Salisa lohavittayavikant

“To young intellectuals disillusioned with the ensuing reality, utopia had become a precious asset. It was the one thing to be trusted, precisely because it contained nothing real. It demanded sacrifice and commitment; it filled life with meaning, by providing a formula that rewrote every negative as a positive, every destructive act as an act of creation. Utopia issued instructions, implacable, secret but authoritative instructions that ordered you to betray everything and everybody that stood in its way – which meant everything and everybody. The thrill of all this was irresistible to people who were taking revenge on a world that they had refused to inherit.”

Roger Scruton

There are three addenda to the quote by Scruton. First, that I might have, in an ironic twist of stupidity, mistaken Scruton for Singer after having mentally indexed during my time in college the lukewarm contemporary voices I consider too dastardly boresome to read, like a swain you take on simply because he is not a swine. Perhaps the horseshow model of political spectrum is rather pat and I held these two as representatives of the genius loci of two stormbearers in a teacup. Indeed the stormswept, highswell sea inspires lesser dread among the mariners than the dead, windless Sargasso, for having no wind which drives the sails they would have been stuck forever. Second, I cannot forgive Scruton’s oversight, or rather deliberate ignominy, repudiating Marx’s materialist theory of history by sputtering “but.. but.. the Common Law of England!”. Shall anyone without detritus for a brain take him as anything more than a lightweight poser? One can overlook the lack of generosity in his accusation that Hobsbawm “re-wrote British history,” although we get such skinflint, banausic charges everyday being flung amidst the orgy of minds of the lower order. It is not mere cross-grained canker but chivalrous candour which elevates splenetic Schopenhauer that in his highest dudgeon he had shown neither hide nor hair of such skullduggery. One rather hears a man scream, in earnest, “the most sickening and loathsome tediousness hangs over the empty bombast of this repulsive philosophaster” ! over and over than read surreptitiously that “Hobsbawm’s rewriting of history according to the Marxist template of ‘class struggle’ involves debunking those sources of loyalty that tie ordinary people not to their class (as the Marxist doctrine requires) but to their nation and its tradition.” If one were to pick at such a mind, riven with cracks and rife with crumbs and riveted with snarls and whistles, one might as well flounce needlessly in the clod-brain of a muckraker or a bushwhacker. Thirdly and most important of all, was Scruton’s insight not, at least, enlightening in some way? Was he not alluding to Nietzsche who first posited that destruction is a creative act? Was he not hinting at odium generis humani when he said “The thrill of all this was irresistible to people who were taking revenge on a world that they had refused to inherit”? Yet he should have perhaps amended “refused to inherit” and replaced it with “failed to inherit.”

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The ills of the world are many and people have turned ghoulish and glum. What else is new? First off, I would say we are quite wrong to fancy that we, the plebians and the sans-culottes, are the factious rout; that there are thoroughgoing wars being waged among or against the common people by two fractious rogues running amok.

There is an undercurrent of extreme bias in the press trying to frame the ongoing political crisis in the United States as the war of the wealthy vs the people, whereas it suggests to my rather naive mind a clear-cut case of an internal strife within the fractured wealthy class itself. It is not poor vs rich, but nouveau riche businessmen vs old-moneyed establishment and self-serving politicians. This is an interesting sociological phenomenon. The elites are fighting each other and perhaps it’s not difficult to see why. I truly doubt that the self-made billionaires that started to emerge in the early 1990s to late 2000s would have much in common with the entrenched economic oligarchs and their venal moneygrubbing political allies, whether in official or unofficial capacity, who have operated in tandem in this way for at least half a century, probably since Vietnam War ended up cementing the helm of what C. Wright Mills called the triumvirate of power elites (since then co-opted the Fourth Estate, making up the quadrumvirate of power).

This can be understood as either a generational war: the septuagenarians and octogenarians (and their slightly younger allies who stood to benefit) as against the entire younger parvenu class mostly in their 40s and 50s who came into wealth later—or an ideological war: the entrepreneurs and businessmen who envision and create products or services from the ground up, or lick them into shape that is serviceable enough, as against the chatterboxes and old moneys who mostly just connive their ways to the top. Both sides would have had their dealings with the wealthiest echelons of the billionaire classes and dynasties who by now must have had their hands in every single pie self-generating endless generational dough and would be blasé either way, and both would have no doubt benefited from the backdrop of the free market initiatives and globalisation that make them unimaginably richer. Both sides can overlap and intertwine, in motives and interests and standings—and members of one camp can abscond to a greener, greedier, greasier pasture (Gates, Besoz)—and yet Trump and Musk, for their own peculiar yet different reasons, do not seem to fit into the existing power structure.

If the suggestion surfaces, that Trump and Musk act in such a way as to benefit their billionaire friends, I may have to ask: what billionaire friends? Trump has been a laughing stock in business and a running gag in media for decades. And politicians despise and revile Trump (see: Seth Meyers’ speech at the White House in 2011). When it comes to Musk, does anyone think a man like Musk is truly capable of maintaining a friendship?

