Who put the Modern in Modenism....

Guernica, by Pablo Picasso

When it comes to common sense most of us believe the word modern applies to the type of life we lead in the Twenty First Century. We use the term as if this era were radically different from any preceding one and far better than the obscure past; we use it to link our ordinary lives to an abstraction of a present beget by the technocratic woumb: ipods, electronic music, video consoles, interactive television, metalic appliances, plastic surgery, ABS brakes and Louis Vuitton.
Who among the Nintendo generation would suspect that everything modern was already invented by their great grandparents?

When it comes to literature, on the other hand, Modernism refers to a specific set of writters and the work they produced, but defining Modernism becomes difficult when thinking out of the box and pulling away from any text book. Why is it such a complex period in Art History and one of the most ellusive ones to define?
Allow me to invite you on a journey through space and time. Let's imagine we are standing, not at the threshold of a second milenium in Christianity, but living in the first couple of decades of the Twentieth Century.
We look around and all we see is chaos, Paul Valéry expressed it better:

The storm has died away, and still we are
restless uneasy, as if the storm were about to break.
Almost all of the affairs of men remain a terrible
uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared and
we are alomost destroyed by what has been
destroyed; we do not know what will be born, and
we fear the future, not without reason....




When it comes to common sense most of us believe the word modern applies to the type of life we lead in the Twenty First Century. We use the term as if this era were radically different from any preceding one and far better than the obscure past; we use it to link our ordinary lives to an abstraction of a present beget by the technocratic woumb: ipods, electronic music, video consoles, interactive television, metalic appliances, plastic surgery, ABS brakes and Louis Vuitton.
Who among the Nintendo generation would suspect that everything modern was already invented by their great grandparents?

When it comes to literature, on the other hand, Modernism refers to a specific set of writters and the work they produced, but defining Modernism becomes difficult when thinking out of the box and pulling away from any text book. Why is it such a complex period in Art History and one of the most ellusive ones to define?
Allow me to invite you on a journey through space and time. Let's imagine we are standing, not at the threshold of a second milenium in Christianity, but living in the first couple of decades of the Twentieth Century.
We look around and all we see is chaos, Paul Valéry expressed it better:

The storm has died away, and still we are
restless uneasy, as if the storm were about to break.
Almost all of the affairs of men remain a terrible
uncertainty. We think of what has disappeared and
we are alomost destroyed by what has been
destroyed; we do not know what will be born, and
we fear the future, not without reason....

Written in the aftermath of World War I, this passage by Valéry captures the sentiments of many people of this day. More devastating than any war the world had previously known,
World War I forced peole to the realization that the world had irrevocably changed. In doing so it left them disconnected from the past and uncertain about the future. No longer trusting the ideas and values they had taken for granted, many people struggled desperately to find new ideas that were more applicable to the twentieth-century life.
This paradigmatic transformation had begun long before the first shots of Word War I were fired. Sparked by the work of scientists such as Edison, Graham Bell and Pasteur whose major techonological advances closed the previous century. Within a period of just a few decades, the airplane, the automobile, the radio, and the telephone were introduced, making travel and communication not only faster and easier than ever before imagined but also an abundant source for imagination. At the same time, although some discoveries and inventions such as electricity, central heating, movies, and the new medical remedies, were improving the quality of people's lives, others like the machine gun and the tank made it easier for people to destroy one another.
In addition to these technological advances, major scientific breakthroughs were also taking place that would dramatically change the way people perceive themselves and their surroundings: George Mendel and his works on heritage, Pierre and Marie Curie's discoveries in radioactivity, Pavlov's experiments about behavior and, of course, Einstein's revolution in Physics.
But of all the scientists of this period, Pavlov's contemporary Sigmund Freud made perhaps the greatest impact in Art with Psychoanalysis and the way it explained the human mind.
Encouraged by the advances in science and technology, many people became increasingly optimistic about the future of humanity. To some, it even seemed possible that people could ultimately solve all their problems and establish lasting peace. This sense of optimism was shattered by the Great War (the war that would end all wars....) and by its horrifying outcome.
With the advances in travel and communication, the various regions of the world became increasingly intertwined during the modern age. Consequently Art became more interconnected than ever before, as artists from all countries were exposed to the movements and traditions originited by cultures different from their own.
The Art of this period was also marked by the interaction bewteen the Western world and the nations of eastern Asia. Westerns literature, for example, had a dramatic impact on both Chinese and Japanese literature, and writers from both countries, such as Mori Ogai and Lu Hsun, adopted many Western literary forms and techniques. At the same time, a number of prominent Western writers (from Bertolt Brecht to Ezra Pound) were influenced by traditional Oriental literature.
Regardless of where they lived, modern artists could not escape being affected by the momentous events and developments of their time. Even before Wolrd War I, some artists were concerned with the rapid changes that were taking place and sensed that society was becoming disconnected from the values and traditions of the past. Subsequently, the devastation caused by the war caused these feelings to develop into an overwhelming sense of uncertainty, disjointedness, and disillusionment -emotions shared also by philosophers and many other people-.
Distrusting the attitudes and beliefs of the past, many people embarked on a quest for new ideas and forms. The result was a broad collection of artistic movements generally referred to as Modenism.
Although there were major differences between the numerous movements covered by the Modern wing, they share the desire to establish new approaches to art and new techniques for artistic creation. As a result, Modernism is highly experimental, symbolic, abstract and even grotesque in comparison to the classical, and fundamentally structured, traditions and periods of Art (Greek and Roman Art, the Reinassance, Neoclasicism, Realism, Naturalism...)
Also, as a response to the next to last period, Realism-Naturalism, and its cuasi-photographic depiction of life, its coarse style and blunt statments, many modern movements sought to explore the creative process itself and/or placed great importance in form (in opposition to the heavy weight content had for realists and naturalists), take for example Art Nouveau, the literature of Rubén Darío and many other latin american writters, Symbolism (in Literature as well as Painting), Expressionism (in Music or Painting), Impressionism, Cubism, the literature of Hesse, García Lorca, T. S. Elliot, Proust, Kafka, Joyce or Virgnia Woolf, and the Dramatic work of Pirandello or Brecht.

Such and wide range of artistic points of view, techniques and applications coexisted without any defined separation. Therefore, the span of time comprehended by Modernism is perhaps as ellusive a concepts as the nature of this period. We can agree, however, that by the time the Second World War was over the world had yet again changed and this new turn of the screw would result in Posmodernism, which is evidently more accurate to describe our present time as well.

