https://someislands.com SOME ISLANDS Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:19:36 +0000 https://someislands.com en https://someislands.com/Home-Image-Scroll Tue, 15 Aug 2023 09:31:54 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Home-Image-Scroll Some Islands <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b393d04492910679fbd9fe510103350ea0328d47010e27ee17583f8df09e93c1/IMG_4130.JPG" data-mid="223251029" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b393d04492910679fbd9fe510103350ea0328d47010e27ee17583f8df09e93c1/IMG_4130.JPG" /> https://someislands.com/si3-2024 Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:10:43 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/si3-2024 The scientific study of explanations <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e88c1b0f8a9fafa1546a4fe0738802bce377ee7c91c0096e5110e8d917b33c96/IMG_5333.JPG" data-mid="223251919" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e88c1b0f8a9fafa1546a4fe0738802bce377ee7c91c0096e5110e8d917b33c96/IMG_5333.JPG" /> Theory I was recently discussing with the 4FE dudes, those with whom I work on this journal, how Some Islands 3 is different to Some Islands 2. “The 2023 volume is like a sine wave. The articles therein are congruous. Enough. They are individual yet meld together into a constant and coherent whole,” I said. “The 2024 copy presents like an electrocardiogram, an ECG reading where blips and glitches appear and disappear everywhere. Some are short and punchy, some are lengthy and detailed. While not necessarily incongruous, the articles in Some Islands 3 index the nature of theory, the scientific study of explanations. They are as diverse as they are pointed, as easy to digest as they are challenging.” Some Islands 1 presented some initial sniffs of a soft shift in my and other scholars’ thinking toward a design- and art-based scientific writing and aesthetic. This compilation demonstrated that small titbits and morsels of linguistics coupled with attractive art and design—photography, painting, and musical thinking made worded—can do a lot of work, possibly more than that produced in scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles and books. Some Islands 2 extended this foundation of linguistics, art, and island studies with a 25-article compendium. The collection emerges with no beginning or end, alone and together. The spatial and temporal unfolding of Some Islands 2 continues. We are pleased you are still with us. “What does theory even mean?” some asked when invited to submit to Some Islands 3. I gave potential authors my own take. It was up to them to formulate their personal briefs and resultant arguments. It is our hope that what you have in front of you is something of a tip of the hat not only to the three main disciplines driving Some Islands journal and the Some Islands project—linguistics, art, and island studies, but also an opening to other subjects relevant to the ambit of this periodical. A note about the editing. The Some Islands 3&nbsp;Call for Papers and what I anticipated would develop from the call bear little resemblance to the 15-part main outcome (see 10-article themed section details below). I am pleased with the product and the process that brought about its evolution. I made several decisive executive decisions which changed the tack of the articles separately and as a group. Most (not all) articles are devoid of traditional academic apparatus of references, footnotes, subheadings, and in-this-article-I-will statements. Titles are short, justifications and images are few (some were needed). If a reader wants to delve deeper, they can contact respective authors, contact the editor, or look into the subject themselves. Some Islands is not for spoon-feeding peeps, nor is it for throwing out the I-want-to-learn baby with the this-is-how-academic-writing-is-meant-to-be bathwater. We hope you find the minimal aesthetic attractive and informative. Some Islands inhabits a particular and definite space in Australian and international intellectual life. No apologies required, no long reference lists or overly defensive positions needed. We say what we want in the way we do. Some Islands 1 (2022) was an introduction to the Some Islands project. Some Islands 2 (2023) was about representation. Some Islands 3 (2024) is about theory and epistemology. Some Islands 4 (2025) will be about basically, meaning ‘basically’, ‘basic’, and all else in between. Please keep reading, writing, and submitting. If Walls Could Talk: Themed Section on Modern Architectural History and Theory Avid readers of Some Islands would remember a crucial statement I made in Some Islands 1: “Perhaps Some Islands as a product, its presence within the academic industry, and the associated participants as band members are enough and a decent way to end in academia. Still, I need to pay the rent.” Here, the sensitive and aware would be able to sniff something out, namely that the academic biz is far from an easy jaunt. After more than 17 years since first travelling to Norfolk Island, South Pacific, to begin what would become my PhD project about Norfolk language and English placenames, Some Islands 3 is pretty much the only toe I have left in the academy. I love the quest for knowledge and its application in the domain of mind and world. Still, still, I deeply query the how, what, and where of the current model of tertiary education in Australia and elsewhere. The typical metaphors at play are ‘bigger is better’ and ‘more is better’. Such positions and associated bean counting has created irreconcilable dissension between means and ends of education, teaching, funding, and human desire, striving, and ambition. Some Islands makes no claim it is a salve for such. We simply hope that the existence of alternative publication outlets, especially for young and upcoming thinkers, supports communication between people at whichever age and whatever stage in their writing career they are. The first-ever themed section in Some Islands&nbsp;takes its title from Emma Barber’s reflective piece of the same name. Architectural history and theory are about wishing for if walls could talk. If they could, then writers of architecture would have a much easier job. They could speculate less, listen more. As regards listening, I heard (read) all of these pieces in their nascent form as undergraduate essays in 2024 in a modern architectural history and theory course at a university in Adelaide, South Australia. This institution will cease to exist in its present form on 1 January 2026. My kneejerk thought: Why should it only be me, a marker, who is availed the pleasure and privilege of reading such work, the manoeuvres of young and budding architectural thinking? If we don’t encourage new blood in publishing such work, isn’t a publication venue like Some Islands hypocritical and not practising what it preaches vis-à-vis being academic adjacent yet inclusive? ‘If Walls Could Talk’ showcases 10 articles written by enthusiastic practitioners of buildings and words. These authors should be softly urged to write more, to dwell on whether capital A Architecture is about creating physical edifices or written polemics, and to query the role of the modern university system in incubating talent in creative disciplines. We plead you to question the same. And we hope Some Islands readers will remember their heady student days. Joshua Nash Findon, South Australia December 2024 Some IslandsA journal of linguistics and art Number 3 &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; •&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; THEORY ISSN 2653-5602 Published in 2024 by Some Islands, Findon, South Australia 5023, Australia Editor Joshua Nash jahewangi@hotmail.com Designers 4FE - 4th Floor ElevatorEric Bagnara and Dexter Campos 4th.floor.elevator@gmail.com © Copyright remains with the authors Front image: Industry, Woodville North, South Australia, Some Islands, 2023 Some Islands Collective is based in South Australia and acknowledges the traditional owners of the lands on which the work of all Some Islands’authors and artists takes place. https://someislands.com/Brett-Cranswick-1 Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:19:36 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Brett-Cranswick-1 Seacliff SA 5049 Brett Cranswick These narrow alleyways all look the same; So do their townhouses. See this street here, That dips to almost form a picture frame, Bordering either side the ocean's clear, Knowing smile as it laps the pebbled shore Below the level of traffic. And that One might as well be nameless, serving more As inspiration for a TV chat Show on the ordinary lives we waste Than the main tributary feeding streams Of middle class ambition, flowing past Fallow-left fields of vague Housing Trust dreams. For want of better words, silence is golden. The greatest gift is time, borrowed, beholden. https://someislands.com/Cameron-Hapgood-1 Thu, 28 Nov 2024 02:39:26 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Cameron-Hapgood-1 Architecture is air Cameron Hapgood The case study used throughout this explication of theory is a L'avenir Studio design for a client in Adelaide, Australia. ‘Fat Fucking Frog’, also known as Frog, is an inaccessible, controlled, and illusive garden within a forest embellished in, a place where ecology is valued. The façade decays, the internals rot and become mouldy, and access is through the healing tracks of seeds-to-plants. The theoretical prose underpinning the designs are metaphors for growth and maturity through (un)becoming, shadows, and boundaries. This position will explain an aspect of life, is, rather than what. There is tension between Real Objects and Real Qualities, essence fused with causation. In my attempt at shifting perception and relationships, I adhere to a quote from Vitruvius (circa 25 BC); The ideal architect should be a person of letters, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsult, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations. Venturing down seemingly disconnected rabbit holes of theory, the mystery of life is never what it seems. We will all unfold. Meaning is now how you make it. It does not have to be what it always was. Yin-yang symbolises that there can be a bit of bad in the good and vice versa. It is better to view this symbol as intended in movement and spin, where black and white become a harmony of grey. Knowledge is diffractive and interactive, arising from interconnected relationships, enriched by diverse perspectives, shaped by specific practices and power dynamics, necessitating ethical considerations, and co-creating meaning and materiality. I use Donna Harroway’s diffractive methodology1 to explain my theory of Frog. Topics of enquiry are Graham Harmen’s Object-Oriented Ontology—OOO (‘triple-O’)2, philosophical insight into essence and existence, sociological, and anthropological understandings of violence, the neurobiology and psychology of fear and anxiety, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and causation through feminist theorist and physicist, Karen Barad. I call this theory ‘The Stream to Light and Healing.’ As I can’t communicate with you directly, I talk with you through a bending in hope of persuading you into a new way of being toward actions of amicability. Can we perceive uncertainty as a positive and move on with understanding and forgiveness? You are in control. Or are you because I let you be? In Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant posits that matter can have no spontaneity.3&nbsp;Living matter is a contradiction of lifeless inertia. Hylozoism contradicts the conventional understanding of life and matter.4 A vital principle is an invisible presence that performs actions that a mechanical process could not without assistance.5 Jane Bennett6&nbsp;argues that the vital principle cannot be ‘physico-chemical’, because of the observation of morphogenesis.7&nbsp;Entelechy is created in the gaps in the ‘chain of strictly physico-chemical or mechanical events’.8 Aesthetics is the first principle of OOO. How things, people, and places are is a combination of other things, people, places, and their appearance. There is a gap—air—between what a thing is and the aesthetics of its perceived exterior. The knowing of this sentence is not the sentence; the words making up this sentence are not the sentence; the meaning of these words in the sentence is not the sentence, and so on. Frog is, by being not. It is a waste to move through time and space to understand and localise a point of where the gap is. An object is not a sum of its parts or memorisodic qualities. There must be an acceptance that things are and are not themselves at an irreducible unity in present time. OOO is similar to a state of logical contradiction, and therefore not understandable in a socially agreed standard of consistency. Analogies to spark your imagination of what inconsistency is: growth of an acorn into an oak tree, a baby being fed by a bottle or breast, progressing to adulthood, and cooking a meal. Fear opens up a sensitivity to the abundance of life that is a more vibrant experience than joy. The entelechy located within fear is serenity. Haecceity can be pervasive.9&nbsp; Air is the fourth element of ebbs and flows, fluctuations, vortices, and tornadoes. It is involved in movement, transportation, and the drama of events. “The air enables movement and perception, as well as communication, travel, situatedness, and dislocation, in as much as it joins the members of societies and cultures in a common climate.”10 Air is a being with agency in weather, wind, seasons, and temperatures. Air is synonymous with climate (etymology of klinein; Greek word meaning: to slope, lean, rest, recline, or bend.) Colonialist arguments11 posit a historical exploitation of racism linked to place and climate. By changing the climate, a subject changes itself. Culture is self-transformational. Culture uses the working of air to engage a habitable, profitable, and exploitable foundation to existence. We currently relate to air through ‘climate change’. Climate is experienced through temporality. Weather is a singular day of ephemeral memories. Climate change takes on a global and statistical view with an absence of subjective experience, a seemingly inaccessible complexity of meteorological models and jargonised processes to deter the simplistic nature of air. Air has become a hyper-object.12 Air now has an absence of culture and symbolism. Air is the constitution of constantly pressured movements. This uncertainty with understanding is predictably and understandably exhausting. It is better to perceive air as energy in motion: e-motion. Movement of air is synonymous with thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The only constant is change. Scale determines sense of place. Ability within the presence of remembering scale is determinant in locality and non-locality of the moment. In its beginning and inside Frog is a sense of white cardboard fused with white cardboard, the sense of a fused white cardboard existing and avoiding moisture from the build-up inside Frog. Here, the sense of Frog as a garden in a forest, the sense of the forest within a mycelium network, and the sense of objective violence13 dips into the entanglement and immersion of the stickiness of our damaging effect on climate. The self-abuse of inner climates becomes a maelstrom of behaviours. Take in as many moments to be angry, have a cheeky gossip and opinion-sharing session. News media becomes a climate of distressing situations to practise empathy or gratitude. Tensions exist between near/far, static/dynamic, linear/cyclical, expectation with fear/actualised event, and patterns/singularity. Frog goes beyond the divide of being and environment and exchanges in the engagement of breath, skin, smell, and change in season. There is an immersion of flowing flowering fields with shifting perspectives, the noticing of outside compared to inside and inside to actuality. There might be an opening to the world of sensually alluring tasteful harming compliments, and the grounded grounding or repetitive watching of the watcher of inside and outside critiques. But, this is tragically uncertain and unpredictable based on hitherto analysis. Memory serves us as an apparatus of deception, a navigation tool to achieve a desired direction.14 Memory is used to reconstruct selective highlights of significant moments, emotions, and details. Sequential ordering provides a logical flow, the creation of coherence is by linking events through cause and effect of thematic connections. Information is, then, contextualised to enhance understanding. Applications of emotional depth create relatability and engagement. Emotional recall conveys a tone so listeners empathise. A detailed and sensory-rich memory immerses the vividness of identity. Individual identity is constructed through personal placement of profitability in a reflection of values and beliefs. Collective identity is created through community and culture. Expression can be through myths, traditions, and historical accounts. Storytelling through analogies and metaphor is an effective tool for learning and teaching. Memories become blended and manufactured through imagination and filling in the gaps in an embellishing style for the purpose of coherence, entertainment, or objective violence. Fragmentation and the distortion of various narrative factors lead to inaccuracy from personal biases and perspectives that are shaped by desired goals and wanted outcomes. Morphogenesis is an individual process from a blastocyst to an ontogenesis and then onwards to a response towards restitution. The morphogenesis manifoldness in a location does not emerge from the uniform space of an egg. It remains theoretically impossible for a manifold to occur from the source of unity. So, the preceding manifold must be a composite not in space. An extensive manifoldness emerges from the intensive manifoldness. Life becomes puzzling if understood through mechanism alone. It’s all good, man. Entelechy15 is the agency of non-process, self-moving, and self-altering. The vital principle of entelechy is understood as neither of the process in