Facts and Experiences

Coming out of the Closet or Is It Making it Up as I go along?

Contrary to would-be or wannabe writers who would kill or do anything almost as drastic and decisive to get their works published, I write just for the "fun" of it, for my own pleasure and satisfaction, and not necessarily for fame and recognition, or for fortune. I write because I have to otherwise I would have to commit acts of extreme violence and barbarity.

I always have a wry and bitter smile after reading autobiographical accounts penned by self-pitying and angry victims of abuse. I wish I would be bothered enough to drop a line or two to the authors that while it  might be a cathartic exercise to revisit and confront suppressed traumatic memories, it is much better for them to stop regarding themselves as victims of circumstances. These poor souls would be much better off to live with an attitude that we are all the sum of our experiences and all experiences are useful to our survival. The only requirement is we must view the experiences in their proper context, no more or no less. In other words, we must neither romanticize not dramatize the experiences. Most humans are scumbags, if given a chance to prove themselves. Most humans are cowardly, self-righteous liars, too. 

Fuck, I keep saying that we must know where we stand in relation to other organisms, especially other humans, on this planet. To do so, we must be very honest with ourselves and provide truthful answers to the following questions:

1. Why am I here? What's the fuck of my existence? What do I hope to accomplish with it? 

2. Do I believe in my own abilities or in a myth and a fiction called God?

3. Am I in the top 5-10 percentile of the human race in terms of health, looks, education, intelligence, charm, and money?  Or am I a fucked-up, hopeless, short, fat, ugly, impoverished woman loser, and of course no man wants my company, but amazingly enough I would stupidly go around telling others about a man whom I have been desperately chasing after for 15 years that he is dense and a loser. If he were such kind of a person, then why in fuck's name, I've been chasing after him for such a long time and have got no where with him? Think about the irony and the stupidity of my statement that the man is a loser. The statement did nothing but reveal that I am a fucked-up woman and deserve to be in an incineration chamber as my other 6 million kinsmen. Stupid is as stupid does! And this female kike is not alone. There are many like her. And the mother-fucking bitch fancies that she is a loving student of Buddhism! What a deluding "mind". I wish I had the power and wherewithal to feed the bitch to hungry stray dogs. 

But, seriously, Roberto, are you really as enraged with the stupid bitch as you seem to be?

Nah, Omar. The bitch does not deserve a minute of my time. I just said so for the "fun" of it. I have many things to do and far more interesting bitches to associate and cavort. I have lived and I have learned. I just acquired another experience about assholes and scumbags: they don't go for facts, truths, and logic. They are fucking weak---morally, emotionally, and intellectually. They are not even human. They are deep down animals and deserve to be exterminated and incinerated like garbage. That's my greatest insight about them. They are not my equal and should not be treated as my equal. I must stay away from them and consider them as disease-carriers. 

You're right, Roberto, for a change. Look at you!  A fine specimen of the human race: tall, good-looking, nice physique, intelligent, educated, well-read, well-reasoned, financially sound, living in a nice condo and driving a fine car, women falling over themselves for you, a poet, a writer, a philosopher, a linguist, and a winning poker player, in short you're a Renaissance man, and yet the fucking midget kike told you that you were dense and a loser!  Look at her! Fuck, she's a fat, ugly, repulsive bitch, Roberto, and she's stupid and ignorant. Your compassion was misplaced. I hope you learned from your lesson. 

(To be continued) 

A cab driver and writer

Note by Wissai:

I felt inspired by this news report. There are some similarities between Alomar's life and mine, but I have been much more blessed in finance and English. Thus, I have no excuse in not coming up with better stories than what I have written so far. 

CHICAGO — In the Arab world, the Syrian writer Osama Alomar has a growing reputation as the author of short, clever parables that comment obliquely on political and social issues. But here, where he has lived in exile since 2008, he spends most of his time as the driver of Car 45 at the Horizon Taxi Cab company.

Up to a dozen hours a day, six days a week, Mr. Alomar cruises the northwest suburbs around O’Hare Airport in his bright blue cab, dictionaries and a volume of Khalil Gibran piled beside him. When parked in line waiting for a fare to appear, he pulls out a notebook and tries to write.

“Driving a cab is hard work and very hard psychologically, because it takes me away from writing,” Mr. Alomar, who turns 46 on Saturday, said in an interview here recently at a coffee shop and in his cab. “It is a kind of spiritual exile to go with my physical exile. But I have to be strong. I have to be patient.”