Modernity and all things modern have nothing to do with the techonological develpments of our days or with our nearsighted understanding of life. Though we measure life with in contrast with the short span of our lives, there is no obscurity is the past and not much is really new. The wheel that started to spin a century ago is still turning and we bare witness to yet another hour of this long day. Wheather or not we will see the world take a real turn, a paradigmatic turn; one of epistemological nature such as the step into the Middle ages or out of it, the Renaissance phoenix raising or the blooming of Romanticism (era we are still part of) is yet to be seen. Such changes are born out of deep intrisecal forces that go beyond the invention of computers and/or global connectivity.
We will have to be patient and open our eyes widely so this flag won't pass us by without noticing....

As we come back to our time, as we end our journey, the voices of the truly moderns are still booming in our ears:

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle.
Paul Valéry, Literature

Opinions cannot survive if no one has a chance to fight for them.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

The most visible joy can only reveal itself to us when we've transformed it, within.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.
Franz Kafta, "The Metamorphosis"

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.
Boris Pasternak, "On modesty and bravery"

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, blinds the bouquet.
Colette, Mes Apprentissages

He who longs to strengthen his spirit
must go beyond obedience and respect.
He will continue to honor some laws
but he will mostly violate
both law and custom.
Constantin Cavafy, "Strengthening of the Spirit"

I seek a form that my style cannot discover,
a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.
Rubén Darío, "I seek a Form"

At my dying hour, and over my long life
A clock strikes somewhere at the city's edge.
Rabindranath Tagore, "Poem". Read more on this article...

What turns me on

The idea of so much life pouring into us and filling all our spaces, which we thought were empty, with hope, with sorrow, with love, with tears... all that makes life what it is.
I love being alive. Life turns me on. Even when I cry, when I feel afraid, when I am lost and confused life turns me on.

[To live: to learn, to forget, to learn again, to grow up, to be a child forever, to conquer, to retrieve, to discover(....)


For a few years now I have thought Across the Universe is one of the most beautiful lyrics. The idea of so much life pouring into us and filling all our spaces, which we thought were empty, with hope, with sorrow, with love, with tears... all that makes life what it is.
I love being alive. Life turns me on. Even when I cry, when I feel afraid, when I am lost and confused life turns me on.

[To live: to learn, to forget, to learn again, to grow up, to be a child forever, to conquer, to retrieve, to discover, to think, to speak out, to chose silence, to understand, to create, to imagine, to expect, to expand your own limits, to make mistakes, to mend, to receive, to give, to heal, to lose, to start over, to take things seriously, to take nothing seriously, to live in the moment, to plan for tomorrow, to hope, to dream, to redirect your footsteps, to go back in time, to get lost, to get found, to believe, to believe, to believe...]

Being alive is such a challenge, such an imposition, such responsability and such gift; it is, in every sense, a journey... and journeys turn me on.
With nothing but a word from you life starts moving again (moving forwards, moving nowhere, moving along)..... Come here and turn me on...

Across the Universe
Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva

John Lennon
. Read more on this article...

Construction

I cannot believe how much work we have all done in this house. My parents bought the land 20 years ago and it was only 6 years ago that the house was ready for living. When we were little my mum took care of it, my father has always been more of a thinker than a doer. But when we grew up, even if by then we were scattered around the world, we decided it was time to give this dream of old some attention.

We are finally making reforms to the house. For a long time (ever since we finished it 6 years ago, actually) we have been planning on extending the kitchen and building a good size Gazebo for argentinean bbq in the back. Fixing and embellishing the garden, maybe even planting a few trees. But, as always, plans have to wait since normally there isn't enough people to take care of it, time and/or money to make them come true. But now, at last, we are on our way.
I cannot believe how much work we have all done in this house. My parents bought the land 20 years ago and it was only 6 years ago that the house was ready for living. When we were little my mum took care of it, my father has always been more of a thinker than a doer. But when we grew up, even if by then we were scattered around the world, we decided it was time to give this dream of old some attention.
Over a year we all contributed with what we could, mostly working with our bare hands to make it what it is, and although Julian and I did the most we cannot deny that it has been everybody´s effort through the years that made it happen.
I have always been an "homo faber" (in opposition to Homo Sapiens as my father jokingly says: a "builder"), someone who enjoys the planning and the actual process of building. When I was little my grandfather taught me how to put a lamp together and I got hooked.-What a strange combination!- my friends say: Art and plaster...
And yes, my days of late have been spent playing the piano or outside participating of the construction. Why is that so odd, I wonder, aren't we all in the business of creating something?

I look around and I can see my work everywhere now, the windows which Julian and I made, painted, barnished and even installled; the floor I chose and travelled so many miles to get, even the glue under each tile. The library, the paint on the walls, even the walls themselves! I see countless hours of work and so much love mixed with the bricks and concrete. And although it would probably have been nice to have someone else do it for us we wouldnt feel such love for this place, such powerful feeling of connection with this something. This is the little world we have given birth to.
Now the work starts again and with it the cracked hands, the dozens of trips to the shops, the supervision, the learning a new kind of terminology (or remembering by now) and all the dreaming of how it will look in the end.
Sometimes I think it will that "end" will never come. There is always the next project... but maybe that is comforting, don't you think? How does the chinese proverb go? "When the house is finally done, death has come....."
Let's keep dreaming.....
Read more on this article...

Tanka vs. Haiku

The Japanese place more emphasis on the imaginery used and the emotions evoked by Tanka than they do on the structure of the poems. Therefore, the structure is not nearly as rigid as, for example, that of a Sonet.
Often Tanka and Haiku are mistaken to be the same. No doubt they are very similar for a westerner, but there are certain differences that are worth noticing.

Tanka is the most prevalent verse form in traditional Japanese literature. In fact, for many centuries the Tanka was virtually the only form used by poets who wrote in the Japanese language. Each short poem consists of five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. The enduring popularity of the Tanka form resulted partly from the limiting characteristics of the Japanese language, which made it difficult to maintin a high level of intenstity throughout a long poem, and from the Japanese preferences for simplicity, suggestions and irregularity, which are reflected in the brevity of the Tanka form, the evocativeness of the poems, and the uneven number of lines and syllables per line. Most Tanka include at least one caesura (or pause), often indicated in by English by punctuation.
Used as a means of communication in ancient Japanese society, Tanka often tell a brief story or express a single thought or insight. The most common subjects in Tanka are love and nature. In expressing their feelings of love or their appreciation for nature, poets often show restrain when exhibiting their emotions, they rely on clear and powerful images to evoke an emotional response rather than using abstract words to directly express their feelings. At the same time, Tanka poets often hint at or suggest the existence of a higher reality. Take for example the following Tanka by Oshikochi Mitsune:

At the great sky
I gaze all my life:
For the rushing wind,
Though it howls as it goes,
Can never be seen.

