Hello reader,
Over the last year, I’ve often found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be a person. What implies personhood? Is it limited by space and time? What ties a five year old me to the twenty three year old me? How does memory interplay with identity? Why does every branch of study have a different definition of being?
Nature has often helped me move out of this stasis of identity. I’ve written a lot about nature and its healing effects, and hence just before I start this instalment of the newsletter where I recommend books, videos that were of interest to me, articles, the endless list of consumption, I wanted to share a beautiful passage I read from Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, and a quote by Proust, both of which contain a profound bit of life.
“In 1995, the artist Francis Alÿs walked around São Paulo carrying a can of blue paint with a hole punched in the bottom. Over many days, as he moved through the city, a continuous stream of paint dribbled onto the ground in a trail behind him. The line of blue paint made a map of his journey, a portrait of time. Alÿs’s performance illustrates hyphal growth. Alÿs himself is the growing tip. The winding trail he leaves behind him is the body of the hypha. Growth happens at the tip; if one paused Alÿs as he walked around with his can of paint, the line would cease to grow. You can think of your life like this. The growing tip is the present moment—your lived experience of now—which gnaws into the future as it advances. The history of your life is the rest of the hypha, the blue lines that you’ve left in a tangled trail behind you. A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.”
-On Nature, Merlin Sheldrake
“The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
-On Places and the Nostalgia for Time, Marcel Proust
Media and the Medium
This week I have been thinking about the media a lot, and how mere talk about it propagates itself through self-adjusting loops, where mere utterance is propagation. In a passage, Jean Baudrillard writes, “The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... That’s why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
I’ve recommended some of the “content” that made me think about the integral relation between our identity and media
Recommended Watching
1. consuming content to make my brain go quiet
2. Bo Burnham w/ Douglas Rushkoff (Bo Burnham is one of my favourite comedians, and this conversation between him and Douglas Rushkoff will surely make you think so much about the culture and the effects of the internet on it)
Recommended Reading (Essays)
1. E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction by David Foster Wallace1
2. On Photography by Susan Sontag
Science Corner
Recommended Links
1. Fly in multi-connected universes
(Curved Spaces is a flight simulator for multi-connected universes. Because light itself wraps around such a space, inhabitants see their universe’s contents repeating in a crystalline pattern, like a hall of mirrors but with no reflections.)
2. What If? Serious Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
(Science can be really fun. If you have ever had an absurd question like what if the Earth stopped spinning, or what if the entire population of the Earth jumped and landed in the same instant, or what will happen if we all lit our torches and flashed at the moon, all the answers are here)
And Finally, some Books I Have Been Reading
1. Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Daria Fo
Dario Fo brings to life case of Giuseppe Pinelli, a Milanese railway employee, who in 1969 was picked up by the police, accused of a bombing, before plunging from a fourth-floor window to his death, (later he was finally absolved from any responsibility for the bombings). In this cynical, absurdist drama, Daria Fo talks about the police corruption, the labyrinthine structure of justice where the semblance of a just State enables injustice, and brings forth the mere madness within culture, which floats on the invisible superficiality unless shown in art.
You can also watch the play here
2. A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt by H.A. Hellyer
H.A. Hellyer maintains from the start that his attempt is not to give an unbiased or objective take on the events of the Arab Spring. He cannot since he was there, in the middle of all of it, and what he sums up in this book is both a very poignant and profound narrative of a revolution and also a lesson for all young people who strive for it. It is a cautionary tale of how revolutions do not always lead to a better state of affairs, that destruction has to be followed by construction that things in the political arena get complex and nuanced, and ideologies often consume what looked like a utopia.
I’ve always loved dedications in the beginning of the book, but Hellyer breaks my heart. He writes:
“To Darah and the next generation:
…. May they absolve themselves from our generation’s mistakes—and build a future better than the one we could provide.To my mother:
There will never be good enough words to describe your sacrifices for your family—but may you be given good enough reason to be proud of your son.”
3. अंतिम अरण्य by Nirmal Verma
"मरने के बाद आदमी अपने से छूटकर कितने लोगों के बीच बँट जाता है! "
अंतिम अरण्य, is a book that carries the nostalgic whiff of death within it. It is the wait and a treatise on the inevitable end of human life. In a mountain, that can’t be found on any map, all the characters who feel the loss of something that never existed, find or lose themselves in each other, till the point that every life flows into the other.
I hope you enjoyed reading this. In some parting words by Albert Camus, to end things, to explain the fallibility of human experience.
Someone writes to me: "In the evening of our life, we will be judged on love." Then condemnation is certain.
-Albert Camus
I hope you enjoyed the journey,
Abheet Srivastav
David Foster Wallace and the Dangerous Romance of Male Genius
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/the-world-still-spins-around-male-genius/559925/