the mechanical body nor as the soul. True power and control is entelechy. A power responsible for life and non-life. The qualities of organic are affected by change in a provoked and coordinated response. Organic systems learn from experience, hold the ability to adapt to a real action through an internal individual stimulus. This individualisation directs the agency of entelechy. Potentiality of connected lines and actions is greater than the actuality of what unfolds. The agent responsible for the singular specific actuality from a vast potentiality is the relaxing action of entelechy. Here, we witness a directing power in allowing uncertainty and possibilities to emerge from the organism and become actuality through behaviour. To maintain the status quo, entelechy is innovative in its actions to repair old parts, recreate amputations, and adapt old qualities into new roles. Individual movements of an organism are not environmentally determined or mechanically caused by stimuli. The only affect of outside events affecting an individual is through the creation of possibilities for further acting. Freedom exists in indefiniteness. ‘Entelechy is the order of relation and absolutely nothing else.’16 Entelechy is like Machiavelli’s Fortuna17 or Homer’s Psyche.18 We observe and partake in a vitality that flows throughout all living bodies; there is coordination without a rigid plan; it is a general direction answering phenomena innovatively and comfortably. It is the moment in time, observation, and apparatus of convergence into a singularity of unifying dichotomies, discrepancies, and disgust. Is this the closet depiction of God? Unlikely. But, you can believe so if your entelechy says so. We malinger through our lives not getting well and sink deeper into the malasys and abyss of fear. Existence precedes essence, agency is freedom19,&nbsp;and the attainment of freedom is organised with causes, motives, and ends. To attain creative power is to give up hope for a search of essence. This surrender allows L'avenir20 and possibilities. Social learning of fear is through instruction and observation.21&nbsp;Amygdala-centred model of fear conditioning explains social learning of fear. Fears can be obtained through direct experiences—conditioned stimuli and unconditioned stimuli (CS-US)—or indirectly through social transfer, e.g. observing news on a media device and applying qualities to yourself. Fear in possibilities precedes essencing violence and agency towards self-centred desires and goals. CS-US affect autonomic, endocrine, and cognition responses within humans. These human neurobiological responses are environmental and phylogenetic.22&nbsp;Verbal instructions can override the effects of past phenomena with CS-US pairings.23 The main behavioural effect of experience in unconditioned stimuli expectancy ratings is similar between conditioned stimuli experienced and conditioned stimuli instructed. Verbally, instructed fear reversal affects both conditioned stimuli experienced and conditioned stimuli instructed from a threat to safe to an equal degree. Frog is a grandiose, alluring, and slippery egotistical building. It is reflective of you and paradoxically your own Essence of Violence and the precedent with an Existence of Fear. This architectural form and experience is the imbuement of a causal relation in the tension of your own plight of denial with being uneducated and abstract. The action of unfolding is violent. First, Frog is produced by an interaction that then stabilises allowing it to enter a new interaction. Now, the basis of the object can change. Secondly, the life of Frog is based on the emerging properties and the role the basis of Frog has in fulfilling those properties. Structures of the interaction matter more than any other object. Thirdly, inevitably, the basis of Frog can change if the emerging properties are nourished. It reveals itself and affects other beings in its environment and network. It is a continual way of Being, of exerting oneself on its surroundings. Frog begins with a pristine canvas clad skin; this sheath deteriorates and decays through time. Once the decay has passed and the cloth walls are brought down, the structure remains. Climbing plants climb and blossom. Internal space once creating a hidden space of cardboard sculpture for butterflies and bees to nest has now turned to mush and pulp. Physis24 is the origins of process, but not process as an interaction with others externally. Interactions allow the physis to reveal itself and remain incomplete, a process driven by entelechy. Internal space fills with water ponds of ecologies and life with plants and frogs adoring the inner beauty. Dasein25 is the agency of existing and participating in being. A continual act of revealing its vulnerabilities and authenticity to the world. The depth of the inner voids of Frog have been filled. On a warm day you will find a swimming hole in the forest. The void is filled with life sustaining organisms and a water that cleans itself. Frog is now accountable and responsible. It takes care of itself and those who dwell near it. The medium of architecture is air. Architecture represents all of our movement. There is a climatic phenomena of internal thoughts, feelings, and beliefs adjusting to the objective violence of working and hiding external systems. The phenomenon of perception is the entelechy in memoricentric aesthetics creating the external symbology hiding in plain sight. Essence is violent. Thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are the inside and the outside fused with a new and chaotic view of causality. Air is a medium of unbecoming, a weightless, invisible, and imperceptible perception. Air is a background perception. We view air through the trees, and we hear air through gaps. Existence is relishing the fear of standing out. This dynamic state also eats up the fear of fitting in. Existing is like the vortex, draining and computable. Air is a verb, a doing word, like love. OOO reveals the weird world in which we live. Hyper-plurality and individualism are how objects disconnect, dissipate, withdraw, and create meaning in their own identity.26 Sparkling and fleeting connections through the surface of experiences. Dancing with humbling humility by observing humans as a small portion within the interplay. Universal organisms expressing their fundamental parts in the euphonic cacophony of life. A Real Object (RO)27 is anything that exists as its own reality, disconnected from the effects of its environment and in a position above the summary of its parts. A being that is created from relations with other organisms (Bios/Zóé28/Geos29) and relates to external objects. Each object is a real thing; it is independent of the help of other objects in being. An object is taking an action in the foundational process of coming into being or becoming prominent in its reality. All objects withdraw, and from this action they are deviant.30 This deviant act allows an inaccessibility by other beings to being-present-with.31&nbsp; Real Qualities (RQ) emerge from a link with RO. RO are formed from multiple parts. When these causal intra-actions become linked together to form an object, the excess properties of parts not needed in the intra-action float in a close field of RQ surrounding the object ready to be used in the next causal relation. The floating is deep, internal, and mysteriously haecceity-y. RQ are unknowable as they cannot be held within the hands of the mind; they are just as romantic as their kin—sensual. Sensual Qualities (SQ) are perspective-dependent and RQ are perspective-independent. Our relationship with objects is a reliance on them for a slippery purpose. Relationality distorts the reality of things. We experience a world of broken parts. The surface of any object is elaborate and pure. This is the location of dramatic power and interaction. Causal power remains in the inaccessible depths where discretion and autonomous form hides. All relations are surface and superficial. Causation occurs when there is a breaking of, suspension of, or a confrontation unfolding between Real Objects (RO) - Sensual Objects (SO), and a privacy of objects from one another. When broken such a state creates new objects and interior spaces. The proximity of RO-SO is the occasion for a connection between an RO inside the desires—ambition, aim, and intent—of another RO. This has a puzzle-like effect and creates overlaps that shed new light on the actuality of experiences. Reality lies beyond perception; we do not transcend the world but rather descend into the kaleidoscope of allure and into the beauty and heart of objects. Withdrawal is paradoxical. There is an accessibility towards intimacy. Proximity is a subjugated ontic thought. The paradoxical relationship is a denial of space and time. Metaphysics of presence has shifted and you can have an ontological existence without constant attendance. We live and exist in an expression of a withdrawn vacuum. Persistence qua execution suggests Real Objects withdraw from one another and it is impossible for one object to affect another at all. The affect comes from inside the withdrawal, for example, in an action like vomiting. Withdrawal has two parts: excess and independence.32&nbsp;Excess follows along with an internal action (execution) and the capacity for external action (causation) that unfolds from within. Execution is pure in that it is persistently precluding every actual interaction, and pure actuality of possible interactions. Therefore, execution rises above both interaction and possibility. As every possibility is shielded from our understanding, withdrawal of reality is unknowable and thus independent. Things are in a tension between the duality of a persistent amalgamation and inherent plurality. Understanding outside requires bending. Empathic agency can be used in bending, but relating to the outside is through the inside's memories. Causality is an aesthetic phenomenon. Aesthetic events occur in a vacuum of loneliness, separability, and complete delusion of trying to gain a connection towards anything in the universe. The only aspect an object can relate with, connect to, or touch another object by, whether material, emotional, sensorial, or thought, is through a manifestation of perception with an interaction. More importantly, through an intra-action.33&nbsp; Effect precedes cause when it comes to imagination, time, critical thinking, and planning. A desired outcome is worked back through actionable experiences that may cause them. Observer effects are independent. Quantum mechanics can seem complex and counter-intuitive. The subject can be the observer and subject of observation, simultaneously. Quantum mechanics precedes classical physics.34&nbsp;Complementarity principle35&nbsp;introduces the theory that an object can exhibit dual properties. Cause and effect is not clearly defined as being deterministically linked. This model of understanding the nature of interaction now acknowledges observation as the device for affecting systems and objects being observed. Classical models of physics give causation as being deterministic, applying that future state systems can be predicted with clarity and certainty. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle36&nbsp;acknowledges that certain pairs of physical properties—position and momentum—cannot be precisely measured simultaneously. Causation is now probabilistic rather than deterministic. Observer effect37 refers to the role of the observer in the measurement process. This act of measuring affects the system. Such a position challenges traditional views of causation where the observer is independent of the observed system. The outcome of the process can depend on the measurement and perception. Niels Bohr has redefined the limitations of classical causation with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory.38&nbsp;This framework underpins the nature of reality and has leaked into other systems of knowledge and power. There is an entanglement between the material and the discursive. Matter and meaning are co-constituted. This expands on Bohr’s complementarity that integrating practices, language, and material realities are intertwined. There is a deep interconnection in our practices of knowledge. If objects were able to touch at the quantum scale of Planck length, they would merge and become one another. Objects and qualities do not touch and causality is brought into the vicarious aesthetic dimension of enmeshment.39&nbsp;There is no material or physical reason why causality happens. Therefore, it is the illusion of aesthetics in how the happenings unfold from a withdrawal of perception. Measurements of causality endeavour to disregard shadows, sounds, lights, and electromagnetic phenomena. The double-slit experiment40 in quantum mechanics illustrates the role of observation in wave-particle duality of quantum phenomena. Before measurement, two photons can be entangled as they emerge from a laser; there is an instantaneous capability within photons to react to the other’s spin41 and angular momentum.42&nbsp;This current understanding within quantum theory disregards an idealistic version of causality where a phenomenon would be invisible and inaudible in totality. Referentiality is the embodying of chosen concepts at the exclusion of others. This marks distinction between subject-object. Cognitive behaviour therapy is the adjustment of a current state of reality perception self-manipulated towards another. Ideas obtain their meaning in relation to a defined physical apparatus of measurement and observation. This is the shift in objective knowledge acquisition. Human beings determine the outcome and play an interventionist role, stepping forward, tweaking a few dials, and stepping back to watch entelechy come through all aspects of essence and spinning causation into the void of certain uncertainties. The twelfth-century polymath-occasionalist, Al-Ghazali, posits that God interrupts the link between cause and effect and, in an analogy, provides the occasion for fire to catch cotton.43 The second-century Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, argues that if something was to arise from itself or if something were to arise from something else that was not itself, then nothing can or would happen.44 Causal explanations are circular; both-and and neither-nor are mixed views and possibilities. This is the definition of Nagarjuna’s nihilism. Emptiness is not absence but the inability to conceptualise reality. Nothing is something you don’t understand, so it becomes frightening. Psychology and psychiatry have taken on the histrionic pattern of moralistic compassionate-oppression that has replaced the church. Faith is now science and the witches burnt at the stake are replaced with bipolar women. The patterns are the same; language has progressed. Grasping ghastly at a thing never gives you the thing-in-itself.45 The status quo of social contracts is agreed on sub-consciously and through the veil of ‘fear of being an outsider.’ Each object maintains its own unique violent essence and withdraws into the individuality of its fears. Reality is something to be seen. Plato’s allegory of the cave46 suggests movement towards truth requires a turn. Perception in seeing is bending thought through the figures in the cave as being dis-torsions as shadow projections. Figures as shadows and shadows as their Self. Western architecture has progressed from the ancient Greeks. The allegory of the cave is as ancient as the Greeks and stands as a point of reference for the ‘courageous light’ within Frog. Law is a construct shaped by human ethics and Eurocentric moral values. Courtrooms create an illusion of control by attempting to enforce power and maintain order. This is an illusion as the paradox is; the judge is a servant to the public, and yet, is seated in a higher position within the spatiality of the place. All judges are below and of service to those they sentence and to whom they dictate order. We hope judges remember this. The ‘courageous light’ is spatially lower than the skin and external outside. The delusion of order is imbued in the spatial form of Frog. There is a difference between sense perception and on-going empirical investigation. The intellectual process in empirical investigation moves beyond intuitive perceptible qualities into a deeper order. No process can achieve order. Codified Law enforces order but the process to achieve order is never actualised. Only a fantasy, a delusion, and a cyclical one at that. Sense perception owns the empirical intellectual process as it plays with an unmanageable urgency. Change happens, though events are an instantaneous change of state. This is, as well as, part of a process, that is, a series of events. Things undergo processes and in turn cause changes in other things. The longer amount of time within a process, the larger the effective causal change. For example, the process of law is about fact creation. Law is about the search and application for truth. Truth finding happens through a series of events unfolding leading to reactions. Character is observed through the length of this process. Agential cut47 is the process by which boundaries are created and distinctions made between and with entities and phenomena. These cuts are the gaps in what we know—epistemology—and what exists—ontology. Life is a series of relations, entanglements, enmeshment, doumining, and euphonic cacophonies. It feels like the combination of joy and fear—excitement, joy, and sadness (melancholy) or joy and joy (euphoria)—embodies the addition of red + blue = purple, yellow + blue = green, and yellow + red = orange. Queering non-binaries, there is an abundance of anti-matter in comparison to matter. This holistic approach combines our understanding of what exists (ontology), how we come to know it (epistemology), and the ethical implication of our knowledge (ethico-onto-epistemology).