The Japanese place more emphasis on the imaginery used and the emotions evoked by Tanka than they do on the structure of the poems. Therefore, the structure is not nearly as rigid as, for example, that of a Sonet.
Often Tanka and Haiku are mistaken to be the same. No doubt they are very similar for a westerner, but there are certain differences that are worth noticing.
The Haiku, which consists traditionally of three lines of five, seven and five syllables, evolved from a form of collaborative poetry known as renga. Consisting of chains of interlocking verses of seventeen and fourteen syllables composed by groups of poets, the Renga form thrived during the medieval age. Eventually the hokku, the openning verse of a renga, developed into a distinct literary form known as Haiku.
Reflecting the dominant tastes of the Japanese culture, Haiku is characterized by precision, simplicity and suggestiveness (similarly to Tanka). Hakai (pl. for Haiku) present spare yet clear images that stimulate thought and evoke emotion. Because of it's brevity, the images cannot be presented in detail. As a result, Haikai employ the power of the suggestion to produce detailed pictures in the reader's mind. For example, most Haikai include a kigo, a seasonal word, such as "rain" or "cherry blossoms" for example; and in doing so they indicate the time of year being described in the poem, but they also evoke the reader's reminiscence of that time of year. Although some Haikai seem to contain one single image, most of them present an explicit or implicit comparison between two images, actions or states of being. This is a capital feature of Haiku that sepparates it from Tanka.
Take for example the following Haiku by Basho:

Poverty's child-
He starts to grind the rice
and gazes at the moon.

By contrasting the task of grinding rice with the boy's observation of the moon, Basho evokes a sense of longing and captures the soothing effect of nature on the human spirit. We can say that in general terms Haikai present an image of nature that combines with one of a different kind, oftenly one related to life or the meaning of life:

Summer grasses-
All that remains
of soldier's visions.
Basho

In this case the reference to summer and to the general splendor of this season has two purposes: to evoke an emotion in the reader's mind and, when combined with the other image presented, to suggest the fleeting nature of life: a soldier's visions of the sweetness of summer (perhaps whilst marching to battle or just before meeting his death). By contrasting these two images, Basho evokes in us a sense of longing for our own personal "summer grasses" and for the memories that mean the most in our lives.
We could say therefore that Haiku is often a strongly philosophical form aside from a refined lyrical one.
Sometimes, Haikai creat a constrast by rapidly shifting their focus from the general to the specific or viceversa:

An old pond:
a frog jumps in-
the sound of water.

Because of it's brevity and suggestiveness, Haiku demand extra effort on the reader's part. They demand imagination.....

Here you can read some examples of Renga, or if you are interested in Tanka (with both the transcripted Japanese versions and their English translations) click over here.
If it is Haiku that interests you, feel free to gaze at the beauty of life and nature in English or in Spanish. You can even read here some of the Haikai written by Mario Benedetti (in Spanish though) and taken from his book Rincon de Haikús or check out examples of modern Haikai in Modernhaiku.org.
But if you are feeling creative, why not try to write your own? Just don't forget to share!. Read more on this article...

The profan love of Sa´di

This Persian poet wrote Bustan (1256-57, The Fruit Garden, composed in mathnawi style -rhyming couplets-) and Gulistan (1258, The Rose Garden), a didactic work composed both of prose and verse. He was basically a moralist whose stories have similarities with Jean de La Fontaine's (1621-1695) fables.
In Persia his golden maxims were highly valued and considered a treasure of true wisdom.

Condonation is laudable but nevertheless
Apply no salve to the wound of an oppressor of the people.
He who had mercy upon a serpent
Knew not that it was an injury to the sons of Adam.
(from The Rose Garden)

you can read many of the stories from The Gulsitan and much from The Bustan here.

This Persian poet wrote Bustan (1256-57, The Fruit Garden, composed in mathnawi style -rhyming couplets-) and Gulistan (1258, The Rose Garden), a didactic work composed both of prose and verse. He was basically a moralist whose stories have similarities with Jean de La Fontaine's (1621-1695) fables.
In Persia his golden maxims were highly valued and considered a treasure of true wisdom.

Condonation is laudable but nevertheless
Apply no salve to the wound of an oppressor of the people.
He who had mercy upon a serpent
Knew not that it was an injury to the sons of Adam.
(from The Rose Garden)

you can read many of the stories from The Gulsitan and much from The Bustan here.
Shaykh Sa’di (Sa'di Shirazi), byname of Musharrif Od-din Muslih Od-din, was born in Shiraz (now in Iran). Little is known of his life, starting from the exact date of his birth.(...)The complete works of Sa'di were published in Persian at Calcutta in 1791-95. Sadi's writings were first translated into French in 1634 and into German twenty years later. La Fontaine based his 'Le songe d'un habitant du Mogol' on a story from Gulistan (chapter 2:16), Diderot, Voltaire, Hugo and Balzac referred to Sa'di's works, and Goethe had adaptations from him in West-Ostlicher Divan. In the United States Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed a poem of his own to Sa'di.

Sa'di was a contemporary of Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273), famous for his didactic epic Masnavi-ye Ma'navi (Spiritual Couplets). The theme of Rumi's ghazals was sacred love; Sa'di wrote about profane love, although some of his ghazals were mystical: "I am happy through the world because the world is happy through Him; / I love the whole world because the whole world is His." The ghazal form, which Sa'di popularized, had been neglected until the thirteenth century. His work paved way for Hafez (d. c. 1388), who become considered the master of the form. In the ghazals the two lines of the first couplet rhyme with one another and with the second line of the following couplets, the individual couplets are often independent of each other. Sa'di's ghazals were held together by an unifying view. In many poems Sa'di's beloved is a young man, not a beautiful woman. In this he followed the conventions of traditional Persian poetry. Sa'di's own attitude toward homosexuals was more negative than positive. In the Gulistan he stated, "If a Tatar slays that hermaphrodite / The Tatar must not be slain in return." (3:12). Another story tells of the qazi of Hamdan whose affection towards a farrier-boy is condemned by his friends and the king, who eventually says: "Everyone of you who are bearers of your own faults / Ought not to blame others for their defects." In the West the homoerotic parts of Gulistan often were changed in the early editions.

