Impatient with Snapshots of Squalor [Boo]

From Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum by Katherine Boo, 2011, "Author's Note".

I quickly became impatient with poignant snapshots of Indian squalor: the ribby children with flies in their eyes and other emblems of abjectness that one can't help but see within five minutes of walking into a slum. For me--and, I would argue, for the parents of most impoverished children, in any country--the more important line of inquiry is something that takes longer to discern. What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government's economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? By what means might that ribby child grow up to be less poor?

Converting Road Bumps into Digestive Experience [Desai]

From "Decoding the Autorickshaw" in Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India by Santosh Desai, 2010.

The auto is the urban rat: a wily, crafty creature that wriggles its way through the urban sewer. The auto deals with the road on a second-by-second basis, recognizing that the Indian town is the abode of the Constantly Changing Circumstance. Twisting and turning constantly, the auto dribbles its way through traffic, mankind and chaos in no particular order. Every inch of territory is fought for using not courage but guile. The auto defies the idea that the road is a straight line but sees it as a chessboard, contemplating the next move as if a world of options is open to it.

In many ways, the auto is perfectly at home with twisty by-lanes, gullies and mohallas and mimics their lack of linearity. In fact, even on a straight road, the auto contrives somehow to avoid linearity as it zigzags its way out of sheet habit. The auto, like so many other things in India, almost actively seeks to subvert order by insinuating itself wherever it can. It brings to us a vastly enhanced sense of sub-atomic distances by intruding so close into the vehicle just ahead that distance becomes a state of mind rather than a state of being.

The auto is the one vehicle that moves in three-dimensional space, spending as much time off the road as it does on it. This it owes to the nature of Indian roads as much to its own design. This results in a unique ability to transfer the topography of the road into the passengers' innards, converting road bumps into digestive experience.

The key to understanding the auto is to understand its design. The principle governing its design is perhaps a world view that celebrates compromise not as a "lesser choice" but as "inevitable, and eventually, the only sustainable choice".

Take, for instance, the speed at which the auto is capable of travelling at. It is significantly faster than a cycle and much slower than a car but looked at from the reality of Indian roads, it travels at the ideal speed. Any slower and cycles would zip past, any faster is not possible given the nature of the traffic and the quality of the roads. Its suspension too is self-limiting, being designed for its speed; the moment the auto begins to travel faster, one's insides mimc those of a food processor's. The auto represents the ideal of personal transportation, but barely so. It is a shanty-on-wheels, offering just about adequate protection against the elements, which it more-or-less keeps out, without offering any real guarantees.

There are some problems that don't have a correct answer [Harford]

From "Trial, error and the God complex", a TED talk by Tim Harford, 2011.

So I say, okay, fine. You think it's obvious? I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing.

When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, "I want to fix our health system. I want to fix our education system. I have no idea how to do it. I have half a dozen ideas. We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. Then we'll test some other ideas out. We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. We'll get rid of the ones that don't." When a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works.

Like the Rhyming of a Poem [Tagore]

From Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore, 1916
Trans. Surendranath Tagore.

I knew exactly the time that he could come to me, and therefore our meeting had all the care of loving preparation. It was like the rhyming of a poem; it had to come through the path of metre.

Relations Stop Nowhere [James]

From the Preface to Roderick Hudson by Henry James, 1907. >>

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it. All of which will perhaps pass but for a supersubtle way of pointing the plain moral that a young embroiderer of the canvas of life soon began to work in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover and consume as many as possible of the little holes. The development of the flower, of the figure, involved thus an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brave enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practise positively a thousand lures and deceits. The prime effect of so sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on and on; while the fascination of following resides, by the same token, in the presumability somewhere of a convenient, of a visibly-appointed stopping-place. Art would be easy indeed if, by a fond power disposed to ‘patronise’ it, such conveniences, such simplifications, had been provided. We have, as the case stands, to invent and establish them, to arrive at them by a difficult, dire process of selection and comparison, of surrender and sacrifice. The very meaning of expertness is acquired courage to brace one’s self for the cruel crisis from the moment one sees it grimly loom.

Assumption About Domination [Strathern]

From The Gender Of The Gift by Marilyn Strathern, 1990 [1988], pp 328-9.

