Absence of Memory and Book

Been spending time in Khara-Khorum (The Place Whereof We Should Not Speak) lately. No internet. No posts. Got back 10 days ago. Bit of a culture shock - like getting hit by a car in the middle of the night, waking up the next morning to a face covered in blood and no memory. But, you know, the Bone moves in mysterious ways. Something in the presence of absence: what was once here, informing the shape of the world/flesh from within. Now withdrawn... there is no welcome "home".

Saw this while catching up:

http://www.lookatbook.com/

A collaborative exhibition by four artists from both sides of the Atlantic. Oliver and Rory Jeffers live in Belfast. Mac Premo and Duke Riley live in Brooklyn, NY. For 36 weeks, a sketchbook travels back and forth between these four artists. Each has four days to create a spread in book. Each spread is a response to the one before it, and a call to the artist that follows. By the time it is exhibited under the Lagan Weir, from the 29th of April to the 7th of May 2004, book will have travelled over 60,000 miles.

Where, I Hope, You Will Soon Find Me

http://www.tibetanbon.com/monastery.htm

Menri Monastery is dedicated to the preservation of the Bon religion. It is devoted to the religious training and practice of a new generation of students who will be responsible for keeping the indigenous Tibetan spiritual and cultural traditions alive.

From The Monastery of Christ in the Desert Abbot's Notebook

When I returned from Mexico last week, I brought with me His Holiness, the 33rd Menri Trizin, the Abbot of the Bön Monastery of Menri in northern India and the religious leader of all Bönpo people throughout the world. Three monks came with him at that time: Chongtul, Jamay and Chime Yungdrung.

Since the year 2000 our Monastery has had a very special relationship with the Bönpo and with the Monastery of Menri. Every year we have some kind of exchange of monks between our Monasteries. This began in the year 2000 with the arrival here of Sogyal and Dugsay, two young monks of Menri. After a month with us, they returned to their Monastery of Menri. Then their Abbot, His Holiness, wrote to me asking if I would come and visit them and bring with me two young monks from Christ in the Desert to spend some time with them. After finding a benefactor who would be willing to fund such an interchange, I did go to Menri in 2001 and took two young monks with me.

Connections and reconnections abounding...

The Eighth Amendment, "Double-Think" and Nostalgia for the Middle Ages

An excellent and comprehensive article on torture by Joan Dayan in the Boston Review (via BoingBoing):

In Furman v. Georgia, Justice Brennan argued that there could be cruelty far worse than bodily pain or mutilation. It was not just “the presence of pain” that proved the significance of the Eighth Amendment but the treatment of “members of the human race as nonhumans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded.” The ominous leeway of American legal rules—from slave codes, to prison cases, to the Bush administration’s torture memos—redefines these persons in law. That redefinition—the creation of a new class of condemned—sustains a metaphysics that goes beyond the mere logic of punishment. Once you create the category of the stigmatized, whether they are called “terrorists,” “security threat groups” (gangs in our prisons), or “security detainees” (prisoners in Iraq), the use of torture can be calibrated to the necessities of continuously evolving and aggressive security measures.

[...] When does an emotional scar become visible? To make it visible is to stigmatize, yet only certain kinds of stigmatization are recognized: those that accord with the substandard of what prisoners are assumed to be. They are all bodies. Only some are granted minds. And who is to decide? The unspoken assumption remains: prisoners are not persons. Or, at best, they are a different kind of human: so dehumanized that the Eighth Amendment no longer applies. The naked pyramid of flesh in Abu Ghraib, the kneeling and shackled bodies, blindfolded by blacked-out goggles and hooded in Guantànamo, sanction degradation. Such inhuman treatment, however, is made lawful when our government refuses to recognize that “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment has a precise meaning, when our current courts continue to ignore obvious violations of human dignity and worth. In a penal system that has become instrumental in managing the dispossessed, the unfit, and the dishonored, such phrases as “minimal civilized measure of life’s necessities” or “the “basic necessities of human life” prompt us to reconsider the meaning of “human.”

In case you are curious, here is the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

More from the Dayan article:

While Brennan and Marshall sought to make the Eighth Amendment a prohibition against degrading and inhuman punishment, Chief Justice Burger’s dissent in Furman (joined by Blackmum, Powell, and Rehnquist) has set the tone for its recent interpretation. Burger explained that “of all our fundamental guarantees, the ban on ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ is one of the most difficult to translate into judicially manageable terms.” This unmanageability, what Burger described as “the haze that surrounds this constitutional command,” invites rhetorical slippage in defining the limits of torture, and, at its extreme, allows the complete evasion of actual harm done.

And from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the definition of "double-think":

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Finally, from one of my favorite over-the-top radical authors, Mark Crispin Miller, an interview concerning his recent book, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order:

I argue that Bush & Co. is the anti-Jefferson. This regime is not conservative, but represents a radical subversive movement -- one now largely in control of all three branches of the government, and also dominant throughout the press. What ultimately drives them is irrational. Sure, they're in it for the money and the oil; but that's not all that's going on here. They're neo-Calvinists, quite clearly working toward the imposition of theocracy on the United States, and then on the whole world. (Although mostly atheists and Jews, the Straussian types around Rumsfeld and Cheney are fine with that agenda, as they believe that theocratic government is best, because it makes the populace compliant.)

[...] And in fact we are now dealing with an adversary whose world-view is opposed to ours completely. They are nostalgic for the Middle Ages, or at least for the colonial theocracies of the 17th and early 18th centuries. They value faith over reason. So those who have dragged this nation into war against Islamist terror think exactly like Islamist terrorists. Whatever creeds they think they follow, what really drives both groups is paranoia. Each side wants to replace the other, either through annihilation or conversion. Certainly the Busheviks are fired up with old Crusaders' zeal

Death to TV, Long Live the Monkey

Since I destroyed my TV a while back in a fit of rage against non-interactive boxes molded from plastic, I have been feeding the monkey in the box with:

Book TV - Check out 2004 Political Books Roundtable featuring James Wolcott and Jay Nordling and the In Depth series, including Simon Winchester, Niall Ferguson and Edmund Morris.

The Library of Congress: Cyber LC - Lectures by Robert Caro, Will Eisner and Harold Bloom.

Archive.org - The Prelinger Archives and Open Mind.

And for Daily Show clips: Comedy Central and On Lisa Rein's Radar.

On Madness and the Devil

While I was out at the Monastery in the Desert, I re-read Thoughts in Solitude by Merton and Grammars of Creation by George Steiner. The resonance between those two books was simply astounding. Combined with the daily liturgy, primarily the Gregorian chanting of the Psalms, and the violent beauty of the Chama river canyon, the overall effect upon me can only be described as having my bones slipped out of my skin and burned in the unbearable laughter of God's absolute presence.

I started out with Merton, so it makes sense to return with him also. From Thoughts in Solitude:

The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. So too the mountain and the sea. The desert therefore is the logical dwelling place for the man who seeks to be nothing but himself - that is to say, a creature solitary and poor and dependent upon no one but God, with no great project standing between himself and his creator.

This is, at least, the theory. But there is another factor that enters in. First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives men mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence - lost because he had immured himself in it and closed out everything else.

So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage.

And while I may have raged, there was nothing sterile or paradisical or empty about the desert I wandered though. Nevertheless, the devil attended to me also. He loves those violent Psalms.