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First, it’s been a hoot and a half blogging with you all. Thanks to the people who actually took the time to read all my poorly articulated and frustrated thoughts this year. I can definitely say (without crossing my fingers or truth stretching of any kind) that I gained a boat load of insight from all of you.

But despite this, bonafide “Aha” moments in ASTU were hard to come by. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, but I’ve found that it has been fairly uncommon for anyone to waltz out of the classroom this year bouncing with weightlessness from an uplifting discussion. No, our scholarly musings generally functioned more like a magnifying glass on the densely compacted troubles of our time, succeeding not only in enlarging the issues but somehow subsequently multiplying their heaviness.  All this is to say that we deal with some darkness in ASTU. And when I think of “aha” moments, the accompanying imagery is generally more along the lines of your typical Einstein lightbulb epiphany, rather than plunging headlong into a black abyss of questions regarding trauma, terrorism, and xenophobia. It is saddening, and sometimes I would rather push the thoughts aside.

But I hate to obscure reality with idealism or a falsely constructed sense of peace. There is no questioning that we need to search through this darkness for a light more permanent than the little sparks of greatness that give us hope to keep going. Could it be that just as we are getting close to finding it, we burn out, unable to devise something stable for the next generation, and they are enveloped by the darkness without a clue just like we were? I refuse to believe that we are condemned to this type of cyclical existence. I have to believe that our efforts are worth something, and that the efforts of everyone before us were worth just as much. Maybe the aha is that for now we must continue to end our thoughts with a frantic barrage of questions – not just because we don’t know any other sound way to conclude a blog – but because we must combat the temptation to fall into pessimistic complacency and mediocrity? But then, at what point will the questions pay off with answers?

bye for now

Joseph

What is it with dogs?

I get that they are cute. And affectionate, sometimes. But recently I’ve been wondering about this whole domestication business and when i really think about it, the idea of it is kind of messed up. That’s besides the point though.

In “Redeployment”, Richard Klay uses the dog as a metaphor for… well, that’s currently up for debate. My first thought, as many of ours were, was that it was to grab our attention, and make ourselves question our own incapacity to value humanity, to challenge our desensitized attitudes towards human life. I still think that this is true. But it’s also lot more than that. Sergeant Price does something difficult, noble, honourable… whatever you want.. in killing his own dog rather than taking it to the vet to be put down. Most people wouldn’t be able to do that. They would rather remove themselves from death, because death isn’t really death if it’s far away and the blood is on someone else’s hands (cue Butler). But Price knows differently. He knows death, he’s faced it, he’s killed. By taking it upon himself, he takes full responsibility for his dog’s death. The way I see it, Price feels the full gravity of what it is to sentence someone(thing) to die. It isn’t as if he is just declaring war, sentencing people to die and knowing that he physically will not have any part of it. But by his actions, he is recognizing that this and killing are essentially the same thing- and that to ignore that is to deny the value of another’s life. It is confusing and complex, and I cannot assume, but I would wager that this was part of his reasoning in shooting his own dog. He is taking responsibility for what he is doing, and will not deny the gravity of it by sending the dog to the vet.

They say that a dog is a man’s best friend. Sadly enough that can be true. Isn’t something a little bit off if we hold an animal as our truest companion? Why is it that humans are often so incapable of empathy? I would argue that a dog is a man’s best friend not because they’re cute, fluffy, or friendly. Although if that’s your personal reason, awesome. Dog is a mans best friend because he cannot empathize. He cannot understand other human beings. He is so limited by his own experiences, stuck inside his own skin, that he cannot feel close to another human because he cannot understand them. But a dog, a dog is easy to understand. A dog doesn’t even try to understand you back. A dog just loves you. It’s loyalty at its finest, and in its most empty form.  The dog doesn’t ask questions, it doesn’t get politically charged, it doesn’t start wars over oil or religion. So it’s easy to empathize with a dog.

Maybe Klay is onto something by drawing off our twisted love for canines. Maybe he’s commenting quite acutely on our struggle to empathize. But empathy is, in my opinion, one of the greatest things we have. Its one of the things that makes us human. Its why when Judith Butler asks what lives are grievable, our gut reaction is a frustrated ALL LIVES are grievable, Judith! Don’t try and convince me otherwise with your academic jargon! But obviously, empathy is something that we’re far from perfecting, which is why Klay, Butler and all the texts that we’re reading are of paramount relevance.

I used to fancy myself the old guy living off grid with his dog. But, given a bit more thought, I think I’ve changed my mind. How can we practically empathize with those we don’t come in contact with? How can we get outside of ourselves and understand “others”?

