All things change. Nothing stays the same. All things return. As I have finally come around to re-reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha a second time, its chain of existential inquiry resonates differently than before. The first time I read it, I was filled with ideas of aspiration, possibility and fellowship. This time, I have been emptied of all of it. It seems the delusions promised simply by imagining their existence have dried up, much like the American Dream unrealized. The moreness – the +1 – the historical materialism draw an asymptotic projection of attainment that is – without the data to support this – inversely proportionate with happiness. Perhaps Biggie said it most eloquently: "Mo Money, Mo Problems".
Toward the end of his life, reunited with his childhood friend, Govinda, Siddhartha reflects on the direction his life has taken. From a Brahmin's son, to a sadhu, to a successful merchant with a beautiful consort, to a possessionless wayfarer who ferries people across a river, he has come a long way from his roots. He abandoned his family, his friend, and his consort all in the search of Enlightenment. Finally, alone and in possession of the greatest gift – himself in full freedom – he reveals his truth to Govinda, who beseeches Siddhartha to offer a kernel of wisdom to aid in his search for Truth. Siddhartha replies that the reason Govinda is discontent is not just because he set out on an unachievable goal, but because he has a goal at all. Remove the goal, and one can simply live in the present. (Note, there is a strong irony in the fact that Govinda is a disciple of the Buddha at this point, so it would have made sense for him to abolish any desire he had long ago...) As pragmatic as it sounds, could this simple solution work in American culture today? Can we forgo goals and just... "be"?
The answer is an uneasy yes and no. No, so long as we honor the obligations of the social contracts we were born into and must uphold through an enslaving capitalist system designed to in-debt us and hook us for life (more on that another time). We cannot just "be" when we have bills to pay and a family to take care of. But what if we didn't? How would that be possible? Not having a family is imaginable, but one will always have bills so long as one honors the social contract thereby participating in society. The only solution to achieve the level of presence Siddhartha did and advocates is to opt out – must like Henry David Thoreau did with his experiment at Walden Pond.
But this will never happen in America. Sure, there may be a few social deviants – the Emory student on which the movie Into the Wild is based, as an example – but psychologically the vast majority of us are so hopelessly attached to the system, so interdependent, so oblivious to how to subsist without it, that even though subconsciously a return to Eden of sorts is desired, people wouldn't know where to begin or would simply be too afraid to act on their alienated (fill in the blank). It's not that we as Americans are hopeless – though we are – but that there was an asterisk next to the opportunity we were promised that clearly stated we would effectively be selling our souls in order to attain from the sweat on our brows. Unfortunately none of the immigrants could read the language of American sophism, so cleverly disguised with the inviting words engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor..." Yes, give them to us, so we might enslave them for our utility. Shameless Americans. We've been exploiting our population since our independence. My only question to America is: was it worth it to get where, or become what, we are today?
Siddhartha was right about goals being the undoing force precluding happiness, but few of us if any will ever have the opportunity to test his hypothesis.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
My America? But how?
In the last year or two, there has been one overarching, almost overwhelming fact that has cropped up again and again in my observations of the world around me: we are in deep trouble. I'm not just talking about the seeming proliferation of natural disasters and citizen uprisings alluding to the Second Coming (boy, would my face be red if that were to come about). I'm talking about the state of American society.
I'm very lucky in that I'm Caucausian and middle class, but I'm oddly unlucky in that I'm also female. As I grow older, I am becoming more and more aware of the conflicting forces that push and pull on my psyche. As an aspiring academic, I'm entering into a temporal sphere that is forcing me to make some very fundamental decisions. On one hand I want a family, but on the other, there's no way I could sacrifice my dreams and what I've accomplished so far for an outdated understanding of what it means to be a woman...right? Do I stay in academia and push through to get my PhD? Do I want to get married and have children before I'm 30? Is any of that feasible while pursuing my PhD?
