At long last
Jul. 28th, 2004 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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theodora
1. Fill in the blanks: I was a teenage ____ for ____.
You know, it was this question that tripped me up. I couldn't figure out what to put in the blanks. Also various bad 80s movie title-inspired inanities kept besieging my brain. I was a teenage Faustus for Satan? I was a teenage Tit for Tat? I was a teenage Something for Nothing? I cannot for the life of me answer it. I don't think I will be able to answer it. It belongs to some weird lacuna never to be mastered by my immigrant brain that vaguely alludes to the first generation of video games and the "who's on first" word game. I am completely incapable of answering it, or even attempting to, except in pathetic paroxysms of contrived cleverness, like inserting "flowers" and "Algernon" in the blanks. Alas.
2. Masculinity/femininity. Which is more essentially fraudulent? Why?
It's a trick question because the default answer is, of course, both are equally performative. However, I think the schizophrenic contradictions are more obvious in masculinity. If we look at the historical cultural imaginary of both masculinity and femininity, before "feminism," the discourse of masculinity is far more bipolar than that of femininity. So, femininity was composed of the following possible tropes, in various permutations and combinations: frailty, sorcery, enchantment, instability, emotion, etc. None of them are really in conflict with each other; frailty can lead to overcompensation via enchantment or unbridled instability. Being ruled by emotion, rather than reason produces the instability, which is, nevertheless, enchanting as radical alterity. However, masculinity containts opposite, even mutually exclusive tropes, namely stoicism, formation of identity through hardship and self-denial, and absolute self-containment and aggression and ur-entitlement, jealousy, anger. The only way they could be mediated is through an uneasy dialectic of sublimation and return of the repressed, and that's basically what happens.
3. List three foundational stories of your childhood. (As example, three of mine: The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, Watership Down.) How did they affect you?
Well, that's a hard question. My father collected fairy tales like other people collect matchbooks. That is to say, in our house we had collections of fairy tales from every country in the world. In fact, my theory as to why I became an anthropologist is that I failed to process a single normative cultural code and internalize/naturalize my own culture because my learned second-order symbolic structures were from all over the place. It's like being raised a super-polyglot, but with cultural units, instead of linguistic ones. In a way, it was overdetermined that I would become an anthropologist. But as to the stories themselves. It's hard to pick, and I could just respond to this question with three of my dad's fairy tales (see below), but I will try to diversitfy my response. So, first let's talk about the most terrifying story I have ever read.
The Golden Bird, a short story in an anthology of Romanian fairty tales, scared the shit out of me. I've referenced in on livejournal before, not too long ago. Basically the story follows a child who is washed up on the seashore in a net. He is adopted by a fisherman and his wife; he grows up into a handsome, healthy young man, but the net grows with him; it cannot be cut. So he becomes known as a guy-in-a-net. As a result he never fully acclimates, and when he comes of age he goes on your standard Campbellian/Proppian garden-variety quest to find out what's what. He ends up on an island where things are not going well. There is a Golden Bird statue on an island, it's huge, with rubies for eyes, encrusted with precious stones. The statue had been installed on the island as a malevolent gift that's like the evil cousin of the Trojan Horse. Every night the statue comes to life, and walks around. As it walks, it shoots out lightning, night becomes as light as day, and all the residents of the island become overwhelmed with uncontrollable primal terror and to run to each other for comfort. Except, whoops, the bird's other magical power turns all the islanders' arms into swords, so everyone ends up stabbing their near and dear ones. Every morning the dead are burned at funeral pyres, as their relatives that killed them weep in fear and remorse. People start hiding from their family members before nightfall, but nothing really helps. The net guy ends up not being affected by the curse, he takes the bird away from the island and drowns it, then he has more adventures, and eventually his net falls off. But the thing that scared me was the inexplicable evil of this bird, the unmitigated terror, and the ambivalence of the categories of good and evil, the lack of climax where the former definitely triumphs over the latter. It was more like an episodic, picaresque narrative that featured a monster that scared the shit out of me, and my fear was not mediated by an allegorical defeat. As a result, my fear lingered. For years. That story still freaks me the fuck out.
Moving on.