Sa'di's style is pure, simple and elegant, his tone is sometimes severe, sometimes cheerful, blending humor with cynicism. On the cause for composing the book Sa'di wrote: "I may compose for the amusement of those who look and for the instruction of those who are present a book of a Rose Garden, a Gulistan, whose leaves cannot be touched by the tyranny of autumnal blasts and the delight of whose spring the vicissitudes of time will be unable to change into the inconstancy of autumn." Both books contained reflections on the behavior and teachings of dervishes, with whom Sa'di sympathized.
For further reading: Beiträge zur darstellung des persischen lebens nach Muslih-uddîn Sa`dî by Carl Phillip (1901); Essai sur le poète Saadi by H. Massé (1919); Eastern Poetry and Prose by R.A. Nicholson (1922); Persian Literature, an introduction by Reuben Levy (1923); What says Saadi by Ehsan Motaghed (1986); The poet Sa`di: a Persian Humanist by John D. Yohannan (1987); 'Johdanto: Sa'din elämä' by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, in Ruusutarha by Sa'di, trans. by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila (1991); A Literary History of Persia: From Firdawsi to Sa'Di by Edward Granville Browne (1997) - For further information: Sa'di - Medieval Sourcebook - The Gulistan of Sa'di - A Brief Note on the Life of Shaykh Muslih al-Din Sa'di Shirazi by Iraj Bashiri

Extracts taken from Books and Writers. Read more on this article...

What on earth is Engrish?

Let me begin with some examples of good Engrish (click on pics to zoom in):

And refer if you wish to find out more visit Engrish.com.


Let me begin with some examples of good Engrish (click on pics to zoom in):

And refer if you wish to find out more visit Engrish.com.
Recently a friend informed me of the existance of something called Engrish. At first I did not understand since it is rather an odd thing, but after a while I thought (being a Linguist after all and therefore not interested in the "appropiate" usage of Language but the interesting psycho-social phenomena around it) that I wanted to find out more and see more examples of it.
Basically, Engrish is the mispronunciation and spelling of English in Japan and other Asian countries. It is apparently very common in public places and most likely the consequence of a very poor use of automatic translators.
We all know how those translators can be, even the most gifted programmer cannot create a machine that will think as a person does. Language, and humans for that matter, is too complicated (Thank God!) to be substituted in any way by a machine. (except in Science Fiction, that is)
How can any machine consider (appart from grammar and the particulars of every dialect) all the social and cultural connotations of a word?
You have probably encountered, as we all have, various difficulties is communicating with those who supposedly "speak your own language".
Put aside for a moment those situations where an English speaker from another country has misunderstood your meaning in a given situation; I am talking here about the sutile differences, the blury and ambiguous line we commonly and dangerously walk on daily: the misunderstandings between father and son, or between teacher and student; even between friends or lovers. How sometimes we say something thiking our message is perfectly clear when in fact, it isn´t, or even worse, it comes across as the exact opposite of what we imply.
If Language were so systematic and clear there would be no spouses´quarrels, no generational gap, no "oh, no pun intended". Could any translator pick up the ambiguous and polifacetic meaning of a word when we (the masters of language) cannot? I doubt it.
How if not because of this are such Engrish posters and signs so funny?
Don´t get me wrong, I love Engrish: it is the perfect punch line for Stanislaw Lem´s story El electrobardo de Trurl, and what a punch line it is! ("Trurl´s Electronic Bard", from The Cyberiad is available in my sub-blog The Infinite Voyage but only in Spanish, for now though!). Read more on this article...

Two excerpts by Fromm

Love for one person implies love for man as such. The kind of "division of labor" as William James calls it - namely, to love one's family, but to be without feeling for the "stranger," is a sign of a basic inability to love...


It appears from what has been said that love cannot be separated from freedom and independence. In contradiction to the symbiotic pseudo-love, the basic premise of love is freedom and equality. Its premise is the strength, independence, integrity of the self, which can stand alone and bear solitude. This premise holds true for the loving as well as for the loved person. Love is a spontaneous act, and spontaneity means - also literally - the ability to act of one's own free volition. If anxiety and weakness of the self makes it impossible for the individual to be rooted in himself, he cannot love.
This fact can be fully understood only if we consider what love is directed toward. It is the opposite of hatred. Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of its "object".12 That means that love is not an "affect" but an active striving, the aim of which is the hapiness, development, and freedom of its "object." This passionate affirmation is not possible if one's own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted, can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.13

(...)
The important point, however, is that love for a particular object is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one could love, that it is the great chance of one's life to find that person, and that love for him or her results in a withdrawal from all others. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love, but a symbiotic attachment. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities.
Love for one person implies love for man as such. The kind of "division of labor" as William James calls it - namely, to love one's family, but to be without feeling for the "stranger," is a sign of a basic inability to love. Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming "after" the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific object; it is its premise, although, gentically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.

“Selfishness and self-love“
Erich Fromm. Read more on this article...

Fractals and the notion of Infinity

A fractal is, according to Mandelbrot (apud Wikipedia): "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole".
Fractal is a word that derives from the latin Fractalus (fractured) and therefore we can deduct that a fractal image has many parts. The interesting thing about them is that each part (or sub-structure) repeats the same pattern as the entire image itself. We could say then, that a fractal is a macrocosmic structure with infinite micro systems that mimic the larger one. Take these fractal for example:




:





Some fractals are not as clearly subdivided as Sol de Cobre: look at "En clave de sol" (In trebble), by Oscar Portela:


Both these fractals have been created by mahematicians, but take now The great wave at Kanagawa, a japanese ukiyo-e by Katsushika Hokusai (1831):
In this case, a plastic masterpiece uses the notion of fractal without even knowing it. Obviously Hokusai had no idea what fractals are, and yet this beautiful painting is created with the same concept in mind. Hokusai's work ws based on an old tradition of ukiyo-e making, and yet he was an innovator. Maybe that is why The Great Wave at Kanagawa has influenced so many artists in the west, and astonished as many viewers.

Learning about fractls has made me think about the metaphorical connotations of the word. How many fractal realities do we know? In many ways reality unfolds in different dimenssions just like a fractal. Even love, our own bodies or imagination (in the abstract sense) can be understood as a macro-cosmos... Fractals are the visual representation of a notion that was already expressed by Zenon of Elea (Eleatic school in Philosophy): the infinite subdivision of space and time. Just as he proves theoretically in his paradox of Achilles vs. the Turtoise:

(Wikipedia, sic)
In the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, we imagine the Greek hero Achilles in a footrace with the plodding reptile. Because he is such a fast runner, Achilles graciously allows the tortoise a head start of a hundred feet. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run a hundred feet, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point; during this time, the tortoise has "run" a (much shorter) distance, say one foot. It will then take Achilles some further period of time to run that distance, in which said period the tortoise will advance farther; and then another period of time to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, Zeno says, swift Achilles can never overtake the tortoise. Thus, while common sense and common experience would hold that one runner can catch another, according to the above argument, he cannot; this is the paradox.

In this case, his best known paradox of motion show how, at least in theory, the logical contradiction between real motion and the concept of motion itself. For Zenon, as for Parmenides (and according to fractal theory) reality develops ad infinitum and has nothing to do with what is obvious to the senses.
How interesting that Zenon's paradoxes had to wait almost 2500 years to find a suitable debate with Modern Physics. Until very recently, his theorical postulate had not been refuted succesfully by any other scientific or philosophical notion.. Read more on this article...

