Mọi việc, khi đã hiểu, rất đơn giản. Giống như khi sương mù tan đi khi mặt trời lên cao, chúng ta thấy rõ cảnh vật, nếu chúng ta muốn thấy.
Luôn luôn có 2 giai cấp: trị và bị trị
Cấp thống trị là chính tri, liên minh là hoặc bao gồm luôn tôn giáo và kinh tế.
Cấp bị trị là dân đen, ngu hoặc dốt hoặc hèn hoặc kết hợp của ngu, dốt, và hèn.
Khí giới của cấp thống tri: dùng sợ/bạo lực/dốt nát để đe doạ/hứa hẹn.
Mặt trời là kiến thức, học vấn, kinh nghiệm.
Giải pháp: dũng khí, không hèn.
Phần thưởng: tự do quyết định đời mình. Hết còn nô lệ.
Kết luận: ít ai ngu và dốt mà biết mình ngu và dốt (và hèn trong tư tưởng nữa) vì nếu biết mình như thế là đã hết ngu và dốt và hèn rồi. Cách mạng trong tư tưởng rồi hành động đã, đang, và sẽ xảy ra.
I always maintain that one does not understand oneself until and unless one is tested. My reactions to the the fucked-up, mother-fucking, stupid and ignorant scumbags who exhibited tawdry remarks and envy clearly revealed a side of mind that hitherto I had only been dimly aware of. I now learned of human capacity for violence and hatred because of outrage and indignation. Outrage is the rage that is outed and must be pacified.
A lesson I gained from this was that when you are very angry, you must remain calm and quiet. You must not do or say anything.
“Are these real concerns? Is this work convincing?”
Behind all the other questions one asks oneself about a novel, these are perhaps the most determining—and the most slippery. Probably we should accept that in many cases a straight yes-or-no answer just won’t be possible. There will be shades of gray. Still, the matter of whether a work of fiction—its setting and characters, its interactions and preoccupations, etc.—feels “authentic” may have much to do with how we ultimately judge it, whether we like it, whether we take it seriously. But what do we mean by authenticity? Since we can hardly ask for documentary accuracy from fiction, what is it exactly we’re looking for?
Let’s take some easy cases. All Dickens is packed with orphans or people in uncertain relation to family groups, or clubs. It’s impossible to read anything he wrote without feeling that the question of belonging was a major issue for him. He had to write about these matters. If we read Lovecraft’s science-fiction horror stories, weird and unpleasant as they may be, they are all obsessively about fear of otherness—women’s, people of other races’, aliens’. All the over-heated horror of the books arises from this gut fear. He can’t leave it alone. Whether or not we like the books and quite regardless of any verisimilitude, it’s clear that the author is writing directly from his personal concerns. The stuff wasn’t just constructed for a literary prize. A certain form of repetition, particularly the endless reformulation, in dozens of different guises, of the same core conflict is probably the hallmark of authenticity.
Now consider a contemporary American. Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius posits a tension between the need to tell an unhappy personal story and the desire to exploit and manipulate that story to accrue fame and celebrity. He wishes to use his suffering to become special, but fears he has betrayed fellow sufferers and to an extent himself in the process. This anxiety that the project is flawed becomes itself another form of suffering that again can be exploited in witty description for the purposes of self-affirmation. The autobiographical nature of the work, which gives a version of Eggers’s adolescence and early adulthood, the constantly and comically reiterated clash between the desire to respond charitably to suffering (in short, to be good), and the yearning to be recognized as a genius and achieve celebrity status, pretty soon convinces us that whether or not we “like” the book, it is coming out of something genuine.
Even when Eggers is not talking about himself, the same problem turns up: at one point a certain Adam Rich agrees to have Dave’s magazine report him as murdered as part of a rather pious project to ridicule the public obsession with celebrity. However, Dave is soon wondering,
Could he really be doing all this for attention? Could he really be milking his own past to solicit sympathy from a too-long indifferent public?
No, no. He is not calculating enough, cynical enough. It would take some kind of monster, malformed and needy. Really, what sort of person would do that kind of thing?
Dave, that is, is projecting his own concerns about motivation on Adam. Authenticity doesn’t preclude monomania, quite the contrary. Novelists do this all the time. All Shakespeare’s tragic heroes have the same concerns about appearance and reality, performance and inner life.