I lay here typing, all too eager to finish

Fumbling through vocabulary, pushing aside thoughts of a “reading” break

so tantalizingly near.

I wonder – what to write that will be smart, reflective, thoughtful enough to get the job done, to please the crowd. Forget that. Blogs are worthless without authenticity. Make it mine

but. follow the rules. How about Language poetry? Such irritating meaninglessness…

I consider Spahr’s fusion of meaning and meaninglessness, of yous and beloveds, when I become guiltily aware of my me, my I, my my, oh my. My self absorption.

Aware of my lyrical preface, aware of my contentment to be contained in my skin, aware of the academic undertaking – you must know, you must care, open your mind, open your skin,

close the classroom door.

Contempt for my lyrical apathy, contempt for ambitious individualism. Contempt for language’s limitations

You’re irrelevant, you’re relevant. A solution, a problem. Are the privileged obligated to know and care? Are they obligated to act?

What use is knowing without action? Nothing (Everything).

Only an immobilizing web of fear and despair

Meaningless.

knowledge is a noun. to know is a verb. a verb is an action word

is knowing an action? presently.

how to know?

I don’t know.

I lay here typing (in bed, go figure). Finished, and unsatisfied.

__________

Finding it difficult to write anything coherent on Juliana Spahr’s avant garde poetry, this blog was a shot in the dark. Literally, in bed in the darkness. I find that reading back on it, I puke at my own pretentiousness and the irony of it all, so if you feel that way about it – know that I’m with you. Yet it did make me appreciate some of the intricacies of Spahr’s writing – given that I wrote it while laying in my bed, ineffectually trying to synthesize impossible contradictions, thinking about big things with little success, great ignorance (probably), and no positive impact despite all the hoping.

sources – Juliana Spahr, the connection of everyone with lungs

One of my favourite aspects of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Safran Foer is the plethora of Beatles references. I think that they are far more significant than just name dropping for the sake of it. Actually, I would argue that they are strategically placed and that each song frames the stages of the narrators’ development over the course of the book.

At the outset of the novel, Oskar references Yellow Submarine, a catchy, happy go lucky tune, sung by one of Oskar’s idols; Ringo Starr- a fairly happy go lucky guy. I remember hearing Yellow Submarine for the first time on the radio in the car when I was young. It was one of the first Beatles tunes that I heard and I was captivated by its images in my youthful innocence and curiosity. I think that Oskar’s love for Ringo and “Yellow Submarine” represent his own innocence, or atleast an attempt to hold onto an innocent happiness that is sliding further and further out of reach.

Next, Foer sneaks in “Fixing A Hole” and “I want to tell you”, fitting precursors to the next big stage of Oskar’s journey. To the soundtrack of “Fixing A Hole”, Oskar journeys through “fixing a hole where the rain gets in” in his own life, seeking to patch up the hole in his understanding. To George Harrison’s “I Want to Tell You”, he struggles through the confusion of hiding emotions and what he knows from his mother, illustrated with perfection by the lyric “I want to tell you, man is full of things to say; but when I’m near you, all these words seem to slip away”. This emotional roller coaster of things untold is arguably an even bigger theme in the Grandpa and Grandma’s story.

Next up on the queue of Beatles tunes hits a very different note – I am the Walrus.  I like to imagine the mind bending time that such a quizzical, science oriented child like Oskar would have had trying to make sense of such nonsensical Lennon mischief. What better song to illustrate the missed connections and confusion that litters the pages of each narrators’ story than a song that intentionally makes no sense at all? Oskar in particular comes to realize that there are things that no amount of intelligence can spell out, that sometimes things are just incredibly complicated. Likewise, the grandpa ponders if anyone has ever figured it out, or if people all make the same mistakes. I can hear “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together” playing in the background of their frustrations.

This leads to the emotional low point of the story for all the narrators, punctuated with ‘Eleanor Rigby”, looking at all the lonely people, and where do they all come from? Where do they all belong? What I found particularly intriguing was how the book did not necessarily have a happy ending, or solve the characters’  problems. But there is a shift of perspective. We get to what could be the point of the whole book – take a sad song and make it better. Anytime you feel the pain, [Hey Jude], refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulders. Let it out, and let it in. Remember to let [Mom, Grandma, Grandpa] into your heart, then you can start to make it better.

So, my blog-ending question is, in many ways, borrowed from Foer, who seems to have borrowed it from the Beatles, who I suppose borrowed it from life: all the lonely people, where do they all come from? And is the answer that we need to simply knock down walls, let love out and let love in? Or, is it just really, really complicated? Coo coo cachoo.