Hanami and the soul of Samurai

They show every spring
beauty in their life and death.
Cherry blossoms fall.

Cherry blossoms fall,
and where once we saw deep snow
we now see all pink.

We now see all pink
in the distant western sky.
Twilight at springtime.

Kasamatsu, "Cherry Blossoms at Ueno Shrine"




In Japanese culture, cherry blossoms, or sakura, have served as a reminder that life is brief, and beauty fleeting; they represent a deep sense of melancholy in the presence of the ephemeral, the sense of uncertainty or transitoriness which is represented by the sakura flowers at the height of its beauty, for a very short period of time. No sooner does the sakura reach full bloom then it begins to shed its blossoms.
For the Samurai warrior, Hanami (the art of flower gazing) represented a moment of reflection and communion with the possibility of death, but always in a vitalistic way; for them the Hakura was a symbol for the
samurai soul because it fell at the moment of its greatest beauty, an ideal death for the samurai.
So this sort of melancholiness and also joy of looking at the full bloom flowers coexist in Japanese culture.. Read more on this article...

The loss of one´s own, an article by Nicolás Casullo

SUMMARY

The present late-modern times of globalization under the rule of the market pose new, traumatic forms of exile resulting from the ruins of national identities, of millions of people fleeing their countries and crossing borders in either legal or illegal ways, of walls raised to prevent entrance of travelers coming from an economic and cultural post modernity which is dividing the world into lands of labor and lands of misery and death. Modernity brought along a profound sign of exile, caused by political, social, and spiritual uprooting, by the decentering of native times, spaces, and regions that gradually faded away. This modern kind of uprooting was posited in the 18th Century by J.J. Rousseau in his novel Julia y la Nueva Heloisa. Still, if we go back to the origins of Western civilization, the Aegean world inflicted the penalty of exile as a most serious punishment, and looked upon exiles as living dead. In Euripides' tragedy Medea, the protagonist exemplifies heinous exile within a play that outlines various instances of exile. Coming back to modernity, it is then when we shall find literary, poetic, and philosophic exposures of the infinite varieties of the loss of a sense of belonging, personal inscriptions, the homes of the soul, all of them sorrows that may or may not entail geographic or non geographic violence. Modern subjectivity felt exiled from language, from individual marks, from the words that named the world, and from the very sense that identified life. This exiled subjectivity composed the modern esthetic symphony: to be a stranger in one's own homeland; to be a foreigner to filiation. In the realm of history, 19th and 20th Century capitalism found, in exile, the new foundation of a vast part of America through substantial throngs of migrants who had been forced out of Europe for economic, political, racial, and cultural reasons.

The loss of one's own





Nicolás Casullo

Translated by Marta Ines Merajver
Translation from Sociedad, Buenos Aires, no.25, 2006.

I
Nowadays exile would appear to be in extinction in the face of the logic presented by a way of life that can fit anywhere in the world, at any moment and in any space occupied by homogeneized urban populations. Still, by contrast, exile also appears as a belated awareness of a decisive condition that denounces an insomniac I, a real, unreal, or imaginary subjectivity; it is not important which. The world market redesigned the planet through an undifferentiated logic of regions that offer employment, regions for investment, extinct continents, and crossers of sea and land frontiers.

Like yet another vicissitude of an excessively Protean present, the remainders of native places and the ruins of identity crisscross the political and military upsurge of new walls, electrified fences, and armor-plated boundaries built to separate and define territories whose economic, cultural, racial, and religious marks are protected with unprecedented belligerency.

If something is to be learnt from news programs blaring from the TV screens in thousands of urban rooms on an ordinary day, it is that we have reached the end of the comprehensive, primeval, classic history that man used to find in his distinctive national codes, with his gods and his past; in other words, the evidence that there were communities that could not be replaced and whose loss was unthinkable. Or that losing them meant being subjected to the ultimate punishment.

Together with this present, where regions dissolve into the industrial, modern post-society, where virtual appearances and esthetic forms have taken the place (have taken our place) of an already “unnecessary” real world, it is patently unquestionable from every informative image, or from the scores of events we live through, that man's different lands and customs controls are impassable. Lands of winners, and lands of losers. Beautiful lands, and devastated lands. Lands protected by the law, lands of crime, lands of good, and lands of evil that only yield the imaginaries of social and national banishment; the brutal capitalist exiles.

If modernity, as a historical era beset with supposedly secularized desires and anguish, was warned of something, it was that the nodal experience of the free spirit, of the glittering invention of a reached I would imply the unavoidable loss of everything it had fleetingly accumulated as property. This loss took on the appearance of fate as determined by the end of religious terrors, by the demythifying illustrated explanation, and by the melancholy that was now found in the background of all essays on critical thought, aroused by the novelties of the Western world. Still, the fate that uprooted belonging with a forcefulness that pertained to no-one and for which no-one was to blame –it was simply the echo of a “new age” –became a proof, esthetically and existentialistically sought, a desired experience of remoteness, of banishment, and of disencounters; the Baudelairean myth as, confronted with the question about his homeland, the poet answered: “I do not know under what latitude it lies”.



II

One of the first instances of literary awareness of modernity as a form of exile is found in Jean Jacques Rousseau's protagonist of Julia y la nueva Heloísa: this was a conscience that simultaneously discovered its sovereignty and self-estrangement. Written in 1761, almost at the dawn of Encyclopedism in the arts and sciences, and a year before the Contrato Social, Saint-Preux, the protagonist, elatedly rises from the letters to his beloved, teeming with illicit deeds mixed with guilt, and masterly guided by Jean Jacque's pen. His journey to Paris from the town where he spent his childhood and early youth is an 18th Century version of Ulysses, with a newly-minted heroicity that anticipates how the depths of the world had withdrawn to the innermost parts of the subject in conflict; to the private seething of his own representation, amid idealizations and sleepwalking.

Thus, the geography of exile shifts into the self. In the wild imaginary , the outside may appear under whatever outline or silhouette. To Saint-Preux, everything will amount to “exile”, where he stands unprotected: “I am a wanderer, deprived of land and family”; “my days go by like unending nights”. Leaving one's self behind and despairing to know what one has evolved into, standing on the unfathomable threshold of drifting, amounts to a perception or guiding star where the modern pilgrim of feelings came to life. He who wanders from place to place wrapped in a nomad's cloak, following an itinerary that will eventually lead him to his own face in a mirror –a place that is not to be found– rather than roaming among regions and landscapes to be found outside. To the protagonist, the insalubrious quality of his Paris home will provide the evidence of definitive expatriation from genuine affects. Ironic characters and beautiful souls gush forth.

