A conversation from after my last class with my current BPP group, group 45 (next term, new classes):
Luke H to Natalie S: - How come up you always seem to be going on a new date every two or three weeks and none of them work out?
Natalie: - No - not every three weeks..
Luke H: - Yeah, whatever, but why?
Natalie: - Well, it's just...
Me: - It's because you've got a distinctive mind. It's bloody hard to find someone like you if you have a distinctive mind.
Natalie: - Are you saying I'm a freak?
Me: - No, no - we all have distinctive personalities in this class. I'm just saying it's difficult with a distinct...
Sarah C: - It's true this class was pretty random. We were such an odd combination of people.
Eoin F: - Yeah, we're the zoo. We're such a random group.
Luke H: - That's so true
Eoin F: - It's like group 43.. group 44 .. The Zoo.
Friday 27 January 2012
Wednesday 18 January 2012
Other Parties
Many months ago, I left behind an aborted blog about a party in Dalston. It involved various eccentric self-metamorphoses in the spirit of pagan carnivalesque. Additionally, the last lengthy poem I wrote was called a 'Party for Introverts' (written months before the blog), which failed to manifest the paradoxical potential of its title but still retained some wicked, energetic humor. In any case, these show a persistent interest in the imaginative life (or lack thereof) of parties.
One reason for my interest is that parties usually contain a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and sometimes even the return of faces that were once familiar but need to be recovered through conversation and memory. Parties inhabit a kind of halfway between the anonymity of London street life where a passing character becomes a dissolving entity among entities, and the crystallisation of relationships in the various institutions most of us participate in whether as couples, family, friend circles, workers, students, or any other kind of bond-group instituted through a recurring role.
Emmanual Levinas, the French philosopher, described this process as the face-to-face encounter. For him, the face is not merely a visual phonemenon, or else a blind man like Dennis Church, my grandfather, would not have had this pleasure universally available to human sensibility. Instead, the face is a multi-sensory part of us which to a large extent governs our sense of the immediate (as opposed to the abstract). When ours is alerted to an other, we perceive an immediate intersubjective relation that Levinas believed affects our precognitive core. This disrupts our consciousness's natural bias in believing it holds sway in the world. (I apologise for the general abstraction of this paragraph. It should be noted that Levinas was a Jew and Talmudic scholar living through and in the wake of the Holocaust, attempting to retrieve a philosophy that could survive that awful mess. The opening line of the Torah reads "When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste (tohu wabohu, in Hebrew) and darkness over the deep and God's face hovering over the waters...,")
Parties offer the opportunity to temporarily find out about another person, to feel a frequent punctuation to our habituated sense of our own sway and settled relationships. As I approach a new person, I find myself catching faces, turns, and impressions that create a persistent definition of a character - sometimes hard to shake, perhaps even impossible. I think even as we continue a relationship, we are drawn to similar features of a person over and over again (cue: http://bit.ly/bkyog1), and these repeated viewings perhaps could have been different if we'd only initially viewed them another way. Other details stick because they're striking or unusual while making sense within a field of understanding we recognise.
On Saturday, I went to a party hosted by my old Westminster friend Nick and Westminster flat-mates Eddie and Theo. (For reference, my earlier blog about feeling guilty about not contacting Westminster friends was cathartic and I subsequently have had many good drinking sessions with them.) I found myself discussing with a physics undergraduate about how we know about the chemical compositions of distant planets (me and him), the prospects of life on Io (him), the unique ionisation properties of iron and electron properties of carbon (him), synthetic life drawn from cells in the ocean (me - look up Craig Ventner), wind energy and the uselessness of government policy (me and him) and thallium-based fission (him). Then someone I knew from Catz, Oxford called Rado appeared.
"What are you doing here?"
(Physics undergrad) "Oh he's from St. Catherine's like me and like Caroline."
"Really? .. actually I'm from Catz. I left in 2009.
Who's Caroline?"
(undergrad or Rado - can't remember) "She lives here."
"Oh - she's the fourth flatmate?"
At which point, I realise I'm going to have something in common (Westminster/Oxbridge/Catz - all four housemates were Oxbridge) with soo many people at the party. Earlier, Nick and I had been discussing language and how it creates communities and senses of insider-outsider and here I was feeling this disruptive familiarity. E.g. talking with a GDL student who was obnoxiously sneering at the intellectual capacities of his fellow students - (me) "Come on - which one did you go to? Of the universities, it can be two..." Or bumping into the girlfriend of Gap Yah comedian - "Oh right - never seen him in the flesh before - funny that."He looked a bit more grizzly than in the videos. Made me think about the grotesque comedy of going viral. Fame with lazy, dotty students/youtube surfers - bound to ask you to shake their hand.
And yet, although this familiarity did confirm my sense of holding sway, it also was very stimulating as it easily offered rapid access to interesting conversations with people I hardly knew.
Iphone v blackberry - blobby fingers, iPhone averse - the touch of the world - different to those people? The hand as a kind of snake - slipping over textures with evolved prejudices, provoking prejudices in its encounters - how you can judge a person by the nervousness exhibited in their interactions. Bright currents of likemindedness/likebodiedness.
