Monday, April 30, 2012

Nabokov's Lolita Compared to Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Terhan

  In both Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran there is a general overriding conflict. That is the clash between the world one creates in her own head and the real world of actual things and events that never ceases to intrude upon the private world that one creates for herself.

  Literature and reading enable one to both know more about the actual world and to build upon one's own private world through the use of fiction. In Lolita Humbert is constantly alluding to the world of mythology when discussing his desire for young girls. Humbert also displays an extensive knowledge of actual past societies when he describes common sexual practices between adults and children in times past. In Reading Lolita in Tehran Nafisi's girls use the fiction of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Henry James to try to create worlds within their minds that are ameliorative to the everyday indignities and cruelties they live through as women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. These fictitious worlds, however, are constantly being intruded upon by the actual world and so a blend of the ordinary and the cruel world is created. This is referred to as "posh-lust" by Nabokov. The Islamic Republic also builds its own fantasy world through the use of popaganda and ideology in order to justify its seduction and rape of Iranian society. The Islamic Republic uses ideology to shape its own version of the actual past in which the government of the Shah was entirely Evil and so the structure of society must be torn away.

   In the same way, Humbert often uses references to mythology when attempting to explain or justify his lust foir and rape of underage girls. Humbert uses his concept of the "nymphet", a clear reference to mythology. Humbert describes nymphets as maidens between the ages of 9 and 14. The nymphets, in the warped world of Humbert's mind, live on "an enchanted Island....surrounded by a vast misty sea." This clearly is a reference to the mythical Sirens who tempted sailors at sea with song. Humbert depicts the nymphets as non-humans there to simply serve blind lust and satiate his "super voluptuous flame permantly aglow." If a nymphet is simply a myth and not a person, then to have sex with her is not the vile act of rape and the theft of a young girl's future, but the playful act of a carefree Pan or Puck, dancing through the forest having his little mymphs as it pleases him. Afterall, a myth has no past, no future and therefore no present meaning, no reality. In myth one is free to play and act upon impulse.

   Humbert not only uses mythology to justify his actions but also references to the past and present real worlds. He states Virgil, "probably preferred a lad's perineum", referring to the Greco-Roman world's instances of man-boy sensual relationships, although more common among the Greeks than the Romans. From the relative present, Humbert mentions the Young Person's Act of 1933 in England where the term "girld-child" is defined as a girl beteen the ages of 9 and 14. Here we see Humbert cloking the outrageous action of the rape of a young child in the respected cloak of English Common Law!! It is the combination of the horrific and the banal, posh-lust to the extreme.

  In Reading Lolita in Tehran Nafisi's girls use fiction, especially that of Nabokov's Lolita to try to build a private world that explains the public hell they live in the Islamic Republic. Nafisi states that her girls (her students) discussed Lolita and the "discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys." The girls, as stated by Nafisi, had not LOST a normal life, they ALWAYS lacked a normal life. The girls had never lived before the Islamic Republic. Therefore, they lacked any real-life reference points to the make-believe reality portrayed in Lolita and the other novels they read. The world they read about in the novels, "would turn into something more pure and golden than it ever was or will be." This is the reason that Nafisi is quite adamant that her girls are not like Lolita. These girls could never imagine living life in the consumerized nation that the USA had become even by 1947 (the year Lolita is set).

   So, the reality of the Islamic Republic is never separate from the world of the novels that the girls read. To fully place themselves in the world of the novel, as the reader can do in a sane nation not driven by ideological fantasies, is impossible for the girls. The pervasive nature of the regime makes this impossible. This is shown when one of the girls goes on a Caspian Sea trip with her girlfriends. She is castigated by her own family for doing this. The regime has so embedded in the peoples' reality that they become its willing enforcers and executioners. A simple road-trip to a beach, part of a normal life that one might see in a novel, is not possible. The regime, through its lack of respect for the Rights of its citizens, has invaded not only the girls' real lives but also any world of the imagination they had created for themselves through fiction. The ideologically horrific mixes with the normal and Nabokov's posh-lust oozes forth. As John Stewart Mill understood, societal conformity is a stronger and more pernicious force than legal conformity. The State could wither away but the People would still chain themselves to its corpse.

