Salisa lohavittayavikant

I have decided to begin publishing the selections of my college essays seriatim, a personal experiment in writing in second language perhaps as I had been at the end of the tether with my first: a medium through which thoughts are confined to the concreta and the sensory, the prosaic and the mundane, through which things are yapped about rather profusely but not much said (see also: language speed and information density), where feelings replace sentiments, and emotions reality, words manners, slapstick subtlety, self-equilibrium truth, and order justice — a language to which its highest and primary, if not its only, but ineffective, purpose is to assay at resolving and maintaining tension and affinity by way of equilibrating individuals in their own meagre selves and in relation to even more meagre others.

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Here is my list:

1. Singling Out Darwin (Biology 101, Nov 2018)

Link: https://salisa-lohavittayavikant.com/2023/03/30/college-essay-seriatim-1-singling-out-darwin/

A personal commentary on one BBC editorial as the end-of-the-term essay. I could no longer find the aforementioned article on the web, but it surely contains the sentence: “Every single person who died before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 was ignorant of humanity’s origins, because they knew nothing of evolution.” It was not presented as a misguided or begrudged opinion piece that the publisher voluntarily lets astray in order to boast of their liberality and intellectual diversity, but came out officially as a kind of eulogic fascicle in their yearly annals of science worship, which prompted this pillory of mine.

Around a year or two later after I composed this assignment, I summarised my then thought in a correspondence which could be taken as a brief sketch of what I attempted to say but ended up opining with a needless sprinkle of citations:



I believe there is a strand of thought that posits that since the ascendency of science in roughly the eighteenth century, especially in the intellectual sphere, nature and science have splintered off from one another. Scientific materialism, an epistemology which views nature as consisting of mere matter, aids in the devaluation and destruction of the natural world, that full of living and dynamic processes and entities is now thoroughly exploited and colonised for the most inane human activities and consumptions. And how remarkable the intelligence inherent in lower forms of life! Octopuses are increasingly known for its cognitive intelligence and ant colony has its own complex social division and organisation. Equally tiny brains such wasps display what recent researchers believe to be a skill in logical reasoning. I am not quite convinced that such complexity of life and cognition emerges from mere Darwinian natural selection, which amounts to survival from a pool of divers genetic variations. There is such thing as an intelligent design. How such things are I am reduced to or rather stupefied into immediate silence

I agree with you that evolution is less a theory in the sense in which the term is often used. It is indeed a hypothesis. In my view, the theory of evolution is an old chestnut established to glorify the triumph of scientific paradigm over and above its oppositions, which without a latitude of thought one would seek to include only religious fervent and superstitious shamanism. I believe there is a more nuanced and logical view, perhaps with a small vitalist tint, that can satisfactorily explain the evolution of life and its diversity compared to the one offered by darwinism. In the same manner and spirit as you I believe, I did out of indignation and grievance decide to take down a notch what I deemed to be supercilious thinking in the sphere of science, which in that particular occasion was a veneration of the said scientific idea in vogue. It was however not in the form of a verbal confrontation but a written essay in my biology class which sought to dispel the myth that the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species suddenly heralded the age of enlightenment and the certainty of scientific truths. His theory of natural selection still remained a controversial doctrine at the closing of the century and it had been rejected and questioned on various grounds by scholars of the period. 



2. TBD

3. TBD

“Has it not always been beneath our attention, a genuine waste of time and mental resources, to pen about a culture so grim and distasteful — about morally worthless people, mentally rudimentary, emotionally undeveloped, intellectually challenged, psychologically non-existent?”

“Why such a vindictive spirit passing undue judgement without proportions! Surely the wide-sweeping judgement a misuse of that thinking faculty which ought to be nuanced or precise if not grounded or truthful in its application and enterprise?”

“You mean to elevate the highly materialistic, the unimaginative, unintellectual, unspiritual, incurious; those without wide generosity or deep sympathy or, God forbids, without heightened thoughts and emotions? The “pig satisfied”, the exceptionally mediocre, inconsequential, insecure dunces squawking raucously at one another?”

