Transgressio, Urban Analogs

"... for the Baghdad I knew then seems now closer to the time of the Nights than it does to our own times." --Hussain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, 1988 edition

Strange, the predilection for translators ventilating on their under-appreciated art, this failed child of the sixties marooned in the void between Drexel, Temple, and University of Pennsylvania campuses, respectively, the latter of which is not Ivy League, but sticks its nasal accent up your ass with well mannered decorum, though what it shares with the other two is the specter of inner city crime hanging over your shoulder. Our society both was and wasn't the film that, though now fallen   victim to kitsch, is in some ways ruthlessly modern, minimalist. The female actors potted plants, aerosol air and glued eyelashes, tears and widow weeds ready. It owes a debt to Kubrick, as does Mr. Soames. District 9 pays subtle homage to analog aspirations, and Blomkamp takes his work seriously. Earned undying gratitude.

I should be going to sleep, and this post may not ply so deeply due to this salient fact, but perhaps I should refine my parameters. The hate in my marrow has more to do with the void closing in on me, like our bodies daring the overwhelming entry into space, and our sheer insignificance in it. This is not the constriction I wanted to settle for, state socialism, an exploited body everyone else earns a living on, though I too, must plead guilty of having done the same. I am imposed upon, with fewer and fewer choices not to be so, but let's get Copernican. We all know Manhattan is the center of the universe, representative of every urban environment, whether cosmopolitan or provincial slummers who never get much beyond the radius of their street block, with an encompassing loss or longing, an interior with its own macular degeneration. I lived in Manhattan, never fully absorbed it, exactly the same and not the same as Philadelphia.

The Sunlight Aria

I am on a semi-lucid search for yet another well thumbed natty paperback from my tribal imagery days (huh? I see you, puzzled, asking what I am alluding to), John Gardner's Grendel, and I am not succeeding. I could, probably should, given the age of the paper, my marks on the typeface, just buy the much more expensive etext, but my used paperbacks are important, they provide clues, and Grendel survived the building renovations, unlike my health; where it was last escapes me. Gardner himself died quickly, violently, days into my swelling freshman breast, and I've clung to his memory ever since, my most beloved post-modernist, even if not the most profound. I have talked myself into an etext edition while my hunt pauses in digging through my musty bins, the paper trail of drafts, the certainty of checking account statements. Gardner, much like Lessing, is interested in the obscurity of origin, but where Lessing sees violence as an innate repression in the evolution of homo sapiens, Gardner has a more problematic view, as does the original epic from which his derivative masterpiece stems. Grendel and his *dam*, if I remember correctly the curious and hard word for the Teutonic view of the feminine, are monsters, perhaps obscure survivors who formed our myths, created our heroes, formed the basis of our territorial empires, the muscle of our modern powers, which, in Gardner's view, is a geocidal insanity (Beowulf as the rationale for the systemic extermination of the Vietnamese), one that makes Grendel a curiously sympathetic, disruptive figure.

Within this paradigm, Grendel's violence is the catharsis necessary for survival, whereas the personality cult evolved around the hero is a horrific, deadly excess. Where applicable, violence is unavoidable, targeted as a means to an end, but when it is senseless, it then becomes tragic. Ajami, versed in feeding our penchant to look for reasons, soothes the Western mind with timelines that provide insight, but I'd ask the Muslim world how it is that you forget the fabulism within your own traditions? Everyone knows the enchantment of Shahrazad's narrative loom, and its cures for palliative erosion that festers due to disillusion, and how European literary traditions copied from it, evolved.

I pity Nakoula, without endorsing his need for a polemic; he was used as a covet instrument, a cover as another means to an end. Vomiting Islamic traditions against liberalism, even into it, for the purposes of identity, is only a devaluation of virtue.