Death, monkeys, and dancing bears

Thinking about the meaning of death in different cultures these days. My study of non-European cultures has been either so academic or so pop, so Bhagavad Gita or else Monkey!, that I have no practical idea what death means to people outside Europe. There's something rather brutal about the dominant thread we have in Europe and North America now. Centuries of training by our religion to see life as a linear progression to death and to the subsequent judgement of our selves, as we now understand our selves, by God, who we comprehend as another self. I think we still have that pattern, if you can call something so simple a pattern, in our minds. But now, for so many of us, especially in Europe, who have been repelled by the church, we've lost even the small complication of the assumption of judgement at the end - just the simple linear sentence of our selves, growing and aging and dying, and then a sudden full stop.

But in early Christian theology (well, not REALLY early - really early, it was a death and apocalypse cult) there was a conception of the afterlife that was less deeply personal. An idea that on death, we came to understand the will of God, and being in heaven was the same thing as being part of God's will. The release of one's own will, which leads inexorably to the idea of the release of the self - of our consciousnesses in any way that we can understand consciousness. Though from what I remember that's an idea that was resisted by the people who wrote about heaven, and when I listen to Christians going on about God's will they're able to contort their mind into believing that surrendering yourself to God doesn't mean not being your self anymore. Too pagan? Too frightening? I don't know. But the release of the self. Imagine that. You could spend years trying to imagine it. A lifetime. And once you did - once you could imagine that - surely you're no longer your self . . .

I think being alive is the process of being able to release your self. I think I'm very excited to be moving close to Asia and to start taking my holidays in countries and societies I don't know a fucking thing about in any practical sense. My head was full of it last weekend when we were in Brussels Far East museum - Congo-era colonial visioning of the east extraordinaire, to the tackiest effect possible, and I was standing there in the middle of all the Chineuropean fantasization, thinking - I don't know shit. I don't know shit. No cleverer than that fat corrupt shitful bastard Leopold II. I've never gone outside of my cultural comfort zone whilst travelling so I'm really not used to thinking like that. I don't know shit. A bit like death, really.

Sorry if this post is coming off as morbid or (retch) "emo". I'm actually in top form. Rather in the grip of pity for Michael Jackson, though. I don't know about iconography but I think historians will look back on him as a sort of textbook figure about what obsessive fame in our era can do to a delicate person. I was going to post a video of a "Love You Save" performance from the late 70's - that song's in the running for my 'Best Song Ever' trophy - but having just looked at it again I couldn't help but feel, as I was watching him grin and dance around superbly, that I was geeking on a dancing bear with a ring through its nose and no more memory of the wild, no conception of the bad it might do, nothing except not fucking up, not fucking up and getting burned by its trainer . . . Couldn't do it. Poor dead dancing bear. Poor thing.

In testament to pity, here's the only joke about his death I've heard so far that had nothing to do with little boys (and I've heard at least a dozen already):

A post-mortem will be held to determine which was the cause of death:

A) Sunshine
B) Moonlight
C) Good Times
D) Boogie

I am not an animal

I made a mistake in Berlin. On Tuesday, in my ongoing quest to be unacceptably insubordinate whilst sparklingly competent, I gave the talks I wasn't covering a miss and went to the Berlin Zoo. I hadn't been a zoo in twelve years and about as soon as I entered and ran to the ape section I remembered why. I don't have much of a problem with seeing most animals in captivity; I think most of them are probably deeply relieved nothing's trying to eat them, or that there's enough food just sitting there, or that, if it's a proper zoo, there are others of their kind and they can fuck and communicate.

But some animals need more than that, of course, and hoofing it to the ape section right away reminded me of that. Chimpanzees and gorillas are ugly hair people, and they're in small enclosures, and their tits are visibly bored off. They look like characters from Oz during a bit of violence downtime. As much as I hate to sound in accordance with people who annoy me as badly as Richard Dawkins and PETA, here it goes: it was visibly obvious they're people - ugly hairy people in a gawking-jail - or that we're ugly naked apes, imprisoning hairy apes and gawking. They have our mannerisms and features and visible symptoms of our mental agonies. It was a fucking downer, and while it's totally unfair, it was the first thing in four days that made me remember I was in the old Nazi capital.

The only great thing about it - besides the largeness of the revelation that they are ugly hairy people and should be respected as such - was that a bunch of moronic Italian teenagers were standing next to me next to the gorilla enclosure, going on about how ugly and stupid the greyback looked, and then a mouse popped out of a nearby hedge, and they freaked the fuck out. It was great. Mock something that shares most of our genetic code and could tear your arms off when a nice big ditch is separating you, and then lose your shit when approached by a harmless overfed rodent. Beautiful. They were boys, too.

