Great Writing on The Emigrant’s Point of View

This from Patrick French’s “The World is What It is” (a fascinating biography of V.S. Naipaul):

In 1950, Naipaul, endearingly named Vido by his parents and siblings, leaves his island-home of Trinidad for the U.K. to pursue studies in English Literature at Oxford. He has received a full scholarship to follow his dreams. As there aren’t any ships scheduled to sail from Port of Spain, Vido flies to New York and from New York he would be ocean bound to London.

As his plane takes off, French writes this by surmising what Vido saw:

“As he receded towards America and England, he saw the island as he had never seen it before, the pattern of the fields and the roads and the houses, while his family looked up at him, suspended in the sky in a cross, at a right angle to Columbus, leaving the new world.”

Buddha Was a (Brown) Woman

Move over, Taylor Swift, who sings “Karma is my boyfriend/Karma is a cat/Karma is an acrobat”, and the public swoons as though she had sung a revolution into being.

Go back in time, and read what Marita Bonner has to share instead.

She speculates that perhaps the Buddha was a woman; a brown woman like herself.

In “On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored” (1925), Bonner evidences autonomous thinking:

“You see clearly–off there is infinity–Understanding. Standing alone, waiting for someone to really want her.

But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and really drag her in.

So–being a woman–you can wait.

You can sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden–and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty.

But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha–who, brown like I am–sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before that white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands.

Motionless on the outside; But inside?

Silent.

Still…”Perhaps Buddha is a woman.”

So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into you and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding into your self.

And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet–at your full height–at a single gesture.

Ready to go where?

Why…Wherever God motions.”

The Bullshit Detector & Human Delusions

Zadie Smith’s unsentimental, non-hagiographic, tribute to Joan Didion, is worth a read. Didion was the writer, who lived and breathed in her “sentence,” not in a self-propagating myth created by today’s writers in the Twitterverse.

Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan” located “just beneath the seemingly rational and ideological topsoil which [Didion] found to be dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillments, self-loathing and bitter fancies.”

In other words, the writer dealt with people’s delusions, though readers misunderstood these intentions. But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims and beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Heminway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to detect how much truth was in it, how much delusion

According to Smith,

“When your main subject is human delusion, you end up drawing that quality out of others, even as you seek to define and illuminate it [delusion]. How else to explain the odd ways in which we invert her meanings? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. A sentence meant as indictment has transformed into personal credo. The same goes for “magical thinking.” Magical thinking is a disorder of thought. It sees causality where there is none, confuses private emotions with general reality, imposes “a narrative line upon disparate images” (White Album) . But the extremity of mourning aside, it was not a condition from which she generally suffered. Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words we use to express our core beliefs and aims. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Heminway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion.”

Cars

In his 1956 poem, “America,” Beat poet Allen Ginsberg had asked a pertinent question about cars in America: Why do cars sell at $2500 apiece, whereas a product of artisanal penmanship like a “strophe” doesn’t sell at all? Yet cars are mass produced, whereas poems are singular works of individual imaginations.

What is a car’s appeal?

A rudimentary response would be that it is a vehicle that transports us across long distances in a short time and in the comfort of privacy.

But a car is more than that; it’s a second home for many. Moreover, to be able to drive a car is deemed a valuable activity, not just in the United States, but now, in light of the legalization of driving for women in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, elsewhere as well.

In Saudi Arabia, driving has been for a while upheld as a right, akin to the right to vote or to shelter and dignity. Thus by getting behind the wheels, Saudi women expect to experience liberty and modernity in a way that they haven’t before.

A car therefore has utility, market value, imparts status and now symbolical value.

Yet, a car, as writer Jesse Balls reminds us in the novel, “Census,” is less than a “mule,” if we allow ourselves to momentarily think of this piece of machinery as just that–a tool, on which we ride.

The following sentence from “Census” is brought to our attention in the “First Sentences” segment of the New York Times:

And, of course, a person riding and singing–isn’t it obvious that this is a superior situation to a man on a mule with a radio?

The sentence has been parsed to yield a meaning:

The narrator has explained why he has never had a car with a radio. A car, he contends, should be like a mule, only less beautiful–just a mute thing that moves you on, steadily and faithfully, toward the place you are going, while [you] sing to pass time.

 

 

 

 

A Profile of Seduction

According to a NYT book critic, the following is a grand articulation of seduction:

Roxana does not pretend that the virtue whose loss she intermittently laments is something she deeply and sincerely believes in. On the contrary, she was happy to remain in a divided, ambivalent state in which she wants to resist seduction but equally wants her resistance to be swept away. She is well aware of this division or ambivalence within herself…Implicitly she recognizes that she finds being seduced more interesting than giving herself in a direct, unambiguous way; that the prelude to the sexual act can be more desirable, more erotically fulfilling, than the act itself. Seduction, the thought of seduction, the approach of seduction, the imagined experience of seduction, turns out to be profoundly seductive, even irresistible.

These are the expressions of J.M. Coetzee in his recent collection of essay’s “Late Essays.” In these lines, Coetzee intuits the mental universe of one of Daniel Defoe’s most intriguing of heroines.

Linguistic Peregrinations

Pulitzer Prize winning fiction-writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s first non-fiction book is on language. Lahiri conceives of the world of language as a world in and of itself in which the learner and the practitioner is like a traveler, a citizen, an immigrant or an exile. Lahiri volunteers out of passion to be a citizen of Italian language. The book is a memoir of her experience traversing the landscape of Italian.

The New Yorker had published an excerpt from the book last year, while the NYT has reviewed the book.

Metaphors and Similes

[The] promises and equivocations are like bounced verbal checks.

Lines of Beauty

“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive and die only when you are dead. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what’s simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”

Arundhati Roy in an interview.

Metaphors and Similes

His bones were as ludicrous as a raised pinkie.

His head felt like an empty ice cream jar.

Her throat sounded crumpled with dollar bills.

It was beautiful outside, high sixties and crisp, the blue with its attendant white.

A muffled cry as if the earth were a heart broken pillow.

Rows of razor sharp buildings, like a shark bursting through water. (on seeing Manhattan from above)

A Simile

The French poet  Guillaume Apollinaire compared memories with the “sound of hunters’ horns fading in the wind.”

I have never heard a hunter’s horn, but the sound must be haunting, evocative of something caught in the liminal zone of lingering and passing away.