Works Cited

Yellow Submarine, Fixing a Hole, I Want to Tell You, I Am the Walrus, Eleanor Rigby, Hey Jude – The Beatles

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer

Last week we ventured into the UBC Library archives to take a closer look at Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and the variety of processes that were behind its creation and continue to surround the book. The Fonds contained everything from publisher rejections and newspaper articles about Japanese internment to fan mail with pastel rainbows from school children. One piece I found of particular interest was a letter written in the form of a poem to Kogawa from one of her readers. As I read it the first time, I had no idea what on earth the poem was getting at…. but the words stressed me out! They made my body ache and tense. So I took a quick picture (making sure to put that little legalistic “for research purposes only” slip in the shot) and put it in the back of my mind for later pondering on the bus ride home.

Although it somewhat defeats the purpose of poetry, I’ll give my best shot at the gist: why and how do we measure division how does one respond to the scarcity of those who seek the fullness of unity? These were spoken of in terms of warmth. It brought up images of fire and flames as divided warmth, and the sun as the togetherness of warmth, unreachable in the vastness of space and beyond understanding. There was an air of desperation, of waiting, of hope in clinging to the warmth of fleeting fire and light on earth. Why did these words and themes hit me like a large school bus and why did I feel that they were so relevant to Obasan, to the world?

Obasan delves into these themes of division and unity with people (albeit fictional), not warmth. What does it mean to be both Japanese and Canadian? Why do people insist on putting up walls amongst themselves? This is the division that the characters in Obasan are at odds with. But there is that desperation and clinging onto the hope for a better future, that clinging to the fleeting warmth and vision for unity that so scarcely appears amongst the division. These themes are a big deal in this world. While the sun and fire are arguably more poetic and drive the feelings home with great force… we see how the themes are relevant and ridden with controversy on the ground in Obasan. This raises some interesting questions about the place of these literary genres as technologies of memory. With the poem and Obasan getting at similar themes but one having a more profound effect on me than the other, what does this say about the subjectivity of technology of memory? What does it say about the need for diversity in what we draw upon for memory?

Works Cited

Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Penguin, 1981. Print.

Joy Kogawa Fonds,UBC Library Archives,

There’s been a lot of discussion in ASTU about humanizing our perceptions of foreign conflicts, starting with Persepolis and continued with Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. We’ve been asking ourselves again and again how we can understand the people behind the numbers, what enables us to do this, the implications of this in memory, and whether or not we are entitled to this kind of knowing. On the political stage these conflicts are often reduced to statistics. X amount of people were killed. There are X amount of Syrian refugees. There are X amount of missing and murdered Indigenous women. While this without question adds gravity to the issues, why is it that we likely wouldn’t be bothered were these issues scaled down to only a handful of people, or even just one person? What is it about numbers that calls for our attention?

There is so much emphasis on the worth of being able to measure things empirically, giving things a scientific face, defining things. It’s built in. I consider myself a relatively empathetic person, but I often tend not to be able to take things seriously without numerical relevance. I get frustrated in class when people share very loosely related anecdotes, because it’s just a stupid little story and I’d rather get to the tried and tested material. I think it’s thoroughly uncool that I end up feeling that way.

In one of my other classes today the prof began the hour by asking if anyone had any feelings to share. We hadn’t even began talking about anything yet. I had to stifle the urge to laugh, roll my eyes, whatever. Then I asked myself, why do I think that that is an invalid way to begin a class? I looked up synonyms for invalid. Google gave me unscientific. Go figure. Forget trying to humanize the people behind the statistics in foreign conflicts. I had to remind myself that the people in the room right beside me weren’t just UBC student numbers.
So what’s the fascination with numbers? I want to be able to know people deeply, and if that means knowing only one person well then so be it, but I’d rather be able to extend it to everyone. I guess as humans we’re limited in how much empathy and understanding we can handle. Does that mean we have to choose who and what to invest in? I suppose. But we can in a way fight our own nature of exclusion by sharing our own and other people’s stories like those in Persepolis and Safe Area Gorazde. How else can we humanize the numbers? How can we understand more deeply what humanizing someone looks like?

Back to the blog. It’s been a good while since my first post where I toyed with the value of learning. I can’t say I’ve been able to hold fast to the somewhat optimistic conclusion I came to, but I do re-arrive at it through frustratingly cyclical tornadoes of thought that seem to be set off by just about anything brought up in class on a daily basis. The question itself though has begun to take a few different shapes. In ASTU (I have to reach for connections somehow) we’ve been delving deeper into the finer aspects of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis through Hillary Chute’s literature review. Today in class we discussed Satrapi’s pointed artistry, specifically her use black and white. We brought up the idea that this is perhaps an attempt to simplify her depictions of violence to increase it’s effect, and thus create a more realistic portrayal despite it being less visually accurate. Since UBC became a thing I’ve developed an annoying problem of  abstracting everything I hear, so this led me to thoughts of why we tend to work with black and white on a larger scale of general ideas. This thought has made itself a nice little home in my head over the past while, mainly because of the utopia oriented discussions that have been taking place across classes.