The other thing that was deeply depressing, besides the gorillas and chimpanzees (the orang-utans, surprisingly, weren't depressing at all - they seemed to be having a marvelous time playing on a swingy rope-maze), and maybe one of the most depressing things I've ever seen, was Knut the polar bear. Now, I'm not a fucking animal psychologist. But that poor fucker obviously has no fucking idea he's a polar bear, and on getting back home I've read one of his handlers agrees. He was pacing back and forth on the part of his enclosure closest to the audience - back and forth - I watched for ten minutes, went away for half an hour, came back, he was still pacing - another half hour, still pacing - staring at the people, sort of tossing his head around and struggling to make eye contact with them. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen an animal do when it wasn't in actual physical pain.

So that's it for me and zoos. No more. It was dreadful. I'm still not opposed to them in principle but there are some species who are going to lose their fucking minds in there, and some animals who are going to lose their fucking minds if they can't remember what kind of animals they are . . . why do they need all the animals in there, that's what I don't get. Why isn't there some sort of acknowledgement that it's going to drive some species apeshit? I don't know. I'm done, though. No more. Next time I'll just get some pay-per-view porn in the hotel room.

And now she's looking for a furze-cutting man, that's what I am

Once more - bam - the weekend is over. I really, really hate this about the passing of a chemically depressive state. At least a slow burn of mild braindead makes time crawl. Feeling very bitchy this morning. Not just because we got a new bookshelf this weekend and our library has morphed from piles on the floor to nicely arranged tomes on a shelf (I've even grouped the authors, something I haven't had the mental organization to do since 1996) so I know exactly what I'm not reading as I walk out the door to work.

Not just because I listened to an interesting broadcast this weekend whilst sewing which managed to incidentally spell out for me that part of what makes me hate my profession is its ecological parasitism - a fact I was aware of, but which I'm usually able to bury under five or six layers of rationalizations. My relationship with Buddhism is limited to watching 27 episodes of Monkey! but when people get going about it, it reminds me that there are some good and bad choices to make for oneself as a moral creature that I'm not making right now - all I'm making is money. Ouch. I can say to myself endlessly 'it's okay, I'll stop in a year and a half, in a year and a half everything will change,' and maybe it will, but it's not a year and a half from now yet and in the meantime I don't like the ethics of what I do.

No, on top of all that, I've had motherfucking 'Uptown Girl' stuck in my head since I woke up. I know it was a huge success as a single and probably made Billy Joel millions of dollars, but seriously, as an aesthetically aware creature what possesses you to unleash four minutes of such shit on your fellow humans? Ugh.

Possibly what got it stuck in my head was reading the first ten chapters of The Mayor of Casterbridge last night, since Thomas Hardy's novels are all about uptown girls and downtown guys, or vice versa, in the framework of rural England. At least I think they are, I'm just getting my feet wet with Hardy, having only read The Return of the Native and Tess of the D'Urbervilles before. I didn't enjoy Tess of the D'Urbervilles - it was a very good book but it was too heavy for me at the time at which I was reading it. The Return of the Native I liked better, though it was also quite heavy - I think because in The Return of the Native, I felt less sympathy for the main characters, though Eustacia really struck a nerve, she seemed so real, than I did for poor Tess. The Mayor of Casterbridge also promises to be heavy. It opens with a wife-auctioning scene, in which the protagonist Henchard gets loaded and sells off his woman and child at a country fair. And hijinks ensue.

Sometimes I wonder if I like sort of depressing authors like Thomas Hardy and Somerset Maugham as a sort of hangover teenage Curehead thing - if I've just replaced whiny Robert Smith vocals with whiny British authors dealing with the deterioration of their country's social and economic edifices. But then I get over it. I like Thomas Hardy, at least, because of his incredible powers of description - not just of people, but of place and ambience. Read this, from the beginning of chapter 11:

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain (. . .) The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself the most common of any--seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers (. . .)

Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few towns-people in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

So nice.

Are you sure that's what you meant to say?

So you know I love Joseph Conrad. And these couple of sentences are a reason I love him, as well as a sort of symptom of what makes me love him:

"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies, - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do."

I've read and nodded my head 10, 20 times at that before, but today it rings true in my head more clearly than it ever has. Not just as a quick, effective literary device to make Marlow into a living, breathing thing in Heart of Darkness - dear Marlow, I've got such a crush on him - but almost as a manifesto.