In his later work Zeitoun, however, Eggers writes a novelized but declaredly non-fiction account of an Arab man wrongly accused and mistreated by police and judiciary after he chose to stay in his New Orleans home in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The book is a j’accuse. It seems then that the drive for visibility of the earlier work has been tamed and put at the service of altruism. But has it? Zeitoun is very “written,” very stylish; it draws attention to its own melodramatic telling. And the insistence on the protagonist’s goodness frequently seems forced, exaggerated, manipulative. Non-fiction the story may be, but we’re not convinced. Rather than confronting these conflicting impulses—the desire to be good tangling with the determination to be famous—the book pretends that the second has been put to rest. But we suspect that this is not the case.
On the other hand the crazy plot of his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, where two Americans try to go around the world in a week giving away $32,000 in cash to anyone whose poverty might make them worthy recipients, once again sets up the clash between monomania and altruism in grand comic style. Here are Eggers’s heroes in Senegal:
We found a group of boys working in a field… They were perfect. But I couldn’t get my nerve up… “This is predatory,” I said. “Yeah but it’s okay.” “Let’s go. We’ll find someone better.” We drove, though I wasn’t sure it would ever feel right. I would have given them $400, $500, but now we were gone. It was so wrong to stalk them, and even more wrong not to give them the money, a life-changing amount of money here, were the average yearly earnings were, we’d read, about $1,600. It was all so wrong and now we were a mile away and heading down the coast.
Finally someone—and it sounds like Eggers himself speaking—points out to these would-be benefactors that far from doing good and relinquishing the control that money gives, they are actually exercising their control in the very arbitrariness of their choice of recipient. Precisely because we now have a completely different plot, but nevertheless the same issues, you can’t help feeling that the story arises from a real personal concern.
Authors who switch between genre writing and “serious” fiction introduce a further dimension to this question. Is the literary work “authentic” and the genre work not? Georges Simenon wrote seventy-five detective novels featuring Inspector Maigret and, starting somewhat later, forty-four serious novels that many believed should have won him the Nobel Prize. Frequently autobiographical (and we remember here Simenon’s boast to have made love to ten thousand women), the serious fiction endlessly reworks the same territory—like it or not, this does seem to be a hallmark of literary authenticity. Life, in Simenon’s literary novels, is ruthless self-affirmation, “Some [people] seem powerful,” remarks one character typically, “and maybe for the moment they are. But they’re never—and don’t forget it—as powerful as they pretend, because no matter how powerful they are, there are always others who are more powerful still.”
The resulting struggle may occasionally be quieted and contained in mutual understanding, but more often leads to open conflict and catastrophe. In one of the strongest of these novels, Dirty Snow, a young man seeks to assert himself by theft, murder, and deceit. But paradoxically he contrives to do so in such a way that he will be observed by a “good” neighbor whose adolescent daughter he seduces and betrays in the most ugly fashion. Monstrously provocative, the young hero seems simultaneously to seek recognition and condemnation, victory and defeat. Flashing around money that is the reward for theft and murder, he knows he is attracting attention, but reflects, “Why say he was worried when he was perfectly calm, when it was he, of his own free will and in full awareness, who was doing everything to bring about his own destruction?” It’s hard to imagine more conflicted books than Simenon’s romans durs.
What has all this to do with Inspector Maigret, whom the author had invented years earlier as part of a lifelong project to become extremely wealthy, and then trotted out four or five times a year for much of his adult life? Inevitably the plots tend toward the formulaic and are often wearily mechanical. Clearly, the temptation to read all of them amounts to a form of addiction, rather than the kind of fertile engagement one associates with literary fiction. Yet Maigret himself is absolutely sui generis and, for all the far-fetched action that surrounds him, convincing. In the rapidly sketched world of suburban Paris or seedy, small-town France, ambition, passion, and consequent conflict has led to murder. This is the territory of the serious novels, but reduced now to caricature.
After the crime has taken place, the murderer enters into a different kind of conflict, this time with Maigret. It is a battle of wits and wills. Bovine, dogged, and brilliant, Maigret always wins. But he wins not through violence, a mere assertion of power, but by understanding his quarries on a human level, to the point that, having arrested them, he often personally “forgives” the assassins. It is as if both sides of the conflict in Dirty Snow had been resolved in one fantasy figure; Maigret was the kind of man who would have understood and forgiven Simenon himself for his endless philandering (some of it bordering on rape), and the ruthless ambition that produced all those books, often provoking outrage among family and friends who felt they had been grossly misrepresented.
