Homi Bhaba

A famous Harvard professor, Homi Bhaba, came to Carleton to speak last Thursday. According to his Wikipedia page, "he is one of the most important figures in post-colonial studies," and "he has been criticized for dense, barely comprehensible, jargon ridden prose."

I won't claim to have understood everything that Bhaba said during his hour-and-a-half long lecture, but, as he discussed the genocide in Sudan in terms of colonial discourse, I was moved. He also had fabulous glasses, and his eloquence was dazzling.

In fact, I kept a long list of direct quotes from Bhaba while he spoke, and re-arranged them in to the following poem after the fact. I'd like to think that it is an apt summing-up of his message.

I have dreamed of world revolution

Here we are, caught in between
violence and the sacred
striving to forget
the unpronounceable things we
scribbled in the margins of history.

"Life fell to pieces here,
... and now poetry is barbaric."

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
How do we excavate the silences
while trapped in the double
time-frame of memory?
It's a terrible mystery--

but the future can't wait to be born
and I am here, in your poem
unsatisfied.

In Praise of Rain

It's raining.
Out the window, I can see the drops splashing into puddles in the concrete. The green is greener, and, outside, it smells like everything my heart is missing.

I sit here in the library with my thesis to edit and the sinking realization that electricity involves calculus, but somehow the rain makes it ok, at least right now. Yesterday I reveled on a particularly alluvial balcony. Today, with each little splash, something inside me sighs a quiet thank-you.

thankyou
thankyou
thankyou
thankyou
.
.
.

Of course the breeze ruffling the rain-slick oak leaves is so much better at expressing my current mood than these damn words. And of course the last tidbits of my college life (i.e. NOW) are all map-less, unbounded and terrifying.

Terrifying, but also very free.
Falling.

I love the rain.

A Conversation Between Sartre and the Buddha

I came across the following vignette when I was searching my hard drive for some old notes. I wrote it last May, when I was concurrently enrolled in Philosophy 240 "Existentialism" and Religion 270 "Buddha."


Sartre: I’d really like to thank you, Buddha, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk with me about essences.

Buddha: It literally was no problem at all. My potential manifestations are infinite. You are talking to an illusion right now.

Sartre: Wow. Well, I really appreciate it anyway. Umm, so I guess you probably know my ‘slogan,’ “existence precedes essence.” When I say this, I mean that we humans, unlike common objects, have no essential nature. We are free to forge our own essence through our actions. I’ve heard that you have an interesting perspective on essence and the composition of the self, and I was kind of curious what you might have to say about my philosophy.

Buddha: I agree with your criticism of essence, Jean-Paul, but I don’t agree that such a thing as a paper cutter would have an essence, while human beings do not.

Sartre: Well, I think you’ll find that it’s really quite simple. A paper cutter has essential properties that are fixed by its type—it is created with the specific purpose of cutting paper. In contrast, man was not created with any specific purpose (since it is now widely acknowledged that God is an incoherent concept). In light of this, man forges his own essence via a process of becoming.

Buddha: Despite the fact that your criticism of essence initially appears to be promising, I now see that we have different views entirely on the matter. While you think that tools do have essences and that humans create their essences retroactively, I hold that essence cannot exist. Every concept and form can be shattered to reveal emptiness, or no-thing. You argue that, for humans, the how of existence precedes the that of existence, but the truth is simply that there is no that. That is a chimera; a propagator of suffering.

Sartre: You are a nihilist!

Buddha: Some have accused me of this. They are not enlightened.