Now the mystery lies in the yearning for a world filled with profound sensibilities which, phantasmatically, has “remained behind” for good. Or else the loss of this world turns it into a mystery to modern subjectivity, which will no longer be able to say what it – ‘it' standing for both the world and the self –was like. One hundred years before Baudelaire, and in the same city of lights, Saint-Preux says, “I am alone amid the crowd”. Stripped from his soul, the young man tells us. In a place where words and reality do not match, as he used to believe. “I am right in regarding the crowd as a desert”. And this is bound to be the first journey of a refugee to whom no night shelter will open its doors: the notion of a depleted world in spite of its tumultuous novelty of languages, truths, sorts, and strife. Exile from the soul is the experience of the desert in the city. What is full is in fact empty, will conclude soon afterwards German poet Jean Paul, longing for a living Christ. Expatriation in the desert does not need geographies or corresponding Biblical myths. Now the youth knows that the same happens in Paris, Rome, or London. He tells his beloved about it, and the I that tells the story firmly grounds all its forcefulness as an exile and a lover.

Now everything is as impossible as it is possible. To return; to possess. The desert is a frame of mind and also a ghost. A crossing. The journey toward the border. It is the place that delays the finding of a new, modern homeland, a space of successive mirages with no appointed spaces. “I spend the whole day in the world,” says Saint-Preux. This is ostracism in the big city, the distant, barren land, no man's land: the world that remained. The metropolis will bring together a vast dispersion of the ancient worlds in a ghostly, mercantile World that can be culturally groped for, but that slips between our fingers like sand. Still, at the same time, it will become a stage where Saint-Preux will begin “to feel the intoxication of this life”. Delusion, appearance, prejudice, concealment, mask, hypocrisy, rhetoric, insensibility, “terrible loneliness and bleak silence” are the relentless glares of a sun that scorches the barren land and offers the opportunity of delirium, trembling, fever, going blind with the light and the steep shadows. The desert, the non-homeland, is a mixed habitat which, while instituting the modern imaginary of some lost native soil, of a yesterday where it is impossible to seek refuge, also injects the fortitude of grief: that of expatriation as a sweet pain of what was thought of as a possession. Therefore, exile in the sphere of the filiar, the amicable, the desired.



III

If we go back to the beginnings of communal order; namely, to those of the wars, the law, and the foundation of politics through acknowledgement of conflict, living in alien lands has always been permeated by the sorrow that forced this step and by the grieving imposed by estrangement. The Greeks deemed this kind of punishment as second to death only; to a great extent, it meant just another form of dying while watching their own corpse immersed in the misfortunes of life.

Perhaps the toughest, most ruthless document of confinement in foreign geographies is to be found in Euripides' Medea, where the wretched, fearful wrath experienced by the protagonist is a narrative inscribed within a wider story: that of a time of exile which, through impending revenge, affects everyone involved. She had arrived as a “fugitive”; she was “a stone from the seas” lying on the shores, the strip of land forever hit by ocean waves, in an indistinct place which, 2500 years later, Dutch filmmaker Lars Von Trier would set in a waterland, a spot that neither admits of marks nor records traces of any kind. To the poet of the ancient Aegean, this was the place where she could only mourn for “her father, her land, and her home”, gone for ever.

According to the tragedian, Medea learns the misfortune of dwelling away from her homeland. But her exile, that piles her past crimes upon her head, is worsened by the threat of a new forced departure. Creonte, king of Corinth, orders that she “be banished” from the territory at which she had arrived with her children, while her husband Jason, the cause of her misfortunes, agrees that “exile involves many evils”, and admits that he was driven to commit the crime of marrying Creonte's daughter to escape further exile. He, too, feels uneasy in foreign lands.

Existence might be taken to stand for a tragic series of exiles that bury previous exiles. Accordingly, the chorus poses the primary question that pervades the story of spiteful Medea with inexpressible horror: “which is the land where you will find salvation?”, echoed by her own answer expressed by another eternal question: “which city will have me?”. Medea's question does not refer only to the political decision of a power that menaces and banishes. In Euripides' poetics, exile is the world as perceived from the very place the subject is. It is “that which is hated by the eyes” and which demands that “the alien adapt to the ways of the city”. Exile is the impossibility to re-view, to re-connoitre, to re-place. In the first and last place, it is the impossible to re-present. Medea has been exiled from the representations that should set her life in order: she has been estranged from happiness, from the conjugal bed, from love, from her children, from her own gender –she confesses that she would rather be a man and a warrior than a child-bearing mother.

Medea mourns her ostracism. Jason fears yet another exile. Creonte protects himself by banishing what he feels as a threat. From the horizons of tragic art, Greek culture depicts the sorrows of uprooting as the type of politics that barbarizes the victim's existence, as a naturalized history lurking in the shadows, lying in wait. The culture of the inhabitants of the ancient Aegean lacked a modern subjectivist spiritualism that could have turned the exiled part of conscience into a construction or derivative of another world –secret and torn, perhaps –within the world. Instead, in the Hellenic universe it becomes a part of nature in its pure state within a universe that assigns a fate. The distances have been erased between the wandering fate –via the gods, knowledge, or stigmatized heritage –and the bearer of evil. But the very figure of the one who has been condemned to being uprooted, or of the one who finds a living death in being uprooted, is symptomatic of a land that philosophizes, of an esthetic land that wonders about what is native to it as well as about what is foreign. A land that wonders about estrangement in a strangely determined manner. A land that Socratically carries its own knowledge to the edge of estrangement. The misfortune that pulls us away from happiness composes rhetorical geneses, and politically unthinkable notions, while a Greek stormy sky looms large as a possible hamartia in the way of what will become victimized.



IV

It could be posited that the great initial issue of a seed of thought lies in the indifference of cosmos, of an absurd outside that cannot be encompassed. The desertion that outlines man's fate refers to the sense of all senses, to a lack of sense, to a reckoning of what is missing, to what is mute, or to the unknown language that places us in the world. It is the first estrangement as a location for what will later be defined as a creature: the condition of humanity. This location precedes every relation to and explanation of the world, and this situation pathetically requires that all of them be produced. A later step, always lagging behind the rising sun.

If Sense in fact exists, it will always surpass us; it will never reach us and stay. Or else it may be a totalizing vector, like fire, brushing through the heavens, through divinity. Regardless of which it is, we have been banned from its trajectory. Exiled from sense, the only thing left to us is an endless journey in which we dream to allay the pain of being outsiders to a land that existed before and will exist afterward, identical to itself in its estrangement: we will not be there.