It is quite obvious that both of these figures are upsetting the current political order and they don’t seem to be doing it for show. Musk’s purchase of Twitter is dumb, financially, beyond anyone’s imagination. Social media speculated at the time that he bought Twitter in order to gain access to the wealth of natural language corpus necessary to train an AI which could then be linked up with Neuralink, but that speculation did not bear out or came close to being based on anything tangible. The press figured him as a stupid and silly businessman throwing his money away at a doomed pet project and overwhelmingly glossed over the reporting of motive. He had said he bought Twitter to disrupt the public discourse and wanted to change things, and that he did. His free speech haven however turned rightway quickly and perhaps that’s what he had wanted. But Musk has been transparent with his motives from the beginning. We won’t be able to understand Musk unless we take stock of his decision to purchase Twitter which has led him down this path.

There is a rather comical story arc in Boston Legal where Denny Crane, a character very much based on Trump, is being vetted for a republican presidential run. It turns out to be a major leg pull, with everyone working him up to believe that he would win a candidacy. That is a vile joke no doubt and Trump must have gone through a similar experience or encountered the exact same level of derision trying to make it into politics. A narcissist like him does not take well to being disrespected, let alone bullied.

I think Musk and Trump are more alone than we would like to think, which would explain Musk’s cabal being consisted of twenty-something-year-olds. It would explain their unlikely alliance. It would explain their cantankerous unconstitutional undertaking that takes a circuitous route in an attempt to strike at the heart of the matter. The matter being, hopefully, to tuck at the thread of the quadrumvirate of power. One must not forget that Trump survived an assassination attempt and it is old wives’ tale at this point to question the official bulletins despite the questionable, statistically anomalous tragedies that struck down three prominent Kennedys in succession (John, Bobby, John-John) and mutilated another (Robert Jr.). But if someone like Trump even remotely suspects foul play or an inside job, then his radical approach at undoing or circumnavigating the existing order might start to make a bit more sense.

There is a great deal of American politicking embedded in a show whose main focus was supposed to be about international geopolitics: Madam Secretary. Foreign aid was a recurring theme. Intelligence was a low-key, dependable, ominous presence. Political maneuvering with and kowtowing to interwoven corporate interests became more prominently featured in later seasons. I must admit that re-watching it recently has underscored some negative points that had been glossed over during my initial introduction to the show, including Madam Secretary advocating for a swift transferring of $50 million dollar into a pocket of a Taliban terrorist as an outcome of a strategic decision, nepotism sticking out like a sore-thumb, and foreign aid being obfuscated and advertised as something it clearly is not. One finds it hard to believe that the show is not a state-funded propaganda. If the government funded Jackson Pollock back in the 1950-60s, they surely must have funded Jack Bauer for example. After all his legacy did find its way into the Supreme Court in an infamous hypothetical that had since elicited a snowclone of the Christian imperative: ‘What would Jack Bauer do?’

But I am one of the least politically informed persons and aside from reading Machiavelli and Paine for literary value in college (also some Hobbes and Arendt and a textbook on political philosophy I could scrounge off the university library) have got no special flairs for nor interests in politics. So take this as a tree fiddy. It would take a person with real psychological acumen and political insight buttressed by historical training to draw up a précis of the situation worth reading. However I have this much to say: the whippersnappers seem to have got the rein and the old fogeys are discombobulated. This can portend a meaningful change or forebode a structural calamity (gerontocracy is after all a scurrilous damnation). It so far does not look like political showmanship if one casts a holistic glance. I believe it was Karl Kraus who wrote that the ends are the means of forgetting the means. Hopefully it never comes to that.

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I have pointed out some time ago the interesting phenomenon of Thai businessmen’s venture into politics who have either revolutionised (former PM Thaksin Shinawatra the telecom magnet) or been hampered in their bid to revolutionise, or modernise, the country (Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit the automotive billionaire tycoon and Pita Limjaroenrat the millionaire CEO). These largely self-made men (a well-heeled beginning coupled with sheer intelligence and will-power) garnered a broad swell of popular support and upended traditional politics. The full pictures are of course too complicated and too inflamed by scandals and ire to unravel here. But in the main they are success stories engendering hope. It was Thaksin, the shrewd businessman, who nationalised healthcare, distributed wealth to provincial backwaters, and inspired grass-root activism. Thanathorn set the Western media abuzz. All of them ended up being ousted by the powers-that-be (nobility, military, and commerce). However no one here, in press or in passing, ever outright imputed to them without slender provocation the slanderous charge of money-eyed opportunism or greedy cronyism by mere virtue of their class, background, or association. Mudslinging and malignity are unprincipled and unenlightened, even as a counterpoise to gasbaggery and brinkmanship.