I’ve always believed in good and evil, truth and lies, these kind of opposing forces. It seems like this type of black and white is one of the primary ways in which we understand the world. But, quite obviously, it can’t be that simple. For example, cultural diversity is… good right? But so is unity (for lack of a better word)? So if what I believe to be true and good is different from what you believe to be true and good, is one true and good or are they both? If both are, and so is the grey in between, that means that neither nor the grey are really true. There is no real black and white, just an infinite amount of meaningless grey. So why learn?

I heard a former UBC student Tyler Milley speak tonight about perfectionism. Part of his argument was that perfectionism is one of the contributing factors to destructive and crippling anxiety. When we are perfectionists, searching for perfect ends to our work, seeing everything as black and white, win or lose, life or death, we become burdened by immature extremes on both sides. He said that there is something freeing in the grey. I applied this to how I was approaching my pursuit of the truth and realized that I have been looking for a concrete measuring stick of good and evil, always trying to put what I learn under the microscope of some absolute truth. Yet when I do this it always brings me full circle to the skeptical view of truth itself. Maybe its time I tried to find some of the truths in the grey, because as difficult and dialectical as it could be, it could be freeing.

If you’re looking for a more concrete connection to class, here’s something for you: I think that the idea of the genre testimony lies right in this grey area of truth. As John Locke says, “a credible man vouching his knowledge of it is a good proof: but if another equally credible, do witness it from his report, the testimony is weaker..” , which I think is his intelligent, wordy, scholarly way of saying opposing testimonies create a conversation of seemingly grey contradictory truths that is not altogether worthless.

sources: tylermilley.com, class slides for the John Locke quote

The idea of the academic conversation is a topic that we, students of the Global Citizens CAP stream at UBC, have recently been discussing in our ASTU100 class. Questions on the nature of the scholarly community have been fuelling our discussion (led by Dr. Luger), a discussion that has clearly sparked the curiosity of many including myself.

While I do believe that the scholarly community  is a well refined and educated place for conversation, I believe that the question is bigger than simply how or why we contribute to exclusively academic conversation. It seems that we, as budding scholars, are really asking; why does one learn at all?

As I began to give more and more thought to this question over the course of the past week,  my train of thought took a wrong turn down a discouraging track. Chances are, whatever knowledge you discover, whatever thoughts one has, it has already been discovered or thought through by someone who preceded them. Education is, essentially, feeding students knowledge that has already been discovered. The fact that it is already known is what enables it to be taught.  While a university setting claims to leave room for creative thinking, there are few (if any) new conclusions to be drawn. So what good is it to learn at all? If I can’t contribute anything new, I may as well save myself the hassle, quit learning, and become a hermit.

Scholars are supposed to be the smart ones. Shouldn’t they have realized by now the futility of their quest? This concept began to manifest itself in other aspects of life and became quite burdening. For a few days, I was savagely pessimistic about the idea of a university and academics. I became critical of the value of creativity.

So I thought about music, about writing songs- a widely praised embodiment of creativity. Literally everything that makes musical sense must be explored and written by now. Logically there just aren’t enough options that exist to come up with a musical progression that hasn’t been created yet, recorded or not.  Yet artists and composers still manage to create new songs. Chances are the musical structure, the chords, the lyrics, whatever else makes up a song… chances are that they’ve already been created or used. But by some miracle, the artist has organically arrived at something new. There are traces of what the artist has learned along the way (what we like to call influence) but by way of their own unique and personal approach to music they have succeeded in lending it a new voice.

For me, this reality is largely what began to shed a more positive light on learning. In academics, this same new voice that artists achieve is what we can and must contribute to the conversation. Though the same knowledge or the same truths may have been discovered and written long before our time, there is value in the fact that we can give them new shape in the present.

What humans do so well is ignore the value of the process and the growth it nurtures. Success is something that we tend to measure by the end product, instead of by how we strive to reach it. Yes, much of what there is to know has been known. Much of music has been written. Many if not all mountains have been climbed. But there is value and joy in getting there, regardless of who has reached it before we have, and in getting there we’re able to give it a new voice.

We’ve been given a world to make sense of and the journey of making sense of it is precisely what makes it exciting and worth making sense of.

-Joseph