I absolutely loved the Moomintrolls series by Tove Janssen. The books were really more about the world of the Moominvalley, rather than the specific stories, which were often more character-driven than plot-driven, and whimsical at that, at times even melancholy, and I liked the sense that there was this unhurried life that constantly existed in a world that required no ontogenesis or cosmology, it just existed. That mattered more to me than the particular adventures. If I had read them as an adult for the first time, I would have attributed my enchantment to the well-developed themes of a community that priorotized ethics and was based on diversity without any hint of moralizing or didactic rhetoric that often rears its head in its special incarnation in children's stories, that the adult/kid binary was fluid, that the family seemed largely matriarchal, and that the threat to community by the outside was always resolved through acceptance/integration/reintegration. But at age 10 I just found the entire universe offered up in those stories extremely satisfying, without relaly knowing why.
Finally, in answering I think this is a good place to explain that from the time I was five until I was about eight my father told me fairy tales that he made up every night. I became spoilt and I refused to go to sleep unless he told me a fairy tale. When he was out of town, my mother tried to fill in, but her rehashing of stories I had already read incited my anger, because they weren't my dad's fairy tales, which were mostly wonderful, although in retrospect I think some of them were rather bizzarre stories to tell a child. It's important to keep in mind that a lot of my father's stories kind of followed a Guy De Maupassant model where someone sacrifices everything for one thing, and in the end they lose everything in a bitter ironic twist. Not all; some were bittersweet, and a (very) few were unambiguously light and sweet. One invovled a man, obsessed with Boticelli's The Birth of Venus spending his life building a machine that can be hooked up to a painting and will transmit the audio of what was going on in the room while the painting was produced, only to find out at the end, that the model for Venus was a cheap street hooker. Anyway, this was the story that probably affected me the most:
ON THE ORIGIN OF CHESS
Once upon a time, there were two superpowers in the world. For years they had been building up weapons, spying on each other, vying for control over spheres of influence. Finally and inevitably, they found themselves at the brink of war with each other. Even though everyone knew that this would be the Last War, because both countries had a sizable nuclear arsenal, neither of them would back down. An emergency meeting of the International Peacekeeping Organization was called into session. Dignitaries, diplomats and negotiators from all over the world gathered for a week-long summit, trying to think of ways to avoid a final showdown. By the end of the seventh day, they were nowhere closer to finding an answer. In desperation, the moderator announced an open forum, and invited anyone to come down to the floor and speak. At first there was silence, but then an old man appeared, and shuffled over to the podium.
"I am not a politician,' he started. 'I am simply a folklorist, I collect stories and fairy tales from all over the world. And today I would like to tell you a story about how the game of chess came into existence.
Once upon a time, there were two kingdoms, the Kingdom of the Red Fox and the Kingdom of the White Rooster. They were very small kingdoms, each contained only 16 people, including the kings. They lived side-by-side in peace, worshiping their sacred animals. But one day the Red Fox ate the White Rooster, and the kingdoms started preparing for a war. The kings and their subjects gathered on a field, and were about to start the battle, when they saw a cloud of dust on the road, and a mysterious rider, clad in black, appeared.
'I have come to teach you a different way to solve your conflicts,' the rider said. In his hands he had a wooden box. He opened it, and set it on the ground. It was made up of 64 squares, and inside the box there were 32 figurines that he set up on the opposite ends of the board. Then he taught the kinds the rules for properly moving the figurines.
'From now on,' he said, “when you have a problem, play a game of chess before fighting, instead of going to war, and make your concessions based on the outcome of the game.”
The kings sat down and started playing, and the rider started preparing to leave.
'One more thing,' he said. 'This board has two magic qualities. When the chess figurines are set up on this board, every figurine is connected to a soul of a subject in your kingdoms. Sixteen figurines for sixteen souls, one for every person. To remind you of this, I have made the chess figures warm, so that when you touch them, you will remember that they are connected with a live person. And the second magic quality you will have to figure out for yourselves.'
With these words he departed. The kings continued to play. At one point, one of the kings saw that if he sacrificed a pawn, he would gain advantage, but he touched it, and it was warm, and he remembered that it was linked to a soul of one of his subjects, so he made a different move. Later, the other king saw that if he sacrificed one of his figurines, he would surely win, but stopped for the same reason. The game ended in stalemate, the kings got up, shook hands, announced a truce, and went back to their kingdoms.