Hobsbawm has written as to the cause or catalyst of the French Revolution:

“War and debt — the American War and its debt — broke the back of the monarchy. The government’s crisis gave the aristocracy and the parlements their chance. They refused to pay without an extension of their privileges…”

And the consequence of which was the institution of the Third Estate:

“Since the peasants and labouring poor were illiterate, politically modest or immature and the process of election indirect, 610 men, mostly of this stamp, were elected to represent the Third Estate. Most were lawyers who played an important role in provincial France; about a hundred were capitalists and businessmen. The middle class had fought bitterly and successfully to win a representation as large as that of the nobility and clergy combined, a moderate ambition for a group officially representing 95 percent of the people.”

And on the British Industrial Revolution:

“.. The ‘Enlightenment’ .. drew its strength primarily from the evident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientific rationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. And its greatest champions were the economically most progressive classes, those most directly involved in the tangible advances of the time: the mercantile circles and economically enlightened landlords, financiers, scientifically-minded economic and social administrators, the educated middle class, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Such men hailed a Benjamin Franklin, working printer and journalist, inventor, entrepreneur, statesman and shrewd businessman, as the symbol of the active, self-made, reasoning citizen of the future“

My two cents, slightly reworked based on a fresh correspondence pertaining the upshot of the “borderline” psychiatric label — as having rectified the hermeneutical injustice (too lazy to re-write into a proper item):

Same with Schizoid which seems to not have been evidently associated with the “nature” aspect of upbringing but nevertheless not as insulting or controversial (whereas with Bipolar, Schizophrenia, or Sociopathy people suspect the “genetic” components.. although it makes equal sense for someone being raised in a household with mood disorder or paranoia to show the same patterns of behaviour – it would be quite unusual for them not to). 

But the concern still revolves around the built-in bias towards women as “borderline” and men as “sociopathic” (would be good if we can watch Soering vs Haysom on Netflix together because I think Haysom is a sociopath misdiagnosed as borderline, but does share “borderline” traits insofar as it was more acceptable for her as a woman, esp. in the 1980s: manipulation, risky behaviour, pathological lying, callous promiscuity, complete lack of empathy – including the fact that she is much more scheming and detached than emotional and impulsive, manipulates in a deliberate and systematic manner demonstrating long-term planning, displays no neurosis, no anxiety, no weak identity, and overall was in total control of the situations, so it was a bit baffling to me that the well-respected psychiatrist working with the Scotland Yard who diagnosed them both refused to say outright that she manipulated him as that would suggest a formidable and overpowering and careful agency that she could not have possessed, but that she was borderline and he was subjected to folie a deux – a curious fact-bending interpretation that to me seems asinine) or even simply owing to gender stereotypes not being labelled as a disorder at all, but simply e.g. leading a “rockstar” lifestyle, being a “gangbanger”, or a destructive bum and a violent druggie or a deranged roué or a hurtful philanderer, as not being on a spectrum but part of a repertoire of normalised social behaviours for men. With Schizoid, there is not much gender stereotype being involved. Histrionic is more often diagnosed in women of course (can men even be “attention-seeking” in the cultural understanding of the term)? It will seem less problematic if the psychiatrists start diagnosing more women as sociopathic and men as borderline. The issue isn’t so much the labelling itself (or the cataloguing of symptoms) but the subjective, gender-norm-influencing perception involved in this process of labelling (interpreting certain behaviours as symptoms/problematic). ADHD and Autism are vastly underdiagnosed in women as well. It would be easy to say on the former that this is simply due to women “masking” them, rather than them being women as understood by society i.e. “scatter-brained” or “incompetent.” Interestingly more and more women are being diagnosed as having ADHD and even Autism post-partum (‘never knew I had it my whole life until my shrink told me because I’m sensorily overstimulated, etc.’). But the whole post-partum genre is another topic entirely and problematic in itself.

While I don’t condone the usage of this inherently biased label, a certain risible fictional character, the alleged feminist icon of the last fin de siècle in quite a clever and saucy third-wave social satire, does warrant a perfunctory cussing and a red-hot expletive tending in that particular direction. Good grief tricenarians and beyond. You embarrass me. There is no place for glamorising the twisted and exploitative situationship between a predatory sociopath (Mr. Big) and a mentally unstable borderline (Carrie Bradshaw). There I said it. I don’t condone it. I can stomach the nauseating juvenile skits revolving around an emotionally stunted celebutante and her failed romantic overtures which made me want to self-enucleate, but not ones which normalise clear behavioural pathology and demonstrate a lack of genuine good sense (whereas our modern male anti-heros who are much beloved possess redeeming qualities, for which they are endeared or at least tolerated, however few). I happily pulled the cord when the mise-en-scène was crafted in a shifty way as to forebode an intent to breach that trust of fidelity, rectitude, and decorum that would have condoned or excused or justified wrecking the lives of others in needy pursuit of nonchalant self-absorption or malicious narcissism. One indeed feels a certain malignancy, a lurking infestation of cynicism and callousness that aims to demoralise the viewers. Every routine is an attempt at sounding the depth of emptiness, as if the writers, though spinning fabulous yarns, vicariously recreate a lived simulacrum of their own lives, being hollow at heart that nothing matters and being muddled in the head that nothing makes sense. This type of performance is at its core absurdist hyperrealism disguised as profundity. It lacks more than intelligence — it lacks sense and conviction as well as heart and humanity. This coming from someone who detests feel-good movies and whose list of notables overwhelmingly features a very harrowing ending e.g. The Divide (2011), Blue Jasmine (2013), Up in the Air (2009), 3:10 To Yuma (2007), Cube Trilogy (1997 – 2004).