This is how I construe authenticity: however many ways the author reworks his material, it is recognizably his. We might say he or she is obedient to a need, or an inspiration, even when setting out to work in a different genre. Tackling an author who is new to us, it can be hard to tell whether the work is authentic or not. In which case, best to enjoy the perplexity of not quite knowing how serious our author is, weighing the arguments on both sides, reading another novel to see how it fits. This is part of the fun of reading, too, the attempt to get one’s mind round the work, accepting a long game played out over three, four, five books. I have had this pleasure reading Annie Proulx. Or again Damon Galgut, the latter’s work being intensely focused around questions of fear and courage.
In general, when a novel manipulates its material to conform to the pieties of the day, or alternatively to attack those pieties for no other reason than the visibility such an attack will generate, when its literary tropes are all too familiar, its clever prose reminiscent of other clever prose, then the compass needle is slipping away from true north. William Giraldi’s Busy Monsters, Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries are all recent examples. (James Walton, writing in The New York Review, speaks of the “feeling that The Luminaries is more a careful simulacrum of a great novel than the real thing.”) When, on the other hand, the author renounces some easy twist, some expected payoff, to take us into territory we didn’t expect but that nevertheless fits with the drift of the story, then the novel gains force and conviction. And when he or she does it again, telling quite a different story that is nevertheless driven by the same urgent tensions, then we are likely moving into the zone of authenticity.
This approach to novels, which is only one of many, inevitably has implications for how we see the relationship between an author’s work and life. Explore a biography of Dickens or Simenon and one’s intuitions on reading the novels are quickly confirmed. The conflicts in their fiction emerge very clearly in their lives. “The artist,” Simenon remarked, “is above all else a sick person, in any case an unstable one.”
This is not an easy concept to teach in a creative writing course.
Aristotle said in the very first sentence of his book Metaphysics that "All men desire to know". I take exception to that statement of his. Not all men desire to know. Only real men do. Most men prefer to dwell in purposeful ignorance, to live in darkness, hence the saying--- invented and popularized by such men, undoubtedly--- "Ignorance is bliss." Such men have neither intelligence nor strength of character. The following is a brainstorm of mine about facts and truths and the desire to know/the quest for knowledge. The notes are being written in a hurry while thoughts are flooding my mind. My fingers are flying all over the keyboard. I am racing.
1. God:
When I was of eleven years of age, a thought came to me that there was indeed no God ("Trời" in Vietnamese, a very interesting word which can be used to refer to sky) as I had been taught. To test the veracity of my thought, I confidently raised my head to the sky and challenged the so-called God to strike me dead if "He" was indeed all powerful and all-knowing, as I had been taught. Nothing happened to me then. And nothing has happened to me since. All I have been having is a silence, a nothingness, and a creeping and growing awareness that God is a man-made entity, a figment, albeit important, of the human imagination. Man has the desire to lie, not only to others, but also to himself, I thus concluded at the tender age of eleven. Thus an immense pride of my precocity of matters concerning metaphysics was born. Such pride has never wavered. I have no fear of God because He is not real. Neither do I fear ghosts/demons for they are not real. I fear men instead because they are real, vicious, proud, deluded, and ignorant.
2. Politics:
Politics is the quest for power. Drive for power is very strong among all sentient beings, manifest clearly among social mammals. Man is the apex of all mammals. To attain power, machinations, deceptions, and ruthlessness are employed. Facts are distorted and twisted to serve the political goals. Truths are sacrificed along the way. The end justifies the means, that's their cherished motto.
All politicians are liars. That is the statement you can take to the bank. Granted, there are very, very few politicians driven to help others and society than to enrich themselves. I have not seen any Vietnamese politician of that caliber to emerge yet, although I must state that so far I have been very impressed by Điếu Cầy on account of his demeanor, bearing, and ability to handle himself under hostile questioning. The guy was doing well for himself in Vietnam, so why did he risk all that and got himself imprisoned (for over 5, 6 years) for speaking for human rights and against the invasion of Vietnam by China? Also, the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. must have done a thorough job to investigate/vet him before he was allowed to be admitted to Vietnam and apparently anointed as one of the future leaders of the "Post-VC era". I could be wrong. Time will tell. But to me, he has a commanding way of speaking, full of poise and articulateness, that endeared himself to me. He is far better than most, if not all, Vietnamese politicians I have seen on TV. Nowadays when I am called upon to speak in front of an audience, I tell myself that I must speak like Obama and Điếu Cầy do.
