Scribblings with Green Chalk

Heidelberg has an astounding concentration of physicians per square kilometer, with no shortage of ophthalmologists. Most of them were on vacation yesterday.

I understand that it was a stupid choice on my part to get stye just before the long weekend, when everyone should be having fun in the sun and seeing the world without distortions. If I had had any doubts about it, the annoyed tone of the receptionist at the university clinic made it blindingly clear to me.

I used to naively believe that it was Communism that turned people in petty power positions into condescending bastards. I should thank that lady for the cultural lesson: it’s petty power that makes you a petty official.

Eventually, I found a workaholic doctor who saw me even though I came some two minutes before his lunch break. I learned that apart from the infection I have more or less perfect vision. My left eye (the good one) can fly planes and solve 3D puzzles, the right one (attacked by stye aka Gerstenkorn aka jęczmień) can fly planes too, but slower, I suppose. He prescribed me some magic ointment and told me to nap a lot, because it works most effectively during sleep.

The monster seed from space hasn’t started sprouting yet, apparently, in spite of my worst fears. However, I’m strongly motivated to nap through the next two weeks: if it doesn’t go away by itself, it will have to be cut open. I’m also contemplating wearing shades everywhere, including indoors, because I don’t deal too well with constant questions. I don’t have any wheaty* answers.

*cross-linguistic attempt at a pun: cf. Polish and German names for the inflammation

Originally, I was going to post here a quasi review of my airplane reading from March. Half way through the third paragraph, I yawned. If I was bored writing it, I wouldn’t want to imagine what reading it would have felt like. Similar to a glass of milk with honey on a sleepless night… only painful?… Eh… I’d rather go with ’short and sweet.’ (If only I could use it as a motto and excuse in my thesis.)

My review of the National Geographic piece on animal intelligence, fast forwarded:

Pretty photographs but the pop-science explanation of the research methods made me cringe. Since the intended reader is apparently one that could not grasp the real thing, the writer gives them parrot-teaching magic tricks. And pretty pictures to look at. The intended reader will wait for some real articles on the subject. Without pictures.

My main reservation–a bitter cry to heavens: Why didn’t that brilliant dog cross my path when I lived in Vienna!?

Speaking of heavens and dogs: I’m all for iconoclasm. Love the word. It sounds defiant and has a great story to it. But I also love pretty pictures.

So, away with the bearded man, welcome my vision of God:

I don’t attach too much importance to the English anagram/pun but it’s nicely and prophetically fitting here. God (see picture above) is a lady and her name is Sunka. Which means ‘dog’ in the Lakota language, I’m told. Behold and admire.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

I don’t know how it works, but that’s what it says. All the pretentious language and references for nothing

I would like to know, though, how this application dealt with the entries in Polish…

How much has been done for simplicity’s sake: dealing cards on the table of history only to your best buddies, keeping women in the kitchen, peasants in the field. For simplicity’s sake masses of people were deprived of rights. For simplicity’s sake all they were given instead were lame explanations why that is the case. It was both cruelty and fear of effort that did so much for the idea of simplicity. So when the intelligent young man who had a talk on Thoreau today told me he used in his paper the words ‘man’ and ‘he’ as synonyms of ‘the individual’ precisely “for simplicity’s sake,” I tried to explain that he was shooting himself in the foot.

For how does simplicity benefit from excluding roughly half of your readers? With ‘man’ scurrying to and fro in the text, searching for transcendence, how could the woman reader seriously believe that she too is implied in all the masculine glory of that ‘individual’? My brain shuts off after a few paragraphs of such writing. The ‘he’ is huffing and puffing, but my indifference towards the idea only grows.

I don’t care if ‘he/she,’ ’s/he,’ or ‘he or she’ seems cumbersome to you. You can always pluralize. Otherwise, don’t count on my understaning and appreciation. “For simplicity’s sake” I will ignore your text.

and similes and — of course — very, very bad movies. See Rudraksh, an extended Bollywood rumination on how you get better hair the more evil you become. The movie sort of alludes to Highlander, at times pretends to have a plot, but in reality it is a clever measuring device. If you don’t know how much ludicrousness you can take, see how far you can get with Rudraksh. I listened to the faith healer/night club bouncer explain that God is like the internet and was so astounded by the pure idiocy of the explanation that I kept watching. After our hero rescued the posse of 20-year-old American scientists/lingerie models from the threatening debris of styrofoam pillars, I got what obviously was an email from the “divine internet” which told me to take a shower. When I came back, the movie was over. Debbie, who bravely sat through the hairstyle adventures, told me it ended quite abruptly, without the anticipated resolution (the hero purging himself of evil and getting the girl). Her hypotheses were: (1) the crew and cast realized they could not stuff more absurdity into the picture and just stopped, (2) they ran out of money, (3) Sanjay Dutt (faith healer/nightclub bouncer) had to go to prison.