A pavilion was built that housed the chess set, and the game itself became a ritual. Any time there was a conflict, the kings would get together and play chess, and there were no wars.
Several decades passed; the kingdoms grew, and each kingdom had hundreds of people now. The kings gathered to play chess after a breach of courtly etiquette. Again, one of the kings saw that if he sacrificed a pawn, he would win. He remembered the rider’s warning, but when he thought about it, he decided that now that his subjects numbered in hundreds, one piece could no longer be connected to a whole person; if he sacrificed the pawn, maybe somebody would sprain their ankle, or hit their elbow. But he would win. So he sacrificed the pawn, but strangely, the game still ended in stalemate. However, the next morning, when he went outside onto the balcony at his royal palace, he noticed that something was amiss in the city. It was quiet except for church bells ringing all over the city, and the streets were filled with black-clad somber people making up funeral processions.
Hundreds of years passed. The kingdoms grew to the point that there was nothing besides them in the whole world. Every kingdom had millions of people. The pavilion on the top of the mountain still stood, and the board was still set up inside, but the old kings died centuries ago, and the original pieces were lost, and new pieces were molded from precious metals, and encrusted with jewels, to take their place. The two kingdoms were on the brink of the final war, but the kings, paying homage to tradition, more than anything else, gathered in the pavilion to play a game of chess one last time. Forgetting the old warnings, they started taking and sacrificing figures left and right, but at the end of the match, it was still a stalemate, with two kings left on the board. As they emerged from the pavilion and looked down, they saw that everything in their kingdoms had been destroyed and that everyone was dead. And then they saw a cloud of dust, and the mysterious rider appeared again, and gazed over the ruins and the death.
'You foolish kings,' he said.
'I can see how with these cold, metal figures you forgot that the chess pieces were tied to the souls of your subjects. But the other magical quality of the board, the one that you were supposed to figure out, that you had a thousand years to figure out, was that every game on this board will end in a stalemate. You foolish kings.'
And so he rode away and left them among the ruins.”
No one in the assembly really noticed when the story ended, and when the old man disappeared from the stage, but when they looked around, as if shaking off a dream, they saw an empty stage, and the podium, on which there was sitting a chessboard.
4. "Love at first sight." What's going on with this? Is it: chemical? Psychological? Paranormal? Delusional? How do people get the sense they get off each other? What's going on?
It's a variation on narcissism. We fall in love at first sight when we see someone who would be the ideal partner for our ideal self. Someone who it seems to us would want our ideal self. The more descreptancy there is between our real self and our ideal self, the more potential there is for various trajectories of pain. Also, the greater the descreptancy, the greater our proclivity for projection, which obviously can severely distort our vision of our new object of desire.
5. "Suspicion on our part justifies deceit in others" - La Rochefoucauld. Discuss.
Causes? Sure, a dialectical model is always useful. Justifies? Oh, no. That's blaming the victim mentality. Tricky quote, obvious agenda, unfair verb.
bonus: Which of the seven deadly sins do you most embody and how does it fuck up your life?
Hm, I don't know. The Christian discourse is something that I am familiar with only on a very literary/metaphorical level, those categories mean very little to me, and thus practically they translate into very banal concepts in my life, like "timing." I kind of don't know how to answer that question, because I am not sure what it means to embody a deadly sin, so I in a way I can only engage with with the second part of the question, because practical consequences are easier to assess. So, which "deadly sin" fucks up my life the most. In general I am very in control of my impulses and behaviors. I guess I would have to say lust, not because I think it is, but, again (and it might be by conjecture demanded by the paradigm of this question), the only area in my life in which I am compulsive could be roughly, crudely designated as "lust" with an insistent caveat that the map is not the territory. It's not really lust, it's less physical, and has more to do with desire as the lizard's tail that it is in psychoanalytic theory. Again, I measure this very crudely. But I think only something of this nature could ever cause me to betray someone, therefore it is something that is less subservient to my almost-mathematical control-freak ethical paradigms. But, I guess, if you ran my mind through a babelfish translator set to "medieval" your would get "lust." And that would be about as accurate as "Coca-Cola brings back your dead ancestors."
theodora1. Fill in the blanks: I was a teenage ____ for ____.