3. Discussions/Debates:
Most participants in the debates on the Net are not concerned with facts and truths. They are not in the debates to search for facts and truths. They are there to impose their views on the situation at hand. Let's look at the debates involving politics and religion on the Vietnamese websites and ask yourself if the following points are facts or mere opinions:
Political Points:
a) Is Vietnam in danger of being slowly, but inexorably, step-by-step, taken over by China?
b) If point (a) is correct, what are the steps that have been taken to counter that, in Vietnam, and in Vietnamese communities overseas, besides ineffectual and tension-releasing demonstrations?
c) Is there a sense of urgency and extreme concern about the situation mentioned in point (a).
Religious Points:
a) If taking away God as the cornerstone of the edifice of Christian Faith, can Christianity, a strong political force, survive? In other words, once it is proved that Jesus was only human and indeed mortal and that Christianity's doctrines were built on lies, can Christianity survive?
b) Religion is nothing but an ideology, a view to answer existential questions and meanings of existence. As ideologies, all religions compete among themselves and with other religions for the hearts and souls of men in the marketplace, increasingly dominated by the Internet. Nowadays, people google to search for information to aid them in making up their minds. Islam and Christianity have been perennially at each other's throat. It looks like they are at it again, now, after the "Charlie Hebdo" incident. Regardless of whether it was real or staged, the incident marked the watershed of the fight between the two religions in the 21st century.
c) Since religions are invented by men and since men are not equal, religions are not equal in terms of soundness of doctrines and relevancy. Religions evolve as men evolve in understanding the world he lives in. Men no longer sacrificed virgins to appease their "Gods" as they did hundreds or thousands of years ago. Outright slavery is now frowned upon while abortion and homosexuality are being accepted though grudgingly. What once were regarded as timeless truths are now looked at matters of opinion and choice.
d) The Catholic Church is a political and religious empire. All the Catholics are supposedly to swear allegiance to the Pope, the de facto emperor of all Catholics, the representative of Christ on earth, the unerring source of authority. Can any man/woman of reason and learning accept such an outlandish doctrine, such a ridiculous assertion which flies in the face of facts and reasoning?
e) It's time the Vietnamese Catholics must ask themselves that whether they care more about the well-being of the Catholic Church than the well-being of Vietnam and their fellow compatriots. Have they ever wondered that they have been brainwashed into believing in falsehoods, instead of facts and truths which can stand up under scrutiny and questioning? Beliefs don't have to be blind and stupid, against logic, against scientific knowledge, and against common sense.
f) it's time the Vietnamese Catholics must forsake their dream of dominating the majority of the inhabitants of Vietnam, as they tried to do throughout the colonial period and up to 1975. The current and ridiculous shaking of hands between the Pope and the VC Premier signaled the fervent desire of the Catholic Church to reassert itself in Vietnam. What happened to the loud, clamorous slogan that the Catholics are fierce anti-Communists? So you see, religion and politics sleep together and are in fact twins sharing the same spine. All politicians lie, remember that.
Cái suy tư về vai trò của tôn giáo của ông VLC là cái hiểu biết sở đẳng về tôn giáo của đa số con người không có thói quen suy tư đến cặn nguồn của sự việc.
Sống trong một tập thể, trong hiện đại hay thời kỳ ăn lông ở lổ, cần phải có luật lệ để duy trì sự tồn tại của tập thể, vì những ước muốn và nguyện vọng của cá nhân thường không hợp với những ước muốn và nguyện vong của tập thể.
Những luật lệ đó chưa hẳn là có tinh chất tôn giáo. Tôn giáo là về cái ý nghĩa cao hơn những luật lệ của tập thể: tại sao tôi ở đây, trái đất và tinh tú từ đâu ra, sống để làm gì, tại sao tôi và các sinh vật (động và thực) phải chết, có phải chết là hết, v.v...Nói một cách khác, tôn giáo là hậu quả của suy tư của con người về những câu hỏi hiện sinh (existential questions) và ý nghĩa cuộc đời (meaning(s) of life). Vì tôn giáo là sản phẩm của con người, nên không có bình đẳng về giá trị giữa tôn giáo. Hơn nữa, sự suy tư của con người có tiến triển, do đó, tôn giáo cũng tiến triển theo thời gian, từ pantheism, polytheism đến monotheism. Cái sai lầm và ngạo mạn của những ai theo monotheism là cho tôn giáo phải có vai trò của "Thượng Đế", và đạo của họ là "tốt" hơn các đạo khác mà không nhận thức rằng họ là nạn nhân của thói quen, hoàn cảnh, và lười biếng suy tư/vấn đáp/học hỏi. Họ không biết hoặc không chấp nhận tôn giáo chỉ là một hình thức của ý thức hệ. Nếu chúng ta chấp nhận tiền đề tôn giáo là một hình thức của ý thức hệ thì Buddhism, Communnism (chết vì đi ngược bản chất ích kỷ và khuynh hướng mê quyền lực và độc tài của con người), atheism, secular humanism đều là tôn giáo cả.