  The Islamic Republic busies itself creating its own myths to justify its subjugation of the Iranian people. The myth of the Islamic Republic is best represented in the mind of Mr. Bahri, a radical Islamic student leader. In the Islamic Republic, "a philosopher-King ...had decided to impose his dream on a country....to re-create us...." Mr. Bahri has completely bought into that vision, even though he is intelligent and young. He tries to shape Nafisi into the kind of person he thinks an "Islamic teacher" should be. In the person of Mr. Bahri we see how not only the ignorant are influenced by ideological myths, but the intelligent as well.

   The Islamic Republic uses old-fashioned real-world ideological propaganda in addition to its dreams and myths. When the Iran-Iraq War began the Ayatollah Khomeini state, "this war is a blessing for us." "War" and "blessing" being related to each other only makes sense in an atmosphere where ideas have become ideologies. The idea of war is its reality: killing and human suffering. The ideology of war is the advancement of the Islamic Revolution. The killing and suffering is but a means to an end. War is the health of a State in permanent revolution.

  We can thus see clearly the difference between ideas and ideologies. The former is promoted through the normal institutions of a free country designed to separate the world of the mind and fantasy from the world of reality. In such a country fiction is possible. Living in one's own mind is possible and therefore Art is possible. This writer can think of no better definition than this of a "free" society. In a totalitarian society, like the Islamic Republic, ideas become solidified into ideologies, the Tyranny of the Idea. The great flowing river of conversation that has a past, future and therefore a present is dried up in the mass chant of the unquestionable "truth": the ideology.

  It is Lolita who desperately seeks to maintain the idea of herself and not to succumb to Humbert's ideological notion of her as the nymphet chained to his loins. It is Nafisi's girls who vainly to maintain the idea of themselves as independent women as more of their fellow Iranians fall to the ideology of the Islamic State.

  Ideas are the great product of the power of the human mind. Ideologies are the great perversion of that power. It is this notion of the perversion of power through the seduction of ideology that is the common thread of Nabokov's Lolita and Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran. It is this perversion that twists the individual person into a category, ready to be counted, collated, questioned, and if necessary destroyed all "for the greater good." Perhaps this is the common thread that in many ways renders our modern world so tragic.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

A Literary Analysis of Three Short Stories

  In Alexie Sherman's "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix,Arizona", Russell Banks' "Sarah Cole:A Type of Love Story" and Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta" we see the contemporary absence of God or the spiritual realm in modern life. We are turning to new gods such as consumerism, narcissism and drugs.

  The course of the 20th century in the United States has moved away from the mainstream spirtual traditions that guided the country at its origins. In the 1880's Nietzche declared that "God is dead." He was not simply referring to the God of Christianity that had been in decline for at least 100 years. He meant the outlook and focus of intellectual thought had lost its center, its logos, its guiding word and spirit. The outlook had crashed to earth, into the jumble and chaos of the world of things and away from the Platonic and Kantian spiritual realm. In order to fill the spirtual realm, new "gods", perhaps even a new religion, would have to be created. The new religion was supplied by the State in the form of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia. By the middle of the 20th century these had been discredited, the one by fire-bombing and Auschwitz and the other by Stalin and the terror of famines and gulags.

  After this we might have expected a return, especially in the US to a more traditional God. To some extent we saw this in the perversion of the religious Right, however, for the most part we have seen an increasing escape into personal "gods" be they consumer goods, self-love or drugs.

  This worship of "brave new gods" is understandable in the context of the bankruptcy of statism and the seeming confirmation of God's non-existence in the smoldering radioactive rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the simmering flesh-filled ovens of Auschwitz. If Man can do THIS to Man without God's intercession, then there must be NO God. As Voltaire's Candide eventually learned, we must simply tend our own garden in the end.

  Man's greatest discovery, the splitting of the atom, spelled his spiritual descent into post-modern angst and chaos. The intellect in its timeless tumult with the soul stood gawking and dumbstruck at the soulless inferno it had wrought and looked forward in horror to the soulless being who would inhabit the dead and earthly realm, untethered from its spiritual sustenance, like the Blue Devil frozen in the depths of Dante's Hell.

   Sherman, Banks, and Braverman, in their excellent stories, examine this new world and the new gods that we have created to fill the spiritual void.

   "This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona" is Sherman's tale of Victor's loss of his father and his journey to recover the body accompanied by Thomas. They are American Indians living on a reservation. Thomas is a spiritual man who tries to teach his people through the use of stories. Nobody wants to listen to him. When they are seven, Thomas tells Victor that he senses his father is sick.

