Flash Notes on John Berger's Ways of Seeing

Ways of seeing, a popular college text now, is perhaps one of the all time must read small books ( less than 200 pages). I revisited  it for a reference and ended up rereading the whole thing again . As fascinating as it is pioneering ( considering it was written in 1972, way back in capitalism's childhood, well before the capitalism grew up and cast it's powerful grip around the idea of human life).

Berger and co. essentially chart the history of visual imagery in art, from the era of oil painting to television, slowly peeling off layer after layer, teasing out the implicit messages and societal subtexts hidden within the images, and quite remarkably without preaching a communist manifesto in the process! There are 7 essays in total - four with words and images, and three just images. Berger and team take you through how art has been influenced by many variables in the society, from wealth and class to religion and sexuality; how their interplay produced art as we know it (the oil paintings, nudes and portraits of colonial Europe, in the middle ages) as well as how, now, we are compelled to consume it (capitalism - here Berger understandably moves into photography, Design and Advertising)

Berger is still alive and kicking, I remember he wrote a recent article for n+1 or Guernica recently. I would be really curious to know his views on modern-age consumerism as a culture. It would be just wonderful if he takes time out to write a sequel the Ways of Seeing- possibly  commenting on the new era capitalism - from designer handbags, high definition televisions to Tumblr reblogs and FB like buttons. Perhaps not on the idea of compulsive consumerism as such ( which has been already covered here)  but more on the consumers themselves as a cultural cohort.  The need for the consumerism and perhaps suggestions about alternatives?

If you haven't read The Ways of Seeing, you must -  pronto. If you can't  get hold of the book, you can find the parent BBC series on youtube. Here's a quick link,  I haven't checked all those uploads on youtube, so not sure if all of the episodes are available.

Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer

The book jacket identifies the Paris Trance as a romance. I suppose to a large extent it is indeed a romance. Geoff Dyer, who I am getting to scorningly, grudglingly admire ( more for the life he’s lead than his writing, which by no measure is any less admirable) is a writer of themes and images.

The stories of the two couples, on their own and together is developed well. The unique, perhaps even daring aspect of the book is the dedication to idleness. I’ve never come across a book where the characters mooch around as much as they do here. It’s almost as if the book itself had smoked a joint and entered a trance.

Dyer has indeed admitted that one of the two main purposes of the book was to capture this aimlessness (the aimlessness of the 20s to be specific , the other purpose - to capture the drifting away). Dyer does capture it well in wry, informed Dyereseque prose ; a typical Dyer sentence would essentially twist on its tail contradicting its meaning yet conveying a perfect sentiment. And it is for this self flagellating funplay, that one reads Dyer.  But as the book progresses the images and the themes that Dyer specializes in turn monotonous and well, excessive. Somewhere midway through the book I became slightly nonplussed and at pages even lost interest.

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Dyer is a core romantic in denial. All his works or rather the books that I've read so far are elaborate sublimation to wrap the romance in a deliberate, middle aged sort of wisdom, even cynicism. But at its heart they are all young wild at heart romances.

Agreed that Paris Trance is a romance and agreed it is Paris, but how often do you meet a woman studying Nietzsche in Paris who also fancies walking past the idle men playing street football everyday at lunch time?  She must be almost unrealistic right? This is where I find Dyer faltering in his fictions, in his conception of his fictions rather (he’s admitted he’s poor at plots).

Most of his characters save for the protagonist ( who are invariably versions of himself) lack the richness of what I would call ‘an original fiction writer’, say Zadie Smith. Often most of his women characters become versions of themselves. I couldn’t tell the difference between Nicole in Paris Trance  and Laura in Jeff in Venice… Dyer seems to fail to look beyond a set template that he seems to have for his women – they are always intelligent, funny, articulate, somewhat attracted to marginalised men, and they are invariably, good at quips!

For these reasons we don’t really know much about Nicole in the book. I mean her own internal mind, her perspective. For the most of the book she is invariably looked at from outside, while pages and chapters go on about Luke. In the story both Luke and Nicole seem equally purposeless and lacking any direction, which is what makes them a great couple, well couple in a first place.  But something’s got to give right? Of the two, Nicole seems more mainstream and integrated. She comes close to questioning Luke about his life once  - What does he want to do? gets a typical I'm living my happiness answer and drifts back into the trance again! I felt slightly disappointed that somehow Dyer leans towards Luke than Nicole, almost overlooking her if not ignoring. I would have loved if Nicole actually broke up with Luke than the other way around. She had reasons to, yet it seemed that Dyer was too preoccupied with Luke which left the ending, in my opinion, one-sided and somewhat confused. I am aware that Dyer was trying to portray the absurdity and the confusion of the breaking up, but again it can’t be absurd without it making no sense to both the parties involved. As far as I know, the separation made perfect sense to Luke and Nicole just went with it. It's symbolized in their parting scene where Luke makes Nicole walk away from him while he watches her leave, as though living a Noir scene of a movie he had memorized in Pariscope. She willfully complies!

