Culture Blog - What this blog is about



This is an attempt by a 29 year old man, now approaching the dreadful third decade of his life (perhaps its very summit!), and driven by various existential needs, to attain the following:

(a) A measure of self-understanding by attentively parsing the world around him, with a special interest in how the cultural orbit in which we move, and the historical baggage that we carry with us, affects the construction of meaning and how this meaning-pattern evolves through the ages, and its implications for the individual;

(b) An understanding of the "world-as-history", as an object of interest and curiosity and a thing of value in itself, i.e. for its own sake. Of course, one cannot neglect to mention the impetus provided by pleasure brought about by the study of the myriad forms through which human concerns have expressed themselves.

These two purposes may thus be but different faces of the same coin, aspects of the same goal. Inasmuch as what we know is commensurate with the sum of the world (at least as it expresses itself is our psyches) that we have become conscious of, and the sum of what we have become conscious of (or were once conscious of) is in turn the full measure of our humanity, then it follows by way of syllogism, that this impulse towards greater knowledge (that is, the concretization of understandings about both the world and my own mind) is nothing less than an attempt to actualize my humanity to the fullest extent possible. An attempt to bring everything that was potential into the realm of the actual. The use a Pauline expression - to know as I am known (by the world), not out of a radical intellectual conceit, but out of the peculiar destiny of a man with a strange inclination to subject all things to analysis, and to improve himself to the farthest extent, which as you probably can tell, I believe are really one and the same thing, and part of the masculine need for extension and assertion.

To this end, I have taken a heteromodal approach:

(i) bottom-up - at the level of the particular, by recording my own responses to literature and art, in whatever form, that comes my way
(ii) top-down - at a higher level of generality, by analysing these responses in terms of what is customary to the genre of that art or a particular culture
(iii) horizontal - by exploring the relationship between the forms that have arisen in disparate genres, mediums and even particular works
(iv) temporal - by exploring how these forms evolve over time

Conscious life is a continuous dialogue between a Subject and a multitude of Objects that mutually contain and interpenetrate one another on the stage of the psyche. This cannot be understood without a deep feeling for the gravitational pull that the "constellations of associations" and "interrelations of meaning" that have been adopted and shaped by our ancestors exert over our own minds, and that we in turn shape for future generations. This inner world of assocations and meanings determines not merely the forms in which this Subject-Object dialectic takes place, but also inform the representation of the nature and qualities of Subject and Object in our own minds. It is hoped that through the contemplation and study of various cultures, the dynamic agencies that drive them can be discerned and abstracted, and that a coherent metaphysics might be constructed out of this archaeological expedition into the debris of the human mind and its objective past.

At a more instrumental level and jejune level, one could say that the purpose of this blog is to also force me to engage in a sort of disciplined approach to my reading, by offering me an outlet to analyse and offer a critique of the books I read, the movies I watch, the music I hear. I hope that this critique will also help you, in offering potential materials that you may in turn feast yourself upon.I will be reviewing and rating these books, movies, music and other articles of culture, for the purpose of our mutual edification, I the subject and You the object - the mirror of my mind, and We part of a common and inextricably linked reality that births all phenomena on the stage of the psyche. At a purely molecular or even basely mechanical level, this blog is about everything in popular culture that enriches the human mind, it is a loosely connected constellation of hasty observations that reflect the results of my communion with the world, expressed in the form of verse. It is that ineffable substance which my mind reciprocally secretes back into the world after having received something from it.



Waltz with Bashir

I like the movie Waltz with Bashir because of its portrayal of amnesia, and the overall feeling of estrangement from reality that results when one cannot quite connect the past with the present. In many ways, my endeavour is inspired by a similar feeling. Because I identify so much with things that are fully human, and refuse to see myself as nothing but a collection of atoms or an ever-decomposing concoction of chemicals held together by elastase, I am forced to examine the nature of the divide that separates the psyche from the world, and explore the nature of the Subject-Object dichotomy that Buber so poetically articulated and Foucalt extended. To borrow a term from Baudrillard, man is at the center of a Perfect Crime, that estrangement of the Ideal from the Real, and the twofold alienation of the Self from the World and from God. We do not know who has perpetrated this Perfect Crime or whether it is sensible to even ask that question. All we know is that the mystery must ultimately resolved, and to that end, we are left with the collective debris of our ancestors' actions, and their memoirs in the form of a written history, which constitutes the patchy evidence with which we are left to fill in the gaps in our psyche. In some way, we are all amnesiacs, and the gaps in the collective memory of the human race are precisely those lacunae that confute an understanding of our situation "in an ever-present future".

I apologise for the prolixity of the prose, which I will progressively pare down as these ideas coalesce, and take solid form in my head, which will surely render them more readable. I deliberately did play a few intellectual tricks here and there to test the response and perhaps disorient readers. I aim to strike a delicate balance to resolve the tension inherent in the competing needs of self-satisfaction, which comes from writing rich prose, and comprehensibility, which is the fruit of sparsity, sometimes idiocity. For that temporary excess, I must thank the multiplicity of authors from a wide-ranging assortisement of disciplines whose speculations, hypotheses, articulations and analogies now impinge, like a swelling crowd, on the rather narrow stage of my mind. Acknowledgements to the following influences:

Psychology - Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm
Philosophy - Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Wittgenstein, Aurelius, Bacon, Aristotle, Plato
Religion - Jean Calvin, Martin Luther, Erasmus, Martin Buber, Aquinas, Augustine
Culture - Lin Yu Tang, Oswald Spengler
History - Felipe De Armesto
Literature - Baltasar Gracian, Oscar Wilde

If you liked this blog, you may be interested in my essays, currently dispersed amongst other blogs:

Meditations on the Faith
http://meditationsonthefaith.blogspot.com/2011/11/purpose-of-blog.html#!/
Contains some of my theological reflections.

A Little Illumination
http://sekhelmazhir.blogspot.com/view/magazine
My attempt to draw inspiration from the interconnected fields of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.