  When he was a boy Thomas believed that he could fly and he jumped off a roof to prove it. He actually flew a bit. However, the world caught him and he fell to the ground and broke his arm. The spiritual had defied the concrete and secular for a few moments. But the concrete firmly and harshly reasserted its dominance. The other boys watch could simply taunt Thomas about the broken arm.

  As they are driving back to Washington through a dead Nevada landscape devoid of all spirit, Thomas and Victor hit a Jack-Rabbit, the only living thing they have seen. Ironically it is the spiritual Thomas who is the driver after Victor had driven all day.

  As they arrive back at the Reservation the two men see the rising on a new day. The people are arising and praying to the secular gods of work, breakfast, and the paper, "just like everybody else does."

  Thomas professes his philosophy of "take care of each other" and "nothing stops." These profoundly spirited statements express the Amerindian spirit of the circular pattern to life where actions and reactions rebound together in a perpetual path of Being. In response to this Victor reflects that the most he shares with his friends is a beer bottle. In the end Victor and Thomas cannot remain friends. After one brief acquaintance the earth and spirit must separate again.

  In "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story", we see the narcissistic love of self replace spiritual love and existence. Ron is the self-described handsome man who becomes the lover of an extremely fat and ugly woman, Sarah Cole. Sarah is in love with Ron's physical appearance and approaches him in a bar. Ron objectifies Sarah not in the usual sense of wanting to possess beauty, but in the warped sense of wanting to possess the ugliest person he had ever seen.

  At one point Sarah asks if Ron wants to make love to her. Of course he does. "What could be be simpler", he thinks. Here the self-loving and loathing aspiritual attitude of Ron is at its most obvious. He equates sex to a simple mechanical process in which it is obvious he and she both want it. Ron seems to see it as similar to munching a bag of chips. It is the ultimate victory of the long sexual revolution of the 20th century that has culminated in a world where sex is relatively easy to find, without consequences if we are careful, and more an act of soulless self-love than love. This triumph in some ways has been a godsend, as we can quench our loneliness in the soft and moist body of another. In the short-run much pleasure has been gained from this. In the long-run many lives are broken and ruined by the suppression of the soul that results. It becomes impossible to love.

  By the end Ron experiences this inability to love Sarah. "Go on and leave you ugly bitch", Ron says to her during an argument. He describes Sarah as wrapped in a golden light. He is left alone with his beautiful hands in his beautiful face, spiritually dead.

  Kate Braverman's "Tall Tales From The Mekong Delta" is the story of a woman's (let's call her Kate) descent back into the morass of drug addiction. Her gods are cocaine, cigarettes and booze. Lenny, a drug-dealer and cocaine addict, becomes Kate's anti-Moses, leading her back into the bitter land of the slavery of drug addiction. Lenny is shorth, fat and rude. Kate surrenders to the only temptation Lenny can offer: the forbidden fruit of this exciting, fast, soul-killing and ultimately suicidal world.

  Lenny has money and he reminds Kate of her love of material things. "Want a rolex?" Lenny asks. This gets Kate's attention.

  Like the color of Dante's Devil, blue is the prevailing color in the air. China Blue is the drug Lenny sells. "The air was a pale blue, bleeding into the horizon taking the sky." The oxygen is being sucked out of Kate and blue death is being injected into her. For Kate it feels good and comforting. It is a structured environment, as Lenny says. Never mind that the structure is rotten and infected where mental anguish and pain is not confronted but smothered by chemical concoctions that kill the pain but dull the mind. No matter, a mind is superfluous in modern Los Angeles where pleasure and ease are what is desired. The drugs deliver this comfortably and painlessly for Kate.

  Eventually Kate gives Lenny the sex that he craves. She opens her lips and legs to him as the Santa Ana winds howl. She is left wedded to her god of drugs, addicted again and floating in a blue haze, dead spiritually and perhaps soon dead physically.

  In Sherman, Banks, and Braverman we see the world of soulless creatures that we have become. Sherman shows the secular embraced at the expense of the spirit. Banks shows how narcissism can twist love inward rendering it unable to reach out for another. Braverman demonstrates the dominating aspects of drug abuse demanding the submission of the soul in obeisance to a mind dulled to a flame flickering out.

   Commonality, narcissism, and drugs are just three of the many post-modern gods that we have embraced in the Nietzchean world of "God's Death" and the atom bomb. It seems that there are as many gods as persons and they have become death, the demons within us squeezing the life from souls screaming in agony, ultimately to be our destroyers. Living Being cannot long inhabit a dead world. Either we regain our souls from the depths into which we have buried them or we ourselves, humankind, will descend into the recesses and catacombs from which nothing emerges save the darkness of lost souls.