[48] Frog (RO) is filled with plants, bees, butterflies, and organisms within the internal space of the ‘courageous light’ (RQ). It can never be admired for its full beauty. We can observe little moments through the gaps in Frog’s surface, but we can never enter and be with this illuminating space (withdrawal). ‘The path to heal’ gets in the way of us entering Frog (essence) . Water always finds a way of getting where it needs to be. Over time the ‘crooked stream’ fills the ducts and dykes inside Frog, until it reaches the internal space (fused with causation). Architecture is for Air: Entelechy through (un)becoming, the withdrawal of Reality in Objects and Qualities, ([Fear] Existence within) ([Violence] Essence) in(side) the shadows, and the fusion of vicarious causation within the boundaries of intra-actions. The theory ‘The Stream to Light and Healing’ is a foundational part to the design process of Fat Fucking Frog. The process begins with entelechy, the realisation of potential, which guides Physis and Dasein in the unfolding of being-in-the-world. The process of Frog engages the movement of gaps and air through thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, becoming an intra-action in aesthetics, where the structure itself reflects the lived experience of those who inhabit it. The shadow, formed by memory, hyper-plurality, and individualism, reveals the deeper layers of existence, where fear becomes a precursor to an objectively violent essencing. This fusion with relationality acknowledges that each element influences the others, guided by the principles of complementarity and the uncertainty of quantum scale causation. Through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology, Frog must balance the Real Object—Real Qualities, while also embracing the paradox of withdrawal, where objects remain unknowable in their full complexity. Observation affects referentiality and enmeshment, where objects and elements are inseparable yet distinct. Absence, here, is not a void but the inability to fully grasp the withdrawn inaccessible depth and reality of objects and qualities. Perception guides the way we sense and interpret space and boundaries, leading to agential cuts—decisive moments where possibilities become singularity, and one outcome becomes actualised. Ultimately, Frog becomes a testament to the interaction and intra-action between air and memory, where existence precedes essence, shaping both the structure and the lives within it. Air will remain in the background, away from observation, if it functions without disruption and corruption. There is a knowledge that results from recognition, the paradigm of new, rising from a renewed potentiality from within. We understand the anthropogenic effects of climate change. Air is now another object in need of care through the violence of control, repair, and reform. Probability, uncertainty, and fear are known factors in this collapse. Probability amplifies an explanation as to why a pattern can be on the opposing side of the duality spectrum until observed. Reality lies beyond perception. We do not transcend the world, but rather descend into the kaleidoscope of allure and into the beauty and heart of objects. 1 Barad, K. 2007. 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The essences of objects: Explicating a theory of essence in object-oriented ontology. Open Philosophy 3 (1): 1-10. 40 Jaeger, G. 2009. Double-slit experiment (or two-slit experiment). In Compendium of quantum physics, eds. D. Greenberger, K. Hentschel &amp; F. Weinert, 174-178. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. 41 Hentschel, K. 2009. Spin. In Compendium of quantum physics, eds. D. Greenberger, K. Hentschel &amp; F. Weinert, 726-731. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. 42 Greenberger, D., Hentschel, K., &amp; Weinert, F. 2009. Angular momentum. In Compendium of quantum physics, eds. D. Greenberger, K. Hentschel &amp; F. Weinert, 10-14. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. 43 Abrahamov, B. 1988. Al-Ghazālī's theory of causality. Studia Islamica 67: 75-98. 44 Garfield, J.L. 2001. Nāgārjuna’s theory of causality: Implications sacred and profane. Philosophy East and West 51 (4): 507-524. 45 Houlgate, S. 2015. Hegel's critique of Kant. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 89: 21-41. 46 Wright, J.H. 1906. The origin of Plato's cave. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 17: 131-142. 47 Stark, W. 2016. Agential cut. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agential-cut.html - accessed 18 October 2024. 48 Geerts, E., &amp; Carstens, D. 2019. Ethico-onto-epistemology. Philosophy Today 63 (4): 915-925. https://someislands.com/Dario-Vacirca Thu, 28 Nov 2024 02:57:23 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Dario-Vacirca Creativity-resistance and nomadic-becoming* Dario Vacirca This article investigates transversal approaches to creativity as a means to transform hierarchical dichotomies, such as citizen/refugee, worker/slacker, man/woman, self/community, nation/globe, and human/non-human, into assemblages of difference. By examining creativity-resistance and nomadic-becoming as foundational to futurability, the research draws on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead to construct an ontology of creativity and difference. It introduces Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory of becoming and radical subjectivity as an affirmative ethics, along with Marco Checchi’s concept of resistance preceding power to form a politics of entanglement. The analysis extends to non-identity, ambient poetics, cultural hybridity, and the liberation of time from capital as key components in the field of radical cultural praxis. The work concludes by proposing critical dreaming as a transdisciplinary approach to contemporary political aesthetics that is simultaneously creative, critical, and transformative. This work offers the observation that creativity is an approach, ethic, modality, and method to develop modes of enquiry through a process of meshing multiple interconnected fields of affect and thought. Stated simply: creativity is a powerful mechanism for bridging seemingly diverse fields, while opening us through aesthetic and performative devices to new knowledge, empathy, and, therefore, potentiality. Creativity is the first and most general category of a metaphysics of process, difference, and relationality that connects diverse epistemologies. Creating is an active process continually negotiating with influences from various points of subjectivity and temporality. Theoretically,creative-process philosophy fuses the traditional dyads of material and ideal, into a dynamic process that connects surfaces and creates new perceptive actualities. These new possible-actuals, once brought to the surface of perception, continue to operate within the processual flow. This means the other which encounters this new form is affected by it and influencing it simultaneously. With this dialogic entanglement in flux, the premises and properties of the world we have taken for ‘neutral and natural’ are disturbed and understood as false assurances of the sanctity of the static singular subject or object as a fixed identity over time. In this mode of thinking, difference is ontologically prior, and reality is formed through a process which is continuous, and in a constant exchange with other elements of (seen and unseen) processes which form new material (apparitions of reality) through their collision. Viewed&nbsp;through the lens of differential ontology, identity, or reality as I have called it above, is constructed from an ever-changing nexus of relations, not something with a self-contained nature, but which is secondary to the processes of differentiation. This process is a creative force permeating all experience. For Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and their philosophical progeny, difference is the resistant (prior and always) plane of immanence, becoming new form and affect through a flow of nomadic transversal change. What connects the metaphysics of these thinkers is an understanding that “becoming, thinking and creativity are one”, and that this creativity “is an unlimited ‘One All, that differentiates itself into all that is”. That is not to say creativity is an eminent substance but is a process of differentiation resulting from a complex interaction of energy, thought, and perception over time. Deleuze and Whitehead aim not to rediscover the eternal or universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). Their project locates the points where differentiation occurs, the events which give rise to creativity, and the conditions required for philosophy, art, and science to flourish. This process of differentiation is creative and affirmative. It is not a differentiation through negation. Using this metaphysical ground as a lens to unfold-into-the-world-with, the creative practitioner is offered boundless opportunities to act within a cosmology of potential with others also affected by these potentia. As a mode of engagement, such creativity-difference informs a politics of entanglement that is important when forming actualities of common values - of labour, land, and subjectivity. Such an intersectional political ethics helps us perceive fundamental value (integration, connection, responsibility to other forms of life) and that which needs to be resisted (capital accumulation, border violence, militancy, oppression) through a methodology of differing, action, creativity, and care. Philosopher, Marco Checchi, expands on this creativityness, problematising notions of agency, revolution, and becoming through his pivotal 2021 The Primacy of Resistance, which reassesses the relationship between resistance and power. He articulates a conceptual framework of resistance as being prior to power, flipping the standard definition we have of resistance as against, and arguing for it as an-always process “of creative and transformative potential that appeals to becoming.” Indeed, it is power which is responsive to the affirmative, creative processes of resistance. In this radical reading, resistance is the force of openings, whereas power is one of closures. Checchi writes: “To each closure, there are an indefinite multiplicity of openings, creative trajectories oriented towards a future that is already present.” These futures are already present because they are an-always potential in the drive of resistance. The formation of these present-futures is dynamic and subject to change, but is already resistant matter to power. This existent reality forms an ‘against’ (through stasis) to limit the boundless expansion of possibilities. According to Checchi, these present-material-futures of resistance are already in motion, prompting power to respond by absorbing their energy and cutting off their progression. Checchi’s thesis opens a new way to understand struggle, framing it not as a deficiency, as viewed through the lens of the victor or static (state) power, but as a productiveforce experienced by those who resist. Key to Checchi’s concept is an understanding of immanence and becoming indebted to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. For these thinkers, immanence is the inhering of life-force in all matter, and becoming is a way of understanding these micro and macro life processes as engaged in constant change. For Checchi the history of becoming is a series of closures and new openings. These new openings are creative, continuous, and unstoppable. Checchi’s framework of resistance advances the understanding of difference and creativity as material functions that shape subjective reality. His framework makes sense of the history and politics of struggle. This tension serves as a central focus in research-creation practice, oscillating on the dial of personal-subjective experience, and collective, active resistance to generate alternative visions and ways of living. This resistance process is a creative and complex energy, operating both autonomously (within individuals) and collectively. It is at this nexus where transformative creative praxis thrives. Rosi Braidotti’s thinking on creativity, difference, and becoming is most clearly articulated her 2011 book Nomadic Theory, where she developed a conceptual framework and method prior to the new materialist posthuman philosophy for which she is now renowned. Nomadic Theory explores the importance of a double-edged vision that combines creativity and criticality as necessary to transform the conditions of the contemporary subject. Braidotti’s ‘creative critique’ evolves with feminist and queer theories, pushing into ecosophical and posthumanist (‘post-manthropocentric’) thought. Feminisms are critical because they define a break in the Western philosophical canon, and they are creative because, through this break, new concepts and modes of subjectivity are made possible. As a method this allows thinking-through-subjectivity toward dynamic modes of becoming, and transposing these across disciplines. Braidotti advocates for the Humanities to match the Sciences in decentring the human, seeing this work as vital for the continuation of interconnected planetary species. Her philosophy proposes that humans transform (from their anthropocentric view) by engaging in radical compassion and empathy for the (human and non-human) other. Her ethics involve the transformation of institutions into non-profit, collective, relational, viral (de)centres that empower creative alternatives and value the oscillation between theory and practice. These ideas are integral to a contemporary world view wrestling with a palimpsest of crises brought on by centuries of violence through patriarchal empire and the narrow hermeneutics of philosophical and religious texts which value competition before collaboration, see scarcity before abundance. A key focus of my research is on the critical re-imagining of human relational systems through radical nomadic arts practices and thinking. I share Braidotti’s concern and passion for radical alterity and the transformation of systems of power and static notions of the subject through nomadic and creative processes of becoming and how these can be harnessed toward a better world for all living beings. &nbsp;In saying this, however, my work challenges an aspect of Braidotti’s critique that she proffers in various texts, namely that the subject’s own story is not an important part of decentring. In this thinking, personal experiences of trauma, identity formation, and other phenomenological expressions need to necessarily be decamped in order to open to a radical reformation with the other. I don’t entirely agree: Braidotti’s position here is inconsistent with her overarching view of the nomadic subject as a “transversal entity: a folding in of external influences and simultaneous unfolding out of affects.” The story or affects which require unfolding are as essential to the project of radical resistance and becoming as is giving over and interplaying with the river of forever others. Their material reality is as affective as any other; it cannot be ignored. It is in the consistent and perpetual interplay of these processes that radical change occurs. Without an understanding of the personal or an engagement with its affects, we are doomed to perpetuate the failed histories of revolutionary movements. This is not to say the specificity of our stories and traumas and personal attributes are important to resistance itself, but that an engaged process exists in how the surfaces of these phenomena as encounter others and connect to our experience of life, which requires attention. In other words, without an engagement with the affects and phenomena of identity, while embracing an ethics of non-identity, it is difficult, nay, impossible to sustain an externality of resistance. This reading of nomadic subjectivity harnesses the affirmative ethics which Braidotti is positioning, while avoiding the pitfalls of shaming the attributes of memory work and deconstruction. These loci are necessary to the evolution of the revolutionary subject when engaged from a position of a non-identarian nomadic self. Integral to this theory and how it relates to art and creative praxis is the interplay between the radical subject and the normative world it encounters. The subject (self) is part of a nature-culture continuum, a transversal multiplicity in non-hierarchical relationship to others and the world. In this view, there is no ontological difference, in terms of categories between any kind of living entity. This flattening of hierarchies leads the nomadic thinker-doer into radical acceptance of the other as being constituent, and an extension of ‘self’. When embodied, this idea necessitates an ethic of care, responsibility, and friendship that sees the world, and us within it, as kin. This idea is not unique in contemporary philosophy, sharing a lot of touchpoints with object-oriented ontology and new materialism. These other frameworks do not encompass the dynamism, openness, breadth, intensity, and, most importantly, clarity of the Nomadic Theory and method. In the practice of art, these ethics of care and responsibility can be extended into relations between materials, whether they are ideas, objects, systems, institutions, buildings, or people. These affirmative ethics can influence efforts to change normative systems through radical counter-propositions. Instead of approaching these systems in a combative or antagonistic manner, change is explored through alternative transversal offerings, presenting a counter-intensity to the status quo. This approach aims to shift ideologies or alter the conditions in which ‘subjects’ can redefine and re-determine their positions. The subjective experience of each individual, and in relation to others, is central to understanding the world. Therefore, subjective experience itself is key for attempting to change the world through various modes of resistance, whether through art, activism, direct action, politics, or other means. Shukatis and Graeber narrate: &nbsp; &nbsp; What we perceive as fixed self-identical objects are really processes. The only reason &nbsp; &nbsp; we insist on treating objects as anything else is because, if we saw them as they really &nbsp; &nbsp; are, as mutual projects, it would be impossible for anyone to claim ownership of them. &nbsp; &nbsp; All liberatory struggle therefore is ultimately the struggle