On Saturday and Sunday, Mr. Alomar, whose first book to be translated into English, “Fullblood Arabian,” was recently published by New Directions, will take a brief respite from that grueling routine to attend the PEN World Voices literary festival in New York. He is scheduled to take part in two panels: “Creativity and Craft in Asylum,” on Saturday, and a Sunday afternoon conversation with the American writer Lydia Davis, who has emerged as his biggest champion, and the Icelandic writer Sjon.

Mr. Alomar’s super-short stories “are very imaginative and vivid and exhilarating,” said Ms. Davis, whose own work often occupies a terrain similar to Mr. Alomar’s in terms of length and tone. “Some are dark and angry, while others are funny. They are compact stylistically, wasting no words, and they go quickly from one moment to the next and on to the end. So they have density, but also are sort of explosive, with an aftershock, because they seem to tell one story at the same time they are telling another.”

Mr. Alomar sees himself as an heir of a literary form, now called al-qissa al-qasira jiddan, or very short story, that in the Arab world dates back more than a millennium and contains elements of poetry, philosophy, folk tale and allegory. “Fullblood Arabian” was, in fact, issued as part of a poetry series that includes work by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Hilda Doolittle, and the stories in the book run no longer than three pages, with the shortest being only one sentence.

Muhsin al-Musawi, a Columbia University professor and literary critic who is also the editor of The Journal of Arabic Literature, described the genre Mr. Alomar has embraced as “similar to the riddle or puzzle,” but requiring “a high level of prose.” As such, he added, “it offers a way out of many restrictions and constraints without being very explicit.” 

Certainly, many of Mr. Alomar’s stories make use of ambiguities, especially in relation to the political scene. Here, in its entirety, is “Tongue-Tie,” the title piece of one of his three collections published in Arabic: “Before leaving for work I tied my tongue into a great tie. My colleagues congratulated me on my elegance. They praised me to our boss, who expressed admiration and ordered all employees to follow my example.”

C. J. Collins, Mr. Alomar’s translator, remembers meeting the writer for the first time in Damascus in 2007. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, had eased some restrictions on private gatherings, and Mr. Alomar was a regular at salons that had then sprung up, where invited speakers would address political, cultural and social topics, but steer clear of directly criticizing the dictatorship.

“In the discussions that would come afterward, Osama’s stories would come up spontaneously as a way of driving home an intellectual point in a poetic fashion,” Mr. Collins recalled, adding, “In the States, it is putting literature down to call it utilitarian, but for me it was quite striking to see his work put to this really concrete use.”

Mr. Alomar was born in 1968 in Damascus, where his father was a philosophy professor and his mother an elementary school teacher. He read widely from his parents’ library, studied Arabic literature in college and sang and played guitar in a pop band. When the BBC’s Arabic service broadcast a poem he had submitted, he became convinced that he had a future as a writer.

Thanks in part to that upbringing, “I’m very interested in social and political movements,” he said. “Especially in my own country, but in the Middle East in general. As a secular person, I believe in democracy and individual freedom. There is a lot of persecution and oppression.”

Asked about his literary influences, Mr. Alomar, who speaks accented but nearly fluent English, produced a diverse list.  Gibran, the Lebanese poet who wrote “The Prophet” and lived for many years in the United States, is at the top, but Mr. Alomar also cited Aesop, Hemingway (not surprising for a writer who values terseness and brevity), the British novelist and philosopher Colin Wilson and Kafka.

Emulating Gibran, Mr. Alomar came to the United States in 2008 to join his mother and an older brother. From an apartment near O’Hare, he has watched on CNN and Al-Jazeera over the last three years as his country has disintegrated into civil war, and he finds it agonizing.

“At the beginning, I was optimistic, because the Syrian people had an awareness about their freedom,” he said. “Now I’m not, because we have a lot of obscurants, even in the opposition. To see this suffering, it breaks my heart every day.”

If his exile started voluntarily, it would be difficult to return to Damascus now, Mr. Alomar said, and not just because he is so publicly identified with opposition to the Assad dictatorship. This year, he said, an apartment he owns there was destroyed in a bombing, and he lost not only his library and Fender guitar and amp, but also many manuscripts, including a novel.

“I lost everything, but I have to be wise about this,” he said. “I have to live with it. I have anger, but I keep it inside me. You can take it two ways, and I want that this can be a positive experience.”