Note: here is an interesting nail to gnaw on and possibly hammer in: the so-called low-functioning psychopaths that inhabit the dingy cells of state prisons in marked opposition to the high-functioning psychopaths that hobnob in federal prisons: how many of the former are actually misdiagnosed male borderlines?

It began when I was slithering down one of the Sukhumvit streets on the rare pained occasion that an out-of-doors sojourn to any place at all is less of a tedium than what the paradisiacal inner world, well-curated and well-crafted, has to offer — the svelte and tenuous world of different registers and flavours, of diverse undertones and overtones, of tenors and strains, of wits and wisecracks, of whims and whams, of gustoes and pathos, of thoughts and themes that irrevocably bind one to the ethereal and the historical and the threads athirst to bridge them. But the miserly world of the senses, of the mere sluice of sensory experiences — without any intellectual content or logical coherence or aesthetic unity — is, to many, supposed to inspire a sort of vivacity, electrify an amperage, or douse astir those dullards and deadheads without any inscape, being two-part bland and three-part blech.

Alas, I am periodically exposed to the elements and a happy felicity has re-introduced a familiar tune to my ears. A jazzy saxophone rendition of a contemporary Thai ballad, an old record released during my early years of youth, and as such, had a reminiscent stronghold on me. It is not an august tune, nor is it a spell-binding one. Extremely poor in influences, its tendency merely rounds out the extent of its potentiality afforded by the limited mediums and expedients. One happily evinces neither a start nor a sursaut at the hearing of it. No wrenching in the heart nor whirling in the head. A simple linear progression through a passage of varying pitches.

But atop the trusses and the columns are, if one is blessed with enough acuity and fortune to witness, a perched pediment, a crowning capstone, a vestal spire. There is a saying in German, regarding a certain hygienic and aesthetic practice common among men, that a tree without the surrounding copses is well-disposed to appear more estimable i.e. more towering than its veritable height. The opposite is true for a height of a remarkable presence — one tails off more favourably amidst the frigidity and foppery of the poppy stumps. The more flagging the outlying undergrowth, the less bounteous the land, the more staggering the sight. What would sufficiently explain the seminal growth, the outsized canopy, the fructifying frondescence, in an expanse where others do not grow beyond the height of a stubble? What is the alchemy, a legerdemain even, that fuses and enkindles in a barely tepid cauldron a grandee beyond its kith and kin?

The auteur of the original composition turns out to be such a grandee: a Thai musical prodigy. A Thai prodigy, you clamour? What an oxymoron! A barefaced putrefying verisimilitude! A country that venerates jackboots and thundercunts, that slavers at pissants and pinchbecks, that prostates at the behest of worthless old maids and senescent dotards, a country whose hatred and envy towards their children, nay towards their fellow human beings, could scorch the earth twice over — how could such a self-defeating, self-hating, self-immolating nation ever produce a genius of any standing?

How could such a scurvy excuse of a culture — for vainglorious culture requires commensurate pretense, however slight, to some form of moral edification or spiritual purification; a culture which desires, demands and relishes no more and no less than the total and thorough destruction of those under its aegis to whom its existence is beholden; a culture which commits, celebrates and consecrates in blazing offense a universal malefaction against an amour propre of any and all statures, in each and every of its stations, with a malevolence that is its plinth, with a malediction that would be summoned with a stinky, milk-lipped scowl under the staid veil of hoary wisdom — produce a single fecund head of illimitable and formidable greatness? How could such folks, bereft of an inner patois or a mediated outpour characteristic of an enlightened culture, amount to anything beyond the impulse-bound, muck-bemired, tear-bedewed scatological-suds that is their lives? What would they know of a genuine actuation towards the higher and nobler world of mental summits? Of joyous revelry, fervid enthusiasm and intellectual ecstasy? Of the most cheerful wisdom and the principled achievement of the highest order?

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Epilogue

‘The Roaring Twenties,’ both Twenties — a fated dalliance, a renascent rebirth of that bygone decade which symbolises freedom, prosperity, creativity, culture and progress — has filled my mind with hopeful longing, not in the least evoking a fanciful allusion to the possibility of the third unheralded era: my Twenties. Indeed what a marvelous decade! Marvelous in (spite of) all its trances and turmoils, all its trials and trepidations, all its thralldom and triviality and temerity.