  Have a good Sunday...wherever you might be, John.



Friday, April 27, 2012

Fear As A Political Weapon

  The oscillation between "reform" and repression is the common practice of all totalitarian states. In Soviet Russia Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, followed by Stalin's purges, followed by Khruschev's reforms, followed by Bhreznev's repression, followed by Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's reforms, followed by Putin's repression.
  In China we saw Mao's "Hundred Flowers" movement, followed by the Cultural Revolution, followed by the opening to the West, followed by the massacre in Tiennamen Square.
  The common thread in such states is fear in both times of reform and repression. In times of repression the fear is political, present, and real, taking the form of violence. In times of "reform" the fear is psychological as the People still remember the slaughter of the time of repression. They are kept in line not by actual violence, but by the memory of it; not by the bullet from the gun, but by the smoke which still emanates from the last shot. Fear is a potent weapon.
   Let us work for that weapon to never be turned upon the American People.

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Saturday, April 21, 2012

Fearing Hoping

And when we embarked it was already dusk
Stumbling silently, intently, fearing and hoping
Blackness enveloped us in its raven wings aloft
Groping, grasping always peering ahead
Daybreak
Golden drops of air awash in color faces beaming

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Obsolescence

The last argument of the scoundrel is to say that his opponent's ideas are "old" or "obsolete." Its not an argument, but it generally gladdens the addled,hypnotized brains of the ignoramuses in a chanting crowd who replace self-dignity with a worship and reliance on the supposed infallibility of their leader.

Monday, April 16, 2012

Words Naturally

Words
Build a world unto themselves
Rolling on the mind
On the tongue
Building blocks of worlds to come

Words Always
Ceaselessly haunt and pain
Is life really in vain?
But no, but not at all
Castaways long for a friend
Songs of thought bring comfort on the wind

Words Always Come
In a trickle of truth
In a river of doubt
Unexpectedly brilliant
Predictably bland
A herald across the land
Flaming embers of mind burning in blood

Words Always Come Naturally
A friend gone but never forgotten
Love once whispered but never forsaken
Once begotten, can never be lost
Gifts for the mind, for the seeking heart eternal
Calming the roiling seas of prejudice
Inflaming the passions of love, lust, beauty,truth
A treasure born from the solitary soul internal




Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Follett

An interview with Ken Follett a very good popular author whom I have recently discovered but who has been around for ages.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

An Atheistic Ethics

From what I can gather, this is the basis of an Atheistic Ethics and one can undermine the atheists' position by understanding their logic. I will now channel my inner Atheist and write and think as an atheist for 10 minutes. Then I will return to my normal, confused, dirty, grimy, messy, irrational, theistic, metaphysical, unattractive, disappointing, confusing, and confused selves :)

We too often go through life stumbling blindly forward in the mundane haze of existence day passing after day. But in order to live, above merely existing, we must live justly and well. This is what ethics allows us to attempt. This attempt is made more rationally when we know from whence ethics comes. This question is both one of the authority of morality and its history.

Examining the Hobbesian social contract theory and the Christian will of God theory provide a different insight into the origin of ethics than simply studying the history of ethics. This is accomplished in two ways. First, focusing on the authority of morality allows us to answer questions about morality regarding why we should obey ethical rules in the present. Second, this focus forces us to imagine a future in which these moral values have ceased to exist. Would the future be better or worse? Simply studying the history of ethics gives us a window into the past but does not necessarily focus on the present or future.

The study of the ethical authority of Thomas Hobbes' Social Contract Theory and Christianity allows us to focus on the present and the future. Hobbes postulated a social contract that regarded Man as a power hungry, selfish being grappling with anyone in his way, subject to his animal passions. Christianity postulates that Man is made in the image of God. These two views provide us with the obligations and duties that guide our actions. But if their assumptions regarding the authority of ethics, namely a social contract or our God Soul, are wrong then those obligations and duties will be an ethics not commensurate with human nature and therefore unsustainable.

Our ethical principles are not rooted in any mythical "social past" or irrational notion of a Logos, or God as the progenitor of humanity. Our ethical principles are rooted in our natural animal dispositions. When these natural dispositions are coupled with human reason then our ethical principles are formed and the authority upon which they rest is established.

ok, back to my old fashioned metaphysical Lockean, Burkean self. :)

Sunday, April 1, 2012