against identity. These ideas foster empathies from diverse interactions connecting to an ‘extimatic’ force that seeks to flatten hierarchical thinking and action. Extimacy is the translation of extimité, a Lacanian neologistic blend constructed from exterior and intimacy. It is understood as the externalisation of the interior, and vice versa, and relates to the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage and the position of the other never being situated in one place, always out of reach, yet informing who we think we are. I use it here to articulate the dynamics at play in the intersubjective relationships of the artistic experience as well as that of the relationship between the artist, the artwork, the world, and specifically how the practice of art is always sharing the internal externally, with the exterior being experienced intimately. This flattening of hierarchy does not suggest there is a compression of meaning or a sameness which permeates such experiences. On the contrary it expands difference and meaning, and is unafraid of non-identity. This ‘non-identarian difference’ is a concept shared by many, often divergent, philosophical schools of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where these ontologies of difference agree is in the radical acceptance of the other, as paramount to the foundation of the one. Embodying this knowledge necessitates a radical politics of difference. This requires developing a praxis that opens a deep empathic awareness and care to those others who, though not yet recognised as part of us, can begin to be heard through struggle. Artistic practice, especially of the radical kind, takes this struggle seriously. It may be one of the last places left to criticise and re-evaluate the identarian structures of power, both personal and collective, we hold as natural and true. We live in an era where this work of change is increasingly critical. Now that systemic problems of capitalism and post-colonial geo-politics are so apparent, ‘change’ is explored across industries. From medical to military sectors, workers, not only managers, are engaging in ‘leadership’ courses asking them to ‘re-imagine’ the way we work. This may lead to insight and promote collaboration, but it is still within a system that remains hierarchical, tied to power corruptions and continuing for-profit effects on the planet. These industries are beholden to specific tasks they need to achieve which means they can only go so far in questioning the fundamental flaws of their economy. Art does not have this restriction, because, when it is free of teleology and emancipated of its object, it can undermine itself and reimagine an-order of relations that values self-determination, time sovereignty and free association — leading to further creativity-resistance (change). Articulating the ontological and epistemological complexities of difference and non-identity shapes an understanding of creativity and its significance in the world. This perspective underscores why much art production gravitates toward liminal spaces of difference, treating these as sites for creating new meaning with audiences. Whether this dynamic oscillation is achieved at any specific point in the art is less relevant. It is the intensity of the struggle, empowered by difference and non-identity (becoming), which drives change. In other words, the process of becoming-artist, of undertaking the works themselves, of doingcultural practice, is the ultimate goal. Indigenous cosmologies develop as systems of interrelations between all life forms. Points of connection between the appearance of one and another are continuing acts of culture acknowledging this relationality: singing, speaking, writing, drawing, painting, dancing, tilling, sharing, caring, and kinning worlds into existence. Inherent in this way of being is a continuous tie to all forms of life in an everlasting creativity process of becoming. These ideas are critical and could be the framework from which we redesign our economies of land; from that of proprietary to that of kin and custodianship. This necessitates an ethics of care and fundamental shifts in ideology that lead us to radical acts of commoning. Worldviews create worlds. For some Indigenous scholars, however, this ‘ontologising’ from Western academics can be seen as another form of colonialism. Without future imaginaries being led from a feminist Indigenous perspective embedded in its land and ancestry, we run the risk of superimposing a Westernised interpretation of this lore and using it to reinforce our right to be in the centre of the conversation. I agree with the resistance in this approach and the opportunity it affords Indigenous women to use their knowledge and power to lead discourse and action. From my perspective as a dual identity, Western-male born and identified, with a privileged upbringing interconnected into global cultural opportunities, I would add that embodied practices that oscillate between internal (psychological, mythological) and external (systems, others) are integral to unlocking the potential of heterogeneous communities embedded in kinship relations to each other and country. In my argument, these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but require each other to make a difference in the worlds of relationality and discourses of power toward forms “of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership” as described by Aboriginal film collective, Karrabing. This dual approach of regrounding claims to connections and alliances between different constituencies is taken up in the research and work of critical theorist and filmmaker, Elizabeth Povinelli, especially through her collaborations with the Karrabing. In this work we start to approach a method which belies the prevailing methods of relationality and discourse through alternative transversal experiments in story-telling and social praxis. In her critical anthropology, Povinelli constructs four axioms of existence to describe a theory addressing the ontological, social, political, and historical knotting of Western provincial epistemologies. Povinelli’s four axioms are: 1. Entangled existence (knotting of self is actually outside); 2. Unequal distribution of effects of power (to knot) and the power to affect a terrain of existence (to unknot); 3. The multiplicity of the event and the end of the event; 4. Provincial nature of western ontologies and epistemologies (postcolonial, critical race, queer theory). She unpacks active methodologies that confront contemporary repression stemming from layers of contemporary and historical violence. Povinelli develops new parameters to engage in acts of radical collaboration, between the seat of her own family’s displacement in northern Italy, and with the Karrabing, her long-term friends and collaborators. Povinelli’s practice as a philosopher and artistic collaborator is grounded in her background as an anthropologist. Her ideas transcend geographical and conceptual space, zones, and concepts of time, and critical cultural ‘placedness.’ These ideas and approaches resonate with my own interests and projects that examine a personal history of displaced ancestry and how this relates to the historical and contemporary violence of geo-politics. This practice articulates the resonance I feel on the country in which I was born, but with which I do not have intergenerational cultural history. For Povinelli and me, this ‘displacedness’ is explored through artistic investigations that intervene on the impossible in-betweenness of such cultural identities. By forging new connections to each liminal location, new strains of culturally hybrid identity are formed. These threads become traces articulated in practice. Importantly, these investigations, wherever they occur, continue to act critically in their analyses of power and oppression. New cultural formations and critical analysis are constantly in play and at play. To achieve this level of engagement with the struggle of history as it interplays with one’s personal imaginary, involves layers of privilege to which many do not have access. One of these privileges is, of course, money. Another, and perhaps even more important, and not always tied to money as I argue below, is access to freed time. As all creative people—all people—know, time is not money. Yet, as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi notes, modernity has been “structured by the semiotic code of Economics”, and through this “time was priced and mathematically measured as the source of value.” The control of labour under industrial capitalism and rent under financial capitalism has radically shaped the way humans relate to a core fundamental property of the universe: time. This has structured individual and collective worldviews and concomitant effects on systems of relationality, namely governance, family, self, and work. We are shaped, indeed, instrumentalised, by the dynamics of financial capital. We become agents of its dispersal. Our identities are forged by contemporary capitalism’s flows and striations, and our bodies are therefore distorted in its image. This economics and its affective-reality is best countervailed by a particular amalgam of creative modalities, namely poetic sensibility, creative resistance, radical proposition, and self-reflexive, free time. These devices allow us to oscillate on the threshold between hegemonies, and, importantly, unlike other sectors in the creative industries, from music to architecture, are hard to ‘mine’ and turn into products of accumulation and consumption. I contend that this is because the creative modalities described above—poetics, resistance, radicality—cannot be compartmentalised, atomised, and standardised, and this is due to their creative, fluid, and extimatic sensibilities; processes always on the threshold of resistance and becoming. According to Berardi, it is at these thresholds where: A schismogenetic process can begin. Not a revolution, not a new political order, but the emergence of a new organism that is different to the old organism. This is, properly speaking, the space of poetry: the activity that shapes the new dispositions of sensibility. It is at the confluence of these creative approaches where a new critical and active aesthetics emerges, oscillating between the fields of direct intervention, aesthetic translation, and embodied poetics. Where else but in this new aesthetics is time-itself freed, allowing us to experience the joy and weirdness of the cosmic, geological, spatial, nature-culture continuum? To Berardi again: &nbsp; &nbsp; Exceeding the self is the core of the sexual drive: highlighting a desire to be traversed &nbsp; &nbsp; by the flows of the other, to inhale the other, to smell the flavour of the other, to lick the &nbsp; &nbsp; skin of the other, to become the other. The field of mediation studies asks us to consider how acts of creativity and aesthetic translation can help us in the struggle toward knowing and becoming with others outside our knowability. Eugene Thacker explores in his study on the paradox of ‘excommunication’ how “one communicates with or connects to that which is, by definition, inaccessible.” In other words, the other is unreachable, obscure, alien, until we know and learn about it through mediation. This other can be data, algorithm, biological life forms, robots, bunnies, alternative cultural practices, or things, matter and lifeworlds that are immediately alien to us and which require mediation to comprehend when we encounter them. Thacker and his co-writers, Wark and Galloway, ask us to confront what mediation is, not what it does, but what it is and why. For the authors, the impossibility of communicating that which is alien to our immediate understanding is the necessary struggle of media and art. Engaging with this challenge reveals the potential of perceiving the world of objects and interactions as both autonomous and interrelated. Through our engagement in these acts of mediation, of listening and speaking simultaneously, like Berardi’s analogy of sex, not for the proliferation of the species, but for the sake of knowing the other, we can cultivate an empathic artistic praxis leading to the creation of new connections and possibilities for creativity. This ‘becoming-other’ is imperative for radical cultural practices that use nomadic methodologies to transform systems of personal and collective normativity. One of the techniques of this method is to practise creative repetition from different angles to produce new empathies and meaning, leading to the possibility of further creativity and care to those seemingly outside our established sense of identity. Through these repetitions and remediations, we become aware of the creative possibility of beings we have not previously considered in our realm of importance as artistic agents. We effectively become each other through this process, together forming a new subject and art object. These relational processes connect ideas of radical futuring with what else is possible given contexts, materials, flows, and sites beyond individual control. Working within these new relational systems shapes experiences that, in turn, open further relationships to new materials and contexts. Both resistance and becoming are radical in that they consistently open toward the new, creatively offering possibilities to the world that are then confronted by static forces of power and authority. Resistance will always continue to surface, for it is a fundamental flow akin to process, creativity, and difference. Due to its primacy, resistance necessitates a philosophy of becoming, framing acts of resistance as positive, creative, and multiple. These new modes of subjectivity affect both the person we think we are, and crucially our relationship to otherness. The overlapping and bifurcating themes explored here - of resistance and becoming, criticality and critique, aesthetics and ethics, speculation and action, personal and political perception, constitute the fabric of my creative arts-research practice, which I call critical dreaming. Critical dreaming is a theoretical and practical method emerging from the intersection of crisis and creativity, engaging in vital pursuits that speculate future/new modes of relationality. Both ‘critical’ and ‘dreaming’ hold multiple and layered meanings: Criticalis both critique of power, systems or other texts, and a sense of urgency. Some collective contemporary crises and urgencies are: sanctity of private property; border mentality and neo-liberal competitive ideology; addiction to work-identity; protectionist collective structures such as the nuclear family and racial/national sectarianism; and extractive capitalism resulting in the destruction of the living earth for the accumulation of wealth and power. Dreaming refers to imagery, symbolism, and narratives that arise from unconscious and preconscious states, influencing and inspiring arts practice in both hypnagogic and waking conditions. It also encompasses dreamingas an active, imaginative process of envisioning alternative futures, such as “I am dreaming of a better way to redistribute common wealth”. While each term carries multiple meanings individually, new layers of significance emerge when they are brought together. Here, dreaming is not a fantastical, disengaged unconscious-only process. Instead, when combined with critical, it is understood as the constituent force of our personal, collective, and institutional lives. How we live our lives and understand our relationships to each other every day is informed by the ideas - the language and ideologies and symbols we use and which use us - embedded in the material of our social organ. To critically dream, therefore, is to confront the norms and modes of subject and power with something transversal. Dreaming is a necessary, and, indeed, crucial form of resistance. Dreaming is not a mere by-product of the brain or a waste of time; it is a force of creativity that precedes and supersedes stasis and normative reality. When using this method, being radical is not about doing or even critiquing politics or social change but involves acting critically in one’s dreaming toward acts of becoming and modes of agency in the world which open new spaces for further differentiation. Opening these new spaces of potential liberates further creativity and care to those seemingly outside our established sense of identity, whether that is of artist, scholar, activist, family person, or self. It is important to remember that these continuous openings must remain critical, and that dreaming is a constantly unfolding and dynamic process. Otherwise, we will face the self-defeating issue that has undermined revolution throughout history, denying ‘difference’ and enforcing a power, which soon, simply becomes hegemony. Instead, we must embrace, as Deleuze defines it, the “poet, who speaks in the name of creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterises eternal return.” Community-building work frequently encounters the challenge of acting within a mode of creativity and resistance that remains unswayed by power. This power arises from various sources, including commercialism and State inaction, both of which attempt to restrict the creative flow of self-determined communities. The tension between maintaining openness and avoiding enforced closures, while simultaneously fostering conditions for a sustainable and impactful creative practice, presents a continuous challenge. This can be addressed through an evolving form of critical creativity that prioritises autonomy of practice alongside a steadfast ethics of care for relational entanglement. * References in this article have been excluded by the editor for readability. A fully-sourced version is available here. https://someislands.com/Fiona-Sprott-2 Thu, 28 Nov 2024 02:58:55 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Fiona-Sprott-2 Haunted (by) houses Fiona Sprott One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house; the brain has corridors surpassing material place - Emily Dickinson Home relies as much on the environment as it does on the bodily way of being in that environment. How does one re-imagine home after a traumatic un-homing event? How does one re-orient one’s body and mind to experience a feeling of being-at-home when the cultural object that symbolises and functions as ‘home’ (a house) is denied? In this piece I traverse a spectrum of theoretical and personal encounters with a loss of house-as-home. I explore a conceptual notion of both unhomeliness and non-home in which the house is a ghost that haunts my idea of at-home-ness. This idealistic house is haunted by my ghost-self conceived of as an Other that emerged from the trauma of being un-homed. Home, I argue, is ultimately where the heart is at ease, not just where the heart is, for a heart can be broken and still pump blood around the body, while standing in the ruins of a house that was once where I most felt at home.