Like Gibran, Mr. Alomar now aspires to write in both Arabic and English: “My goal, my aim, is to become an American writer,” he said. Inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Nausea,” he has begun a novel that he said will be written in the form of a journal kept by a fetus, even as he continues to write his short stories. 

Yet the long hours behind the wheel trying to make his weekly nut limit his opportunities to write and to meet people other than passengers who know nothing of his story and aren’t necessarily interested in Syria’s conflagration.

“I feel isolated in my cab,” he said. “I like my life here, but to be honest with you, I am homesick, too. I have a lot of memories of every corner, of every stone in Damascus. But this is my new country, and I want to penetrate it.” 

Our Lonely Home in Nature

THE tornadoes that have been devastating parts of the South and Midwest, just weeks after a deadly mudslide in Washington, demonstrate once again the unimaginable power of nature. 

After each disaster, we grieve over the human lives lost, the innocent people drowned or crushed without warning as they slept in their beds, worked in their fields or sat at their office desks. We feel angry at the scientists and policy makers who didn’t foresee the impending calamity or, if forewarned, failed to protect us. Beyond the grieving and anger is a more subtle emotion. We feel betrayed. We feel betrayed by nature. 

Aren’t we a part of nature, born in nature, sustained by the food brought forth by nature, warmed by the natural sun? Don’t we have a deep spiritual connection with the wind and the water and the land that Emerson and Wordsworth so lovingly described, that Turner and Constable painted in scenes of serenity and grandeur? How could Mother Nature do this to us, her children?

Yet despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants. 

I first encountered the insensible power of nature during a two-week sailing trip with my wife in the Greek isles. It was just the two of us on a small boat. For the first few days of the voyage, traveling south along the coast from Piraeus to Cape Sounion, we were within sight of land. Then we turned west, toward Hydra. Soon, the land and other boats vanished. All we could see was ocean. 

At first, I felt elation. Then I felt fear. Because during the summer season, the Aegean Sea is plagued by a fierce, dry wind called the meltemi, which can appear without warning in clear air and be upon you in minutes with great waves and gales. At any moment, a wall of water and wind could have lunged from the horizon, washed over the boat, and drowned my wife and me. I realized that there was no compassionate overseer or oceanic consciousness to prevent that from happening. To the vast expanse of water, my wife and I were just additional pieces of flotsam and jetsam.

Our comfort with nature is an illusion. Here on earth, even with our earthquakes and storms, we have no conception of the range and the power of nature. In many other parts of the cosmos, conditions are far more extreme than on earth and quite inhospitable to life. On the planet Mercury, for example, the temperature reaches 800 degrees. On Neptune, it is minus 370. On Uranus, the winds exceed 350 miles per hour. With the recent work of the Kepler spacecraft, searching for planets favorable for life, we can estimate that only about one millionth of one billionth of 1 percent of the material of the visible universe exists in living form. From a cosmic perspective, we and all life are the exception to the rule.

For all of recorded history, humankind has had a conflicted view of nature. In ancient times, we made awesome and frightening gods of the natural elements. The Babylonian-Assyrian god of storms, Adad, brought rain to the crops but also caused havoc and death on land and sea. Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, both created and destroyed and was sometimes invoked to annihilate one’s enemies. So close to nature are we in some mythologies that human beings are regularly transformed into other animals and even inanimate matter. In Aztec mythology, the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were once human lovers, later turned into mountains by the gods. 

In the other direction, nature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature has comforted us in every culture on earth. In the 20th and 21st centuries, some environmentalists claimed that the entire earth is a single ecosystem, a “superorganism” in the language of Gaia.

I would argue that we have been fooling ourselves. Nature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent.

Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept. We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall. That absence of mind, coupled with so much power, is what so frightened me on the sailboat in Greece.

The recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents the damage now being done by human-created greenhouse gases and global warming. In reacting to the report, we should not be concerned about protecting our planet. Nature can survive far more than what we can do to it and is totally oblivious to whether homo sapiens lives or dies in the next hundred years. Our concern should be about protecting ourselves — because we have only ourselves to protect us.

Alan Lightman is a physicist who teaches humanities at M.I.T. His most recent book is “The Accidental Universe.”

Religion and Ignorance

To the Editor:

Re “Religion for $1,000, Alex” (column, April 27): As one who teaches world history to first-year college students, I can certainly testify that the ignorance and misinformation about religion that Nicholas Kristof catalogs is indeed widespread.

Many of my students are astonished to learn that there are two different “creation” stories in Genesis, and different accounts of Jesus’ lineage in the Gospels, and that these accounts contradict one another.