Must say was slightly relieved to finish it. And quite aptly finished in travelling in Turkey in the meander river basin, the river that gave us the word meandering just what the book did in its latter half. 

As a plot and characterizations quite thin actually, not one of Dyer’s best, and slightly stretched, otherwise a good read, the usual Dyer positives apply, enjoyable in most parts. I loved some of the Parisian images the book evoked, Dyer's view of Englishness and the coffeeshop flags conversation. Even Dyer can’t convince me that the said conversation didn’t really happened in his life.

The Temple of Dawn: Mishima

From time to time, I like to come back to Japanese writing, mostly to float in its ethereal world as against walking the more defined (and often harsh) ground of European writing. Besides, there are times in life when Memento Mori needs to be refreshed , and to do this, Mishima's words are a good place to go to.
The Temple of Dawn is the third part of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy written by Mishima. It is well-known that he committed ritual suicide the day he finished the last book : The Decay of Angel, and hence the set of books are tinged with the after-effect of this event. The awareness of death seems all the more palpable because we know what is to follow, and hence the words appear to carry a prophetic & self-appraising weight.
I have not followed the tetralogy in sequence (I seldom follow order in books), I first read Spring Snow, part one, and have now skipped the second Runaway Horses to make way for the third. At the heart of the books is one person, fated to die young again and again, in different reincarnations. These reincarnations are witnessed by Honda, who sees the same soul in four different forms, and attempts to save each of them from these early deaths.
The Temple of Dawn is named after a celebrated temple Wat Arun (literally meaning Temple of Dawn) in Bangkok. It is in Bangkok that Honda meets the second reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, who is now born as a Thai Princess. The princess remembers her past lives, as she remembers knowing Honda in both these lives. It is a fantastic story, and could be written only by an Oriental. The Occidental will find it hard to transgress the boundary of births, or even suggest multiple lives.
From Thailand, Honda goes on a trip to India - he wants to visit Benares & Ajanta there, towns from a very distant past. On the way, he spends some time in Kolkata during Puja where the violent religiousness of the city intimidates him. His descriptions of that madness is evocative. This madness seems to be the theme of his entire Indian sojourn, as he meets a country which is physical, crowded, anarchical and turns him into an insomniac. He dearly misses his country and its peace, acutely feeling the Japanese discomfort of things foreign. The parts on India read like a perceptive travelogue - something a more religious/spiritual Chatwin could have written. I would like to return to these pages when I am finished with the book.

The part where I am now, is almost a second book in itself. As a war is going on from which he is dissociated due to his age, Honda finds time for extensive reading. He reads and reflects on various theories in Buddhism - on reincarnation particularly, and on the differences between Theravada Buddhism & Mahayana Buddhism on the subject. Needless to say, my pace has considerably slowed down in these pages because they are quite rich and dense.

Underground

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama. [7]

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum cult, released sarin poison gas in the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. The difference was that it was a nightmare unfolding, as if in real time, in the real world. He did what Gabriel García Márquez accomplished in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interview into a compelling narrative.

The narrative was divided into short sections, focusing on a single human being and his part in the gas attack. The first part, also titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story, the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of Aum cult members. I've yet to read the second part, but the first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism.

In the first part, Murakami allowed the victims to tell the story on their own. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current work, the itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway when they were exposed to sarin. For many of the victims, the attack had taken a toll on their lives. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. They are still burdened by the aftereffects of the sarin gas months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted snugly into Murakami's journalistic framework of conveying a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. Here it was told without fanfare, and yet there are many instances in the book where I had goosebumps. Whereas some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth is no less surreal, just like any surreal event that happens in life.

In its form and structure, Underground was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witness are asked in a kind of deposition to recount what really happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, of a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces of the two parts, in the introductory sections prefacing each victim's testimony, and in his summary essays at the end. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake and the unconvincing war scenes in Kafka on the Shore, this work of nonfiction probed the direct infliction of cruelty, a direct confrontation with madness.

Perhaps Murakami's accomplishment here was to communicate what it really felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. This he did with a generous amount of sympathy for the victims. In section after section, he interviewed a new face, someone with a new injury, a new perspective at what really transpired. It was a catalogue of grievances. The victims were repeating the terrorist act for the reader, over and over and over, as if drilling the same nail in the same hole.

What is the point of replaying the tragedy? What is the point of repeating for the reader the same thing in different ways? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent or graspable?

One is struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who had to talk and listen to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

It did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. In the act of reading, it was as if the potent smell of the sarin gas was coming into life. The stories relived the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet the collective stories were pointing to something more arresting. We are not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We are reading about many tragedies, many nightmares, and many hells.

Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a world of "overwhelming violence" (his description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent earthquake and tsunami event in March and the resulting nuclear accidents). It is an uncertain world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world literally darkening in front of you.

This is probably the finest book by Haruki Murakami that I've read. The ten works of fiction I've sampled had their brilliant moments, but they were a mixed bunch. One had the feeling that he was born to tell this story of terrorism.

Reading Dyer and Batuman ....

I am flitting between two totally different writers, who, if not overtly, by measure of the emotions evoked are very similar; I don’t know if it’s just me but reading the sober, whimsy tongue-in-cheek Geoff Dyer ( Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it..) alternately with the energetic, airy, delightful Elif Batuman ( The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them) is a party of epic proportions.

In cinematic terms it’s like watching alternating shots by Wes Anderson and Terrence Malick add up into a perfect narrative montage. Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it… is about Dyer’s travel-pieces ( that’s the best word I could come up for the chapters of  his book) and The Possessed is a chronicle of Batuman’s experiences of studying Russian Literature and all sorts of people she meets in the process; While Elif sends you on silents spasms of chuckles, Geoff makes you hold them, turn them into a reverie and float in them for a while relating your own travel experiences to his before you let it all go in an audible sigh or even an utter, that startles cab drivers! I am alternating the essays from the books and it’s just wonderful. If you are not too caught up see if you can try the combination, you will surely not regret it.

Here's a shot of the index of Yoga for people.....what Kindle can't offer :)

More soon 

Third Class in Indian Railways

Gandhi was forty five when he returned to India - the land he had left as a teenager, the land that was now completely alien to him.  As the hero of the South Africa he was extended several invitations by the Congress to join the nascent ‘national freedom struggle’. He politely refused them; instead he chose to travel. He travelled extensively throughout the subcontinent, mostly on trains. The main purpose of such a venture, as he had said himself was ‘to get a grasp of the life’ in India.

During these jaunts, it is believed he made very elaborate entries on his ‘first’ impressions of India. When I picked up this book (free ebook lying in some corner of  the net) I was hoping to find his journal entries during these travels. But as it turned out this book was a compilation of six essays/ media articles/ speeches between 1915 – 1918, after the major chunk of his travels were done.

Enriched by his travels, and the success at Champaran, he started giving shape to his ideas - on a social, cultural and a political level.  These essays were his initial arguments, where he is still somewhat ambivalent, where he still comes across considering their pros and cons than being conclusive about them.  These ideas would later gather momentum, evolve much more powerfully to eventually enter the national consciousness as the core 'Gandhian' values.

The first essay is actually about the travel in third class in Indian trains. He describes the hopeless conditions of the third class in Indian Railways and as always with Gandhi, makes a case for their improvement.  These passages are perhaps one of the earliest documentation of reverse culture shock by an Indian. Consider this one, and imagine the comment section if the following passage for published in an Indian web portal:

Not during the whole of the journey was the compartment once swept or cleaned. The result was that every time you walked on the floor or rather cut your way through the passengers seated on the floor, you waded through dirt.

The closet was also not cleaned during the journey and there was no water in the water tank.

Refreshments sold to the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales. These were previously sampled by millions of flies. I asked some of the passengers who went in for these dainties to give their opinion. Many of them used choice expressions as to the quality but were satisfied to state that they were helpless in the matter; they had to take things as they came.

Subsequent essays are values one usually associates with Gandhi. Ideas like  'vernaculars' and 'The Moral Basis of Co-operation' are just of historical relevance now. Few others, like the chapter on 'Ahimsa' are perhaps still valid? The one titled 'Swadeshi' is penetrative where he espouses how religion and politics in India are inseparable. ( which is true, contrary to liberal opinion even to this day). Gandhi’s arguments are times warped, at times too vague but it does reflect something unique for that time – one man observing the world, preparing a ground report, and suggesting solutions.

The writing is typically colonial replete with waxing and waning of humility and excessive consideration. Personally, as far as the ideas are concerned, nothing written was new to me; I was looking to find a personal voice, something more direct that would reflect on the writer himself. But Gandhi writes in a very impersonal tone. Even in the article 'National Dress' where he defends against personal attacks  (Irwin who had criticized Gandhi for choice of desi clothes against European attire) he remains rather circumspect.

What the book reaffirms to me is what Naipaul had written long back about Gandhi –

No one, no one had understood India like Gandhi had.

As an aside here’s Gandhi writing about Banks and credit system in 1917. See if it rings any bells?