“I point specifically to those incapable of thinking or acting logically and ethically: the abusive browbeating fetid filth of wasteful space; the screaming bullying psychotic hag at one’s place of employment; the low-minded, intolerant, unsophisticated, emotionally dysregulated infant who wishes to be revered based solely on some random number extrinsic to their person and quality and circumstance.”

“Ah, so you mean the poor inconsequential soul who banks their entire moral worth on their inborn characteristic like some feudal ignoblesse⁠ imbecile? The “random number extrinsic to their person and quality and circumstance” — that insipid vacuous yardstick which slots them as above or below others for which subsequent maintenance of illusion is precarious and perennial and only by dint of denigrating others below their ‘caste’ (a mass psychotic idea to be defended by those that are in great measure obtuse).”

“Indeed, that is what makes them poor and inconsequential; it is a haphazard two-barreled act of mercy and damnation: a quality of having no qualities; a quality in substitute of actual qualities; a quality as an excuse, as an avoidance, as an aversion from assaying some actual notable qualities; a quality that in the tragic end negates its own existence: an in-quality that diminishes its bearers to such an extent that they need to, in turn, diminish others in order to feel good about themselves, or to feel themselves at all.”

“I too attest to that and like you bear witness to an obscene system which paramount to its continuance is a covert practice of diminishment and denigration, of intimidation and inequity, of self-immolation and self-entombment. What was it that you had penned in the past: Let them be blinded by the multitudes of brute stupidities .. Let them do to themselves what they do to us! Let them dehumanise! (Salisa, 2016).”

“I did! How flattering that someone can conjure that watchword of mine when I was only a fledgling who had too much feeling and too much sense and not much else. I believe that is originally a Conradian idea by the by. Horror! Horror!”

“Horrid! Horrid! will be your most prominent exclamation perhaps.”

“This may surprise you but I do not provision my attention towards those blinkered bunch evidently below my stature, let alone being affected by their obnoxious presence unless obliged by a labour contract. I may be bourgeois in that sense but I am uniquely above them — the blinkered bunch — bereft of a sociological imagination (their outbound attention and awareness stop short of borders, if ever beyond themselves) and verily without deeper cognizance (their inward perception and enrichment stop short at the epigastric region). Neither am I in want of that quintessential characteristic one would bequeath to a zoological inferior: the inability to differentiate between themselves, their emotions and their acts and the constancy and predicament with which they would correspond in a manner so predictable and elementary and melodramatic. I am of course haranguing about what to me is one of the greatest achievements of my life: a developed psyche, an actualised self, an intellectual center or a moral compass on which a person builds and expands upon the greater they age. Unlike those critters that are mere processing plants of victuals outputting sewage.”

“So many words! Any last utterance?”

“What you take to be the basis of your faux superiority is a delusion as pitiful and farcical as a congenitally deaf man imagining he could hear Bach: bastardising and bandying words as if one is linguistically challenged — out of depth, out of mind, a stock clown to me.”

“But darling, certainly that shabby-genteel demographic is unstintingly benevolent in their wholly rendered munificence?”

“Based on your learned observation, experience, and reading of history and of men, for surely no man’s judgement on society is sound without an intelligent grasp on the rudiments of human psychology, what do you reckon, with your intuitive probe, will succeed as the monstrous machinations of this century and beyond?”

“A tiddler you are and to speak with such pomp and pessimism of the world you know so little about.”

“Experience is overrated, my dear. Worse, it coarsens men’s sensibilities, and in some tragic case, at one vicious stroke.”

“You doomsayer and scaremonger – insensate, fanatical, gormless – with no appreciation for what mankind has hitherto achieved. Always scouring for the indicia of moral, political, and intellectual declensions to your heart’s content.”