But Mr. Kristof’s implication that secularists do not care about religious knowledge is not fair. Secularists, including historians like me, care deeply about how religion motivates people’s actions, both for good and for ill. Secularists often try to show the similarities across religions, which makes the special pleading of any one religion for its role in history or its claim on the truth less compelling.

And many secularists wish that all people would study religious texts carefully, to see how they lend themselves to varied interpretations as well as to show the internal tensions and inconsistencies in many religious texts and doctrines.

ROBERT SHAFFER

 Shippensburg, Pa., April 27, 2014

 

The writer is a history professor at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania.

To the Editor: 

Nicholas Kristof’s column had me chuckling through the biblical bloopers. As a professor of religious studies, I’ve seen many of those same mistakes on exams and papers. I’ve taught in the Bible Belt and the godless Northeast, and curiously the bloopers are more apparent in the Bible Belt.

Yes, we need better religious literacy, but we also need to get beyond the quiz-show variety of religious knowledge.

Religion is not a set of beliefs and doctrines held by people who read texts. That deeply Protestant conception is the first thing that must give way if we are to find a better understanding of diverse religious traditions.

Instead of knowledge, people who are religious have expertise. That is because religion is a technology, an art and craft created in and through human bodies in time and space. The devout handle objects, sing, sway, sniff and see.

To learn about the religious lives of others, we need readings in the humanities, just as we need to engage the lived practices of those who may or may not have all the answers.

S. BRENT PLATE

 Clinton, N.Y., April 27, 2014

 

The writer, a visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College, is the author of “A History of Religion in 5 ½ Objects.” 

Lessons at 65

Lessons at 65:

1. Forever gentle in speech. And ever-ready to apologize if in the wrong. 

2. Respect facts. Don't lie. Don't falsely accuse. Don't project your shortcomings unto others. If you are ugly, fat, vertically challenged, stingy, ignorant, blind and dense, don't tell somebody who's your superior in looks, intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and wit, that he suffers of the same afflictions as you do. Self-projection and imputing faults on others are hallmarks of despicable cowards and mother-fucking ignoramuses and ugly bitches.

3. If a woman is not loved by a certain man, it's because she is repulsive in appearance and character, and not because he doesn't  know about love, especially if he is attractive, charming, and witty, and women have flocked to him like bees to honey. 

4. Have some respect for yourself.  Improve your appearance, finance, and mind. Learn a foreign language. Read serious books. Cultivate love and understanding, not envy and resentment. Be objective about yourself. Look at yourself more closely in the mirror.

5. Ask yourself a square question: Am I lovable or am I a stupid, short, ugly, ignorant, fat bitch?

Truths and Losers

Fantasies While in Fear and Trembling

Truths often hit me at night when the stillness of the moment brings out insights with startling clarity, not counting of my mind's recollections and flirtations with words and language usage. Those episodic arrivals of truths have comforted me and reinforced a self-image and self-identity that has furnished me with a defiant and fierce pride and conviction, not unlike the silly beliefs that theists have about their Creator. Those episodic arrivals have provided a much needed palliative for my mind's darker moments when self-destruction seems to hold much promise. I have a feeling that everybody's talents are tied up and linked with their pathologies. We are all sucked into the vortex and maelstrom of the yin and yang of warring opposites and we all struggle to find the balancing. I am drawn to the melancholy of life while having an irrepressible sense of humor. I am touched when I am shown love but I delight in making myself unlikable, let alone lovable. A friend of mine recently said both theists and atheists are wrong in their dogmatic positions and the truth is somewhere in between. I wonder by playing it safe and embracing relativism and agnosticism, he is on to something profound or whether he is facilely flippant and easy. Somehow it's easier and more "natural" for me to embrace the view that God is only a concept invented by Man, and not an entity. Anyway, I used to, in my youth and middle passage, take full and uncompromising pride in my glaring eccentricity, agitating emotionalism, and abiding loneliness. Now it appears that a vaulting pride of my "intellect" coupled with a deep contempt for the masses are creeping into my soul while outwardly I try to evince polite, mannered speech and respectable attires, and in my mind echo the haunting final words uttered by Edgar Allen Poe, the poet and writer of several unforgettable poems and short stories, during his delirious struggle with Death, "I was never really insane, except on occasion when my heart was touched.”