Who could ever foretell that I, the least copacetic and most captious of all, would one day slough the swarthy sheen for the sanguine shine? That I would, with all my wits about me, choose to luxuriate in the lambent lights and lofty aspirations of the yonder future? Upon witnessing the divine fervour of bravura extraordinaire…

I used to have a “music” section in my old college blog, a platform which catapulted and centred as a frontispiece my love for reading and writing, a hodgepodge of finds and discoveries that one must eventually ebb out of, being a juvenile coming-of-age ledger during the beginning of one’s intellectual journey, a measly-mouthed fledging composing monodies and monologues from a papoose. The prose itself was a hard sell, being on the cusp of that nescient time where one’s English tongue still flopped uselessly in the mouth.

There was, indeed, nothing like the unleavened cants and the harrowing consternations of youth — one felt most keenly, acted most cowardly, and quibbled most prosaically. Take, for instance, an inconsequential quippage referring to one Guardian article:

What’s that quotation by Matthew Arnold on this stupendous sort of foolish liberalism? A state of moral indifference without intellectual ardour?

Let’s not do anodyne politics here, people. You know, the stock argument, the dizzy look of profound ignorance and misguided unconscientious outrage, of course, or all would be amiss. Just… No. Hirsi Ali deserves better than this.

Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “This is the New Low”

Or even more culturally involved, in response to https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain:

[…]

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic: jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick on the heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.

[…]

Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”

Some interesting insights I almost made a concession or two. But some people do believe that feelings need not have the last words; that the way one’s mind spins it determines their person. The author seems fretfully indignant that some of these are female. Is the notion of “post-woundedness” then another ingenious, evolved form of modern sexism?

A legitimate question:

How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative? Fetishize: to be excessively or irrationally devoted to. Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself.

Especially that psychical projection a commonplace phenomenon, wherein this narrative (“female pain”) stands in as a readily available venue for the apprehension, realisation and assimilation of repressed inner experiences, as one of the ego’s integrative activities, or even a form of wish-fulfillment.

The possibility of an ideal solution perhaps lies here:

There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain—​a self that grows larger than its scars without disowning them, that is neither wound-​dwelling nor jaded, that is actually healing.

Although the post-wounded conditions seem almost necessary an aid and a context to get there (because the self isn’t merely the pain, the product of pain or the receptor for pain, it, as an agency, reacts and interacts with pain and one agency, if one is to accept such thing as individual differences, is different from another), and as a journey, if I may, more interesting, more dynamic, more faceted, more exploratory […]

We’ve got a Janus-​faced relationship to female pain. We’re attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we’ve developed a post-​wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon—melodrama, triviality, wallowing—​and an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don’t valorize suffering women.

Though the author and I might diverge on value-systems and ideal modalities of fundamental human experience, this manifesto proves nonetheless a worthy and entertaining read […] However, let this universal ethical and aesthetic commandment be stated unequivocally, without censure or a chide: Don’t valorise suffering women; jolt them, with a scorching iron if need be.

Sylvia Plath needed not have a miscarried child, Tina Turner needed no bloodied nose, and no woman needed social affirmation to any form of emotional or physical jarrings to an extent which might override her vehicle for critical faculties—​a cut or a clout, metaphorical or not, never brings much pain, only a sharp pang of disappointment or a stunning shock of disbeliefs; a continual hacking and a prolonged clobbering might.

Personal history does consist in cyclical repetitions and some measure of psychopathological predispositions, especially in a sphere where sentiments reign, self-identity mired, and self-worth hazarded. It is wise indeed to be wary of the unconscious and what in or of ourselves we can’t fully grasp or control. Quell the instinctually or habitually destructive; never endorse it, never fertilise its hotbed of cultural sympathies, in other words, don’t normalise. If women are the historically wounded, then the answer might just be that we rectify it.

Salisa, published in Nov 2017, “What is ‘Female Pain’?”

Or the most politically vogue, on the topic of ‘Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject‘:

My standard of judgement is this—insofar as the work of art expresses sympathy and acknowledges reality of the subject in question, then its aesthetic depiction should be allowed. The painting, Open Casket (2016), of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy who was lynched in a horrific incident of hate crime fails the test on the ground that the illustration doesn’t retain the elements of cruelty, inhumanity and grotesque realism which affected the victim who was real and deserving of our commiseration as any victim who had their human person dismantled due to indiscriminate hatred against their race, ethnicity or gender. In other words, the problem of romanticisation stands parallel to the contrivance of art as recreation. Insensitivity is expressed when the subject’s personal calamity (especially one with historical significance) is taken as a subject of personal amusement, entertainment or leisure.

I have no scruples with the question of ‘appropriation’—the artist’s identity should in no way affect the judgement of his or her work. It doesn’t matter whether the artist is black or white or hispanic; what is problematic is that the work lacks social and cultural awareness as to transmute a heinous and gruesome act into an object of aesthetic indulgence—for your viewing pleasure. If the painting, say, tones down its artistic embellishment or distortion—not necessarily that such creation is always plausible—but if it is rendered possible, then the defilement via an act of painting is to be judged on the same basis as an act of photographing. Romanticisation—almost contextually synonymous with trivialisation—does, indeed, limit the range of subjects of depiction for an artist. And let us not forget that a claim to collective—or “objective”—reality through self-expression (or under the guise of), not only engenders psychological harm to the families and communities of the victim—a matter of past atrocities—it expresses a certain set of judgements and sentiments which has further implications on individual realities through future atrocities which may be committed—in whichever form or scale, however subtle or slight—a matter of future repercussions.

