getting to the realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams
Two images from Tierney Gearon’s show Explosure at the Phillips de Pury and Company gallery in London last year.
Frame 13 is Goldilocks, innocence and the bears in a verdant wood, by a lake in the mountains. Frame 18 is looking through time and perhaps not understanding what you will become – from innocence, through a glass to adult preoccupation.
They are beautiful collages about memory and childhood accomplished by double exposure and transparency.
These are excerpts from Michael Pollan’s No Bar Code essay in which he talks to Joel Salatin of Polyface farms.
You know you’re in trouble when your food is smarter than you. Smashing metaphor: lack of knowledge of the world – the loving inward gaze – could very well be the source of bad diet! We won’t travel to see the world – who needs to see the world? – but we’ll ship the goods from hell’s half acre over here so we can eat it.
Food is like the movies too. We don’t care how good the movie is, just how much it makes at the box office. Likewise, as long as it looks like an apple and I can eat loads of them in and out of season, who cares what it tastes like? Or how many chemicals are keeping it from turning to mush in my hand?
Here are Michael Pollan’s comments on how in food, quantity always trumps quality and how we have come to this state by general public ignorance:
The typical fruit or vegetable on an American’s plate travels some 1,500 miles to get there, and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater.
/…/
When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is so often sold strictly on the basis of price. Look at any supermarket ad in the newspaper and all you will find in it are quantities–pounds and dollars; qualities of any kind are nowhere to be found. The value of relationship marketing is that it allows many kinds of information besides price to travel up and down the food chain: stories as well as numbers, qualities as well as quantities, values rather than “value.” And as soon as that happens, people begin to make different kinds of buying decisions, motivated by criteria other than price. But instead of stories about how it was produced accompanying our food, we get bar codes–as illegible as the industrial food chain itself, and a fair symbol of its almost total opacity.
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–”dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just “value”–will inform their purchasing decisions.
This is from Simon Critchley’s Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction which describes the differences and similarities between continental and Anglo – also called analytic – systems of thought.
I’m just back from a trip to London and Paris and found the two cities to be radically different; I am convinced the forms of the cities derive directly from their philosophies.
Is it fair to say that there is a gap – a gaping one – between merely finding remedies to problems, as Thatcher seems prone to do in the excerpt below, and finding a way toward a well lived life?
Here is Simon Critchley -
On 5 October 1999, when pressed for her current views on the prospect of a European union, Margaret Thatcher remarked, ‘All the problems in my lifetime have come from Continental Europe, all the solutions have come from the English-speaking world.’ Despite its evident falsehood, this statement expresses a deep truth: namely, that for many inhabitants of the English-speaking world, and indeed for some living outside it, there is a real divide between their world and the societies, languages, political systems, traditions, and geography of Continental Europe. British politics, especially but by no means exclusively on the right, is defined in terms of the distinction between ‘Europhobes’ and ‘Europhiles,’ known to their opponents as ‘Eurosceptics’ and ‘Eurofanatics’ respectively. That is, there is a cultural distinction, some would say a divide – perhaps even an abyss – between the ‘Continental’ and whatever opposes it, what Baroness Thatcher, in tones deliberately reminiscent of Winston Churchill, calls ‘the English-speaking world.’
From the article by sociologist Lera Boroditsky on the relationship between language, our bodies, and the space around us. The past isn’t necessarily behind us, things aren’t always properly ordered left to right and, don’t look now but there’s a bug on you southwest leg.
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”
-HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? [6.12.09] by Lera Boroditsky on Edge.org.
This is from Bea Ballard’s article about her late father called My dad, the perfect mum at Times Online. Their mother died when the children were young and the father raised the children alone.
In this way of living, home is a reflection of a state of mind: cleanliness is next to bourgeois repression. To me it’s far closer to the truth than its cousin which drags God – unwillingly, no doubt – in.
We lived in what we came to think of as a very happy nest – there was a sense of warm chaos that was hugely liberating. He did not care about bourgeois concerns such as keeping the house tidy – as he once said: “You can do all the housework in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it.” He later speculated that the compulsive cleaning of a family home “might be an attempt to erase those repressed emotions that threaten to break through into the daylight” and certainly I remember finding the grander homes of some of my school chums eerily silent and stultifying in their neatness compared with our wonderful home, where old plastic flippers discarded from a beach holiday were used as doorstops.