Active and passive. Men's advantage does not of itself lie in the constitution of action; men and women may act with equal assertion. At once I encounter the literary problem. Going against the grain of a language is going against its own aesthetic conventions: how one makes certain forms appear. I have claimed that Melanesian men and women do not stand in an irreducibly active and passive relation to one another. Indeed, as the analysis of cause and effect relations indicated, since being a (passive) cause is to have been at an earlier stage an (active) agent, the positions are reversible. But when it comes to writing about concrete instances, the symmetry seems to disappear.

It was argued earlier in this chapter that there is a sense in which men's collective endeavours are directed towards the same reproduction of relations of domestic kinship as concern women. And here lies the intractable Western aesthetic. It conjures a quite inappropriate gender symbolism. If I say that men's exchanges are oriented towards their wives' domestic concerns, then the statement will be read as men appropriating those concerns and turning them to their own use. If I say that women's domestic work is oriented towards their husbands' exchanges, then this will be read conversely, not as their appropriating men's activities but as being subservient to them. I know of no narrative device that will overcome this skewing, because it inheres in the very form of the ideas in which we imagine men's and women's powers.

On the one hand it is important to appreciate just how Melanesian men and women may be seen to be the causes of one another's acts. On the other hand, in order to scrutinize the relationship between these ideas and domination as such, the one move to avoid is working into the analysis of these ideas any assumption about domination. Yet the active/passive (subject/object) skewing of Western gender symbolism makes this separation hard to sustain. I repeat the point. If I say Highlands men are regarded as the cause of their wives' giving birth, then this will imply in the mind of the Western reader that they exercise a superior agency. If I say that Highlands women are regarded as the cause of men's transactions with one another, then this will imply their inferior, object-like status, as instruments of men's exchanges or as provisioners of them.

This aesthetic impasse derives from the Western proclivity to personify convention, to seek the authors of rules, and to reduce images to dogma. Take the specific example of the Eastern Highlands beliefs about procreation: indigenously women are said to be vessels for men who implant the fetus. A woman's act of giving birth is thus an act 'for' her husband; this can be read by the outsider as male dogma. Indeed, it gives rise to anthropological interpretations that are paradoxical from a Melanesian point of view, namely that the the woman is acting in a passive way. Concomitantly, male dogma is also read into the way in which men imitate the act of birth in the course of initiating boys. Outsiders do not consider this female dogma or men as passive in this context; it may even be reported as a kind of afterthought that the purpose of the rites was to make the boys into husbands 'for' the women.

To See What It Is 'Like' [Fremlin]

From The Seven Chars of Chelsea by Celia Fremlin, 1940, pp. 1-2.

I can think of no more striking condemnation of present-day society than the fact that there is room in it for books like this. And there are coming to be a good many more of them. It is becoming more and more the fashion for people like myself to come down from a university, or out of Mayfair, and go and work as charwomen, waitresses or whatnot, to see what it is 'like'. And when we have found out what it is 'like', we come back among our old friends and tell them about it.

And the astounding, and sociologically horrifying, thing is that they listen to us; we are considered to have a real function as purveyors of information.

Now it is obvious that any even partially efficient social system would have no use for amateur job-crawlers such as us. In such a social system, if you wanted to know what it was like to be a charwoman, you would read books by experienced charwomen, and discuss the matter with them, not with dilettante adventurers who happen to have done charring for a couple of months.

But one has only to say this to realize that, in our present society, this simple and obvious method would not work. Charwomen don't write books; and you know quite well that (unless you are a very unusual type of mistress indeed) you would have no idea how to set about finding out from your charwoman what it feels like to live and work as she does. You would not know what questions to ask her, and she would not know how to answer them, nor even what you were getting at. Deadlock would be reached in the second sentence.

The trouble is that the two of you speak different languages; you think different thoughts; you live in different worlds. In a word, you belong to different classes in this British society of ours.

This, then, is why people such as myself have a useful function in present-day society (and, naturally, I believe that we do have a useful function). We can act to some slight extent as messengers and interpreters between the two worlds--extremely inefficient ones, but at present we have no efficient competitors, so we enjoy a scarcity-value that we do not deserve. Such is the state of our society.

One Definition Of Dignity [Todorov]

From Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps by Tzvetan Todorov, 2000 [1991], pp. 61-62.
Trans., Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack.

The important thing is to act out of the strength of one's will, to exert through one's initiative some influence, however minimal, on one's surroundings. [...] No constraint, not even that of social determinism, is ever total: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Viktor Frankl declares, "the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way". But Améry, who eventually came to agree, was also correct in rejecting a purely subjective and internal definition of dignity. As Améry suggests, it is not enough simply to decide to aquire dignity; that decision must give rise to an act that is visible to others (even if they are not actually there to see it). This can be one definition of dignity.