Therefore, what really matters and completes the silhouette –the material quality of the ‘self'-is the uncanny, the unspeakable, an other language. The world. The outside. Then our own silhouette is outside itself –exiled from itself –because what pertains to it fails to contain it, and it does not inherently contain what we call sense either, something that supposedly lies outside thought, in the surrounding world, in the transcendental, in “social life”, in what the huge human tribe will later name history.

We are indebted to the archaic poetry produced by goatherds for an initial consciousness of the only universe that conveyed meaning in the chronicle of mankind: the meaning of gods that were also makers. That which is extraordinary and belongs to no-one. At the foot of the impressive, holy mountain, Hesiod was able to think of the trilogy that then shaped and composed mankind; i.e., the notions of ‘present', ‘past', and ‘truth'. Poetry. These notions did not come from the inapprehensible world of the heavenly gods, but turned out to be the essential, brittle, linguistic means to comprehend that which banishes us from fate: we were thus able to understand the whys and wherefores of life, death, and memory. Of the raging details and marks that come to us as a gift, a curse, fleetingness, or pain.

And thus it happened, according to the songs by the Greek aoidos: narratives rose from the amazement caused by what was ours/ by what we were, by discovering that we were strangers to the most important aspects of our selves. Hardly envisaging that which, through belonging, actually deprives, but in the context of a foggy sun, of a night moistened by thick vapors of dew given off by the Muses of Mt. Helicon, the poet sings. In other words: to be, among blurred images. Among images askew and iridescent, likes the ones that still persist, perhaps, after the first esthetic stroke, in a cinematographic flou that shows and conceals things.

What literature, caught unawares, first turned into song, was later on transformed into philosophy: man's expatriation from his own surroundings as the gesture that prologues all manner of thought. The possibility of posing questions from a position of amazement at the real, at man's innermost estrangement from the real. What was it all about? Well, it had to do with the riddle that made a man out of man; in other words, the obligation of having to understand all that was his, and to view the world as an intruder that takes on different shapes and undergoes transubstantiation. It was about the exhaustion resulting from wondering about what was his as if his constituents always lay outside, in ex-istence. As if, above anything else, life had always been intended to step out from the spiritual silhouette where life dwells into the kind of confinement that has always demanded that consciousness gaze into a foreign land.

Exile on the land, then. And from such a perspective, the fateful condition implied in setting off from oneself toward an utopian one's self. Setting off toward an endless questioning about the region of the “human” condition, and making both the departure and the one-way journey into the most profound dimension of a pondering existence. An experience of exile that Western historical modernity consummated in the novel, its larger-than-life favorite poetics. From a fictional way of philosophizing –or philosophizing fiction –that could be woven only from representations of an I drowned in terror, free, released from its own jail-like discourses, recreating itself in kaleidoscopic parodies, and picturing the laughter of the gods. An I that discovered that the riddle was the initial fracture and distance between that other “I” and the world; between the word and the cloaks of the real, with the purpose of translating distance and ostracism in post-epic terms, tragic or satirical, destroying literature insofar as it was the ultimate form of accounting for the lack of homeland and home. According to María Zambrano's philosophy, it was about acknowledging the night of history thinking of the experience of exile which, in her view, is a time that resembles that of dreams, away from history, from days, and from groping hands.



V

Still, María Zambrano speaks of an exile which, like black shadows, will pervade political, economic, social, and cultural modernity when 19th and 20th Century history unravels its violent economic exploitation, revolutionary utopias, barricades, independence exploits, popular communes, totalitarianisms, and warfare at home and abroad. Society had become a projectual construction, implacable and possible from the standpoint of the philosophies of history: just as the Romantics had predicted, there was more financial power, more political engineering, more mythologies, added to the actions implemented by the masses organized as trade unions, political parties, armies, or the nation itself rising up in arms. It would not be possible to think of this dimension of exile –the countless exiles of thousands of people brutally banished by the expansion of world capitalism –without contextualizing the experience of forced migration within the plexus of modern Argentinean historiography.

A scattered, lonely colony in the insignificant Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata, the outlet for Peruvian silver and, basically, a seat of smugglers, after the revolution and the ensuing independence the country's architecture was built on the basis of massive exile from Europe, proving true what had initially been set down in Sarmiento's and Alberdi's chimerical writings, just as medieval utopists dreamt of an “unseemly” history turning into the history of a “golden” city. It was necessary for the country to stop looking like an Asian desert crossed by nomadic bands of belligerent gauchos (such was Sarmiento's disdainful description) and to grow into a welcoming territory for white 19th Century refugees. Two different ways of starting from those that were left at the other side of the fence.

In the 19th Century, reformulated by the millions of exiles coming from a millenary history, driven away from their homelands by a ruthless economic pressure translated into social barbarousness, cultural catastrophe, shattered existential identities, filiar smashing, beheaded memories, and linguistic orphanage, Argentina was restructured –whether as a fake Arcadia or as a place of undoubted commonal reparation –with expatriates in the leading roles as the new subaltern society reached certain regions of the country. Consequently, under such circumstances, history amounts to exile, and exile amounts to violence exerted against a background of tradition, a wealth of customs, idiosyncratic manners, physiognomic resemblances, phantasmatic imaginaries, silenced unconscious minds, and memories of things and people gone without the opportunity of being portrayed.

This final form of exile is identity as unthinkable, the kind of identity that cannot be replaced by either reflection or emotion. It is the biographical detail that challenges the quid of identity as nothing else does, and by identity I mean here the unspeakable phenomenon of life rather than the external symbols that it carries. An economic, political, religious, or racial chink irreparably splits singularity. The whole is cut asunder: the individual no longer is what he was, and neither is he what he has reached. He lives between two worlds, in an in-between that cannot be thought of as such; it can only be felt as a set of shadowy experiences that are difficult to name. María Zambrano speaks of Spanish exiles torn apart from their roots, scattered in various countries once the Spanish Civil War was won by Franco's faction. She speaks of ahistorical inhabitation, telling of a nightlike hiatus that engulfed the voices, the scents, and the well-known sky of the homeland, that same sky that German esthetic theorist Johan Winckelmann described as the parusia of a language, the mystery of art, the cultural mould that turns a woman into a particular woman and a man into a particular man.

As a punishment, exile steals away the circumstances of birth, childhood, youth, the native land in their most profound proofs of existence. The exile is an outcast from his community. The experience of he who has been deprived of his homeland is one that leads him to think of his homeland more than ever before. It is also under such circumstances that the questions about the immediate, the filiar, and the close acquire an authentic philosophic consistence without the intervention of either philosophers or philosophy. Yet modernity was polyphacetic, giving rise to national literatures as well as to openings that facilitated the escape of thousands of aesthetes who mistrusted the fate of their original latitudes. By the same token, it multiplied the dispersion of intellectuals and politicians fleeing defeat and persecution.