You know, it was this question that tripped me up. I couldn't figure out what to put in the blanks. Also various bad 80s movie title-inspired inanities kept besieging my brain. I was a teenage Faustus for Satan? I was a teenage Tit for Tat? I was a teenage Something for Nothing? I cannot for the life of me answer it. I don't think I will be able to answer it. It belongs to some weird lacuna never to be mastered by my immigrant brain that vaguely alludes to the first generation of video games and the "who's on first" word game. I am completely incapable of answering it, or even attempting to, except in pathetic paroxysms of contrived cleverness, like inserting "flowers" and "Algernon" in the blanks. Alas.
2. Masculinity/femininity. Which is more essentially fraudulent? Why?
It's a trick question because the default answer is, of course, both are equally performative. However, I think the schizophrenic contradictions are more obvious in masculinity. If we look at the historical cultural imaginary of both masculinity and femininity, before "feminism," the discourse of masculinity is far more bipolar than that of femininity. So, femininity was composed of the following possible tropes, in various permutations and combinations: frailty, sorcery, enchantment, instability, emotion, etc. None of them are really in conflict with each other; frailty can lead to overcompensation via enchantment or unbridled instability. Being ruled by emotion, rather than reason produces the instability, which is, nevertheless, enchanting as radical alterity. However, masculinity containts opposite, even mutually exclusive tropes, namely stoicism, formation of identity through hardship and self-denial, and absolute self-containment and aggression and ur-entitlement, jealousy, anger. The only way they could be mediated is through an uneasy dialectic of sublimation and return of the repressed, and that's basically what happens.
3. List three foundational stories of your childhood. (As example, three of mine: The Neverending Story, The Last Unicorn, Watership Down.) How did they affect you?
Well, that's a hard question. My father collected fairy tales like other people collect matchbooks. That is to say, in our house we had collections of fairy tales from every country in the world. In fact, my theory as to why I became an anthropologist is that I failed to process a single normative cultural code and internalize/naturalize my own culture because my learned second-order symbolic structures were from all over the place. It's like being raised a super-polyglot, but with cultural units, instead of linguistic ones. In a way, it was overdetermined that I would become an anthropologist. But as to the stories themselves. It's hard to pick, and I could just respond to this question with three of my dad's fairy tales (see below), but I will try to diversitfy my response. So, first let's talk about the most terrifying story I have ever read.
The Golden Bird, a short story in an anthology of Romanian fairty tales, scared the shit out of me. I've referenced in on livejournal before, not too long ago. Basically the story follows a child who is washed up on the seashore in a net. He is adopted by a fisherman and his wife; he grows up into a handsome, healthy young man, but the net grows with him; it cannot be cut. So he becomes known as a guy-in-a-net. As a result he never fully acclimates, and when he comes of age he goes on your standard Campbellian/Proppian garden-variety quest to find out what's what. He ends up on an island where things are not going well. There is a Golden Bird statue on an island, it's huge, with rubies for eyes, encrusted with precious stones. The statue had been installed on the island as a malevolent gift that's like the evil cousin of the Trojan Horse. Every night the statue comes to life, and walks around. As it walks, it shoots out lightning, night becomes as light as day, and all the residents of the island become overwhelmed with uncontrollable primal terror and to run to each other for comfort. Except, whoops, the bird's other magical power turns all the islanders' arms into swords, so everyone ends up stabbing their near and dear ones. Every morning the dead are burned at funeral pyres, as their relatives that killed them weep in fear and remorse. People start hiding from their family members before nightfall, but nothing really helps. The net guy ends up not being affected by the curse, he takes the bird away from the island and drowns it, then he has more adventures, and eventually his net falls off. But the thing that scared me was the inexplicable evil of this bird, the unmitigated terror, and the ambivalence of the categories of good and evil, the lack of climax where the former definitely triumphs over the latter. It was more like an episodic, picaresque narrative that featured a monster that scared the shit out of me, and my fear was not mediated by an allegorical defeat. As a result, my fear lingered. For years. That story still freaks me the fuck out.
Moving on.
