One day I wrote in a notebook: “I don’t mind violence as spectacle, or as a private fantasy, but ultimately I believe in Gandhi”. I think that’s what I mainly think. Sometimes I have believed in the necessity of violence, sometimes violence fascinates me in its cathartic effects, I will explore the problem of violence one day. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand murder, mass murder, war. To me the idea of war is a male idea, I cannot divorce the idea of the physical elimination of life from a certain type of male will, it is the kind of will that I associate with the imperial impulse, with everything that crushes the human. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying males are like this or like that, all I am saying is there is a strand of maleness so thirsty for power it will shatter anything for the bliss of winning the game.

Then there are so many types and degrees of violence, social, personal, visible, invisible, kind, brutal, professional, a grid of violence breaks the world into a myriad of splinters. The current individualistic belief structures often shatter the human on several levels, they are violent structures, they often speak through us in unforeseen ways. Functional scripts start speaking through one, being aware of the internalization of some of these beliefs structures is a necessary step towards change, the difficult task is not to reproduce them when survival might be at stake, but survival has to be thought about in relational terms, that’s to say, to think about the interconnectedness of everything, to behave as if what you did mattered, to ensure that infernos are not replicated.

I used to think about a politics of the self, I thought that through creating networks of empathy that challenge dominator models things could change. I had read this book by Suzi Gablik “The Reenchantment of Art”, where she argues for the necessity to step beyond the whole objectifying consciousness of the Enlightenment. She calls for an opening of vision, a shift from a cartesian way of seeing, to an empathic mode of vision, that's to say, rather than a detached vision, a disembodied eye, a vision that lets the other in, that engages with the world, perhaps a complicit vision. She argues for an art of empathy, an ecological art.

The devil often gets the best tunes, how could one write from an empathic point of view? Does empathy fail to embody complexity, does its energy tend to render things flaccid in the end, to avoid conflict? How could you represent violence without embodying it? How can the current mythologies be changed through empathy? Perhaps through empathy and laughter? I haven’t quite solved the problem with writing. I don’t think writing should necessarily be politically correct or deal with current political issues, it might, it might not, I have caught myself working out the political implications of my own writing, have become aware of an inner censor I feel uncomfortable with, something is lost when you start censoring yourself.

September 11 created a pause throughout the world that was followed by an intensification of violence. Cowboys kill Indians for land, cowboys treat the world as their doormat, cowboys threaten now to ignite hell in the Middle East. The intensification of gangster capitalism, media saturation of every pore, the injunction to enjoy, to desire and satisfy, powerlessness and greed masquerading as cynicism, positive thinking, yoga and prozac to beat despair, I try to understand the historical moment I find myself in and all I get is this painful confusion on the screen of mind. There is seductive senselessness, abomination and beauty, to only see abomination leads to desolate dead ends. To fool oneself, to stand for beauty, for that which escapes functional rationality, might be one way to move forward, that’s what I often think, then there is this gap between theory and practice, then there is the world with its huge social ego from which I am part.

I used to celebrate contradiction, it seemed a way of being honest, my writing used to be concerned/affected by gender politics, with denouncing injustice. Now I am not sure where I am going with my writing, except that I am more interested in trying to understand a little bit than in complicating the possibility of understanding. In life, I believe in a politics of the self to which I try to adhere, then I practice armchair politics (subscribed to humanitarian organizations, signing petitions). I am still working on the same projects I was working on before September 11. September 11 and its fall-out has not altered my writing so far. I think it will affect the long backlog of unfinished manuscripts I have. Apart from reflection on the language of the media, disaster as spectacle, the reiteration that USA policies are the main enemy, the transparency of evil and the necessity for pressing for diplomatic resistance on the part of our politicians, the event and its aftermath has made me muse on the fragility of life and the necessity to cherish the human, perhaps that’s the way it has altered my work.

To create flows that alter the current belief structures, to create space for what matters and resist hell by all means available, that I see as a possibility. There is this bit of writing by Italo Calvino that interests me in its simplicity:

The Great Khan … leafing through his atlas, … said:

“It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Marco Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the mist of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

The mist of inferno is there, other things might not be so in black and white, to give beauty space might create resonances that help us revere the world rather than destroy it. Perhaps that is what is needed, a reverberating space.

2002 “Listening to Marco Polo”, Pores www.bbk.ac.uk/pores