I am reading JG Ballard’s biography Miracles of Life and highly recommend it for it’s frank tone and sweeping scope: boyhood in Japanese occupied Shanghai – as far as I’ve gotten – education and creative output in England.
Here is an excerpt from his description of Lunghua Camp where the Ballard family was interned by the Japanese when he was a teenager. He describes the two years as a period of material poverty but ironically rich in social and intellectual potential. He saw it as the beginning of a lifelong creeping alienation from his parents and of a realization that adults were not necessarily in control and chronically made bad decisions.
This excerpt however, is about the loneliness of adult life and how the prisoner of war camp – it’s cruelty and lack of provision and space – was actually much more social and lively than British peace time living. In acts of sanity later in life, Ballard commits to resisting isolating convention in his own family’s life. For him, private baths and wardrobes are incarnate private hopes and dreams.
But I flourished in all this intimacy, and I think the years together in that very small room had a profound effect on me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for nearly fifty years, and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua.
I realize now just how formal English life could be in the 1930s, 40s and 50s for its professional families. The children of doctors, lawyers and company directors rarely saw their fathers. They lived in large houses where no one shared a bedroom, they never saw their parents dressing or undressing, never saw them brush their teeth or even take off a watch. In pre-war Shanghai I would occasionally wander into my parents’ bedroom and see my mother brushing her hair, a strange and almost mysterious event. I rarely saw my father without a jacket and tie well into the 195os. The vistas of polished furniture turned a family home into a deserted museum, with a few partly colonised rooms where people slept alone, read and bathed alone, and hung their clothes in private wardrobes, along with their emotions, hopes and dreams.
The trademarked city, can the promise of the future be any better than this? These following excerpts are from an old, and interesting article about Houston and a number of other American cities by Quinter and Fabricius in the book Mutations.
Here are some excerpts from a hard hitting critique of the capital of laizzez-faire:
“Houston’s famously ruthless ‘progrowth’ policies with zero local and state taxation in exchange for low civic services have resulted in Houston having less per capita parkland and poorer quality water, sewers, streets, and air than any other city in America.”
And don’t forget that’s America, where there aren’t too many really good downtowns to begin with.
“Despite its parochialism and idiosyncrasies, Houston may well be the ‘globalized’ city par excellence: rigorous and pure in its shapelessness, cruel, unforgiving, and utterly delirious in its conviction that cities need be no more than mega-machines for doing ‘bid-ness’ at ever-expanding scales. It also presents a clear omen and model for all other cities everywhere in the world of what the true destiny and impact of economic globalization could be for human societies.”
from the article Houston TM in Mutations, Actar press by Sanford Quinter and Daniela Fabricius
Here is a description of the consuming role education played for those lucky enough to get it in the Middle Ages in France. Education was tied to the church but was broad enough to include, beside theology, medicine, law and the arts. It was worth giving over everything for; a consuming passion. For the student, in a very real sense, knowledge became home.
the wandering student, passing from Laon to Chartres to Angers, or to some obscure monastery made temporarily famous by a new teacher, would come at last to the banks of the Seine … There he would seek out, or drift to one master or the other. There, as often as not, he stayed.
-E. R. Chamberlain, quoted in A Traveller’s History of Paris, by Robert Cole.
Animals, even wild ones, provide for children who have suffered human treachery. Our own kind and all associated trappings or values, or what have you - comfort, family, home, love – haven’t helped these children who escape it all, or are thrown out, to live alone or with beasts. Some, as here, prefer it to home; the mutual interest worked out, the simplicity, the peace.
“In all my travels, the only time I ever slept deeply was when I was with wolves… The days with my wolf family multiplied. I have no idea how many months I spent with them but I wanted it to last forever – it was far better than returning to the world of my own kind. Today, though most memories of my long journey are etched in tones of grey, the time spent with the wolves… is drenched in colour. Those were the most beautiful days I had ever experienced.”
Quote from Misha Defonseca, a Jewish orphan who, from the ages of seven to 11, wandered through occupied Europe in World War II, living on wild berries, raw meat and food stolen from farmhouses, and occasionally teaming up with wolves.
-Feral Children by jfrater on gnokr.com.
peter rudd