&nbsp; When you think of being at home, what images or sensations do you conjure up? Collins English Dictionary suggests that “If you feel at home, you feel comfortable in the place or situation you are in.” I would add that to feel at home is to feel safe from harm. That is likely because as an introvert I liken my home to a sanctuary that offers me respite from being in the world of ‘noise’—literal and figurative. Another word one might contemplate as being directly linked to being at home is security. Security of tenancy and ownership and secure boundaries that prevent unwelcome intrusion or incursions by others, human or other. &nbsp;For most (well-housed) people, home is a given circumstance. And, suggest Boccagni and Nietro, “there is no dearth of critical literature on the morally and emotionally warm aura around home as a deceptively romantic construction.” My conception of home is influenced by the cultural context of my upbringing which operates at a few levels; a national cultural narrative of home being a collective dream we all hold and work towards purchasing—fundamentally, a dwelling we own; and my own familial experiences of being in a military family where we constantly relocated from one generic house to another. Thus, home became the people and familiar possessions that travelled to each dwelling, and a period of living nomadically as a family travelling in a caravan. Home is now the people as the familiar possessions were stored away. Homemaking is the process by which I engage with home as a verb rather than a noun in which home is not just a place, but an ongoing and reversible process of place attachment and appropriation, a lifelong work in progress. What I can say for myself at the core of my own relationship to home is the concept of sanctuary. It is where I feel safe physically and emotionally. To put it another way, Home is where my heart is at ease. Emily Grosvenor strongly disagrees with the idea of home providing sanctuary in her blog post for The Guardian, “Stop calling your home your ‘sanctuary’.” Grosvenor argues, “I think we are delusional if we think we can have an active, engaged life—a life of purpose—whilst also retreating from public space.” Grosvenor crafts an argument against the idea that our home should ever be considered a sanctuary—but her stance assumes the position of a privileged house/home-occupier. As someone without a home to call my own, I disagree with this view, and stick with my assertion that a home, when I actually have access to one, is a sanctuary. It is a refuge, a protective space in which I am kept from harm. I want to scream in anger at Grosvenor for what I feel is a naïve view to hold in light of what came after her blog post was published: a global pandemic leading to forced lockdowns in which home was necessarily a sanctuary for many, a prison for some, and the current housing crisis in which stable and affordable accommodation no longer exists for many, including me. I also contend the rights of introverted and solitary people to consciously and deliberately define a purposeful life beyond being actively engaged in public space is, and should be, a basic human right, alongside access to shelter. The heart being at ease is a bodily sensation, as much as an emotional-intellectual concept. Dylan Trigg explores the experience of agoraphobia writing, “Home is not something ‘out there,’ waiting to greet us after a long day at work. It is a relation we hold to being-in-the-world.” The home space provides the refuge, literally, from a world in which one struggles to feel at ease. “The unhomeliness of agoraphobia is located in its resistance to experiencing the world as a familiar phenomenon.” Although I am not an agoraphobe, I relate to the notion of how my anxiety (bodily moods) impacts directly upon my ability to feel ‘at home’ in whatever environment I find myself. Boccagni and Nietro noted that when writing of their work with migrant populations about what home means to a migrant, “we encountered a somewhat unanticipated development.” Instead of the interviewee migrants reimagining what home would come to be or mean for them over a period of time after a dislocation or relocation, “they tended to discard the typical meanings attached to home,” and found the question itself to be “of little or no relevance.”&nbsp; The authors argue those who investigate home must consider that non-home “deserves to be acknowledged as a concept and as a social condition.” Currently, this is applicable to non-migrant populations in Australia on a large-scale. Non-home is a growing social condition with no apparent solution in sight. Our nation in 2024 is in the depths of a housing crisis so dire and entrenched people predict it will take decades to re-house the increasing number of homeless and an entire generation will unlikely be able to buy their own home. Here, we are situated at the intersection of a national housing crisis, partly wrought by the global pandemic crisis and complicated by an aged care crisis. You can see a theme emerging, can’t you? Crises piling upon crises to the point of absurd proportions. Implicated in all of these crises is the spectre of Home and the need to collectively re-imagine what it is in a post-house society. Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho offer a provocative argument about the unhomely home as an experience of the uncanny: &nbsp; &nbsp; … the home, which is something that should feel most comfortable and familiar, has &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; increasingly, in late capitalism, become a space where the uncanny is experienced. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The question becomes, what repressed content of capitalism itself comes to the fore in &nbsp; &nbsp; the figure of the “un-homely home”? We are enculturated in Australia to believe that home is a dwelling, one most potently represented as a house. Houses-as-home are normative. Houses are home(s) and that is where the heart is. We know our home because when we enter the house we feel it in our hearts. Are all of us, who are without a home, by definition heartless? No, but homelessness isn’t great for anybody’s heart health. And, arguably, the national policies and economic levers that have rendered so many people homeless in this country might be labelled heartless. For those not aware, basic housing is a human right protected by a number of human rights treaties including three which Australia has signed: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). In a paper published by the Australian Human Rights Commission in January 2008, Article 6.12 states; “Homelessness impacts on the right to freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Just saying. Let’s get supernatural. Reality is too depressing. It began with a dish being thrown across the kitchen and landing at my feet. Nobody (visible) threw the dish at me, and that raised a lot of questions. On the one hand, how thrilling to encounter a pocket of the (Lacanian) Real in my kitchen. On the other hand, I was pretty sure it meant things were getting weird, probably in a bad way. Kristeva writes, of the abject, “There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.” Poltergeists, by their very nature are disruptive of the (known) possible—the carefully thought-out structural and cultural normative descriptors of home and, indeed, house. The kitchen sink is designed as a passive receptacle for dishes to be placed, washed, or dried. What is one to do if it suddenly begins throwing dishes? How is one to create meaning from this moment in time, space, and place where meaning collapses? The kitchen is, of course, laden with cultural symbolism of a patriarchal society in which this space is designated for women’s work, their duties more particularly. This might be relevant, because the uncanniness of my poltergeist experience is directly linked to male aggression targeted at me. My demented elderly male neighbour had begun his drawn-out, increasingly intensifying harassment of me. Because of the then-current lockdown protocols in place for Covid-19 and the aged care crisis, my neighbour and I were bound together in this shared environment of side-by-side housing. A lot of his behaviour was gendered—he targeted my femaleness as a perceived or presumed sympathetic vessel into which he poured his neediness and demands for help. He used terms like ‘love’ and ‘be a dear’ and all the while physically pushing himself upon me, and into my private space. I hated him. He became loathsome to me. I suspect the poltergeist which developed is the culmination and comingling of powerful emotionality pouring forth from us both. Monstrous, destructive, and, perhaps, a little political. Have I conjured a dish-throwing poltergeist by refusing to be a woman kept in her place? I cannot understand what I have witnessed, but I am aware that somehow, this poltergeist is from me, yet how can this flying dish be of my doing? Am I, in fact, hallucinating? Or am I standing in the Real? Heideggerian philosophy, suggests Christos Hadjioannu, “does not regard an unqualified embracing of anxiety as the end of the story. Rather, it holds that an experience of joy and being at home in the midst of anxiety is possible and desirable.” But this is a modern model of stoic mindfulness that I am unable to fully adopt. My heart is not at ease. My home is being wrenched from me. At the very least, I am now co-habiting the space with this Other, this unseen entity. I can’t be stoic. I just can’t. There is at the heart of this exploration the tension of desire for homeliness versus the fallibility of architecture, and technology to ultimately address the psychological needs that underpin the very physical attempts to create the house as the fantasmatic object of home. There is an irreconcilable gap between the fantasy and the physical realities, and our attempts to traverse this gap by subjecting our houses to renovation and accessorising ultimately fail to manifest the impossible home of our desire. There is always some thing which brings to fore, this gap. In my gap appeared a poltergeist. It wasn’t just the dish. Repeated random banging in the walls. (Plumbing, surely?) Lights, turning on and off. (Electrical faults, has to be.) My personal favourite was the television turning itself on, and selecting a recorded movie to play, from the point last viewed. For this to happen, two remote controls, and several different buttons needed to be engaged or pressed. Scrolling, too, through four pages of a menu to even find the listing of the movie. (No explanation for what happened here, just a growing sense of uncanniness.) So, now I was literally (re)living the 1982 horror movie, Poltergeist, in which the entities began their communication with the child of the household, through the television set. Therein began the demise of my home as both a literal physical space in which I could reside, and as an otherworldly concept. Desire crumbles to dust. ‘I’ hanging together by a thread, about to break. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was developing PTSD. Tiffany D Neiheiser suggests: Most people know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a result of trauma, but unless you’ve lived with it, it’s hard to really understand what it’s like. Everyday experiences and objects become terrifying. Having PTSD is like living in a haunted house, but the ghosts are your trauma and they follow you everywhere. My neighbour’s increasingly violent incursions into my former sanctuary radically altered my physical experience of being in the space. Did I believe I actually had a poltergeist? No. But I was certainly in the throes of intense anxiety, constantly—leading to a feeling of unhomeliness. What had once been a lovely little home-space was now a site of uncanniness. My body was a site of constant grinding anxiety. Did I mention I was feeling enraged? Trevor K Bell writes: Ghosts and hauntings […] urge us to move beyond thinking in terms of static locations in the manner of the ancient notion of genus loci, or spirit of place, to engage with disordering eruptions, intersections, or infusions of supernatural possibility into the mundane environment. Police intervention was eventually required. Paolo Boccagni and Alejandro Miranda Nietro ask, “What is the opposite of home?” I suspect it looks something like me crouching behind a couch calling the police to come and restrain my neighbour, who was clamouring to remove the barricade of bins I’d built (theoretically) preventing access to my front door (bins stand in for the ocean in this figurative notion of island-home): If someone has no home or does not feel at home, this is typically seen as a consequence of some biographical disruption, after unsettling circumstances: eviction, forced migration, social marginalization or the experience of one’s domestic space as unhomely, that is, inhospitable, oppressive or violent. In a former life, I spent a lot of time studying the Lacanian Real – that which exists before, and beyond the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, crafted by our languages that create the worlds in which and to which we are enculturated. The psyche is described in spatial terms; what topology offers, thus, is a way of modelling the constitutive interconnection of the registers and how the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are defined only according to its position relative to each. Imagine then, a spatial arrangement whereby we predominately see, and can explore the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary, but the Real is hidden from view, until something, a bad experience, for example, brings it into awareness. Tom Eyers writes, “the subject advances towards the Real as something external and encounters it nonetheless as an internal limit, a limit that, further, seems to imply a beyond that cannot … be reached.” The poltergeist phenomenon introduced the Real into the space of my home environment. It erupted at the Kantian boundary where the knowable collides with the unknowable. I stand physically apart from the phenomenon, but the phenomenon is a physical (symbolic) representation of my experience. Or has my enraged mood conjured an actual, external entity which is not-I? Shall we delve into some horror now? I left that apartment which was the only rental property in the metropolitan and semi-rural regions of South Australia that was affordable for me. I mean that literally. There was no other property anywhere in the state renting for the amount I had been paying for the past few years. They doubled the rent the moment I vacated. That moment meant that apartment became a quaint relic of a bygone era: an affordable rental property. Leaving this property was not done lightly but the dwelling had become unhomely in the extreme. My island was sinking under water. I was cast adrift on my raft seeking new shores, some new sanctuary, fragmented and fragile. Since leaving, sanctuary has become scraps of quiet solitude I grasp for between eruptions of chaos and upheaval as I transform into a ghost haunting the homes of others. Putting ‘I’ into a suitcase, for safe keeping as I perform a kind of Otherness to a script written by the occupants and owners of the spaces I now inhabit. I am sheltered, yes, but still homeless. There’s a distinction here. I have lost something essential, something of deep and meaningful significance to me. A dear friend of mine was on the brink of homelessness unless he could find someone to share the rental property in which he lived. (The rent had been raised significantly.) It made sense for me to move in, but the house in question was poorly built. It was also haunted in a more palpable way. A heaviness and dark feeling emanated from the very walls and I learned that the house had a history of violent spousal abuse and violent sexual assault. I have experienced that spaces hold the memories of such events, and capture the emotional energy of previous inhabitants. This is what I mean by haunted, the sense of lingering pain and uneasiness. A section of the house had been built by an alcoholic, convinced they were skilled in building and construction (they were not). As a result, a family of possums got trapped within the walls, running through gaps and into the ducted air conditioning system, which was no longer in use, screaming in panic every night for several weeks, until they passed away. We could do nothing to help them. The landlord did nothing either. In writing about the haunted house of the horror movie genre, Beth Carroll suggests, “we are but custodians of domestic spaces; spaces that have their own histories, stories and memories, many of which would rather not be disturbed, and that ultimately assault our sense of self.” I feel the truth of this acutely, after the two experiences, of which I am still narrating for you the second, of unhomeliness. It is Carroll’s exploration of the role of sound that particularly interests me here, as the fortnight of listening to the screaming, dying entrapped co-inhabitants of our domestic space is the cue of the horror beginning. Caroll writes: Sounds clearly demonstrate that the walls we build around us and call a home are permeable; they let sounds in, but make it hard for them to leave again. Houses are brought to life through the entrapped sounds; the house is no longer some inanimate object, but a living, breathing entity in its