“Isn’t it true that some men see all humanity’s woes by harking back to the past and others by glimpsing askance at the future? There is no sense bickering with the past and its ideals, for the world has moved on. Any counsel of moderation which you may kindly proffer – the “pragmatism” of piecemeal social engineering or meliorist politics – to what may appear to you as a poor little critter spelunking caves and catacombs, remember that we are facing the greatest existential challenge known to man perpetrated by none other than that generation of the world with decades of experience and ratiocination. So worldly, in fact, that they have developed high talents for absconding from their knavery, poltroonery, and chicanery with complete impunity.”

“You are speaking such vague, moralising nonsense, dear, and with such jaundice. Truly as if your generation is the least benighted of us all.”

“Nay, we are the most, which is why the harried remnants and vexations of their wholesale patrimony – those capricious contingencies of our predecessors now institutionalised and streamlined – will irrevocably, inexorably, inenarrably be catastrophic. The rubicon has been crossed. The future is, tout court, that of ‘a boot stamping on the human face – forever.’ A geyser of perorated nonsense you were quite keen about that. A quiddity of mine that surcease from mental labour is sometimes sought in the wild, venturesome flights of fancy – the recrudescence of that old habit of procrastination. Whatever happened to those days when I waxed indignant about baculum and my particular brand of misfortune indeed.”

— 28 Dec 2018

As I once opined, I’d rather read Henry Miller than read Proust. I actually like Miller, if not enamoured by him (I once used Miller’s life-affirming quote in one of the potpourris I wrote in college). What a wondrous writer! So misogynistic and whorish and brilliant he was canonical to the tee, quite risque to give you a palpable warmth, but not overt enough to rouse ickiness, and so elegant and surreal and compulsive. I feel ennobled reading him, save the passages where he pulled an Epstein and, well, raped a woman. It strikes me as honest and authentic, in his oblique and fanciful way. What Proust depicted was a man connivingly and covertly misogynistic and insecure and infantile, a quite emotional and irrational man, the fact veiled by his possession of a phallus. An educated and sophisticated man who fell for a woman without qualities (not of a Musilean stripe, mind you). He pulled a Professor Unrat, of a variant quite original it was comical (unlike Francine Prose’s adaptation, whose title reflected that of a 1930s film, itself an adaptation on Mann’s book). We could not see her for who she is through the lens of a paradoxically self-obsessed man who is not in love with himself as much as he is an airheaded coquettish woman of dubitable origin and station. She is Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson made interminably tedious and wretched, a distaste that would have been discernibly felt if the reader is not weighed down by, well, a phallus.

I remember the pseudonymous Palermo from La Casa de Papel airing how much he loves Proust amidst his marshalled hostages. Of course he does, and it is starting to make sense now. The person to whom I opined my hatred of Proust was actually my then partner, who was kind enough to reassure me that his mother did not like him either and that Proust was probably writing about a hopeless love interest of his, whom the scholars now believe to be an American by the name of Willie Heath. If so, I applaud Proust. Schadenfreude in conjunction with pity is one of the few reasons to write about anyone, or anything for that matter. Proust becomes readable again, by a happy fact that it was not the creation of a self-obsessed and entitled man who thought he could memorialise his own pitiable dalliance and get away with it.

A free verse composition for my college poetry class.

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O Man, Where’s Your Smarts?

Melded minds, welded visions, and hitched hearts!
The unity of two souls, O my, what a fart!
Spick and span then speck and spot
That swells and thickens
Into a pustule,
Into a blister,
Whence sprouts and spreads
A blister to blisters
A boil to carbuncles
A rough, blustery patch ruptures, O my, what spectacles!

Melded minds, welded visions, and hitched hearts!
The unity of two fools, O my, that’s a start!
A pastiche of pain and pleasure, of passion and folly
A yawning pit
A frozen limbo

Melded minds, welded visions, and hitched hearts!
What a giant crock! Of a deranged, delusional arse!
What a deuce of fancy! A disease of whimsies!
What Holy Grail and shameless mendacity!

***

— 14 Feb 2019