Back when I was an undergraduate, one of my professors confided in me that she felt that other female professors looked at her askance because she had three children, a pretty phenomenal feat for a professional woman. She wondered out loud what her life would have been like if she had taken a few years off instead of diving straight into graduate work. What's funny (or sad) is that while she might have been the anomaly within the Ivory Tower, women who choose to pursue their professional careers and forsake the traditional female roles of mother and wife get the same treatment within dominant society. Women who choose to pursue their careers and end up in their 30s and 40s without a husband are subject to quiet mutterings about their sexual orientation, because there is something that strikes society as simply weird about a woman who does not conform to the societal expectations.
The most recent and striking example I can think of is that of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. During her confirmation hearings, it was never stated outright, but there were little comments by newscasters or commentators about her marital status. (I suppose the same pressure can be exerted on men, but I'd have to ask my esteemed colleague about that.) Ed note: I've been informed that people DID engage in outright speculation regarding Kagan's sexuality; I don't remember hearing anything like that so I didn't want to say something without proof...that's for the Sarah Palins of the world to do, not overworked academics! /snark
Recognizing these societal pressures, I began to think about how they came about. Why does society dictate these pressures, these desires that masquerade as needs? If Peter Berger is to believed, the reason American society is in such a dire situation is precisely because we, as Americans, made it that way. We can rage against the machine all we want, but without being cognizant of the fact that we, as members of society, are in a dialectic WITH society, then effective change can never be brought about. Gandhi was not wrong when he said "be the change you want to see in the world." That personal change is necessary precisely because of our daily interactions with society and our unique yet utterly normal roles as cultural producers.
Put another way, we make the grammatical rules of our societies, and then those rules act back upon us. If we chafe and labor under these rules, or recognize that certain institutions, methodologies, or ideologies are potentially harmful in the long run, then it is not enough to sit around, pontificating and intellectually masturbating until the sun sets. We must take some sort of action for ourselves, our communities, and our society if the dominant social values are to be affected in any way, shape, or form.
I'm very lucky in that I'm Caucausian and middle class, but I'm oddly unlucky in that I'm also female. As I grow older, I am becoming more and more aware of the conflicting forces that push and pull on my psyche. As an aspiring academic, I'm entering into a temporal sphere that is forcing me to make some very fundamental decisions. On one hand I want a family, but on the other, there's no way I could sacrifice my dreams and what I've accomplished so far for an outdated understanding of what it means to be a woman...right? Do I stay in academia and push through to get my PhD? Do I want to get married and have children before I'm 30? Is any of that feasible while pursuing my PhD?
Back when I was an undergraduate, one of my professors confided in me that she felt that other female professors looked at her askance because she had three children, a pretty phenomenal feat for a professional woman. She wondered out loud what her life would have been like if she had taken a few years off instead of diving straight into graduate work. What's funny (or sad) is that while she might have been the anomaly within the Ivory Tower, women who choose to pursue their professional careers and forsake the traditional female roles of mother and wife get the same treatment within dominant society. Women who choose to pursue their careers and end up in their 30s and 40s without a husband are subject to quiet mutterings about their sexual orientation, because there is something that strikes society as simply weird about a woman who does not conform to the societal expectations.
The most recent and striking example I can think of is that of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. During her confirmation hearings, it was never stated outright, but there were little comments by newscasters or commentators about her marital status. (I suppose the same pressure can be exerted on men, but I'd have to ask my esteemed colleague about that.) Ed note: I've been informed that people DID engage in outright speculation regarding Kagan's sexuality; I don't remember hearing anything like that so I didn't want to say something without proof...that's for the Sarah Palins of the world to do, not overworked academics! /snark
Recognizing these societal pressures, I began to think about how they came about. Why does society dictate these pressures, these desires that masquerade as needs? If Peter Berger is to believed, the reason American society is in such a dire situation is precisely because we, as Americans, made it that way. We can rage against the machine all we want, but without being cognizant of the fact that we, as members of society, are in a dialectic WITH society, then effective change can never be brought about. Gandhi was not wrong when he said "be the change you want to see in the world." That personal change is necessary precisely because of our daily interactions with society and our unique yet utterly normal roles as cultural producers.