own right which resists ownership and possession … by the living.” The deathly silence (literally, silence arrived at by death) brought an uncomfortable relief that lasted for a moment. The corpses were irretrievable. A new assault on the senses would soon begin. The persistent and intense waves of the stench of death that soaked into all porous surfaces forced both my then-housemate and me out of the house. The pong was so powerful it rendered the house unlivable. This was predicted to last for up to four months. The building was literally evicting us. And it would strip us both of the majority of material possessions we’d brought into the house. Home was being deconstructed for me, again, quite violently. From this unfortunate tragedy came the necessary loss of all things of relevance to life lived within houses-as-homes. I mean that literally. A huge stinking pile of material items ranging from mattresses and bedding to cutlery, lamps, yoga mats, clothing, furniture. All of it. Had. To. Go. To. Landfill. Situated precariously on the driveway, fifty feet from a building that was once a home but is now uninhabitable (by the living). It sits empty. Doors and windows wide open. Strange calico bags filled with something mysterious hanging from the ceiling intended to soak up the smell, but failing to do so. This now-monstrous building looming over us, with its fetid tendrils of the scent of decomposition assaulting our nasal passages. Perhaps, we said to ourselves, this is how one disposes of emotional baggage most efficiently, in an act of an absolute and violent purge. All ties to the past were irrevocably cut, including a past of living in houses-as-home. From here, I was homeless. We both were. Homelessness is an experience of being ghosted by mainstream society. It is a great way to be rendered invisible in the sense of Esther Pereen’s construction of living ghosts where she writes “the ghost is a metaphor certain people (are made to) live as, the conceptual and cognitive framework through which they are made sense of and come to make sense of themselves.” No longer being bothered by ghosts, I have now become the ghost. Without access to a house to call your own, you are rendered ‘homeless’ by definition in society but for those of us who experience homelessness (by that definition), a heart still seeks to be at ease, and the body-mind still attempts to feel at home in the world. The challenge becomes to learn how to function as a living ghost, and reconfigure a relationship to home that transcends the requirement of a house (or other similar dwelling). For five months I slept in a spare room and camped in a vehicle. This spare room was in an old house, one that I had once occupied with my mother. These were the early days of her dementia coming on. The beginning of a long road of slow degradation of spirit, soul, memory, and ultimately our relationship. Dementia was itself like a thief in the night, a ghost that came into the house and slowly began taking away my mother and leaving a body carrying an unknown woman behind. Before we were at this tragic phase, I had noticed odd things in this house like doors that would tug as I tried to open them, a strange grey shape that would stalk the hallways now and then, an overall sense of being watched. I awoke one night and just for a moment I was terrified by a glimpse of a transparent figure suspended above me, hovering on the ceiling. In the morning, I jokingly commented to my mother, “I sometimes think this house is haunted.” I had anticipated her reply to bring me back to the realm of pragmatic realism. She said instead, “Yes. I think so, too. That’s why I lock my door at night. So, it can’t get in.” I sometimes reflect on this conversation, even years after her passing. Returning to stay in the house, years later, (with other family members), there was no sensation of haunting. No lucid dreaming, or night terrors, such as had gripped me when I’d shared the house with my mother. Trauma is not only evoked by singular, radical disruptions to normality or serenity, or the body. Trauma can creep in the back door, and start a slow and steady erosion of your sensibilities. It can be a kind of death by a thousand small cuts. It can be a house you once tried to turn into a home, but failed to do so because of the presence of pain, illness, and anxiety. In returning to this familiar house, a site of trauma, blended with fond memories, I am carrying the past with me, my body retains memory of habituated movements and being-here-ness of this place. Still, it is no longer my place. I am a visitor. The ghosts here are only my ghosts. Or rather, I am the ghost in this scenario as the dynamic persistence of an event that continues in spite of the absence of its original containment. I am conceding to the power of place as I content with a haunted undercurrent. I am merely treading water while searching the horizon for an island (sanctuary) upon which to wash up. Being homeless in the literal-physical sense forced me to create a sense of being-at-home within. To imagine myself embodying a secret sanctuary, a figurative spatial internality within my literal physical body, invisible to others where I was safe and sound while the noise and drama of lives being lived carried on. I was forced to try and create an island sanctuary within my own mind, one I can visit at any time I need. My ghostly self is where she needs to be, even as my physical self, enacts being here for the entertainment of others. This method is a work in progress. I have landed in (yet) another house that is not and cannot ever be my home. Still, it provides shelter. This current house is haunted by the long-embedded smell of large dogs. No amount of washing or replacing carpets seems to erase the reek which gathers and occasionally pounces upon me. These smells behave much like the dogs might have when they were here. They are ghost dogs now. At least this appearance of ghosts is consistent to the theme of uncanniness woven throughout my experiences of unhomeliness. Places gather traces if the inhabitants stay long enough. Chances are, you will never know I was in any of these houses I have mentioned. https://someislands.com/Godfrey-Baldacchino-1 Thu, 28 Nov 2024 03:00:40 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Godfrey-Baldacchino-1 An unlikely archipelago Godfrey Baldacchino ‘Some Bridges’ is the title of a perspicacious 2024 review of Some Islands 2, penned by Joel Lektemann, published in Lingoblog.dk. Therein Letkemann argues that “If each article is an island, the journal itself is more, to use editor Joshua Nash’s words, ‘amorphous,’ something of an archipelago of artifacts through different media, a landform that morphs and adapts to each reader.” Taking Joel’s reflection as challenge, this piece is inherently something of an archipelago, in and of itself, with (at least) two different strands of engagement, that coalesce around two men who have met once. The motivation to consider both threads stems from serendipity. The day, 12 July 2024, was yet another afternoon at my home office. But these two ‘memes’ have come up, in mad and unruly succession, in the course of this afternoon’s musings, internet searches and email correspondence. Here is what happened. My wife and I ended up watching US President Joe Biden’s unscripted press conference yesterday, live on TV, hot on the heels of hosting NATO’s seventy-fifth anniversary meeting of heads of state. I am sure many viewers were looking out for glimpses of mental incapacity and other lapses in the octogenarian; I found myself thinking of the leadership narrative that the US has assumed of and for itself, and which was again being peddled by the US President, while addressing not just a domestic but also an international audience.&nbsp; At around the same time, the recently elected Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Jeremiah Manele, was in Beijing, People’s Republic of China (PRC), at the head of a high powered delegation, and being hosted by President Xi Jinping. Of all Pacific small island developing states, the Solomons is the one that has reached out most prominently to embrace collaboration and cooperation with the PRC, establishing a foothold for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Pacific. Such initiatives rankle Washington since they fly in the face of a discourse where the US is the undisputed patron of and for developing countries. The Western media speak of how such a visit, and what it implies, raises fears of Chinese involvement in a region long dominated by the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. But, hold on a moment: PM Manele has already visited Australia. Indeed, this was his first overseas trip as PM – and had talks with his Australian counterpart Albanese. He now plans to visit Japan in a bid for investment and development assistance. He represents and is head of an archipelago, with a population of around 750,000, flexing its sovereignty by not excluding donors merely on ideological or geo-political grounds; and which, under Manele’s predecessor, switched their country’s recognition from Taiwan/Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China. (The details of a security pact with China remain so far unknown.) I. In my (perhaps twisted) frame of mind on that afternoon, Biden and Manele feature together, but come across as two men standing at opposite ends. Yes, two heads of state. But: is that where the similarities end? Large state versus small state. Continental, heart of empire versus a small archipelago in Earth’s “Empty Quarter”. One leading a superpower, with a GDP per capita of US$76,000, and with petroleum, vehicles and integrated circuits as main exports; the other leading a developing country, with a GDP per capita of US$2,000, and with wood, fish and palm oil as main exports. One is getting close to the end of his current mandate, and still keen on being his party’s candidate for possible re-election; the other is freshly elected, after various stints as senior civil servant, diplomat and minister. One is advancing a hegemonic worldview; one is preferring a more pragmatic approach. One coming from the US State of Delaware, home to over one million business entities that benefit from its favourable corporate laws; the other hailing from the antipodean island of Santa Isabel, and is the first prime minister of his country from this province (population: 35,000).&nbsp; II. That such a comparison is at all possible speaks to the power of sovereignty. While there may be around 85,000 populated islands in the world, a few of these are actually jurisdictions, equipped with some modicum of local government, such as municipal status. And among these, a few are full-blown sovereign states, They emerged on the world political map in that great age of decolonisation, spanning half a century: largely, from the independence of Iceland in 1944 to the independence of Palau, after protracted referenda, in 1994. Thus have some small islands been thrust on the world stage: occupying seats in the United Nations General Assembly; wielding crucial votes on international organisations such as the International Whaling Commission; having flags, anthems, top-level internet domain names; and, above all, governments and a diplomatic service. Thus, in spite of their smallness – 27 countries are small by any measure, each with resident populations of less than one million; of which 20 are island and archipelagic states. These jurisdictions are visible and command respect. Because of their voting power; because of how they now control huge tracts of ocean because of their exclusive economic zone, itself an outcome of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which, also came into effect in 1994. This is why the Maneles of this world, men and women at the helm of small island governments and diplomatic offices, can and do attract the world media. They also demand and deserve attention. What they do and say also contains news value. And it is not just their position at the helm of their respective country’s government that gives them clout. Personality, leadership, savviness, and presentation skills provide a top-up that makes some of these characters tower over others, and not just others from small island states. Think Mia Motley from Barbados, or Simon Kofe of Tuvalu, or the sadly departed Tony deBrum from the Marshall Islands. This is why it is possible to find out and read about what Biden, but also Manele, is doing, on 12 July 12 2024. III. The power of jurisdiction is not to be underestimated or romanticised. It may appear cute to outsiders to have a country no larger than a medium-sized town. And, in the course of the study of small (often island) states in politics and international relations, the emphasis has been definitely put on the word ‘small’ rather than ‘state’. Scholars and observers from large states, and notably from the United States—Robert Keohane, Annette Baker Fox, Peter Katzenstein, David Vital—have been ‘outsiders looking in’, examining the quirks and peculiarities of these (mostly new) jurisdictions from a distance, while rarely engaging with their agency and influence, often dismissing them as powerless and inconsequential. The most recent years has, however, seen a flourish of small (often island) state studies, led this time by authors from small states themselves: Cyprus (Nicos Trimikliniotis), Denmark (Anders Wivel), Norway (Iver B. Neumann), Iceland (Baldur Thorhallsson), Luxembourg (Anna-Lena Hogenhauer), Malta (Roderick Pace) and Mauritius (Roukaya Kasenally). (I humbly and responsibly add myself to this tradition.) Moreover, the sheer presence of small, often island, states in international organisations (IOs) is so weighty that they are impossible to ignore. Indeed, the very legitimacy of these IOs can be seen to depend nowadays on their ability to acknowledge the presence of and factor in and address the specific interests of these small states. The latter, in turn, have risen up to the occasion, and increasingly flexed their newly found voice and status to make their concerns felt. I have called this ‘positive sovereignty’ and ‘the resourcefulness of jurisdiction’; as if sovereignty cannot be anything but positive. Nowhere is this positivity and resourcefulness more notable than at the UN Climate Change negotiations, with the inordinately active role of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). A Small Island Developing State lobby is officially recognised within the UN, and gets to organise its global summit once every ten years: the most recent event concluded in May 2024 in Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean. The emphasis, in small state studies, has shifted from considerations of ‘smallness’ to those associated with ‘statehood’. IV. Let me be bolder: if there are quirks in the international system, it is the large states, not the small states, that stand out, and really deserve scrutiny. There are some 15 countries in the world with populations over 100 million. Only three of these—Indonesia, Japan, Philippines—are island and archipelagic states. A proper theory of international relations needs to start from the ‘small state’ as the given orthodoxy, the mainstream jurisdiction of choice of contemporary history. After all, the median sovereign state population of the world today is 5.3 million, represented by a country like Finland. If our starting point is thus unsettled and refocussed, perhaps we would stop obsessing ourselves with looking at small, mainly island, states as powerless, vulnerable, lacking heft and clout, since such conclusions only emerge from a deficit paradigm, and from a biased examination that contrasts their predicament to that of the large states which seem to have it all in their favour. But, this is not true, since large states come with their own issues and baggage: militarism, imperialism, nuclear capability, regional power projection, threats of secession, unwieldy forms of federalism. Biden and Manele have thus occupied my thoughts on this particular afternoon. For the first time and perhaps for the only time. They constitute the sinews and rhizomes of an unlikely archipelago of contrasts. It is this human mind that has construed and constructed them as protagonists of the same mise en scène. Some events just stand out, together, because of their sheer sense of difference. https://someislands.com/Jason-Sweeney-1 Thu, 28 Nov 2024 03:00:24 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Jason-Sweeney-1 Home is in your head Jason Sweeney A short experimental documentary film on theories of place and placenessness and phenomenological aspects of 'home'. The work is based on a personal reflection on the psychogeography of a vehicle as a moveable living space versus a static environment. "Going to an open, to a clearing The soil is sour and unforgiving We buried our guilt I think I left the shovel there" Lyrics from the His Name Is Alive album Home Is In Your Head (4AD, 1991) Photography: Jason Sweeney and Fiona Sprott. Music: "For Years" by Panoptique Electrical. Commissioned for Some Islands 3. © 2024 Some Islands. https://someislands.com/Jon-Chapple Thu, 28 Nov 2024 03:02:01 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Jon-Chapple Sri Krishna Prem: In theory Jon Chapple In my recently completed biography of Sri Krishna Prem (1898–1965), the fascinating, brilliantly unorthodox British-born convert to Vaishnava Hinduism who was born Ronald Nixon, I included an appendix outlining what I consider to have been his core beliefs. These points of philosophy, based on three years’ study of both Krishna Prem’s lived example and his writings and correspondence, serve both as a concise introduction to his mature ideas regarding the nature of life and the Absolute and a lens through which we may analyse individual elements of the overarchingtheory, if such a thing can be said to have existed, associated with the teachings of this most unconventional sadhu. Initiated as a vairagi (ascetic) in the Bengali Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition, Krishna Prem’s was nevertheless a deeply personal spiritual odyssey that incorporated influences from Buddhism, Hindu Vedanta, classical yoga, analytical psychology, and the Western mystery tradition alongside Krishna bhakti (devotion). In his personality and manners, he was variously described as being both ‘more Indian than the Indians’ and giving the impression of an English gentleman in saffron robes. A former Cambridge academic and professor, he nevertheless swore to the reality of ghosts, magic, and psychic powers. On his death in 1965 he was succeeded as head of the Uttar Brindaban ashram at Mirtola, near Almora, north India, by his disciple, Sri Madhava Ashish, who, continuing a process begun in the 1950s, further simplified daily life at the ashram, opening the temple and kitchen to all and instructing the growing circle of disciples in an increasingly direct, less religious mode. It should be noted before continuing that students of Krishna Prem were largely encouraged to find their own way, particularly following what Madhava Ashish called the “great clear-out” of the 1950s and early 1960s. The travel writer, Bill Aitken, a disciple of Krishna Prem, has explained that by the 1960s there was “no Mirtola teaching as such.” Instead, the two gurus, who described themselves as “pupil–teachers”, adapted their guidance to the individual needs of each ashramite or visitor. It is important to recognise that most of the published accounts we have of Krishna Prem’s life, particularly those by authors with an affiliation to a particular tradition or sect, tend to emphasise one aspect of his belief system at the expense of others. For many Gaudiya Vaishnavas (‘Hare Krishnas’), he is notable as the first Western guru in their tradition; Steven Rosen, a disciple of Prabhupada, founder of the Hare Krishna movement, connects Krishna Prem’s final words with his guru’s journey to America, writing: “[I]n November of 1965, on his deathbed, Śrī Krishna Prem had been documented as saying, ‘My ship is sailing.’ What he didn’t know, of course, was that the sublime ‘ship of Śrī Krishna Prem’ had, indeed, already set sail, just a few months earlier, headed for Western shores.”1&nbsp;Similarly, followers of H.P. Blavatsky speak proudly of Mirtola as a “Himalayan ashram with Theosophical roots”2, while the psychologist-turned-LSD evangelist, Timothy Leary, who visited Uttar Brindaban in 1965, writes that his “interest in healing as well as enlightenment defines Sri Krishna Prem as a precursor of the humanist psychology movement that was to sweep America and Western Europe in the 1970s.”3 While bearing all this in mind, the following aphorisms, collectively titled ‘The teachings of Sri Krishna Prem’ in my book4, represent my humble attempt to distil four decades’ worth of spiritual theory into what may be called Krishna Prem’s guide to life on ‘the path.’ &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 1. The spiritual life is not easy and there are no shortcuts to the Goal. Without &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;“stickability” – perseverance – there can be no chance of success. It was with two conditions that Krishna Prem’s guru, the Bengali mystic, Sri Yashoda Mai (Monica Chakravarti), accepted his request to become her formal disciple. After first agreeing to adopt a vegetarian diet, Nixon then made a lasting commitment to dedicate his life to the service of his new spiritual master. Whatever happened, he would, he assured her, stick to the ‘path’ laid out by her before them, “and not, like so many would-be Sādhakas [seekers], change his loyalties at each passing whim.”5 For the next 40-plus years, true to his word, Krishna Prem clung doggedly to his vow of vairagya (renunciation), rarely stepping outside the ashram the pair had founded in the Himalayas and minimising contact with those who had known him as ‘Professor Nixon’ in order to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to a life of the spirit. As he once advised a fellow traveller on the path: “Clench your teeth and stick it out. We have no past.”6 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 2. Seek out a living master.Yoga is the art of the soul and can only be &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; taught by a qualified guru. When the student is ready, the teacher &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;will&nbsp;appear. The method by which one realises the nature of God and the soul, what Krishna Prem called the ‘Thing’, may only be learnt from a qualified teacher. Those who would set out on the path alone, armed only with book learning, are doomed to failure, as Krishna Prem explains: It is characteristic of this age of popular education that many people suppose that anything can be learnt by a patient study of books. But there are some things which can never be learnt in this manner and yoga (in any form) is one of them. Yoga is the art of the soul and it can never be learnt without the living contact with a master. All attempts to practise yoga without a guru, and a real guruat that, end either in disappointed failure, trivial psychism, ill-health or madness. The present writer has seen cases of all of the above occurring to uninstructed or ill-instructed would-be yogis.7 Krishna Prem’s fidelity to his own guru, Yashoda Mai, whom he considered a “jibanmukta”8&nbsp;(a liberated, perfected sage), was total. His friend, the celebrated musician and yogi, Dilip Kumar Roy, remembers the pair’s “beautiful mother-and-son-cum-guru-and-disciple relationship”: Krishna Prem, he writes, followed his guru “everywhere like a shadow” and “was at her beck and call at all hours”, including at night-time, when he “slept on the floor, like a servant, on a bare blanket.”9&nbsp;Krishna Prem’s disciple, Narendra Nath Kaul, who visited Mirtola in April 1944, around seven months before Yashoda Mai's death, writes that Krishna Prem’s devotion “had to be seen to be believed. Ma was frail and not too well. … He carried her in his arms to the small chabutra [dais] in the ashram compound in the morning. Whenever she called him he would leave everything and rush to her.”10 While his love for Yashoda Mai the person was genuine, he was also, in these extraordinary acts of devotion, serving Krishna as the paramatma – the “guru within.”11 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 3. Ego is the enemy. There are no separate selves; apart from the All, there is &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; nothing. As light is one, consciousness is one, and pervades all beings. Yashoda Mai, Krishna Prem’s teacher, writes that the “essence of the whole Path” is contained in the ability to suppress one’s “senses and ego”. “As long as there is consciousness of ‘I’, the separate self, there can be no consciousness of the Divine Self,” she explains. “Where the latter is, all self entirely dies.”12 At Mirtola, the term sannyasa, referring the final of the traditional four stages of life (ashramas) in Hinduism, was used as a synonym for vairagya, the vow of renunciation undertaken by Sri Yashoda Mai, Sri Krishna Prem, and Sri Madhava Ashish, Krishna Prem’s successor. Madhu Tandan, a disciple of Madhava Ashish, explains that the gurus further redefined sannyasa – which, she writes, she formerly associated with “wandering mendicants with matted hair and ash-smeared bodies, bound by a religious tradition which had little regard for the progress being made by mankind”13– as the all-important period when the: ego is slowly withdrawn from activity as the individual ponders over the purpose of experience and accepts a phase of quiet withdrawal. Built around actualizing its capacity, the ego must at this stage be sieved and distilled as the individuality pursues a more in-turned principle. For that is what life is about – the development of the ego and then offering it to a principle larger than itself. When that is done then sanyas, or the ochre cloth, is donned. … “Initiation, the disciple asks for, but sanyas&nbsp;(the robe) the guru has to offer you,” [Madhava Ashish] had said.14 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 4.&nbsp; &nbsp;Man is the measure. Human beings are unique as the vehicle through &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; which the Divine Consciousness, the source of all existence, perceives Itself. Part One of Krishna Prem’s unfinished masterwork, his commentary on H.P. Blavatsky’s monumental The Secret Doctrine, was given the title Man, the Measure of All Things – a reference to the teaching, expressed in Protagorean terms (homo mensura), of humans’ inherent divinity. As he once explained to Roy, “all men are incarnate Gods – only they know it not”. This view bears the influence of Meister Eckhart, “perhaps the greatest of the Christian mystics”, who wrote, according to Krishna Prem, that God “sees His own image in Man — and nowhere else.”15&nbsp;This position may also have been inspired in part by his own Vaishnavism, which holds that the ultimate reality—Krishna—feels the greatest ananda (bliss) when he experiences himself through his devotees, but finds its greatest exponent in the personage of Blavatsky. In Man, the Measure of All Things, Krishna Prem and Madhava Ashish elucidate: It is only through him who is ‘one with his Father’, him whose personal self is but a vehicle for his Father’s will, that the Father’s divine power can manifest freely with all its wondrous freedom. When that occurs, as it has now and then occurred, we gasp and idly prate of Gods, not knowing that beyond all Gods is Man, the heart of each of us, Ruler of all that is.16 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 5. As within, so without. Events in the outer world, like the wake from a ship &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; far ahead, originate in those which have already played out within. As is one’s &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; thought, so one becomes. Krishna Prem compares the state of the world to the troubled wake of a ship that has gone on out of sight, the trail of slime behind a snail, the pathway of dead ash left by a forest fire, “or – as He [Krishna] says in the [Bhagavad] Gita– ‘By Me already have these men been slain.’” All events playing out in our material creation have already occurred in the inner realms, if only we have the eyes to see. “It is not that ‘coming events cast their shadows before’,” Krishna Prem explains, “but that inner realities throw their shadows behind and beneath and we – who live in those shadows – take them for realities.”17 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 6. Pay attention to your dreams. As the royal road to the unconscious, &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; dreams contain important signals from our subconscious to our conscious &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; minds. Bill Aitken remembers that following the “great clear-out” of the mid-1950s, in which Krishna Prem and Madhava Ashish gradually de-emphasised Vaishnava ritual and theism in favour of a universalist, non-sectarian doctrine often categorised as “secular spirituality”, dream analysis, inspired by the ideas of C.G. Jung, seemed almost to supersede temple worship. Madhava Ashish writes of he and his guru engaging in what he called “a long-term psycho-analytical adventure, with a vivid dream life which led us from one point to the next.”18&nbsp;In his book An Open Window: Dream as Everyman's Guide to the Spirit, he recalls that he and Krishna Prem: went through a high period when a night without a dream was a wasted opportunity, a forgotten dream was a breach of trust. We hurried through our many chores to be free to pace up and down in the morning light, seeking meanings and their ramifications.19 For the Mirtola gurus, modern psychological and psychoanalytic techniques were useful tools to “clear the ground and bring the mind under control” before entering a meditative state,20&nbsp;and Krishna Prem warned his students against “abandoning the psychological inquiry” in favour of meditation-only sadhana.21 However, not everyone appreciated the introduction of psychotherapeutic methods into the de-Hinduised Mirtola, which by the 1960s was beginning more to resemble a psychoanalytical retreat than a conventional ashram. One woman with “spiritual inclinations” left disappointed after Krishna Prem and Madhava Ashish analysed her dreams of Shiva lingams, an unavoidably phallic representation of the god of destruction, “along ‘Freudian lines’”. “She felt terribly let down and did not care to have anything to do with such uncharacteristic sadhus,” recalls Satish Datt Pandey, a disciple of Sri Madhava Ashish.22 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; 7. Psychic phenomena are real, but beware of superstition: belief in the &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; occult, like any belief, should come only as a result of first-hand experience. Both Krishna Prem and Yashoda Mai, and the latter’s daughter, Moti Rani (c. 1917–1951), were reported to have possessed psychic abilities. In Krishna Prem, these first emerged as a result of the trauma he suffered after seeing his fellow airmen killed en masse in the First World War. According to his disciples, these occult powers, known in Hinduism as siddhis, included telepathy (thought transference) and telekinesis (the ability to interact with physical objects, such as temple bells, using his mind), as well as the ability to access his subtle ‘astral’ body. While some visitors were put off by what they saw as the importance the “‘Mirtola teaching’ seemed to give to ghosts and psychic phenomena”23, the capacity to see ghosts was one of the “rather strange and unorthodox attributes” which Krishna Prem considered to be helpful to a spiritual seeker, according to Satish Datt Pandey.24 Other desirable qualities included acceptance of the “androgynous nature of one’s psyche” and a strong attachment to one parent.25 However, despite his self-identification with India and Hinduism, he was also highly critical of aspects of Hindu culture he believed to be overly superstitious and unquestioningly accepting of untested beliefs: for example, he was disparaging of those high-caste (Brahmin) Hindu priests who made their living by exploiting local peasants’ cultural superstitions. For example, by organising “yajnas&nbsp;[fire sacrifices] etc. to allay the planetary malice”26&nbsp;supposedly caused by certain alignments of the stars, and drew a distinction between the “magnificently rational doctrine” taught by the Buddha and the baseless superstition[s]” of many “Brahmanical beliefs.”27 8. Ignore one’s sacroids. The integrated man knows that earthly love, including the physical, is a shadow of the heavenly. The battle of life must be won and not run away from. Krishna Prem was dismissive of what he called “sacroids” in those seekers whose holier-than-thou piety impedes their spiritual growth by rendering them unable or unwilling to “face the whole of oneself”.28&nbsp;He once chastised Dilip Kumar Roy for referring to him as “His Holiness”, explaining: “My Thakur [Krishna] isn’t holy and my Guru isn’t holyand I am certainly not holy myself nor intend to be.”29&nbsp;Another time, he told a student known to be afflicted with many “sacroids”: “We should do everything for the Lord. We should even piddle for the Lord.”30 Krishna Prem taught that love for or from God (prema) is of the same substance as the romantic or erotic love felt by humans for each other (kama). Taking aim at those who reject the physical aspect of such love, as well as praising the esoteric Vaishnava-sahajiya [the tantric, heterodox tradition of Vaishnavism that emphasises the erotic aspects of the Radha–Krishna legend] love poetry scorned by many conservative Gaudiya Vaishnavas, he explains: “[L]ove is one – there is no love but love, of course the thing that worries our ‘spirituals’ is that love has a physical component which, like all physical things is apt to claim more than its share of the attention. But ‘so what?’ as they say. So has meditation.”31 9. Books are useful – to a point. The Eternal is beyond words, which in any case mean different things to different people. The finger that points to the moon should not be mistaken for the moon itself. If books can serve, in Krishna Prem’s words, as a useful reminder of the reality of the “path laid down by those who have gone before … and reached the goal”32,&nbsp;the real truth is within, beyond teachers and ancient scriptures, and accessible to all. As Krishna Prem and Madhava Ashish remind us in Man, the Measure of All Things (1966): We have got so used to accepting it on external ‘authority’ of some sort, that it is not easy for us to adjust ourselves to the idea that no authority whatever, whether of sacred scripture or whether of men, can guarantee truth, but that it reveals itself in all its infallibility within the pure consciousness. Hence, if we would learn wisdom, we must seek it not primarily in books or teachers but in our hearts.33 Regarding this “hidden Knowledge”, while it is “true that attempts have been made to express it in writing”, these attempts must not be mistaken for “the Knowledge, cannot in themselves impart the Knowledge, and, in a sense, do not even contain it; they can only help to lead us to the Knowledge,” Krishna Prem explains.34&nbsp;The Knowledge, he adds, “exists in the only place where knowledge can exist, namely, in that which is the knower. Within the unsounded deeps of man’s being is all knowledge, for within him is hidden that Power which has brought all this universe into manifestation.”35 10.&nbsp; Doubt is the doorway to knowledge, and he who knows Reality fears no scrutiny of the grounds of his beliefs. In contrast to what might be called orthodox Gaudiya Vaishnavism, which emphasises the total reliance on the words of guru, sadhu, and shastra—the spiritual master, saintly persons, and scripture, Krishna Prem placed great importance on personal revelation, or ‘listening to the heart.’ There is, he writes, “a Light within us which knows the Truth, a Voice which commands the right with absolute certainty.” However, it is because “we usually do not listen … that an outer Guru is a help upon the Path.”36&nbsp;In The Yoga of the Kaṭhopanishad (1940), he further reveals the existence of those extraordinary sadhakas who “appear sometimes to have scaled the Peaks with the aid of the inner Guru alone”37&nbsp;(emphasis mine). Because the sincere spiritual seeker is being constantly guided by this inner, or chaitya, guru, which “dwell[s] in the heart of every living being … and speaks … with the voice of conscience”38,&nbsp;they have no need to fear judgment or disapproval from others, self-doubt, or the possibility that they are making the ‘wrong’ decision. This philosophy brings to mind a piece of advice given to young Ronald Nixon by Gyanendra Nath Chakravarti: “Whenever I have to make a major decision in my life, I try to follow what I think to be highest in myself. I have not always succeeded. When I have, I never had occasion to regret it. When I have not, I have always regretted it.”39 11. Love is the guide. There is no why, no wherefore – love is its own law, and nothing is greater. In his letters to his famous student, the philosopher-poet and one-time prince regent of Jammu and Kashmir, Karan Singh (1931–), Krishna Prem consistently stresses the importance of seeing beyond religious symbols, including Radha, Krishna, and Singh’s ishtadeva [favourite deity], Shiva – to the truth beyond: that “there is nothing greater than Love in this or any world”.40&nbsp;“[H]owever much the symbols glow for us, we have to pass through them to that which they symbolise,” he explains, “and speaking for myself, I find nothing more full and nothing which gives more meaning to an otherwise meaningless universe than the state of actual love.”41 Love of the Eternal – “the aspiration towards that white radiance which, dimly sensed through the many-coloured symbols of the Gods, is yet ‘the fountain light of all our day’” – is, Krishna Prem opines quoting Wordsworth, the “only satisfactory” motive for one’s setting out on the spiritual path: “Fear may cause us to shrink back, turtlelike, from the contacts of life; curiosity may expand our selves into the remotest corners of the manifested universe; but only with the wings of an ardent love can we soar upon the Swan’s Path to the Sun beyond the Darkness.”42 12. Embody the bodhisattva. Having crossed over to the other shore, one is obliged, following the example of the Buddha, to help others across. According to Bill Aitken, who lived with and cared for Krishna Prem in his final year, the “bedrock” of Krishna Prem’s mature philosophy was his adherence to “the Way of the Bodhisattva – a commitment to compassion: ‘having crossed over to the other shore he helps others to cross.’”43&nbsp;Pervin Mahoney, a disciple of Madhava Ashish and another former resident of Mirtola, confirms: “This is an essential aspect of the mature final guide he evolved into: that the man of attainment ‘remains available’ to help others.”44 Such was Krishna Prem’s belief in the reality of the Bodhisattva Path that he devotes an appendix of his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, a fundamental text of Vaishnavism, to a novel, highly unorthodox theory that effectively makes Krishna, along with other avatars, of whom Rama, the Buddha and, for “the more liberal-minded, Christ”, are listed45, into a Bodhisattva: a perfected man who has chosen to stay in the material creation in order to assist others on their journey towards enlightenment. This is a striking repudiation of what he calls the ‘orthodox view: “that Vishṇu [or Krishna], conceived as a personal God, from time to time takes birth among men”.46 While acknowledging that this theory is likely to “repel … the emotions of the devotee”47 (bhakta), Krishna Prem holds that “the real Krishna, Buddha, or Christ is not the outer form which, like all other forms, is illusory, but the birthless and invisible Átman within, known to Buddhist tradition as the Dharmakāya.”48 He had earlier been warned, apparently to no avail, by his param guru (guru’s guru), Bal Krishna Goswami, against trying to syncretise Buddhist and Vaishnava beliefs.49 13. Religions are man-made; the Truth is eternal. Though it has many names, the Path that leads from death to Deathlessness is one, and all who tread it will ultimately reach the same Goal. The idea of the essential unity of all spiritual paths was at the core of Krishna Prem’s teachings and worldview, and he returned to it frequently. This concept resembles the theosophical teaching that all religious traditions contain a common inner ‘great Truth’ and is central to his influential essay, ‘Initiation into Yoga’ (1939), which holds “there does actually exist a Path the treading of which leads to full knowledge of the Truth. It is a Path that has existed in all ages and in all countries, though the names by which it was known have differed widely. The Quest of the Holy Grail, the Search for the Elixir of Life or the Philosopher's Stone, the Devayāna or Pathway of the Gods are all terms for the same Path, the knowledge of which has always existed…”50 Krishna Prem’s teachings offer a unique synthesis of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions that reflect the idiosyncrasies of his own spiritual adventure. No Hindu leader before or since has so comprehensively melded Eastern thought with ideas adapted from Western psychology and esotericism. Still, he would argue he did not invent anything new. The path followed at Mirtola is claimed is the same as that trod previously by the Buddha, Christ, the Theosophical Masters, and the incarnated Krishna: ubiquitous, indivisible and eternal. It is precisely because of these, and other, apparently contradictory aspects of Krishna Prem’s personality and identity – he was simultaneously a Briton and Indian, a Hindu and a universalist, and an intellectual and believer – that Krishna Prem’s life continues to hold such fascination for spiritual seekers, religious scholars, and students of history alike. While his ever-evolving, syncretic philosophy could at times be hard to pin down, Krishna Prem was consistent in his belief that there exists a universal religious truth on which all paths eventually converge. As he explains in The Yoga of the Kaṭhopanishad: There are not half a dozen of these mystical absolutes floating about in the universe. There is not even one true and several false ones. There is just one Reality which has been symbolized in various ways, each symbol expressing more or less inadequately some one particular aspect of it. 'The Real is one; men describe it in many ways' (Rig Veda).51&nbsp; 1&nbsp;Rosen, S.J. 2017. Śrī Chaitanya's Life and Teachings: The Golden Avatāra of Divine Love. Lanham: Lexington Books: 203. 2 Ginsburg, S.B. (ed.) &amp; Madhava Ashish, Sri. 2012. Mirtola: A Himalayan Ashram with Theosophical Roots. Quest 100 (3): 98–105. 3 Leary, T. 1990. Flashbacks – A Personal and Cultural History of an Era: An Autobiography. New York: GP Putnam’s Sons: 217. 4 Appendix I: The teachings of Sri Krishna Prem. 2024. In Chapple, J., Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer. Kirksville: Blazing Sapphire Press: 315-316. 5 Madhava Ashish, Sri. Sri Sri Krishnaprem Vairagi. In Singh, J. (ed.). 2004. Letters from Mirtola (Written by Sri Krishnaprem and Sri Madhava Ashish to Karan Singh). Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan: 88. 6 Madhava Ashish, Sri. 2007. An Open Window: Dream as Everyman's Guide to the Spirit. New Delhi: Penguin Books:&nbsp;XI. 7 Krishna Prem, Sri. A Modern Yoga (review of The Riddle of the World). In Roy, D.K. 1992. Yogi Sri Krishnaprem (3rd edition). Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan: 300. 8 Bandyopadhyay, S. (ed.). 2011. Sri Aurobindo to Dilip, vol. 4 (1938–1950). Pondicherry: The Mother &amp; Sri Aurobindo: 148. 9 Roy. Yogi Sri Krishnaprem: 65. 10 Kaul, N.N. 1980. Writings of Sri Krishna Prem: An Introduction. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan: VIII. 11 Chambers, J. 2009. The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books: 196. 12 Tandan, R. 2019. Metaphors and Quotes of Yashoda Mai’ (summary of Krishna Prem, Sri [trans.]. The Homeward Journey [unpublished]). Mirtola: Thakurji Sri Sri Krishna Trust: 4. 13 Tandan, M. 1997. Faith &amp; Fire: A Way Within. Gurgaon: Harper Collins:&nbsp; 254. 14 Tandan. Faith &amp; Fire: 255. 15 Singh. Letters from Mirtola: 56. 16 Krishna Prem, Sri &amp; Madhava Ashish, Sri. 1969. Man, the Measure of All Things (1st US edition). Wheaton: Quest Books: 404. 17 Roy. Yogi Sri Krishnaprem: 227. 18 Madhava Ashish, Sri. 2015. Where’er Love’s Camels Lead: Sri Krishna Prem Remembered (unpublished). Mirtola: Sri Dev Ashish: 240. 19 Madhava Ashish. An Open Window: XVIII. 20 Ibid.: 5. 21 Ibid. 22 Pandey, S.D. 2003. Guru by Your Bedside: The Teachings of a Modern Seer. Gurgaon: Penguin Books: 192. 23 Ibid.: 99. 24 Ibid.: 98. 25 Ibid.: 98–99. 26 Singh. Letters from Mirtola: 33. 27 Nixon, R. 1923. The Knowledge of the Buddha. The Maha-Bodhi and the United Buddhist World 32(8): 290. 28 Pandey. Guru by Your Bedside: 193. 29 Roy. Yogi Sri Krishnaprem: 281. 30 Pandey. Guru by Your Bedside: 193–194. 31 Singh. Letters from Mirtola: 50–51. 32 Sen, G.E. Sri Krishnaprem (introduction). In Roy. Yogi Sri Krishnaprem: XV. 33 Krishna Prem &amp; Madhava Ashish. Man, the Measure of All Things: 203. 34 Krishna Prem, Sri. Initiation into Yoga: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life. Wheaton: Quest Books: 57. 35 Krishna Prem. Initiation into Yoga: 58. 36 Krishna Prem, Sri. 1938. The Search for Truth. Calcutta: Ganesh Chandra Bose: 8. 37 Krishna Prem, Sri. 1940. The Yoga of the Kaṭhopanishad. Allahabad: Ananda Publishing House: 72. 38 Krishna Prem.The Search for Truth: 7. 39 Madhava Ashish, Sri. 1976. Sri Krishna Prem through the eyes of a disciple (foreword). In Krishna Prem. Initiation into Yoga: 22. 40 Singh. Letters from Mirtola. 67. 41 Singh. Letters from Mirtola. 60. 42 Krishna Prem. Initiation into Yoga. 43. 43 2018. Teachings. https://www.mirtolareflections.com/the-teachings.html – accessed 23 January 2023. 44 Mahoney, P. Email to the author. 23 June 2023. 45 Krishna Prem, Sri. 1948. The Yoga of the Bhagavat Gita. London: John M. Watkins. 199. 46 Ibid. 47 Krishna Prem. The Yoga of the Bhagavat Gita: 199–200. 48 Ibid.: 200. 49 Niroop, email to the author, 9 July 2021. 50 Krishna Prem. Initiation into Yoga: 40. 51 Krishna Prem. Ibid.: 66. https://someislands.com/Joshua-Nash-1 Thu, 28 Nov 2024 03:02:25 +0000 SOME ISLANDS https://someislands.com/Joshua-Nash-1 Creole architecture and creole linguistics Joshua Nash A working definition of pidgin languages derived from the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures is that they are non-native languages arising out of forced interethnic contacts like trade, boarding schools, and on plantations where a common language is required. They are not the main or default language of any particular ethnic, social, or political group. Pidgins have structural norms and must be learned. Pidgins become creoles when they are nativised. Creoles are languages which have evolved in socio-historical settings of, for example, multilingual interethnic plantation societies and similar socioeconomic situations. These languages are used as native languages as they refer and relate to complex social interactions. Children are often considered the creators of creoles because they stabilise the less stable system of the inherited pidgin language. Creoles, then, are not merely hybrids or derivations of the parent languages; rather, they are entirely new languages. They have developed out of creative interpretations in situ where the linguistic needs of a people have commonly become inextricably linked to specific places and behaviours. In the same way that creoles are not simply reinvented pidgins but entirely different languages, architectural creoles are not merely earlier forms reprised; they are newly developed vernacular forms which have been adapted, accepted, and identified with by a group of creole-speaking people into an architectural creole. This is apparent through local autochthony, embedding, aesthetic endeavouring, and a striving to make sense of a new environment. Similar to linguistic features in spoken creole languages like indefinite articles, gender distinctions in personal pronouns, and the occurrence of nominal plural markers, architectural features like gabled end façades, modular construction, and the use of stone in creole houses can exist and change in parallel with the signifying functions they intend to serve. A question arises: Do creole architectures develop in places where creole languages evolve and vice versa? I propose small island environments where creole languages and creole architectures develop are ideal case studies to measure empirically congruencies between language and architecture. There are several possible methodological and theoretical parallels between research in the field of linguistics and historiographical architectural analysis. We can equate language development, for example, the idea that pidgins are evolving vernacular ways of speaking, with the use and reinterpretation of vernacular architectural features. Language change, for example, developing new lexicon in order to make linguistic and cultural sense of novel ecologies, can be extended to architecture by observing how inherited, technical expressions like plan, gable, and elevation features might be used more colloquially. And linguistic change and expansion in new environments, for example, how pidgins become creoles through the creolisation and expansion process with observable change in linguistic levels such as morphology, syntax, and semantics, can all be interpreted and extended analogously as a representation and embodiment of architectural change in certain physical and structural facets of domestic building. Adaption to altered environs, the capacity of complex social circumstances to bring about reordering of things, and the function of isolation and abstraction from the original sources of language and architecture are possible drivers of change. Creole people may take a handed-down architectural pidgin, an architectural vernacular which was not native to them, with which they were entrusted in terms of architectural information and changed it in respect of form—morphology and syntax—and meaning—semantics. The previous pidgin architecture might become creole architecture. Linguistics offers several structural opportunities for analysis as regards the possibility that pidgin architectures could become creole architectures. First, that function creates structure as in functional grammar. Second, that meaning drives and creates structure, e.g. Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor. Third, Chomskyan grammar would have us believe meaning interprets structure. Fourth, Talmy Givón states that meaning is derived from discourse. The position taken here is the first, i.e. that functional objectives, both linguistic and architectural, are the driving forces of change. These analyses explore a plausible position: architectural styles like spoken languages can change in parallel with the signifying functions they intend to serve. There are several benefits of applying theories of creole linguistics to creole architecture. These potentially offer architectural historians different ways of thinking about cultural change in architectural vernaculars across generations so that linguists, cultural anthropologists, and architectural historians might be able to work together more effectively in future. Previous research in creole architecture claims that such buildings in the USA and the Caribbean and their broader interpretations elicit specific historic types and forms of architecture which should be analytically separated from European patterns on the basis of their distinctive creole, mixed, or hybrid planning, form, and meaning. Based in the history of creolisation research and work into creole architecture, particularly in light of the fact that some of the most comprehensive and convincing research into creolisation has taken place within creolistics, taking a more definite and exact linguistic position has proven beneficial. Regarding the question ‘how linguistic is the ‘creole’ element of creole architecture?’, it is suggested that research so far has not been overly linguistic at all. This survey advocates that future work in creole architecture should be more aware of the advancements and insights contact language linguistics and creolistics have made to the field of creolisation, and hopefully vice versa, in Australia, the Pacific, and in the Caribbean. A more linguistically focused characterisation of creole architecture is: Creole architecture and the process of architectural creolisation is what takes place when a group of people, especially those who themselves are culturally mixed, inherit often due to relocation, a pre-determined and already-built building style as an architectural pidgin. When this pidgin architecture becomes vernacularised through necessary building and cultural adaption and expanded in terms of its meaning (semantics) and size and ordering (syntax), it becomes creole architecture. Further, in locations where there is parallel language development taking place in the architecture makers’ society, it is proposed that the changes in built environment may have parallel linguistic changes, because of the nature of the evolving familial structures and language change. That is, linguistic creolisation appears either to have begotten or have occurred at a similar time as architectural creolisation and vice versa. Creolistics may offer architectural historians different ways of thinking about cultural change in architectural vernaculars across generations so that linguists and architectural historians might be able to work together more effectively in future. This correspondence should be productive in both directions; creole architecture reasoning could offer much to creolists and linguists working in comparable language-based environments. These exploratory and hypothetical frameworks need to be further tested from the standpoint of both architectural history and linguistics. Such studies would ideally be comparative involving larger samples through across time of both architectural and linguistic documentation to ascertain drivers of creolisation and change.