Notes

Can you deal with life emotionally? Or get by with living rationally? Towards which will your life keel? Accelerated tech-reinforced soporifics in San Francisco, Dubai, Hong Kong?Or liminal living in the Cairos and Tehrans of the mind? Middle class عادی وگوسفندی in post-crisis Athens? Or down-and-out in 21st century Paris and London? A life of updated OS’s, mental breakdowns, unfree Medicare, extreme processing and uplevelling?A life of anxious positionings in the face of the seeping inevitability of technological domination over human will?Succumbing to the belief that walls must be erected, exoplanets colonized, Antipodean boltholes secured?While scrambling for meaning among cultures once rejected, once repressing, now severed-from? Or will it be a life of regimented unpredictability rooted in traditions, however deficient?And a human will unsubjugated to politically correct behaviours? Eat, Pray, Love for the delusional and privilegedHuman agency extolled for its capacity to self-actualize rather than socially mobilize. Diverted inwardlyDefused

Home The feeling of being alone recognizing this house often generates my anxiety. Anxiety to know if the path is correct or not. Anxiety to open another room that I have not discovered until now. The anxiety of doing it alone and of not having by my side those who accompanied me to recognize my terrain and my foundations. However, I have the feeling that this is the right place and the right time. My recognition of this house is totally personal and non-transferable. “When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all”– On trees by Herman Hesse

Today we visited the Château de Chenonceau, a castle extended on water from its original plan in the 11th century. Examining its lifeline, it seemed to accumulate a succession of extremely clever, strong, beautiful ruling women. Something I had not come across in France’s many castles. As I traversed through the dense shifting crowds of tourists, I came across this explanation by a female French academic. It seemed to encompass lingering thoughts, (especially since our home now was a castle too) in a descriptive short manner that would have potentially taken me several months or several pages to execute. My favorite line – Let’s give a thought to some other successive occupants of the chateau, anonymous inhabitants who are far more numerous than those we know or believe we know…

The shadows I begin to open the windows and these incredible rays start to enter filling the space with a very particular warm color. These rays reach almost all corners and objects of each of the rooms but also leave space for some shadowy corners to form. The shadows I see have different shapes and sizes depending on how close to the light they are. There are some shadows that comfort but there are others that become monstrous figures that I do not want to look at. However, I have left far behind and now I am learning how to live with my shadows. I feel the need for their presence. I feel that without them there would be no place of refuge to go to. I feel that these monstrous figures are part of my incredible imagination and when you see them up close they lack frivolity, instead, they are kind and invite me to sit down with them and get to know them as they really are. We do not know many times what the impact of light or a shadow will be, but each one is created for a reason. “…Be life In all its complicated splendor”– Shadow by Denise Vargas

The work we need to do is showing its impact on us. It’s been a heavy, and emotional day. I’d woken up early, like several others, to get a head start on our blog posts, the increasing development and maturity of which is inversely proportional to the speed at which we can write and send them on to Ahmad to upload. In the midst of some fierce thinking in the kitchen-cafe, I got distracted by haunting sounds from the living room next door. ‘What is that?’, I asked Greg when he came into the kitchen-cafe, ‘It’s making me sad.’ ‘Join us’, he said. And so I did. Only to be flooded by a sudden, inexplicable admixture of loss and longing. I’d never heard the music before, but it pulled, almost too tightly, at my heart even as my mind tried to place it. ‘Rumi’, ‘reed’, ‘poetry’, ‘Persian’, amongst a dozen other words and places and concepts raced through my head. Nebulously strange and familiar, new yet old, past as well as present, it unsettled and stilled in equal measure, jumpstarting an incredible conversation between Greg and I. And so the tone for the first reading of the day was, for me, at least, already set by this ‘merely’ improv performance by Greg and a Kurdish colleague of his. Denise Vargas’s ‘Shadow’ raised a key issue of authenticity — how does one square being true to oneself, seeking pleasure and fulfillment, with wider community and societal expectations about responsibility and the collective creation of meaning? ‘Be the voice/that breaks the silence, not the echo. Be song, be scar/be question/be anything but shadow’ urged Vargas, which led to much discussion about the different connotations of shadow in different geographical and cultural contexts. For all its diminishing associations in the poem, shadows and shade instead evoked for many of us elsewhere, images of refuge, safety, and tranquility. This also led to a rich discussion on different models of leadership. Another important question raised in the discussion for this reading, as well as the one that followed, namely, ‘An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt‘, by Mathias Dopfner, was ‘How do each of us change something destructive into something constructive?’ More bluntly, perhaps, it challenged us to come face-to-face with a rather inconvenient truth — how do we get over our anger, our disappointments, our sense of injustice, our betrayal by others, our hopelessness? In other words, how do we get over ourselves and out of our own way to do the work that needs to be done? Especially when we are in the thick of it and don’t have the will, the capacity, the energy or the time or the clarity or the headspace…

She didn’t get her visa, even at last appeal. All summer’s plans annulled A body released through a trapdoorWrenched back – lifeless – by a noose. First World problems, neverthelessNone of whose consequences can deprive us of a future, shelterOnly of comfort. Back at the talking shop, we discuss expectations of how our lives ought to unfoldOught to?Reinforced by the Gospel of American can-doism, therefore will-doismCarefully skirting away from won’t-happenism What if you were not to expect as muchIn a society where others have been trained to expect the most? Would you tame the wolves? Or be devoured by them?