I absolutely loved the Moomintrolls series by Tove Janssen. The books were really more about the world of the Moominvalley, rather than the specific stories, which were often more character-driven than plot-driven, and whimsical at that, at times even melancholy, and I liked the sense that there was this unhurried life that constantly existed in a world that required no ontogenesis or cosmology, it just existed. That mattered more to me than the particular adventures. If I had read them as an adult for the first time, I would have attributed my enchantment to the well-developed themes of a community that priorotized ethics and was based on diversity without any hint of moralizing or didactic rhetoric that often rears its head in its special incarnation in children's stories, that the adult/kid binary was fluid, that the family seemed largely matriarchal, and that the threat to community by the outside was always resolved through acceptance/integration/reintegration. But at age 10 I just found the entire universe offered up in those stories extremely satisfying, without relaly knowing why.
Finally, in answering I think this is a good place to explain that from the time I was five until I was about eight my father told me fairy tales that he made up every night. I became spoilt and I refused to go to sleep unless he told me a fairy tale. When he was out of town, my mother tried to fill in, but her rehashing of stories I had already read incited my anger, because they weren't my dad's fairy tales, which were mostly wonderful, although in retrospect I think some of them were rather bizzarre stories to tell a child. It's important to keep in mind that a lot of my father's stories kind of followed a Guy De Maupassant model where someone sacrifices everything for one thing, and in the end they lose everything in a bitter ironic twist. Not all; some were bittersweet, and a (very) few were unambiguously light and sweet. One invovled a man, obsessed with Boticelli's The Birth of Venus spending his life building a machine that can be hooked up to a painting and will transmit the audio of what was going on in the room while the painting was produced, only to find out at the end, that the model for Venus was a cheap street hooker. Anyway, this was the story that probably affected me the most:
ON THE ORIGIN OF CHESS
Once upon a time, there were two superpowers in the world. For years they had been building up weapons, spying on each other, vying for control over spheres of influence. Finally and inevitably, they found themselves at the brink of war with each other. Even though everyone knew that this would be the Last War, because both countries had a sizable nuclear arsenal, neither of them would back down. An emergency meeting of the International Peacekeeping Organization was called into session. Dignitaries, diplomats and negotiators from all over the world gathered for a week-long summit, trying to think of ways to avoid a final showdown. By the end of the seventh day, they were nowhere closer to finding an answer. In desperation, the moderator announced an open forum, and invited anyone to come down to the floor and speak. At first there was silence, but then an old man appeared, and shuffled over to the podium.
"I am not a politician,' he started. 'I am simply a folklorist, I collect stories and fairy tales from all over the world. And today I would like to tell you a story about how the game of chess came into existence.
Once upon a time, there were two kingdoms, the Kingdom of the Red Fox and the Kingdom of the White Rooster. They were very small kingdoms, each contained only 16 people, including the kings. They lived side-by-side in peace, worshiping their sacred animals. But one day the Red Fox ate the White Rooster, and the kingdoms started preparing for a war. The kings and their subjects gathered on a field, and were about to start the battle, when they saw a cloud of dust on the road, and a mysterious rider, clad in black, appeared.
'I have come to teach you a different way to solve your conflicts,' the rider said. In his hands he had a wooden box. He opened it, and set it on the ground. It was made up of 64 squares, and inside the box there were 32 figurines that he set up on the opposite ends of the board. Then he taught the kinds the rules for properly moving the figurines.
'From now on,' he said, “when you have a problem, play a game of chess before fighting, instead of going to war, and make your concessions based on the outcome of the game.”
The kings sat down and started playing, and the rider started preparing to leave.
'One more thing,' he said. 'This board has two magic qualities. When the chess figurines are set up on this board, every figurine is connected to a soul of a subject in your kingdoms. Sixteen figurines for sixteen souls, one for every person. To remind you of this, I have made the chess figures warm, so that when you touch them, you will remember that they are connected with a live person. And the second magic quality you will have to figure out for yourselves.'
With these words he departed. The kings continued to play. At one point, one of the kings saw that if he sacrificed a pawn, he would gain advantage, but he touched it, and it was warm, and he remembered that it was linked to a soul of one of his subjects, so he made a different move. Later, the other king saw that if he sacrificed one of his figurines, he would surely win, but stopped for the same reason. The game ended in stalemate, the kings got up, shook hands, announced a truce, and went back to their kingdoms.
