MATERIALIST DOT NET

...and because I am in that curiously inquisitive mood that sometimes invades me when I come back to my parents house and start inventorizing the material remnants of my past.

two pictures.

the first one is from 1995, my first year at oxford. wet behind the ears, crazy and uncertain, eager to please and still, I plaited my hair and sealed the ends with sealing wax. yes, that is the hard brittle red stuff that comes in sticks and you melt to seal letters with. not to mention that I was observed walking around more or less naked and wrapped in a sheet, draped around suspect black-clad women with red demonic eyes at 2am in the morning on the college back quad. where the only permitted activity was playing croquet in the summer term. probably high, too- tsk tsk.

the second one... well, let's just say it's been a long time since I looked remotely like that. it was taken in a temple ruin in honduras in spring 1998- at the time I was living in a small one-room appartment in asuncion, subsisting on a diet of soy milk, avocado and maize bread, meditating four or five hours a day with prayerbeads and dividing the rest of my time between doing extreme, seizure-inducing yoga exercises on the roof of the house and reading german expressionist poetry about incest for my final examinations. I may look happy, but trust me, I was a fucked-up little cookie.

finding it difficult to keep an unfettered record of the daily grind when I'm down south- mostly because everything takes place within a social sphere that involves readily identifiable others, and there are simply too many people involved, most of whom all read this weblog on an occasional basis at least. highly-strung incidents in the past have made me cautious about involving others.

having said that, the week post-christmas has been almost exactly what one expects. lots of boardgames, late nights, a few films, lots of walks, orgies of food, much catching up with old friends. spending new year's eve on the island, probably, before heading in to oslo for a few days then probably north around the 10th. this depends seriously on when I can get my laptop repaired- currently it is in a nameless warehouse somewhere, awaiting spare part surgery after losing the ability to take in electricity. not going back to the tundra without DVD playback capabilities, telling you that much.

dream: last night I dreamt I was an insufferably arrogant upper-class OC-style white american college-boy with expensively über-logoed clothes, who got beaten up by a group of black kids for being a crypto-racist twat. when one of the kids ironically sang a racist ditty that started with the lines "history always drags them to the parties" I was reminded of the 'simple black people' dancing in the apocalyptically racist 1919 ur-blockbuster Birth of a Nation, and I asked him whether he'd made the line up himself.

one thing led to another, his friend and fellow mugger turned out to be a foucaldian art theorist and the beating soon turned into a discussion about the possibility of a specifically black perspective on literary analysis. one kid argued against the idea of black literary studies dealing only with racist texts, in favour of the attempt to articulate a specifically black analytical perspective that could be deployed on all texts.

I woke up before anyone could deal with the implicit essentialism of his position.

prompted by who knows what obscure impulse, I started looking up some old exes on the interweb tonight. lots of strange little glimpses, half-formed pages, casual references: faint footprints in the cybernetic dust, and some untraceables. the fragmentary composite is intriguing.

one is in an Oslo band, where she does the vocals. a norwegian music website gives their second album five out of six, describing them as 'delicious and unsophisticated'.

one was elected member of the board of the Vestfold Symphonic Orchestra at 16:05 on my birthday last year, after an extraordinary meeting of the entire orchestra.

two stand out in terms of their sheer visibility: named personal websites, pictures, online CVs... one [2 months, late '93] is now a researcher in neuropsychology at the university of oslo- (she be the one on the left); the other [1 year, '94-'95] is a theatre instructor in lofoten, way up north. one had a baby last year; the other spends her spare time renovating her flat with her partner. there but for providence.

there are many more, but I dread the thought of a complete inventory.

...so you grab the car keys, an old trance CD and head out. the world is dark because roaring southern winds have melted the snow, leaving the landscape bare, wet, slippery and unreflective. life offers few pleasures to match that of a solitary drive in the middle of the night, when decent people with weekday jobs lie sleeping in their beds, accompanied by an epically crystalline, speedlimit-defying soundtrack of 4-to-the-floor beats overlaid with gloriously cheesy synthetic piano riffs, sharp scratchy electric noise and 50s b-movie samples... the snacks at the end and the glimpses of nocturnal para-life - a few yellow tractors ploughing snow, an ambulance, a car full of drunk teenagers, the guy in a purple tracksuit talking to the moustachioed man at the gas station - are just icing on the cake.

if someone close to you wants to do something you think is a serious mistake, where do your draw the line for your responsibility to protect them from their own decisions?

personally I feel very strongly that as long as people are aware of their own situation and are capable of making conscious personal choices - even if you disagree with these choices - your rights and responsibilities alike extend to stating your own opinions and beliefs about the situation in a reasonable manner, and only just beyond this, to engaging the other person to ensure they understand their own situation as clearly as possible. if someone disagrees with you anyway and decides to go ahead with what you think is a mistake, it is neither your responsibility nor in fact your right to stop them, particularly as long as they harm only themselves. you owe it to them, as they owe it to you, to let them live their own lives and make their own mistakes.

