I realised only of late how protracted the silence has been in this avenue. Somehow I have been distracted by the multitude of events that enveloped my life for some time, and it was only today, when I heard my own voice speaking to me again as I was jogging in the heat of the afternoon sun that I have not been speaking to myself for a long time.
But what with the silence? Why should the taciturnity that I had indulged in be a necessary concern? I have been reading much, but I know I haven’t been thinking much. It is as if suddenly I have borne for myself a responsibility for my thinking that I have no intention to air to the rest of the world. For it is a world of much sorrow and toil, and whatever joy there is that lingers beyond my own battered self is mingled with much grief. Nothing that shrieks anymore shrieks like a child does in joyful surprise. Instead, I only hear piercing cries of solitude, of helplessness, of fatigue that cannot be overcome. It remains an enigma to almost every Munch scholar just what the tortured artist meant to convey when he spilled the sickly colours onto the canvas that became The Scream. I remember that when I first saw it in Oslo, I was pondering down a long gallery of sketches of his Madonna and other paintings of illness and anathemas. The air was heavy with elegies that the man had left behind, and despite the crowd around The Scream, I wasn’t particularly drawn to it; I didn’t even know we were sharing the same space. I was drawn to the sketches themselves, and I was wondering how this poor man had to live every second of his rather long life. He was a proud man, almost eccentric but certainly proud. But he lived a sorry life, losing much of his family and loved ones to disease. His words were rare with people but munificent with his paintings. He spoke through his brush and charcoal, as he strove to perfect the stain on every thread on his canvas, and every fibre on his sheet. Here on these walls hang the works of sensitivity borne out of sorrow, unlike van Gogh, another of my beloved artists who grimaced in pain and hid nothing of it on his canvas heavy-laden with oil, just like his own life heavy-laden with sorrow and pity.
I’ve always had an affinity towards the lachrymose, always tended to gravitate towards tormented personalities and the fruits of their tragedies. Van Gogh, Munch, Lawrence, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, du Pre, these were all unhappy people for most of their lives as celebrities, and all the roses that were scattered on their feet could not soothe their tired souls. They needed emollients that were beyond the reach of this world, and to that extent, they found company in solitude, in not being understood, and the peoples who professed to love them could only love them from afar. No I do not for a moment believe I can understand them, but perhaps I can empathise with them for a fraction of their lives.
I was reading a collection of interviews and lectures that Foucault gave on religion and culture last night, and he was talking about meaning. Of course, part of the discussion revolved around his Birth of the Clinic and his theme on madness, both of which I was reminded of this evening. The problem with meaning is that it is such a paradoxical curse. On one hand it exists only in the light of the wider context of social structures and institutional installments. On the other it often seeks to subvert at least some corpus of assumptions by itself. Nothing in this world, not a word, not a symbol, not a picture of any sort, can exist in any setting and not have an effect of undermining some inference of what it means based on what one observes in that wider setting. A flag flying high on a mast in a national square can signify pride in the country perhaps, but at the same time, someone had to raise the flag up before one can see it there. Did he do it willingly or was he paid to or compelled to? Perhaps one would think he was compelled or paid to if it were a Chinese flag in Tiananmen. So we push back the borders of consideration. But is there even one setting today in which we can say the image invokes only one of patriotism and nothing else? Is there indeed a country that expunges all sardonic thoughts of materialism and pragmatism, and all that naturally resides in it is patriotism when you see its flag flying high in the square? And the simple image of a bottle of drinking water on a table before rows of chairs. That was what was starkly missing in my session with MOF on Friday, and I wondered where the senior directors would sit and address the audience. Water on the table in that setting is no longer simply water. It connotes a position of privilege or power, that the person who is entitled to the water has such important teachings for us that the last thing we can countenance is that his teaching is impeded because of a dry throat. Such meticulous considerateness comes only to those whom the audience or organisers believe are worth it.