It's because of my job, of course. As a business journalist I'm lied to an a daily, hourly basis, and when I'm not being lied to I'm being obfuscated to, and not being a political animal to me it's the same damn thing. And what hurts the most is that these are grown men lying to me, lying in a bald-faced manner that they can't possibly expect me to believe, but they do expect me to believe.

Because I'm very vain, the most painful thing about that used to be that I couldn't bear so many hundreds of people thinking I was stupid. But I got over that, as it's nothing personal; I could be fucking Einstein and they'd still be trying to bullshit me. Now the most painful thing about it is that I feel these grown men (and I mean men -female contacts aren't more forthcoming, but when I ask a question whose answer they don't want to give me they usually stand on the fifth) are lying with the gracelessness of children, but that they're grown men, so it's tragic.

It's tragic because they're stuck in the worst of childhood (guile and bullying) while spinning their way to the worst of age and mortality (greying, balding, fattening, coarsening, suppurating, drooping, and losing their health and energy), utterly wasting the incredible luck (if you're an atheist), the incredible beneficence of our creator (if you're garden-variety religious), or the incredible opportunity for discovering the higher nature of existence (if you're Buddhist - I think, I'm just guessing about that religion based on all the Monkey! we've been watching) that is the fact that I'm alive, you're alive, that we're all alive and who we are. Utterly wasting all that like it means nothing, and they might as well already be dead.

And all that's standard - that's how industry, how business works. I can't bear it sometimes. Frankly, it stresses me. My job isn't horribly demanding in terms of the quantitative workload but sometimes it does get hard to bear all these damn, stinking lies. But at the same time, I love it. I love exposing a lie. I love being lied to and then slapping that lie with the truth. I love collecting two dozen lies and extracting the truth from them. It feels really good. It feels like an abusive but, shall we say, very satisfying relationship, and I don't write that lightly.

Still, I need to find a way to deal with all of this without getting stressed. If I move from business journalism into political journalism or standard garden variety journalism it's not as though I can expect the lies to get any less frequent, blatant, or brutal. I need to find a way to not be so stressed by them.

The dream is over, or at least adjusted to suit local conditions

I've been busy with Haiti and Monkey!, and thus this morning was my first real opportunity to take the theory exam, and also my last chance to take it before the 3-month point preceding my 30th birthday, and thus the last date on which to do it and still achieve my goal of getting my full license before inaugurating the beginning of my 4th fucking decade on November 25th, baby. No dice. Instead:

-15 minute bike ride downhill through industrial district
-found office
-sat down to wait my turn
-DMV worker yells 'there's no theory exam Fridays!'
-I say 'oh!'
-he yells 'there never has been a theory exam on Fridays! It doesn't exist!'
-I say 'what days?'
-he yells 'Tuesday to Thursday!'
-30 minute bike ride uphill to the office, 15 minutes early.

At least I didn't fail. Oh well. Will have to adjust the goal to getting my full permit before turning 31.

By the way, this incident is a prime example of why Belgians have a reputation for being morons, despite, if I'm honest, being no more organizationally inept than any non-Dutch Europeans. Things are at least a little inconvenient all over the continent. But here, when faced with a deficiency in the system, participants tend to say something like 'it doesn't exist'. When obviously, if you have a modicum of imagination or education, you know it does. Just not in this shithole. The same thing happened to me last night at the petstore when I wanted to buy a toothbrush for my cat. I admit it sounds like a made-up thing, but Sugarplum and San Francisca both have had good results with them, and I knew the petstore stocked toothbrushes for dogs. So I asked a lady who worked there, who looked baffled, and who asked her manager, who insisted that such things didn't exist.

What do you say to that? Nothing. That twitch that's starting over my right eye when I get annoyed is just the cost of doing business here.

Mistress Aware of Vacuity

Again, too busy to blog. Too much Haiti to edit for the Quakers. Just two questions.

Number one: if I had spent my childhood glued to the television watching reruns of Monkey! instead of Magnum PI, She-ra, and The Dukes of Hazzard, would I be any closer to enlightenment now?

Number two: at what point did watching reruns of Monkey! now stop being about humouring the Australian F-word, who did watch it as a child instead of Magnum PI, She-ra, and The Dukes of Hazzard, and be about Monkey! being fucking awesome?

Check out the theme music. I think it's up there with Doctor Who's and, speaking of, Magnum PI's.