Những điều tôi viết trên đây hôm nay và vài năm nay trên diễn đàn, phần đông là tự tôi nghĩ ra, chớ không phải lập lại từ trong website "Sách Hiếm", như một vị đã ngộ nhận. Tôi chưa tìm đọc những bài viết trong đó, ngoại trừ các bài được đưa lên diễn đàn. Tuy nhiên, thực sự rất ít có gì mới mẻ trong tư tưởng con người như trong công nghệ và kỷ thuật. Càng lên cao càng giống nhau. Everything that rises will converge.
Sau đây là 3 ý nghĩ tôi có. Có thể nhiều vị cũng nghĩ ra như vậy, vì thế, tôi không cho là độc đáo và ngộ nghĩnh:
1. Mặc cảm tự tôn không phải là cái ngược lại của mặc cảm tự ti, vì nó là một mặt nạ của mặc cảm tự ti. Cái ngược lại của tự ti là chấp nhận có người hơn ta và thua ta trong bất cứ lãnh vực nào.
2. Tất cả liên quan đến con người là một trò chơi (game): tình yêu, chính trị, tôn giáo, danh vong, tiền tài, v...v...Muốn thắng trong trò chơi, chúng ta phải theo luật của trò chơi.
3. Muốn đánh giá trị đúng về một con người, một thước đo đơn giản nhất là coi người đó có trọng sự thật hay không, hay là ngụy biện trong tranh luận để cho cái tôi được vuốt ve.
3. Trong thiên nhiên, cuộc sống là tranh đấu cho tồn tại: kill or be killed. Do đó, đối với người, đoàn kết nhau để chống thú dữ (xưa là thú dữ trong rừng/bụi/nước và nhóm kẻ đồng loại cạnh tranh; nay chỉ là nhóm người/dân tộc khác).
4. Tôn giáo là sản phẩm tư tưởng của con người. Không phải tư tưởng nào cũng bình đẳng. Do đó, không phải tôn giáo nào giá trị như nhau. Tin "đạo nào cũng giống nhau, dạy người có đạo đức, vv..." là suy tư cạn. Tôn giáo được đặt ra để thỏa mãn nhu cầu của một nhóm người/dân tộc.
5. Để giúp cho việc chinh phục đất đai, tôn giáo là một dụng cụ để triệt tiêu ý chí đề kháng của đối phương. Đây là một điều ít ai nhận thấy, nhất là những tín đồ của đạo mang tới từ ngoại bang xâm lăng, có tổng hành dinh hẳn hoi (Vatican) và cơ cấu tổ chức như một đế quốc vương triều.
Đạo Ki Tô và Đạo Do Thái đang lợi dụng sự quá khích của phần tử cực đoan Hồi Giáo để tuyên chiến ngầm và diệt Đạo Hồi. Chiến tranh vì danh nghĩa tôn giáo, nhưng thật sự là vì đất đai và quyền lợi, không bao giờ ngừng trong lịch sử loài người. Có lúc lộ liễu. Có lúc ngầm. Không ai thương ta cả, nhất là ngoại bang dẫu là cùng đạo, ngoại trừ đồng bào ruột thịt cùng văn hoá ngôn ngữ.
6. Giữa con người không có bình đẳng trong hiểu biết vì khác nhau trong thông minh, phát triển trí tuệ, và kinh nghiệm sống. Người ngu và dốt không hiểu được người hơn mình. Bịt mắt, bịt tai, chạy trốn sự thật là thái độ của kẻ ngu dốt và hèn. Thấy cách lý luận trên diễn đàn là biết được trình độ của tha nhân.
A writer wannabe. I am interested in writing short stories. I regard myself primarily as a poet. I love the arts. I am passionate about preserving the territorial integrity of Vietnam against the current Chinese quiet take-over.