Oneself at work. Whether you like other people at work, what kind of work you're willing to countenance - immediately / reported in the press. Neutering those eager to test their powers. and remotely -
The dark side of parties - mere mechanical exchange of detail, life and spontaneity stripped by superficial will to hold conversation together. Or a kind of antagonistic game. People formed by shallow parties, appearing to brim on a surface that holds little resistance to reductive forces. If Levinas finds hope, a kind of transcendental in the exchange, one might also discover that even in our best relationships, there are things we do not wish to discover even to ourselves.
Discovery as a legal process between two parties in a commercially damaged relationship...
One reason for my interest is that parties usually contain a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and sometimes even the return of faces that were once familiar but need to be recovered through conversation and memory. Parties inhabit a kind of halfway between the anonymity of London street life where a passing character becomes a dissolving entity among entities, and the crystallisation of relationships in the various institutions most of us participate in whether as couples, family, friend circles, workers, students, or any other kind of bond-group instituted through a recurring role.
Emmanual Levinas, the French philosopher, described this process as the face-to-face encounter. For him, the face is not merely a visual phonemenon, or else a blind man like Dennis Church, my grandfather, would not have had this pleasure universally available to human sensibility. Instead, the face is a multi-sensory part of us which to a large extent governs our sense of the immediate (as opposed to the abstract). When ours is alerted to an other, we perceive an immediate intersubjective relation that Levinas believed affects our precognitive core. This disrupts our consciousness's natural bias in believing it holds sway in the world. (I apologise for the general abstraction of this paragraph. It should be noted that Levinas was a Jew and Talmudic scholar living through and in the wake of the Holocaust, attempting to retrieve a philosophy that could survive that awful mess. The opening line of the Torah reads "When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste (tohu wabohu, in Hebrew) and darkness over the deep and God's face hovering over the waters...,")
Parties offer the opportunity to temporarily find out about another person, to feel a frequent punctuation to our habituated sense of our own sway and settled relationships. As I approach a new person, I find myself catching faces, turns, and impressions that create a persistent definition of a character - sometimes hard to shake, perhaps even impossible. I think even as we continue a relationship, we are drawn to similar features of a person over and over again (cue: http://bit.ly/bkyog1), and these repeated viewings perhaps could have been different if we'd only initially viewed them another way. Other details stick because they're striking or unusual while making sense within a field of understanding we recognise.
On Saturday, I went to a party hosted by my old Westminster friend Nick and Westminster flat-mates Eddie and Theo. (For reference, my earlier blog about feeling guilty about not contacting Westminster friends was cathartic and I subsequently have had many good drinking sessions with them.) I found myself discussing with a physics undergraduate about how we know about the chemical compositions of distant planets (me and him), the prospects of life on Io (him), the unique ionisation properties of iron and electron properties of carbon (him), synthetic life drawn from cells in the ocean (me - look up Craig Ventner), wind energy and the uselessness of government policy (me and him) and thallium-based fission (him). Then someone I knew from Catz, Oxford called Rado appeared.
"What are you doing here?"
(Physics undergrad) "Oh he's from St. Catherine's like me and like Caroline."
"Really? .. actually I'm from Catz. I left in 2009.
Who's Caroline?"
(undergrad or Rado - can't remember) "She lives here."
"Oh - she's the fourth flatmate?"
At which point, I realise I'm going to have something in common (Westminster/Oxbridge/Catz - all four housemates were Oxbridge) with soo many people at the party. Earlier, Nick and I had been discussing language and how it creates communities and senses of insider-outsider and here I was feeling this disruptive familiarity. E.g. talking with a GDL student who was obnoxiously sneering at the intellectual capacities of his fellow students - (me) "Come on - which one did you go to? Of the universities, it can be two..." Or bumping into the girlfriend of Gap Yah comedian - "Oh right - never seen him in the flesh before - funny that."He looked a bit more grizzly than in the videos. Made me think about the grotesque comedy of going viral. Fame with lazy, dotty students/youtube surfers - bound to ask you to shake their hand.
And yet, although this familiarity did confirm my sense of holding sway, it also was very stimulating as it easily offered rapid access to interesting conversations with people I hardly knew.
Iphone v blackberry - blobby fingers, iPhone averse - the touch of the world - different to those people? The hand as a kind of snake - slipping over textures with evolved prejudices, provoking prejudices in its encounters - how you can judge a person by the nervousness exhibited in their interactions. Bright currents of likemindedness/likebodiedness.
Oneself at work. Whether you like other people at work, what kind of work you're willing to countenance - immediately / reported in the press. Neutering those eager to test their powers. and remotely -
The dark side of parties - mere mechanical exchange of detail, life and spontaneity stripped by superficial will to hold conversation together. Or a kind of antagonistic game. People formed by shallow parties, appearing to brim on a surface that holds little resistance to reductive forces. If Levinas finds hope, a kind of transcendental in the exchange, one might also discover that even in our best relationships, there are things we do not wish to discover even to ourselves.
Discovery as a legal process between two parties in a commercially damaged relationship...
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