by an individual looking back to his own youth, both have a distinct feeling of melancholy for innocence lost, conveyed via an elegant writing style, and both aim to present a picture of the human condition. Knowles' view is bleak: he sees adult life as a constant war, and those who are too pure and joyful to fight are set for doom. This broad view is conveyed through the description of the close and complicated relationship of two teenage boys at boarding school: the joyful, athletic, charming Finny, and Gene, the introverted narrator who betrays him due to feeling of jealousy and - paradoxically - love. Gene is responsible for Finny's death, but his fault lies in wanting to become Finny so much. This novel illustrates, then, the poison contained in the blurring of personal identity, and how lonely we unavoidably are. This is a short but atmospheric, thought-provoking and heavily symbolic novel.

About a Boy by Nick Hornby
I love Nick Hornby: his novels are as warm, funny, unpretentious, and intelligent descriptions of modern relationships as you are likely to read. About a Boy is about the relationship between a spoilt, immature bachelor, and an eccentric twelve-year-old living with his depressed mother, and about how they change and help each other in small, but eventually very relevant, ways. The full book feels alive: the dialogues, the cultural references, the matter-of-fact tone, are all spot-on. It is also very heart-warming, the conclusion being that we can connect to each other, contribute to each others' lives, and in that way build a meaning for our lives out of small things. Life is more than the sum of its parts.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
I re-read Good Omens just because it makes me laugh, take flights of fantasy, and turn the pages voraciously with a sarcastic smile of incredulity on my lips. I tells the very implausible story of the Apocalypse, starring a colourful array of characters - humans, angels, demons, etcetera - and including such wonders as martians landing, Tibetans building tunnels, and 20th century witch-hunters, all in a quick succession which isn't even supposed to make sense, and narrated in a deadpan tone. This book is fun! But it is more than that: it also satirises moralises about some of the real evils of our society (most notably war, pollution, hunger) though in such an entertaining way you won't even feel bothered. What the cover says is true: Apocalypse has never been funnier.

Joni Mitchell's Blue - my new musical love

Blue is everything I could ask from an album: sensitive, soft-sounding but emotional, with a lush, reckless naked vulnerability in both the sonority and the lyrics. It's romantic and disillusioned, joyful and melancholy. It's ten tiny stars burning themselves high into my heart. I am still in the process of savouring it, listening time after time to absorb the texture, the personality and the feelings, and I am sure that the way I think about it will change, but for now I would say it is about the fine line between loving the taste of life, and feeling tired and alone inside of it; about the battle between hope and despair, or fantasy and reality. It is a delicate beauty.

This is the title track, hope you enjoy it!

Brave

In a similar note to my last post, some thoughts on another delightful animation film about a young woman finding her strengths and growing up in a vibrant fantasy setting - Pixar's Brave. 

I took my sister and my cousins to watch it at the cinema (we have a kind of tradition of watching Pixar films together), and it was lovely getting to share with them the interesting and motivating ideas which this film explores. It was also a chance to spend some time talking, and it makes me feel very proud and happy to see them grow into their own people, gaining their independence, exploring new aspects of the world, and shaping up their personality.  

Brave's themes made it perfect to watch together. Like most/all Pixar films, it is not really aimed at children: the theme of growing up and finding your personal space and freedom while preserving your family relationships, and the conflicts and misunderstandings that inevitably occur in that process, become relatable and relevant only in your teens. Besides, the delightful cultural references to the Middle Ages and to Scotland (the actors' accents are so endearing and the scenery is so beautiful it really made me want to visit!) would, I suspect, go over most kids' heads. On the other hand, these mature aspects benefit from being explored in such gorgeous, lively animation and with a child-like sense of wonder and heightened action and emotion.

I loved the development of the mother-daughter relationship at the core of the story, which is very much true to real life. The frustrating bickering mother-daughter arguments lead in a subtle, progressive way to a relationship of equals who are willing to compromise and seek mutual understanding on a basis of love. Both Merida and the Queen change and grow, while the King and the Princes complete this family dynamic. Supporting characters are mostly there for colour and cultural background, excelling in this purpose. I never cease to be amazed at how animators manage to capture so much of what being human looks like/is (are they the same thing?).

In the end - after laughing, (almost) crying, and being on the edge of your seat - you are left with an uplifting and sincere message: we are free to grow and develop as individuals, but it takes bravery and support to do so. We should take pleasure from both these elements, for determination and love are all that can lead us to become more complete as human beings.

Spirited Away

Spirited Away - the animated story of a young girl who finds herself in a bizarre world of gods, witches, and dragons, with her parents transformed in pigs - is every bit as kooky and delightful as you would expect from the numerous awards it won. The story is classical in tone and nature, interweaving a variety of rich influences - Japanese myths, classical epic tales, Alice in Wonderland - and ideas in an exciting adventure which has a lot to say about growing up and developing your own strength. It is not fluffy and saccharine in tone, much to the contrary: it shows how hard and scary finding yourself on your own in unknown land can be, but also how exhilarating and fascinating it becomes when you learn how to manage by yourself. Accordingly, the images vary between disturbing and nightmare-like (seriously, I thought some scenes were very scary, I'm glad I didn't watch this as a small kid) and breathtaking, like a postcard from paradise. The stills don't really do justice to just how beautiful this film is - a feast for the eyes if there ever was one - but I can't resist leaving you with a few which give you a small taste of the poetry, humor and sensibility of this great film.