Only the “divine internet” knows why people cannot resist bad movies.

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

I got an email today from someone whose opinions and ideas I always find very interesting. I consult him often about various things, or rather pester with my ideas and unfinished thoughts. This person, who was my teacher for a while, tends to respond to my half-bitten ideas with wounderfully rounded thoughts. We talked about Complete Thoughts once but it was too hot then to, er, complete the thought. Perhaps one day I might get my mental balancing act to reach that level. I feel I have learned a lot from my teacher but this may not be something that I could learn. Maybe my ruminations on milk cartons and teeth are meant to stay frayed?

What if we all had Complete Thoughts? Would we then want to share observations so eagerly? As things are, there are shapely insights and questions with brand new wisdom teeth, just waiting to nibble at completeness. And then Complete Thoughts bite back and there are crumbs everywhere — tasty non sequiturs and aphorisms.

Before I get carried away into the world of tastes, let me just say that I was very surprised to learn that my teacher reads these entries sometimes. I realized I had been writing them with the assumption that absolutely no one reads them (except Denise, who is wonderful and was kind enough to comment on some of my frayed thoughts). I did feel slightly embarrassed because the overall triviality of my postings after reading my teacher’s letter. After all, who cares about my blueberry obsessions and toothache? But, well, if you can see the world in a grain of sand, then think of what may appear in a blueberry that is not a blueberry in the European understanding of the word and for many people does not exist as concept nor fruit at all…

We are back to tastes again and the little things that make up my postings. I am writing this after a day of tastes and shameless gluttony. It all began with a salad called Flower Power, followed by a trip to the Cornell Dairy Bar, a Shakespearean cookbook that Debbie found at Borders, dinner at home (that Shakespeare certainly would have enjoyed), and lemon ice cream with fruit (Shakespeare might have wanted to count the blueberries and write a blueberry poem which I might have enjoyed). And there are crumbs of ideas, of course. And I really do not think I want to do anything about that.

PS: It was New England clam chowder.

The differences have to be slight. Tiny displacements, changes of scale. I pick up a carton of milk from the fridge and get an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling that everything around me has grown and is stealthily continuing to expand. As for the blueberries — the berries were chalk-like, too. This has, of course, nothing to do with taste. They could seem like a mathematician’s joke; they are larger here. Thick dots.

I am having a great time. My ruminations on kitchen themes seem like research, watching fireflies is a serious study of nature. I think about the first naturalists who came to theNew World and named so many plants and animals after the European species that appeared to them similar — only to discover that there is more than meets the eye. I feel like I can appreciate such kind of misunderstanding.

Back in Ithaca after a few months to enjoy the contrast with winter as I saw it here. I’m counting on those small everyday slips and modest revelations. I do identify to some extent with Zuko, the cat, who gets lost immediately after he steps out of the house but nevertheless tries to get out.

Debbie told me that the Spanish words for blueberry and cranberry make little sense in Latin America. Not only are the fruits fairly unknown, but the names seem to describe nothing. I cannot remember what those words were and I feel that old sense of annoyance that I do not understand. I wish that I could understand that lack of understanding. I looked up “health” in the online Welsh dictionary today and remembered how much fun it was to play with my ignorance, collecting new words like glass balls or souvenir magnets. I wonder what counting blueberries would be like if the word “blueberry” made no sense. And I wonder if Bishop knew about the linguistic confusion when she was writing the poem. Was that in Brazil? Is there any dilemma in Portuguese? If those questions appear silly to you, please remember that I started with amazement at milk cartons. This is as far as I want to go — not straying from the fridge. Here’s the deepest thought that came to me: words like to go for a walk away from the concepts, as the blueberry/cranberry example shows. Or blackberries. Either way, it’s all about fruit.