A one-way journey: Argentinean history throbs with a substratum composed of refounding exiles which show the national as a choice made by victims of punishment on their way to this country, to “the Southern Seas”. An accomplished journey. An itinerary which, from time to time, will continue to buzz at the gates of Consular buildings in the ghostly hope of a return ticket for a journey that might destroy the new foundations. It is typical of exile not to part with its structure of parenthetical time, in which perhaps Medea's grief might be soothed, or her crime might ultimately install a different narration. It is inherent to exile to pretend to block up the original stones with other ontologies snatched on the way. From there it always refers back to the question about the identity of things and references, as if it were what it in fact is not: an interval between dwellings. Instead, it becomes petreous in its inquiry into a bent destiny, for this is indeed the obsessive question that haunts exiles, that assaults women who are bearing their children far away.

The human condition? Adam's expulsion from Eden decided by a God that condemns his creature to move through history? A decentering of poetics that unveil the thin edge dividing language from the real? Perhaps a tangible chronicle of those who were prey to misery, to threats, and managed to survive? Many of those men beyond the frontiers, those who were deported, cast out, and forced to migrate, were endowed with a new kind of lucidity. It would seem as if straying away from the homeland uncovered a threshold to pry into secrets. Karl Marx tracing back the origins of capital from a London library. Julio Cortázar rebuilding a far country. In California, Theodor Adorno thinking of the worldwide industrial culture. In Chile, Sarmiento dissecting the frustrated revolution. Rimbaud, silent in Africa. In Paris, Walter Benjamin laying the foundations for the archeology of the contemporary, Witold Gombrowicz and his daily scribbling about Argentina's anagram. James Joyce in Trieste, writing the first chapters of Ulysses. On many occasions, the foreign quotation marks the equinox of man's pregnant land. Whichever way one looks at it, exile amounts to loss, to an unknown place where present, past, and future would seem to lose their function as clues to sense. It is, then, one of the hard experiences in which the question about the sense of life makes its presence felt.



VI

No doubt it is Romanticism, understood here as a para-esthetic creed, that hyperbolizes the notions of an unexchangeable homeland, of a childhood language that determines fate, of literary nationalities and, at the same time, as a complement to the movement that roots life, it hurls its arrow toward the antipodes, as if home, the hospitable pater, the ownership of the self, could be achieved successfully only through a breach of time, space, and tradition. Through the evils of exile. Through a melancholy tinge cast over what has been lost.

Seen thus, the quality of exile is profoundly romantic and modern. It sums up exiles of different tunes and dimensions. It brings together Jewish and Christian backgrounds, Greek modulations, idealisms of torn subjectivity and political subjectivities that will only agree to revolution, war, and patriotic feelings. From this cultural conglomerate of imaginaries, the romanticization of the world understood its reverse: extreme ostracism. Then, through bold policies, through literature about ill-fated loves, through anarchist and socialist militancy, it bore testimony to the geographies and to the exiled distances of the Ithacas where the anguished rovers yearn to return. Ever since the 19th Century, to die for the homeland became an obsessive idea that branched into different meanings, though it illustrates our point. To die for having lost it, because it is a place of no return, because it kills you, or to give your life for a military poetic figure that accounted for a land and for being forced to leave it. Exile is precisely the dead land that lives or that, romantically, buds to life in the experience of its death by desertion. To romanticize is to play at not discerning between the life/death pair that afflicts the migrant, the stranger, the foreigner, the expelled, the fugitive.

As the capitalist world became deromanticized and many of the clues to modernity began to fade, the figure of exile that invoked pagan, theological, rebel, fictional, and communist echoes turned into a dun sketch, integrated into modernist tradition and replaced, by the 21st Century, for more scientific readings that speak of migrating crowds in search of temporary employment in the framework of economies that at least pay wages. One could add: a rather hard postmodernity, with its masses always on the move and stripped of the old myths and legends of exile. In our times, economic, sociological, anthropological, and cultural studies deriving from field work speak more accurately of these new human swarms pent up in the outskirts of Madrid, Rome, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Buenos Aires, all of them heirs to an ancient story.



Bibliography

E.H. Carr. Los exiliados románticos. Bakunin, Herzen, Ogarev. Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1969

Eurípides. “Medea”, in Tragedias. Volume 1. Editorial Gredos, Madrid, 1991.

J. J. Rousseau. Julia y la Nueva Heloisa. Editorial Futuro, Buenos Aires, 1946.

Nicolás Casullo. “La modernidad como destierro y la iluminación de los bordes: la inmigración europea en la Argentina”, inImágenes desconocidas: la modernidad en la encrucijada posmoderna. CLACSO, Buenos Aires, 1988.

Nicolás Casullo. “Tu cuerpo ahí, el alma allá”, en Tierra que anda: los escritores en el exilio. Editorial Ameghino, Buenos Aires, 1999.

Nicolás Casullo. “Exilio, mito y figura”, en Educación y alteridad: la figura del extranjero. Colección Ensayos y Experiencias. Joint publication by Noveduc and Fundación CEM, Buenos Aires, April 2003.

H. Meschonicc. Les Tours de Babel. Editorial TER, France, 1985.

Jean Luc Nancy. “La existencia exiliada”, in Archipiélago magazine, # 26-27. Barcelona, 1996.

Massino Cacciari. “Las paradojas del extranjero”, in Archipiélago magazine # 26-27. Barcelona, 1996.


© 2007 Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
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Love is freedom

Excerpts from
Selfishness and Self-Love
by Erich Fromm (1939b-e)



It appears from what has been said that love cannot be separated from freedom and independence. In contradiction to the symbiotic pseudo-love, the basic premise of love is freedom and equality. Its premise is the strength, independence, integrity of the self, which can stand alone and bear solitude. This premise holds true for the loving as well as for the loved person. Love is a spontaneous act, and spontaneity means - also literally - the ability to act of one's own free volition. If anxiety and weakness of the self makes it impossible for the individual to be rooted in himself, he cannot love.
This fact can be fully understood only if we consider what love is directed toward. It is the opposite of hatred. Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of its "object".12 That means that love is not an "affect" but an active striving, the aim of which is the hapiness, development, and freedom of its "object." This passionate affirmation is not possible if one's own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted, can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.13

(...)
The important point, however, is that love for a particular object is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one could love, that it is the great chance of one's life to find that person, and that love for him or her results in a withdrawal from all others. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love, but a symbiotic attachment. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities.
Love for one person implies love for man as such. The kind of "division of labor" as William James calls it - namely, to love one's family, but to be without feeling for the "stranger," is a sign of a basic inability to love. Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming "after" the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific object; it is its premise, although, gentically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals. Read more on this article...