The credit which is becoming the money power of the world has little moral basis and is not a synonym for Trust or Faith, which are purely moral qualities. After twenty years' experience of hundreds of men, who had dealings with banks in South Africa, the opinion I had so often heard expressed has become firmly rooted in me, that the greater the rascal the greater the credit he enjoys with his banks. The banks do not pry into his moral character: they are satisfied that he meets his overdrafts and promissory notes punctually. The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath. I have witnessed the ruin of many a home through the system, and it has made no difference whether the credit was labelled cooperative or otherwise. The deadly coil has made possible the devastating spectacle in Europe, which we are helplessly looking on.

The entire book, first published in an Indian Lahore, is now available for free online. Suggested for light reading may be as a break in between heavy books. Obviously for readers interested in  Pre-independent India and Gandhi.

Among other things, this is my first book read on Kindle.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi...

Apologies for the absence dear readers, but I come with the promise of many reviews. Here's the first one : 

I became more interested in Geoff Dyer after I read Lavanya's post here. But other affairs, Galgut and travel kept me occupied. Dyer is not as popular a writer to walk into a bookstore and stumble between Emma Donaghue and Dave Eggers, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found Dyer's Jeff in Venice and Death in Varanasi at Landmark in Bangalore, India.   Took it along to Rajasthan where I travelled, and eventually, between other worries, twittering and work finished it a good month after I had bought it.

This is my first Dyer and I liked it. That, in itself,  would make it unlikable for an average reader.

The book is really two separate novellas: the first is the story of Jeff Atman, an aimless middle rung journalist in London who is assigned to cover the Venice Binneale to a ‘scoop’ interview around a story of prized nude photograph of a singer?

The action moves to very ‘otter’ than ever before Venice. Jeff, portrayed as somewhat of an outsider at the international art scene, trudges along the parties and galleries gulping Bellinis and snorting Cocaine. He meets Laura an American gallery owner (or was she a curator?)  Anyway, they hit off. They roam around piazzos and gallerias cracking airy drunken jokes and witty repartees at each other. They duly end up doing what two people who hit off are expected to do – have roaring sex! The segment is well written – cynical but dipped in comical smugness, an unmistakable sense of lurking gaiety pervades through the pages as Jeff looks down upon the clichés and the quirks of art world between his broad range of experiences in Venice - absolute aimlessness ( keenly observing a pigeon on a pavement or snorting cocaine in a cathedral) to kinky sex and snogging in public toilets. He even manages to get stoned with his celebrity interviewee.  I loved the sense of humour that Dyer smuggles into this segment - not overt yet well ingrained within the dialogues. There are quite a bit of puns too. (Dyer – hair dye etc) 

The second part is the story of an unnamed protagonist (May be Dyer / may be Jeff, it is never revealed ) who gets assigned ( ? again)  at the last minute as a substitute to write an article about Varanasi the historical-holy city of the Hindus.

He starts off at a typical arm's distance – mildly disdainful of the poor hygiene and the mad Indian traffic, but slowly gets drawn into the Hindu idea of the life and universe.  He overstays well past his assignment, gets initially attracted to a fellow Brit and later a Swiss traveler but not as much as to the city itself which continually entices him like a long lost lover, unraveling through its strange inhabitants and mysterious ways that appear, at once, both profound and meaningless to him. Under such contradictions he grows more interested in mulling over his existence and life in general; he becomes more distant from his wants and lacks, finally he is shown to develop abstract spiritual ideas of his own. 


The second segment, needless to say, is more engaging  - the Dyer potshots are more subtle though at times gross and unnecessary ( talking goat - a chide at Rushdie and other magical realists). The description of the scape is more detailed, which lingers away as the book progresses. The change to within is well captured, as the protagonist turns more reflective and zany by the page. 

At times the book was predictable, at parts needed tighter writing, but generally I liked it. It's in my favourite genre too: part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophy without any plot whatsoever. Readers looking for plots are suggested to make an easier choice.  I loved both the novellas, each I could easily relate to: hedonistic frivolity of the west to the silent fatalism of the east. The book draws its title from the old Thomas Mann classic – Death in Venice - a novel that also deals with the same themes of life and death but with somewhat greater intensity. 

This is a love it or hate it sort of a book. I get a feeling that goes for Dyer as a writer too. Once you finished the book it’s not hard to see why Dyer chose to weave in the two cities as a part of a book. In essence, the book is about the these two cities, their similarities and contradictions. Both are very distinct cities – literally poles apart yet very similar. Varanasi being symbol of the abstractness of Hindu philosophy while Venice an international art hub of sorts.  Both attract travellers but for totally different reasons. 


Venice isn’t as detailed as Varanasi in the book, but I still suppose, it’s fair to say that the book is a charming tribute to both the cities, a sort of testimonial that makes you run to them the very next holiday. I haven’t been to Varanasi but I already feel I know a lot about it. I’ve even been googling hotel Ganges View.


Now onto other Dyers.