An interesting point is then raised, onto the problem of realism as realistic as its actual subject—The Minneapolis Scaffold of Sam Durant. Does the erection of this sculpture express insensitivity towards the Native American community? “Who am I to judge what is or is not sensitive?” if I may pre-empt the question sure to be put forward. The greater purpose for platform of discussions is to sway, incite and alter. It is not reductive to recast the question in the form of “Who am I to have an opinion on the topic of which my status renders me an ineffective judge?” It perhaps is not far from the truth that even the totality of my experiences affords no sufficient understanding and empathy towards the issue at hand and the individuals affected by it. While an interpretation of realities is highly fluid, and in this particular context, historical and cultural—of which this acknowledgement conveys my grievous attitude towards publicising one—it is weighted enough, in comparison to the concern raised, as to warrant my speaking of it; not to mention that it is thought-provoking by itself. Sensitivity is a slant and ought to be judged according to its contextual position—with its historical, cultural, social and individual components considered altogether.

A question is posed, “Is realistic depiction of a victim, an event, or other invocation of past injustice—which no reasonable individual would equate it with condonation—an affirmation in a way resulting in the continuity and propagation of pernicious attitudes or is it contrariwise a denouncement?” The answer seems to be neither. A neutral observance—neutral in the case of this actual scaffold and cannot be exemplified with a better example—merely states a past happening uncoloured by any sentiments or prejudices. This observance, it can be said, embodies the prejudices, the hatred, and the inhumanity as to inflict openly a symbolic violence upon the living and future generations of those suffered. Perhaps this is true, but without a solid confirmation by the consensus of the community, by individuals of whom the issue directly concerned, the reaction appears a mere moral masturbation—a touchstone applicable equally well for non-neutral observance, in whatever sense of the term. It is impossible to gauge how a perspective may be taken towards the recount of past experience—however damnable it may be—especially with the passage of time altering its cultural bearing. But it must be argued that the creation of impartial art—if such a term may be permitted for use—should never suffer an aspersion the same way a history book is exempted from it. Realism is good. Realism is unfettered in its elements of realness and the entrusting of naked realism to mankind is a consecration of the individualism of moral judgement and conscience.

Salisa, published in Sep 2017, “On Art Depicting A Racially Or Culturally Sensitive Subject (Art As Artistic Narration Only)”

Of all the hammy nonsense I have arrogated, this one trounces most victoriously. I redact some of the content of the post, a long laborious sustenuto that started off as a footnote to an unrelated item of feuilleton which began:

The one-hour presentation I delivered on Quantum Gravity, and its necessary preparation, as a requisite for my Astronomy course was undertaken via self-directed personal-cramming […]

But to give a sample flavour:

[On Quantum Field Theory]… But if I were to have to naively outline two main approaches to understanding the lack of successful contemporary resolution to the problem (and I’ll take this opportunity to entertain both interpretations with equal respect), one would be to understand gravity as an emergent phenomenon and the other, to understand classical gravitation under General Relativity as an effective field theory (which doesn’t necessarily dismiss the possible inspection of gravity and its effect approaching the Planck scale). Gravity as emergent can be interpreted in the following way:

After all, the description of an ideal gas in terms of a large number of molecules moving at random, by Boltzmann, cannot be pursued further to actually reveal the atomic physics of the molecule. The fact that the thermodynamic description is independent of the microscopic details cuts both ways. It allows you to formulate the theory without worrying about the detailed microstructure but at the same time, refuses to reveal anything about the microscopic structure.

Thanu Padmanabhan, Quantum Themes

That is, in simplification, to view gravity as an elasticity of space-time, the same way elasticity arises out of tangible physicality of material. The elastic behaviour of an iron rod or the thermal property of an ideal gas is independent of their internal structure at the infinitesimal scale, or in the understanding of physics, the equations describing their microscopic compositions (the ideal gas law PV = nRT or PV = NKbT applies to both Helium and Argon, though their atomic arrangements are nothing alike). It is a large-scale phenomenon, so to say, and while gravity does bend light (which, under the Newtonian model, was a striking anomaly given that gravity is understood to act exclusively on particles or objects with a non-zero mass while light consists of massless photons), it is interesting to ask whether gravity acts on “individual photons” (though allow me to tag a question mark on this doubly-quoted entity). However, if one were to evoke Einstein’s model of gravitation—gravity as a distortion of space-time—we perhaps would do away with this notion of “acting on” entirely; light travels in a straight line but our new concept of space-time postulates that this straight line be the world-line, rendering the question of direct action of gravity upon matter as obsolete and possibly ill-conceived (matter, energy or any component associated with the stress-energy tensor distorts space-time, which in turn, imposes on matter and its nearby).