Put another way, we make the grammatical rules of our societies, and then those rules act back upon us. If we chafe and labor under these rules, or recognize that certain institutions, methodologies, or ideologies are potentially harmful in the long run, then it is not enough to sit around, pontificating and intellectually masturbating until the sun sets. We must take some sort of action for ourselves, our communities, and our society if the dominant social values are to be affected in any way, shape, or form.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
My America: Army of One
Americana, it's where I wanna/
Be all I can be, heir of Madonna/
We are the Borg, try this New Age Theravada/
Psychotherapy, selectively de-criminalized marijuana/ 4
Hypocrisy, not a shock to me in the land of totalitarian democracy/
Beef with Uncle Sam cuz I'm for my country but he's not for me/
Robbing me of my rights but how do you steal what I got for free?/
Such debauchery, a menáge-a-three is French: I think I heard it on TV/ 8
Big brother and big lover, a smorgasbord with scores of Lords/
A Christian pantheon that professes one god – ever heard of a whore before?/
Some go door to door claiming compared to others they have more in store/
So donate half your salary that you can't afford and second amendment 44s/ 12
It's corporate war! with no pensions, I guess they forgot to mention/
That Americans are mercenaries of religion, jobs and of course pretention/
Upward mobility ain't so easy see in my lifetime's fourth recession/
Feel bad and perform confession, if in pain have a morphine injection/ 16
There's a pill for everything, found in nature, but when we're killing everything/
Soon we'll no longer possess the means to discover the next sensu bean/
What once were orators are now politicians, ask any adult to do long division/
Learning rhetoric? We deaded it... I presume due to cost restrictions/ 20
Microwavable food when in rush, college students scoff at kitchens/
Don't talk to me it's too early, we're also coffee victims/
Victims because it's not our fault, we were born into it/
Only cheated on my girl because of the normative porn influence/ 24
But it's got more to do with being insecure in our identities/
Cuz when we swear off where we came from we obscure our cultural memories/
Ungrateful bastards that we are, our futures get a severing/
Cuz when I disrespect my elders tell me who is left to mentor me?/ 28
So we turn to tabloids and reality TV to distract us from our lives/
We use Twitter and Facebook to aggrandize our lives/
We all read Harry Potter to re-imagine the magic in our lives/
Can't help but be hopelessly mixed up from all these Americana lies/ 32
Be all I can be, heir of Madonna/
We are the Borg, try this New Age Theravada/
Psychotherapy, selectively de-criminalized marijuana/ 4
Hypocrisy, not a shock to me in the land of totalitarian democracy/
Beef with Uncle Sam cuz I'm for my country but he's not for me/
Robbing me of my rights but how do you steal what I got for free?/
Such debauchery, a menáge-a-three is French: I think I heard it on TV/ 8
Big brother and big lover, a smorgasbord with scores of Lords/
A Christian pantheon that professes one god – ever heard of a whore before?/
Some go door to door claiming compared to others they have more in store/
So donate half your salary that you can't afford and second amendment 44s/ 12
It's corporate war! with no pensions, I guess they forgot to mention/
That Americans are mercenaries of religion, jobs and of course pretention/
Upward mobility ain't so easy see in my lifetime's fourth recession/
Feel bad and perform confession, if in pain have a morphine injection/ 16
There's a pill for everything, found in nature, but when we're killing everything/
Soon we'll no longer possess the means to discover the next sensu bean/
What once were orators are now politicians, ask any adult to do long division/
Learning rhetoric? We deaded it... I presume due to cost restrictions/ 20
Microwavable food when in rush, college students scoff at kitchens/
Don't talk to me it's too early, we're also coffee victims/
Victims because it's not our fault, we were born into it/
Only cheated on my girl because of the normative porn influence/ 24
But it's got more to do with being insecure in our identities/
Cuz when we swear off where we came from we obscure our cultural memories/
Ungrateful bastards that we are, our futures get a severing/
Cuz when I disrespect my elders tell me who is left to mentor me?/ 28
So we turn to tabloids and reality TV to distract us from our lives/
We use Twitter and Facebook to aggrandize our lives/
We all read Harry Potter to re-imagine the magic in our lives/
Can't help but be hopelessly mixed up from all these Americana lies/ 32
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