A loser, an ugly, poor, stupid, fat, untalented female midget kike who has chased after me for 15 years, recently characterized me as a loser like herself. Her action reminded me of a similar deed by another midget. I have learned something from these two vertically challenged bitches: cowardice, self-deception, and stupidity tend to go together. From now on, I will cut loose from my association any bitch or son of a bitch which is cowardly or self-lying or stupid, because sooner or later it would say something stupid similar to what these two midgets said about me. These two motherfuckers and pond scum suckers didn't really know what they got themselves into.

Love Story by David Brooks

Preface by Wissai

We can only love what we understand, treasure, and miss.

Eight months ago, I came across a passage in a book that has haunted me since. It was in Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin, and it concerns a night Berlin spent in Leningrad in 1945. Berlin was hanging out when a friend asked if he’d like to go visit Anna Akhmatova. Not knowing much about her, Berlin said yes. 

Twenty years older than Berlin, Akhmatova had been a great pre-revolutionary poet. Since 1925, the Soviets had allowed her to publish nothing. Her first husband had been executed on false charges in 1921. In 1938, her son was taken prisoner. For 17 months, Akhmatova had stood outside his prison, vainly seeking news of him.

Berlin was taken to her apartment and met a woman still beautiful and powerful, but wounded by tyranny and the war. At first, their conversation was restrained. They talked about war experiences and British universities. Visitors came and went.

By midnight, they were alone, sitting on opposite ends of her room. She told him about her girlhood and marriage and her husband’s execution. She began to recite Byron’s “Don Juan” with such passion that Berlin turned his face to the window to hide his emotions. She began reciting some of her own poems, breaking down as she described how they had led the Soviets to execute one of her colleagues.

By 4 in the morning, they were talking about the greats. They agreed about Pushkin and Chekhov. Berlin liked the light intelligence of Turgenev, while Akhmatova preferred the dark intensity of Dostoyevsky. 

Deeper and deeper they talked, baring their souls. Akhmatova confessed her loneliness, expressed her passions, spoke about literature and art. Berlin had to go to the bathroom but didn’t dare break the spell. They had read all the same things, knew what the other knew, understood each other’s longings. That night, Ignatieff writes, Berlin’s life “came as close as it ever did to the still perfection of art.” He finally pulled himself away and returned to his hotel. It was 11 a.m. He flung himself on the bed and exclaimed, “I am in love; I am in love.”

Today we live in a utilitarian moment. We’re surrounded by data and fast-flowing information. “Our reason has become an instrumental reason,” as Leon Wieseltier once put it, to be used to solve practical problems.

The night Berlin and Akhmatova spent together stands as the beau ideal of a different sort of communication. It’s communication between people who think that the knowledge most worth attending to is not found in data but in the great works of culture, in humanity’s inherited storehouse of moral, emotional and existential wisdom. 

Berlin and Akhmatova were from a culture that assumed that, if you want to live a decent life, you have to possess a certain intellectual scope. You have to grapple with the big ideas and the big books that teach you how to experience life in all its richness and make subtle moral and emotional judgments. 

Berlin and Akhmatova could experience that sort of life-altering conversation because they had done the reading. They were spiritually ambitious. They had the common language of literature, written by geniuses who understand us better than we understand ourselves. 

The night also stands as the beau ideal of a certain sort of bond. This sort of love depends on so many coincidences that it only happens once or twice in a lifetime. Berlin and Akhmatova felt all the pieces fitting amazingly into place. They were the same in many ways. There was such harmony that all the inner defenses fell down in one night. 

If you read the poems Akhmatova wrote about that night, you get the impression that they slept together, but, according to Ignatieff, they barely touched. Their communion was primarily intellectual, emotional and spiritual, creating a combination of friendship and love. If friends famously confront the world side by side and lovers live face to face, Berlin and Akhmatova seemed to somehow enact both postures at once. They shared and also augmented each other’s understanding.

For Berlin, this night was the most important event of his life. Akhmatova was stuck in the Soviet Union, living under a regime of manipulation, fear and lies. She suffered horrendously for it. The regime decided that she had cavorted with a British spy. She was expelled from the Writer’s Union. Her son was thrown into prison. She was desolated but never blamed Berlin, speaking of him fervently and writing movingly about the numinous magic of that night. 

I’m old enough to remember when many people committed themselves to this sort of life and dreamed of this sort of communion — the whole Great Books/Big Ideas thing. I am not sure how many people believe in or aspire to this sort of a life today. I’m not sure how many schools prepare students for this kind of love.