So – as Foucault made it clear so long ago – meaning is everywhere just as power is everywhere, and although I’m not sure if he said this, I’m sure he will agree with my extrapolation of his views, that partly because power is omnipresent and fluid, meaning – which is so dependent on the nature of power – is fluid as well. The glaring emptiness on the table in MOF could be due to an overriding power, one that chose to subvert the custom of what a bottle of water on a table in that room could mean. And when we look beyond an already complex image of a bottle on a table in that setting, to an entire body of symbols in religion or culture, we instantly get inundated because of the complexities and intricacies of the issues at hand, and the absolutely overwhelming web of relations between symbols, between culture/religion and something else, and how these relations and meanings are desperately volatile and even intransigently capricious. And religion and culture place so much hope and expectations on the shoulders of one very often, that even an avowed atheist cannot escape it. The moment one defines oneself as a violent atheist, one’s own identity is dependent on the theos already, and the meaning one ascribes to the notion of ‘me’ or ‘I’ instantly falls flat unless the meaning is constructed antithetically to the theos. The indifferent agnostic – the person who doesn’t know if the Divine exists but doesn’t think his life depends on that – may to a greater extent be said to live independently of religion directly, but indirectly, there will be people who will make claims on him regarding his views on religion. The former may take it upon himself to be respectful because he has friends or people help from whom he needs who are religious. Ultimately then, religion is cardinal to any person in this world. But even if that is not the case, culture is. With culture comes the tyranny of the masses, for culture is to a huge extent simply the concerted articulation of everyday meaning in society, and because one cannot expect to survive happily for long if the masses turn against one, one must live according to the demands of the masses, however repugnant such demands may be.
And it was at least due to culture that these men and women fell into depression and drowned in it. Musicians were expected to perform, artists to paint, composers to compose. The similarity is simply their need to express themselves, their sorrow and joy, but yet so few could understand them properly that they felt alone, and it was in this loneliness that they found companionship in wood and paper, in their instruments, in their paintbrush and palette, in their scores. Yet millions more since the dawn of civilisation languished without a sound whilst they sought a kind soul who understood their misery. They vanished like sand is washed away from the shores by the crashing of the incessant waves, their rolling down into the deep recesses of the seabed noiseless and silenced by the roaring of the current. Certain people grow up feeling alienated, and they carry with them a sensitivity towards persons, towards the air in a room of maladroitly decorated faces of the elite, towards a scowl, towards even just the serene face of a sleeping loved one. This sensitivity may be appreciated if it finds the appreciation it deserves, but almost always, it slinks away as if it were an unwanted strand of shed hair. Yet we are in greater need for such sensitivity as has never been the case. When will all our ears perk to these cries that come from the paintings from our painters still alive, or perhaps even just from the woman in the powersuit who returns to the cold shell she tries to call home, and seeks perfunctory solace in slithering in bed with another faceless stranger?
But what with the silence? Why should the taciturnity that I had indulged in be a necessary concern? I have been reading much, but I know I haven’t been thinking much. It is as if suddenly I have borne for myself a responsibility for my thinking that I have no intention to air to the rest of the world. For it is a world of much sorrow and toil, and whatever joy there is that lingers beyond my own battered self is mingled with much grief. Nothing that shrieks anymore shrieks like a child does in joyful surprise. Instead, I only hear piercing cries of solitude, of helplessness, of fatigue that cannot be overcome. It remains an enigma to almost every Munch scholar just what the tortured artist meant to convey when he spilled the sickly colours onto the canvas that became The Scream. I remember that when I first saw it in Oslo, I was pondering down a long gallery of sketches of his Madonna and other paintings of illness and anathemas. The air was heavy with elegies that the man had left behind, and despite the crowd around The Scream, I wasn’t particularly drawn to it; I didn’t even know we were sharing the same space. I was drawn to the sketches themselves, and I was wondering how this poor man had to live every second of his rather long life. He was a proud man, almost eccentric but certainly proud. But he lived a sorry life, losing much of his family and loved ones to disease. His words were rare with people but munificent with his paintings. He spoke through his brush and charcoal, as he strove to perfect the stain on every thread on his canvas, and every fibre on his sheet. Here on these walls hang the works of sensitivity borne out of sorrow, unlike van Gogh, another of my beloved artists who grimaced in pain and hid nothing of it on his canvas heavy-laden with oil, just like his own life heavy-laden with sorrow and pity.
I’ve always had an affinity towards the lachrymose, always tended to gravitate towards tormented personalities and the fruits of their tragedies. Van Gogh, Munch, Lawrence, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, du Pre, these were all unhappy people for most of their lives as celebrities, and all the roses that were scattered on their feet could not soothe their tired souls. They needed emollients that were beyond the reach of this world, and to that extent, they found company in solitude, in not being understood, and the peoples who professed to love them could only love them from afar. No I do not for a moment believe I can understand them, but perhaps I can empathise with them for a fraction of their lives.