The Exercise of Will

The preservation of dignity requires transforming a situation of constraint into one of freedom; where the constraint is extreme, such a transformation can amount to choosing to do something one is forced to do. Améry arrived at the same conclusion: minimum dignity, the only dignity possible in situations in which one no longer has any choice, means going of one's own accord to the death that others have prepared for you; it is, for example, the suicide of one who awaits execution--the difference between the two is infinitesimal yet sufficient. In This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Borowski tells of a young woman who, having understood the fate in store for her, decides to jump into the truck ferrying new arrivals to the gas chambers.

Risks The Soldiers Themselves Accept [Margalit, Walzer]

From 'Israel: Civilians & Combatants' by Avishai Margalit and Michael Walzer, The New York Review of Books vol. 56 no. 18, May 14, 2009.

But merely "not intending" the civilian deaths, while knowing that they will occur, is not a position that can be vindicated by Israel's condemnation of terrorism. So how can Israel prove its opposition to the practices of its enemies? Its soldiers must, by contrast with its enemies, intend not to kill civilians, and that active intention can be made manifest only through the risks the soldiers themselves accept in order to reduce the risks to civilians.

There is nothing unusual in this demand, and nothing unique to Israel. When soldiers in Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or Gaza take fire from the rooftop of a building, they should not pull back and call for artillery or air strikes that may destroy most or all of the people in or near the building; they should try to get close enough to the building to find out who is inside or to aim directly at the fighters on the roof. Without a willingness to fight in that way, Israel's condemnation of terrorism and of the use of human shields by its enemies rings hollow; no one will believe it.

Never Any Great Risk [Forster]

From Howards End, E. M. Forster, 1910.

'But after all,' she continued with a smile, 'there's
never any great risk as long as you have money.'

'Oh, shame! What a shocking speech!'

'Money pads the edges of things,' said Miss Schlegel.
'God help those who have none.'

'But this is something quite new!' said Mrs. Munt, who
collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was
especially attracted by those that are portable.

'New for me; sensible people have acknowledged it for
years. You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon
islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its
very existence. It's only when we see someone near us
tottering that we realize all that an independent income
means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the
fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is
economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of
love, but the absence of coin.'

'I call that rather cynical.'

'So do I. But Helen and I, we ought to remember, when we
are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on
these islands, and that most of the others, are down below
the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those
whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from
those whom they love no longer. We rich can. Imagine the
tragedy last June, if Helen and Paul Wilcox had been poor
people, and couldn't invoke railways and motor-cars to part them.'

Exactly The Same Fear [D'Amato]

From Body and Soul, Loic Wacquant, 2004.

Legendary trainer manager Cus D'Amato, the 'discoverer' of Mike Tyson, sums up the matter thus: 'The fighter has mastered his emotions to the extent he can conceal and control them. Fear is an asset to a fighter. It makes him move faster, be quicker and more alert. Heroes and cowards feel exactly the same fear. Heroes react to it differently.'

Comes With Money [Flaubert]

From Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Trans. Geoffrey Wall.

Various men, a dozen or more, between the ages of twenty-five and forty, scattered among the dancers or talking in doorways, stood out from the crowd by a family likeness, despite the differences of age, dress or appearance.

Their coats looked better cut, of smoother cloth, and their hair, combed forward to curl at the temple, seemed to glisten with a superior pomade. They had the complexion that comes with money, the clear complexion that looks well against the whiteness of porcelain, the lustre of satin, the bloom on expensive furniture, and is best preserved by a moderate diet of exquisite foodstuffs. Their necks turned gracefully in their low cravats; their long whiskers flowed down over their collars; they wiped their lips on handkerchiefs embroidered with large initials, and deliciously scented. Those who were past their prime looked youthful, and even the faces of the young wore a certain maturity. In their coolly glancing eyes lingered the calm of passions habitually appeased; and, from beneath their polished ways, they exuded that peculiar brutality which comes from a too-casual supremacy in everything that demands strength and amuses one's vanity, the handling of race-horses and the company of fallen-women.

A Lark In A Cage [Webster]

From John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), IV.ii.

Duchess: Thou art not mad, sure: dost know me?
Bosola: Yes.
Duchess: Who am I?
Bosola: Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What's this flesh? a little crudded milk, fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those paper-prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.
Duchess: Am not I thy duchess?