I’d like to make a different conclusion from Padmanabhan though, that this premise, if one were to accept as principal, not “refuses to reveal” but has nothing to reveal. It is not meaningful to imply that there exists such interconnectedness when there is none just as it is not meaningful to speak of an entity (“entity” in physics seems to me an equivocation) of which no direct or indirect consequence of it having existed can be observed […]

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This emergence approach would preserve the classicality of gravitation. The approach which sees General Relativity as an effective theory would overturn the authority of Einstein’s formulations (effective means it is not fundamental, works within certain limits or scales, or describes an effect without attributing to a direct cause) and posit a new set of tools, perhaps a revised unit of basic building blocks or a new way of constructing and understanding relations, interactions and effects which are considered more underlying. General Relativity, if one were to disregard the quantum world as more primary or fundamental, held contradictory assumptions with Quantum Mechanics from the outset, in that the measurements of physical quantities—momentum, pressure, energy—are not probabilistic in nature (the components of the stress-energy tensor in Einstein’s field equation, which determine the curvature of space-time, have definite numerical values); it is a classical theory and as such, creates a conceptual problem when one tries to incorporate it with quantum formulations. However, the failure to integrate gravitation with Quantum Field Theory to produce another canonised perturbative theory is of a technical and mathematical nature, not a conceptual or philosophical one, that is, it produces nonsensical value—infinity for physical quantities—under the procedure of renormalisation; a process required in a quantisation of field.

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The failure to re-normalise, if one is acquainted to a degree with the history or development concerning QFT, also beset weak force when it first underwent the conventional field quantisation. Fermi’s theory of beta decay, an early formulation of weak interaction, was non-renormalisable. The higher order of approximation in perturbative calculation led to the same foundering that gravity has encountered, the divergences at high energies. Its successor, a gauge theory of electro-weak interaction (a quantum mediator of W boson was inserted in between the point of exchange, followed by some appropriate structural modifications to preserve gauge invariance and conservation of electric charge), which modelled after QED and subsequently incorporated it, provided a quantum picture of weak dynamics which then became re-normalisable. An analogy could be made between Fermi’s model of beta decay and Einstein’s model of gravitation; they are not considered rudimentary, and a more complete and rudimentary formulation is needed to bring about this successful transformation under QFT. How much is preserved of Einstein’s formulation is left to the arbitration of different approaches which seek to quantise gravitational field. I know not much of these approaches (while my presentation was titled Theories of Quantum Gravity, forty minutes were spent elucidating contexts and backgrounds starting from Relativity, and only some few last slides touched on major candidate theories—String Theory and Loop Quantum Gravity—which, due to time constraints of my research and reading, ended up mere general descriptions of their methodology; as procured hastily from journalistic layman’s articles).

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This AdS/CFT correspondence seems to be an emerging new concept in high energy physics which I consider, as of the present, to be too advanced for my taste (assumptions are not axioms; axioms, especially in a theoretically rigorous field like this, are not accepted facts). Einstein wrote, quite reasonably:

Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.

It ends with:

Modern theoretical science has benefitted greatly from intellectual pedagogy of German Rationalism—exemplified in Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein himself. But he perhaps did not foresee the rise of such unenlightening tangle that is the contemporary speculation of impetuous nature, invoking though meekly, what philosophy called, the demarcation problem. Are there any other empirical tests for Grand Unified Theory, aside from proton decay and fermion masses? How is one to interpret the proliferation of variants of String Theories? Quantum Gravity itself lacks an expedient model used to test its validity, owing perhaps to the lack of workable invention specifying its constituents (With these practical limitations, what are we to look for? Or equally, without these practical limitations, what are we to look for?..). How much of modern particle physics falls into the domain of falsifiability? How shall we appraise this over reliance of the use of mathematics in a sphere highly specialised, highly rarefied, highly assumptive, even if their corresponding contexts are invoked in the manoeuvring of symbols and the establishing of relations? Such metaphysics in the realm of science seems to be embodied in String Theory, or perhaps any attempt to force into mould a unifying principle indiscriminate of contexts, scales, or limits.

Lastly, a general reminder, from Godel’s Proof:

… it became evident that mathematics is simply the discipline par excellence that draws the conclusions logically implied by any given set of axioms or postulates. In fact, it came to be acknowledged that the validity of a mathematical inference in no sense depends upon any special meaning that may be associated with the terms or expressions contained in the postulates. Mathematics was thus recognised to be much more abstract and formal than had been traditionally supposed: more abstract, because mathematical statements can be construed in principle to be about anything whatsoever rather than about some inherently circumscribed set of objects or traits of objects; and more formal, because the validity of mathematical demonstrations is grounded in the structure of statements, rather than in the nature of a particular subject matter. The postulates of any branch of demonstrative mathematics are not inherently about space, quantity, apples, angles, or budgets; and any special meaning that may be associated with the terms (or “descriptive predicates”) in the postulates plays no essential role in the process of deriving theorems. We repeat that the sole question confronting the pure mathematician (as distinct from the scientist who employs mathematics in investigating a special subject matter) is not whether the postulates assumed or the conclusions deduced from them are true, but whether the alleged conclusions are in fact the necessary logical consequences of the initial assumptions.

