Shift

A few months ago I came across a passage from a book written by a Brazilian writer talking about ignorance in a very fresh way.  

Unfortunately, the title of said book wasn't given by the person who recited it (an actor), and even though I looked for it it was nowhere online. 

So... I'll post my next favourite from her.  I like the idea contained in the quotation I couldn't find, which turns ignorance on its head, seeing the potential in it. (From memory, it is something like "knowledge is always limited; not knowing is limitless."  

How many of us can honestly claim to not have wished for the opportunity to read a book, listen to a piece of music, or see a film or painting, all over again, for the first time?  Only ignorance makes the first time possible. 

“I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.” 

Clarice Lispector

There is a certain, specific kind of liberation in the act of shifting one's perception or body in order to look at the same thing and see something new.

The idea that prejudice comes from ignorance makes the ears of reason perk up in alert suspicion.  I think this idea is incomplete. It's maimed or badly articulated.  To me, prejudice comes not from ignorance, but from incomplete knowledge of a certain thing; it comes from failure to dig deep enough, or failure to understand. Not understanding and not knowing are two different concepts to me.  There are many things one can know about or of, and yet not understand, not grasp the core of what makes the thing itself.

Al's well Or is it?

Chapter One

A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1931

Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949

THE TROPICAL ISLE

Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything -from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-chose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.'

Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.; better cricketers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.

Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.

Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.'

-- From ''The Satanic Verses'' by Salman Rushdie. Copyright (c) 1989 by Salman Rushdie. Used by arrangement with Viking Penguin Inc.

MEN URGENT

I hate to interrupt the Rome trip but this is very important -- heh

I finally received Marc-Édouard Nabe's L'homme qui arrêta d'écrire, one of the books I mentioned in previous posts, and that I've been waiting for since 17 March, when I bought it on his website, the only way to get it. My order got um "lost" (but not the payment) Still...

The MEN experience started even before I began to devour his words.

It is a "different" book - no barcode! No editor/publisher on the cover, nothing on the back cover apart from the number 28 -- in pink!I love it.

This man is the first author in the world to own almost all the copyrights to his books- apparently he has managed to buy back 23 out of the (now) 28. By publishing this book himself, without an editor/publisher, he will need to sell fewer copies in order to get the same amount of money he would have done through "traditional" paths, selling far more. He (and all authors in France) get 10% of the price of the book, whereas bookshops get 30%. He financed it by selling his paintings (I don't know those very well...) and keeping it a total secret he was writing, given the book's title (The Man Who Quit Writing). He did write tracts and spread them all over Paris and Marseilles, stuck them to the walls, rogue style! Some of the tracts have since been translated and can be found on the website set up by his readers.

I love what he said in an interview when asked about editors and publishers in general.

He said the current "literary" system has only been in place for a hundred years or so; he went on to ask the interviewer: "can you imagine Hugo asking an editor if he thought it appropriate to cut the Waterloo scene, or whether Valjean should in fact do this or that..." No! I can't imagine it. But I had not thought of it this way before.

And it doesn't bother me that he put himself in the same category with Hugo. He's got the goods. Also...if everyone saw his predecessors as an impediment because of their greatness, what would get done? The Romans wouldn't have built much, after seeing the Pyramids.

Au régal des amateurs de littérature

Here's a book that's creating some controversy here, for several reasons.

The coolest of which, according to me, is that Marc-Édouard Nabe has completely circumvented the entire publishing Establishment- which has been boycotting him since the mid-80s - by financing his latest book entirely and selling it on his website.

Then there's the question of why he's been boycotted for such a long time, despite being arguably the greatest French writer alive. He says things that one doesn't often hear on television/radio. He writes things one doesn't often read anywhere. In short, he puts freedom of speech to (good) use, instead of rehashing the same tired postmodern/BernardHenriLévy-friendly school of thought that we're fed day in, day out.

I still haven't read this book because since it's gone on sale it has sold out within a month and I was not aware he'd released this book. I've ordered it but don't know when it'll be available.

I have read his tracts though, which he wrote and stuck to the walls all around the city, amazingly, and which are all available for free on the website set up by his readers.