Friday, August 17, 2007

First lesson in the New University For Casual Science

THE SCIENCE OF APPRECIATION
(Roy may call it the god of small things)

Scribblings from over a grosse coffee on schlesisches strasse, berlin:
I feel like a really old person--my handwriting is as small as my voice is as small as my conservatism is as small and directly proportional to my interaction with people. Little.

Every new place I go is my newest favorite place, which is directly proportional to the number of cents I save on my always favorite items.

Is this ego? The pursuit of feeling good. Safety in quiet, warm things.

A new sort of travel writer--she doesn't go far from the door but has means in a few steps to assess the diachronics of out of body experience. Home is my body. Out of home equals out of body, just eyes. Coffee bean eyes.

Today, in world news, somebody apologized to somebody else for their ancestor eating the other's ancestor and the second somebody's ancestor massacring in revenge. I am still unclear about who apologized to whom -- he whose papa's pre-papa cannibalized an invader or he whose mission-filled pre-papa post-slaughtered.

This makes world news perhaps because not much else of relevance occurs in Fiji, or because we are fascinated with the taboo of cannibalism, or more likely because it is still important. My day excursion to the Museum for Ethnology highlights to me the somehow uncomfortable amassing of sacred, religious, daily, costume, and functional items belonging to far, far away peoples by Western men. And suddenly all of modernism falls into place--I see not New Ireland's Malagan effigies of the dead, but Albert Giacometti's Woman with her Throat Cut and Hands Holding The Void. An invisible synapse crossing a gap between areas of my brain snaps, slapping my forehead from the inside out: of course! The roots of German expressionism, surrealism, ja ja ja ...

You know, when you become preoccupied with documenting and collecting something for posterity you can entirely forget the content or significance of the material at hand. Have you noticed that? Just today, like when I decide to make a habit of copying the text from one of my favorite on-line periodicals, I have to read every article twice because I retained nothing. And even now, my day has not been magnified or changed by the information as usual, but I have a different sense of gratification because I "have" it, a salty gratification, salty because it always wants a little more ... it's a greedy and guilty amassing for the sake of a greater cause (FUTURE) ... rip of the butterfly wings off your harmonious experience and put it in a glass box. It's worth it. It's worth it to others too. But walking through such a museum is so much like conducting a speechless interview with the dead , I am glad I limited myself to the time limit of "free thursdays 4 hours before close" lest I petrify in the lostness of my own non-culture (exhibition hall: LOBBY, archiving of the instant present, those whose blood and genes come from the non-documented).

The human being as object -- can this mean that the person is not objectified?

PUBLIC ACTION --- PUBLICATION --- PUBLIC ACTION --- PRESERVATION

In non-scientific, casual observational study, I notice my thoughts questioning the nature of culture and slaughter in relation to practices of nourishment and strength. Video ethnographies at the museum display a sacrificing feast of pigs during the festival of the dead. All the village's men gather together holding strings and are presided over by wild priest dressed in fronds. He dances and sings around the men and around the mounds of black-skinned boar before the people can come together to hack at the sitting flesh. Butchery as a non-specialized practice.

In a non-scientific, casual observational study, I notice my thoughts questioning the nature of culture and slaughter in relation to practices of social order and public transportation. U-bahn excursions in Berlin are encased in boxy cars with row benches; in the Schnelle-bahn the seats even flip up flush to the windows, so everyone could be standing if necessary. Blame me and my pop cultured imagination. But the linear nature of transport design here does lend itself to shaping the human mass that gets transported within it as inhuman, as object, or cargo. Human disposability in correlation to the shaping of the public mass.

Just thoughts, but uncoincedental, or accidental.

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