Is the subset of theoretical physics in predominance scientists employing mathematics or mathematicians employing science? The difference seems to lie in the degree to which empirical verification takes precedence in justifying a postulate or in surmising a hypothesis, in discerning a set of assumptions from a set of scientific facts, in taking caution incorporating foreign axioms or mathematical formulations, in investigating the nature and the integrity of assumptions, statements, relations, integrations, inferences, directly or indirectly, employed. And as a scientist-non-scientist distinction in general, in sustaining sufficient reservation towards analogous reasoning as a means of knowledge-production, in understanding the actual nature of pictorial representation of concepts, in exercising critical judgement towards any set of formulations one might encounter or any set of evidence purported to corroborate them, in acquiring an understanding utilising a top-down approach rather than bottom-up, in keeping in mind the big picture, in building a conceptual edifice, in being able to reason and justify a hoard of steps one has taken in their accumulation of knowledge, in philosophising, in being exhaustive and exhausting, that is, sapere aude!

[1] Being conversant with a history or philosophy of science, or at the very least of their own field, rescues one from being a votary of science or what Schiller called, in his phenomenal inaugural lecture, “a bread-fed scholar.” Although academe is largely an economic apparatus with a clear established hierarchy and authority governing appointments, nominations and publications, what shall be expected of “truth” in such place? “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat” has not only held good in all times, but in all places it seems.

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[2] On second thought, no mathematics or logic should have a final say on what we are or are not capable of excelling (computational system and nature are markedly different; we can’t fully grasp the latter, and the laws we ascribe to them are always a post hoc description of observational occurrences). The limitation of any aspect of nature is what we ought to verify not reckon by means of human reasoning. For instance, Special Relativity posits that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, but our universe does, for one, expand faster than the speed of light (another thing to note of this commonly misinterpreted deduction: simply that human can’t will it, in no way, suggests that nature can’t). So take my suggestion above as a mere parallelism drawn to illuminate the meaning of my assertion.

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Salisa, published in Dec 2017, “What Is This Turning Into?”

In fact, I have worked up, back in the days, quite a roster of scientific ideas in de rigueur garbs against which I would wager: quantum computer and its whole charade, Higgs boson, black hole, some or most of astrology including but not limited to the big bang theory and the expansion of the universe, any non-probabilistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Pardon my blasé naiveté; I profess my alliance with Popper as laid out in his obscure paper edited by Mario Bunge, “Quantum Mechanics Without the Observer,” one of the most brilliant of its kind). It is difficult indeed when one deals with a dunghill of experimental artifacts. But these are the shiny trinkets of youth — trifles with which one disports and dallies oneself during the deadening bouts of boredom or ennui.

Re-reading https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/08/14/darwinian-fundamentalism-an-exchange/ (an endnote for my essay a causerie ago):

This electronic “flame” begins: “At the risk of sounding grandiose, I hereby declare myself to be involved in a bitter feud with no less a personage than Stephen Jay Gould. It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his book Wonderful Life…. Gould, alas, has paid me no mind…. Savvy alpha male that he is, he refrained from getting into a gutter brawl with a scrawny marginal primate such as myself.”

Go in peace, Mr. Wright. You may declare all you want, but fighting is like the tango, and I decline. You too, Dan Dennett. I wish you no ill, and I’m sorry if I offended you both by not paying enough attention to your work—the only common theme, in the absence of any intellectual response, in their replies printed above. But as T.H. Huxley said of Richard Owen, in a parody of Dryden’s line about Alexander the Great refighting all his battles during a drunken monologue—“And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain”—life is just too short for occupying oneself with the slaying of the slain more than twice.

SJ Gould, 1997

Glenn Gould (pilfered from my old albeit embarrassing and to-be-defuncted “electronik Diary unto which…“):

The problem begins when one forgets the artificiality of it all, when one neglects to pay homage to those designations that to our minds – to our reflex senses, perhaps – make of music an analyzable commodity. The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the function of human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system – then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system.

G Gould, 1964

And N Gould D:

Although I cannot draw or paint, when I write I feel pictures intensely within. Arguments have shapes, forms, lines, tensions, structural qualities. When they aren’t right they are ugly and clumsy and don’t fit. But when they are…ah, they look and feel sublime in the mind’s eye of a waking dream. They have immaculate strength and beauty, are formidable and enduring, an architecture of the intellect.

Right now I have a half-formed landscape with rubble strewn around it… will take some struggle, beautiful agony of devotion, to build it so it soars.

N Gould D, 2018

The Goulds are verily magnificent creatures, especially the last, whom I called “Sebastian” after Johannes Sebastian Bach, for whom my greatest love is reserved.