Culture as currency. Culture as wealth. If culture is a form of wealth, could not the culturally ‘rich’ trade cultural information for acknowledgment, advancement or recognition? One way in which cultural history affirms the power invested innately in the image or text is to uncover its dynamic relationship to other cultural texts. Reflecting on our day with our guest Jul, makes me think about creative ways to blur and straddle the lines between perception and fact, history, the imaginary worlds, and ‘real’ ones. Our theater exercise with Jul using an ancient Greek story, modern interpretations, and the theater was just that. Theater and dance are mediums of cultural expression which are not just vessels to disseminate cultural information but it also provides opportunities to respond back. Look around you, do you see your history written down? Histories or herstories begin long before memories are collected and retold. Behind each pen that writes history, is a person with distinct perspectives, objectives, and agendas. Never forget this fact and draw your attention to how texts work and circulate. What about the histories of those which have been excluded due to race, gender, and class. Or those people who didn’t have the leisure of time to write their own historical records? What are your responsibility and bodily standpoint in the writing of history and how can we contribute to more inclusive self-assembled records and new historicisms?

There is a saying amongst Indian musicians that all a musician wants is an audience who listens. As we hit the half-way mark of our Culturisatn experience, what I have to say is being given the space to speak may not be as important as being given the space to listen. The majority of our communication is not heard but read. I doubt we’ll ever lose the ability to speak but I fear as a culture we may be losing our ability to listen. Not just listening to each other but listening to ourselves. Today hit a personal wall for me where our discussion became centered around a topic that was too close to home for me to ignore, and I had to leave abruptly. As it became too painful to continue the discussion in the abstract, I never felt I wasn’t being heard but I had to walk away to hear myself. Our first reading of the day summed it up for me after I returned. It was a poem titled Shadow by Denise Vargas.It begins: Ponder for a momentwhat a shadow is,a space without light,presence in absence,the shape of anything but itself. Instead of turning the abstract into reality, I had to walk away from the group to turn my reality into the abstract. At that moment it was impossible to do so with anyone but myself. I opted for presence in absence.

Destructive to Constructive “Ponder for a moment, what a shadow is, a space without light,presence in absence, the shape of anything but itself…“– Denise Vargas Being a shadow, was always a favorite of mine. You could be a tree for a day and have people enjoy your shade, to follow a master’s steps without worrying to make your own mistakes. A presence in absence, a rare opportunity to be and not equally. Yes, a space without light but not without soul, like Khayyam’s clay cups wherein its empty space is where that liquid of life is poured. How easily can a shadow, dark, absent, silent be a negative that can define without life, without future? How we can take our daily curve balls life throws as punishment instead of teaching. Where do we decide to separate emotions of hardships with constructive solutions? To take away the self-pity, and loathe coloring it with a rhythm that makes us dance. We have broken the camel’s back, halfway into the course. We are all a family now – Tara, Greg, Estephania, Fayaz, Yasmeen, Iason, Taha, Ahmad and I, all living in a castle filled with unconditional fresh tastes of France’s meadows and farms surrounded by grass, lakes, and trees that were drawn only in our fairytales. The birds’ harmony wakes us as the sun guides us on our morning walks or runs. I have never run as much as I have here, and I can keep running. When will I next be able to experience such life and presence? My senses had heightened from Zagros and now shaped into a particular sharpness amongst everyone’s human stories, tears, and literature. Our talks and readings will soon move towards machines and artificial intelligence, subjects that bring a worry to the ends of my stomach. There is a fear that sits there, why, I can’t yet place. For now, I will keep looking out the windows onto the fields, I can breathe easier.

Day 5 of Culturistan began innocently, but we took a turn from our original schedule and programming.  I woke up with a rather urgent work situation to attend to, so my mind wasn’t totally present when we started either. I was not the only one who walked into the discussion with an occupied mind, as another colleague was also stressed, but about a more personal situation. We ultimately decided to discuss his situation at length before diving into the readings. The conversation became much more personal and the question asked for everyone was “how we can transmute something destructive into something constructive”. You can learn a lot about a person at a point in time-based on how they respond to a certain event or question. But what gives us any right to feel like the world owes us something? Why do we approach life thinking it should go a certain way? Who sold us this packet of lies that we should have any expectations about the way our lives are supposed to unfold? Why do we feel like we “deserve” something? “Life is always in the right” is something I’ll paraphrase from an earlier reading. While we may not understand what is happening to us at that particular moment, it just is happening and will shift our worldview, like it or not. We don’t always have to have explanations or reasons for everything – and sitting with the unknown is a practice that is not popular, especially in Western culture. Our ego has a need for protecting itself from death by acquiring as much knowledge as possible, and sometimes to our own detriment.   But not all events are created equal. We all come from different backgrounds and have different triggers based on our subjective experience of reality  — and it is impossible to “judge” or “qualify” what level of constructivism we assign to each event in our lives. Afterward, we read “An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt”, and did some role-playing between Google/pro-technology platforms and against Google and technology platforms. I had to argue on the side of Google and pro-technology. Disclosure: While I disagree with monopolies and unfair manipulation at the expense of other companies and organizations, technology and Google has provided us with a tremendous amount of value for human society. Without these platforms, nations wouldn’t have access to each other on the scale or magnitude that is possible today. We wouldn’t have the level of advancement in multiple industries without the open source knowledge sharing that has happened globally because of the internet. We wouldn’t be able to make the same advancement in science and medicine, and transportation.  While we can’t prepare for the future in…