I Am Not Free [Debs]

From Eugene Debs' Statement to the Court, September 18th, 1918.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Encounter [Wexler]

'Encounter' in E1, A Teacher's PerpLexicon, Peter Wexler.

A teacher-student encounter. One side seeks to 'improve' the other, who doesn't mind being improved, so long as it doesn't involve being different. One side seeks to displace, the other has an inbuilt inertia. The resultant is something in between, which both sides settle for. It's difficult (as you see) to stop thinking of one side of this engagement as being somehow Nominative and the other Accusative.

But each side has come to the classroom as to a market. Both end up getting somewhat less than they'd hoped, renouncing a little more than they contemplated at the outset. In the ideal case, both parties discover in this act of renunciation which of their initial hopes were less non-negotiable than they had originally supposed; come to see this as an insight which neither could have achieved without the other; and so (overriding the adversarial terminology of 'both parties') learn to abandon their all-too-reassuring Nominativeness or Accusativeness, as the case may be.

Troubled Parts of the World [Ghosh]

From 'The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi', in Incendiary Circumstances, Amitav Ghosh.

When I now read descriptions of troubled parts of the world, in which violence appears primordial and inevitable, a fate to which masses of people are largely resigned, I find myself asking, Is that all there was to it? Or is it possible that the authors of these descriptions failed to find a form -- or a style or a voice or a plot -- that could accommodate both violence and the civilized willed response to it?

The truth is that the commonest response to violence is one of repugnance and that a significant number of people try to oppose it in whatever ways they can. That these efforts rarely appear in accounts of violence is not surprising; they are too undramatic.

These Great Names [Forster]

From Howards End, E. M. Forster.

No disrespect to these great names. The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination.

Only The Blasphemies of Sailors [Garcia Marquez]

From Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Trans. Edith Grossman.

"Nothing that does not speak will come into this house," he said.

He said it to put an end to the specious arguments of his wife, who was once again determined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalization was to cost him his life. Fermina Daza, whose straightfoward character had become more subtle with the years, seized upon her husband's casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships from Curaçao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors but said them in a voice so human that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve centavos.

He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tongue, the only way to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the ingenuity of his wife and was even surprised at how amused he was by the advances the parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls. On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathers drenched, he uttered phrases from another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which led one to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor's final doubts collapsed one night when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightened them with a mastiff's barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and with shouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It was then that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mango tree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. From December through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoors unbearable, he was taken inside to sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a blanket, although Dr. Urbino suspected that his chronic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration of humans. For many years they clipped his wing feathers and let him wander wherever he chose to walk with his hulking old horseman's gait. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on the beams in the kitchen and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor's shout of every man for himself, and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with the ladle, scalded and deplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, in defiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots forget everything they have learned, and let out only in the four o'clock coolness for his classes with Dr. Urbino on the terrace in the patio. No one realized in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that morning when he escaped to the top of the mango tree.

To Be Hurt [Beckett]

From 'The Painful Comedy of Samuel Beckett', John Banville, NYRB vol 43 no 18, 14 Nov 1996.

In return for some work Beckett did on the proofs of Finnegans Wake, Joyce paid him a miserly couple of hundred francs and "supplemented it," Beckett reported, "with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt."

Your Sensitivity [Naipaul]

From An Area of Darkness, ch 2, V.S. Naipaul.

India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value; a thousand new-comers to the country before you have seen and said as you. And not only newcomers. Our own sons and daughters, when they return from Europe and America, have spoken in your very words. Do not think that your anger and contempt are marks of your sensitivity. You might have seen more: the smiles on the faces of the begging children, that domestic group among the pavement sleepers walking in the cool Bombay morning, father, mother and baby in a trinity of love, so self-contained that they are as private as if walls had separated them from you: it is your gaze that violates them, your sense of outrage that outrages them. You might have seen the boy lying down; exhaustion and undernourishment are in his tiny body and shrunken face, but lying flat on his back, oblivious of you and the thousands who walk past in the lane between sleepers' mats and house walls bright with advertisements and election slogans, oblivious of the warm, overbreathed air, he plays with fatigued concentration and a tiny pistol in blue plastic. It is your surprise, your anger, that denies him humanity. But wait. Stay six months. The winter will bring fresh visitors. Their talk will also be of poverty; they too will show their anger. You will agree; but deep down there will be annoyance; it will seem to you then, too, that they are seeing only the obvious; and it will not please you to find your sensibility so accurately parodied.