A pavilion was built that housed the chess set, and the game itself became a ritual. Any time there was a conflict, the kings would get together and play chess, and there were no wars.
Several decades passed; the kingdoms grew, and each kingdom had hundreds of people now. The kings gathered to play chess after a breach of courtly etiquette. Again, one of the kings saw that if he sacrificed a pawn, he would win. He remembered the rider’s warning, but when he thought about it, he decided that now that his subjects numbered in hundreds, one piece could no longer be connected to a whole person; if he sacrificed the pawn, maybe somebody would sprain their ankle, or hit their elbow. But he would win. So he sacrificed the pawn, but strangely, the game still ended in stalemate. However, the next morning, when he went outside onto the balcony at his royal palace, he noticed that something was amiss in the city. It was quiet except for church bells ringing all over the city, and the streets were filled with black-clad somber people making up funeral processions.
Hundreds of years passed. The kingdoms grew to the point that there was nothing besides them in the whole world. Every kingdom had millions of people. The pavilion on the top of the mountain still stood, and the board was still set up inside, but the old kings died centuries ago, and the original pieces were lost, and new pieces were molded from precious metals, and encrusted with jewels, to take their place. The two kingdoms were on the brink of the final war, but the kings, paying homage to tradition, more than anything else, gathered in the pavilion to play a game of chess one last time. Forgetting the old warnings, they started taking and sacrificing figures left and right, but at the end of the match, it was still a stalemate, with two kings left on the board. As they emerged from the pavilion and looked down, they saw that everything in their kingdoms had been destroyed and that everyone was dead. And then they saw a cloud of dust, and the mysterious rider appeared again, and gazed over the ruins and the death.
'You foolish kings,' he said.
'I can see how with these cold, metal figures you forgot that the chess pieces were tied to the souls of your subjects. But the other magical quality of the board, the one that you were supposed to figure out, that you had a thousand years to figure out, was that every game on this board will end in a stalemate. You foolish kings.'
And so he rode away and left them among the ruins.”
No one in the assembly really noticed when the story ended, and when the old man disappeared from the stage, but when they looked around, as if shaking off a dream, they saw an empty stage, and the podium, on which there was sitting a chessboard.
4. "Love at first sight." What's going on with this? Is it: chemical? Psychological? Paranormal? Delusional? How do people get the sense they get off each other? What's going on?
It's a variation on narcissism. We fall in love at first sight when we see someone who would be the ideal partner for our ideal self. Someone who it seems to us would want our ideal self. The more descreptancy there is between our real self and our ideal self, the more potential there is for various trajectories of pain. Also, the greater the descreptancy, the greater our proclivity for projection, which obviously can severely distort our vision of our new object of desire.
5. "Suspicion on our part justifies deceit in others" - La Rochefoucauld. Discuss.
Causes? Sure, a dialectical model is always useful. Justifies? Oh, no. That's blaming the victim mentality. Tricky quote, obvious agenda, unfair verb.
bonus: Which of the seven deadly sins do you most embody and how does it fuck up your life?
Hm, I don't know. The Christian discourse is something that I am familiar with only on a very literary/metaphorical level, those categories mean very little to me, and thus practically they translate into very banal concepts in my life, like "timing." I kind of don't know how to answer that question, because I am not sure what it means to embody a deadly sin, so I in a way I can only engage with with the second part of the question, because practical consequences are easier to assess. So, which "deadly sin" fucks up my life the most. In general I am very in control of my impulses and behaviors. I guess I would have to say lust, not because I think it is, but, again (and it might be by conjecture demanded by the paradigm of this question), the only area in my life in which I am compulsive could be roughly, crudely designated as "lust" with an insistent caveat that the map is not the territory. It's not really lust, it's less physical, and has more to do with desire as the lizard's tail that it is in psychoanalytic theory. Again, I measure this very crudely. But I think only something of this nature could ever cause me to betray someone, therefore it is something that is less subservient to my almost-mathematical control-freak ethical paradigms. But, I guess, if you ran my mind through a babelfish translator set to "medieval" your would get "lust." And that would be about as accurate as "Coca-Cola brings back your dead ancestors."