I was reading a collection of interviews and lectures that Foucault gave on religion and culture last night, and he was talking about meaning. Of course, part of the discussion revolved around his Birth of the Clinic and his theme on madness, both of which I was reminded of this evening. The problem with meaning is that it is such a paradoxical curse. On one hand it exists only in the light of the wider context of social structures and institutional installments. On the other it often seeks to subvert at least some corpus of assumptions by itself. Nothing in this world, not a word, not a symbol, not a picture of any sort, can exist in any setting and not have an effect of undermining some inference of what it means based on what one observes in that wider setting. A flag flying high on a mast in a national square can signify pride in the country perhaps, but at the same time, someone had to raise the flag up before one can see it there. Did he do it willingly or was he paid to or compelled to? Perhaps one would think he was compelled or paid to if it were a Chinese flag in Tiananmen. So we push back the borders of consideration. But is there even one setting today in which we can say the image invokes only one of patriotism and nothing else? Is there indeed a country that expunges all sardonic thoughts of materialism and pragmatism, and all that naturally resides in it is patriotism when you see its flag flying high in the square? And the simple image of a bottle of drinking water on a table before rows of chairs. That was what was starkly missing in my session with MOF on Friday, and I wondered where the senior directors would sit and address the audience. Water on the table in that setting is no longer simply water. It connotes a position of privilege or power, that the person who is entitled to the water has such important teachings for us that the last thing we can countenance is that his teaching is impeded because of a dry throat. Such meticulous considerateness comes only to those whom the audience or organisers believe are worth it.
So – as Foucault made it clear so long ago – meaning is everywhere just as power is everywhere, and although I’m not sure if he said this, I’m sure he will agree with my extrapolation of his views, that partly because power is omnipresent and fluid, meaning – which is so dependent on the nature of power – is fluid as well. The glaring emptiness on the table in MOF could be due to an overriding power, one that chose to subvert the custom of what a bottle of water on a table in that room could mean. And when we look beyond an already complex image of a bottle on a table in that setting, to an entire body of symbols in religion or culture, we instantly get inundated because of the complexities and intricacies of the issues at hand, and the absolutely overwhelming web of relations between symbols, between culture/religion and something else, and how these relations and meanings are desperately volatile and even intransigently capricious. And religion and culture place so much hope and expectations on the shoulders of one very often, that even an avowed atheist cannot escape it. The moment one defines oneself as a violent atheist, one’s own identity is dependent on the theos already, and the meaning one ascribes to the notion of ‘me’ or ‘I’ instantly falls flat unless the meaning is constructed antithetically to the theos. The indifferent agnostic – the person who doesn’t know if the Divine exists but doesn’t think his life depends on that – may to a greater extent be said to live independently of religion directly, but indirectly, there will be people who will make claims on him regarding his views on religion. The former may take it upon himself to be respectful because he has friends or people help from whom he needs who are religious. Ultimately then, religion is cardinal to any person in this world. But even if that is not the case, culture is. With culture comes the tyranny of the masses, for culture is to a huge extent simply the concerted articulation of everyday meaning in society, and because one cannot expect to survive happily for long if the masses turn against one, one must live according to the demands of the masses, however repugnant such demands may be.
And it was at least due to culture that these men and women fell into depression and drowned in it. Musicians were expected to perform, artists to paint, composers to compose. The similarity is simply their need to express themselves, their sorrow and joy, but yet so few could understand them properly that they felt alone, and it was in this loneliness that they found companionship in wood and paper, in their instruments, in their paintbrush and palette, in their scores. Yet millions more since the dawn of civilisation languished without a sound whilst they sought a kind soul who understood their misery. They vanished like sand is washed away from the shores by the crashing of the incessant waves, their rolling down into the deep recesses of the seabed noiseless and silenced by the roaring of the current. Certain people grow up feeling alienated, and they carry with them a sensitivity towards persons, towards the air in a room of maladroitly decorated faces of the elite, towards a scowl, towards even just the serene face of a sleeping loved one. This sensitivity may be appreciated if it finds the appreciation it deserves, but almost always, it slinks away as if it were an unwanted strand of shed hair. Yet we are in greater need for such sensitivity as has never been the case. When will all our ears perk to these cries that come from the paintings from our painters still alive, or perhaps even just from the woman in the powersuit who returns to the cold shell she tries to call home, and seeks perfunctory solace in slithering in bed with another faceless stranger?
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