here I try to do unto others as I want others to do unto me. while I appreciate concerned engagement, I do not at all appreciate any form of disempowerment or intervention, gross or subtle. often, this is a thin line to cross. among the very very few things I regret in life are certain mistakes I was prevented from making. I regret nothing that I did of my volition, however rampantly shameful, soul-destroying or down-the-corridors-of-eternity-echoing it may have been. not because it I don't think it was wrong, but because it was my own, because it was something I chose or did or believed at the time, and because my ability to appreciate its wrongness now is linked to my lived memory of it then. a life well lived is not a life well sheltered.

hence, perhaps, my strong but inarticulate respect for personal self-determination and autonomy- rooted in my own deep-seated desire to burn my own fingers on the hot cooker rather than accepting from testimony that it is hot and that I shouldn't touch it. still, if somebody stumbles and I can help, I help. but this is very different from walking them through life by the arm to prevent them from stumbling.

clearly this morality has its limitations, it is not universalizable. for one it is not at all the morality of a parent, or of someone entrusted with responsibility over someone who is unable to look after themselves. it is the opposite of the world-bearing atlas syndrome- taken too far, or applied in the wrong situations, it may become interchangeable with indifference, and therefore inadequate. still, I think it is at heart very distinct from indifference, because it is essentially a self-limitation out of respect for the integrity and autonomy of the other. it aims at the well-being of the other, even through the hardships they inflict on themselves.

[and just in case, this "on themselves" has nothing remotely to do with the "on themselves" in "poor people are poor because they bring it on themselves". it is a moral logic of specific intersubjective mano a mano cases, hinging on the question of informed choice. very few poor people are ever confronted with the informed, real choice of being poor or not. my reasoning here belongs not in the macrosociological vulgate.]

kinship-affirming giftfest over for this year- present highlights included a ridiculously pleasing pair of fingerless peruvian alpaca gloves, of the kind that inspire long walks just to have an excuse to wear them; a beautiful book of goya's capricho etchings; a de sade interpretation I'd never even heard of, starring the young-ish christopher lee; and the addition to the household of a DVD-player, which enables me to finally watch films on a proper screen when I'm here.

earlier today I walked down to the cliffs at the end of the island and watched the sun set in the southern sea. as it dipped below the horizon, the top part of the cloud layer to my left, out beyond the island and across the sea, remained bathed in sharp luminous pink light. every detail, every indentation in the cloudscape stood out like a crevice in the fading light. as I turned to get a better view, I noticed the vast northern skies behind me, still a rapidly darkening shade of swirling apocalypse purple. amazing. much later, at night, it snowed about two inches.

merry christmas to y'all.

...such as these...

...rock my happy little boat 7 votes


...make my eyes bleed 3 votes

"little christmas eve", they call the 23rd of december here. the entire nation prepares quietly for the kinship celebration and giftfest tomorrow- singularly, preparations on a national level involve every household clustering around the tv set in the evening to watch a 1963 short film about a butler and a countess, both very old, celebrating a new year's eve party by themselves. the butler plays the role of all the countess' dead friends, getting progressively drunker with each toast. there is a recurring exchange between the two, butler: "same procedure as last year miss sophie?" countess: "same procedure as every year, james", that has passed into common usage among norwegians.

one of the recurring rituals of watching associated with the film is trying to keep track of how many times the butler stumbles on the head of a tiger-skin rug between the main table and the drinks cabinet. I have to admit that after 20+ years of watching it I still do not remember from year to year how many times this happens- somewhere between 14 and 18 I think. the practice of counting is complicated by the fact that he deliberately jumps over it once, and also walks around it by accident one time. possibly there is also some intentional forgetting going on, as the year-to-year amnesia is also very much part of the watching practice.

the film is called "grevinnen og hovmesteren" in norwegian, translated from the english original "the butler and the countess". in english it also goes under the name "dinner for one". IMDB has an entry about it here. apparently the film is a new year's tradition at least in denmark, sweden and germany, possibly in other places too, but to my knowledge norwegians are the only ones who watch it before christmas.

have tinkered with the commenting code- comments now appear directly, rather than opening in a separate window. not at all sure whether I like it, but I'll leave it up for a while to see what I think of it. in the meantime I am open to praise or critique alike.

website is recuperated, with some new functionality and new cyberspatial coordinates. much chagrinous work and some permanent bereavement, but nothing too fatal. hosting has been transferred to a stable, paid provider with subdomain capacity and expanded storage space, the infrastructure seems to be working to an acceptable standard. all that is left is some tinkering and porting of old entries - october 10 to early november are lost, but the loss is of a bearable magnitude. it is now possible to register usernames and reply to comments, though I have yet to work out whether I can inline or nest replied comments.

leaving the polishing work to a later date. in physical space, I am well and at home. christmas presents have been secured, and except for the fact that my elbows are pathologically itchy: scabies, or aftereffects of my reiki initiation? I'm prepared to take bets on this one...

innumerable trashy films, a lost pair of gloves, sustained absence of supervisor and hooking up with an old friend in a gloriously unexpected manner. temperatures are shockingly mild, the trees are still leafy and I can sleep with the window wide open. will update more frequently when regular internet access is restored. salut to all.