The Noble Savage

The "Noble Savage" narrative is pervasive in human lore. I got to thinking about it after recognizing its presence in various places with different contexts; imperial conquests, ancient parables, academic fields. The premise is an unexpected depth of character in individuals of inferior, unremarkable background--the surprise being so because of ingrained prejudices of contemporary society, the righteous superiority of prideful condescendents, self-rationalization founded on shaky layers of twisted logic and close-mindedness. We may not use the same term nowadays, but the trope is thinly veiled across our stories too. First the person is framed as an "other," then their qualities are recognized. The initial assumption is a negative one.

I believe our enamoredness with tragedy plays some role in the popularity of this character. They're underdogs, hopelessly outmatched by a greater, more modern enemy. In their perceived less-fortunate circumstance and inevitable defeat lies gripping, enviable martyrdom, an innocence that is lost after the cocktails of power have been drunk. This sentiment is unavoidable when the powerful dominate the weaker, especially when the bullying is unjust and the bullied is undeserving. Guilt cowers not far from sight. 

This makes me think that, maybe, there is a universal shared instinct (apart from the mentally ill whose condition is horrifying because they lack it), a subconscious sense, that can respect admirable qualities in any person when shown those qualities. That there is a true goodness we know when we see. It transcends learned hatreds. It's more real than anything we create. 

The ultimate reason behind promoting diversity is this. It gives people the chance to see that there are no anomalous savages that happen to be the good ones. There's only people: people as varied as the world is infinite who should be viewed in the same, unflinching light, judged by their convictions and character before anything else. 

 

With empathy we should approach fellow man. 

Untitled (Russians man)

Life seems to slow around the holidays. We get a bit fatter and more content, and we check out to cruise into January. I feel that big time this year. It's ok. I'm riding the waves of the cosmic ocean instead of fighting them. 

I wrote something earlier about Leo Tolstoy, but I realized that wasn't what I wanted to write about. Not exactly. I wanted to write about a theme that stands out in his work; acceptance. 

Though I'm certain my understanding of him as an author is incomplete because I haven't (yet) read his monumental novels, I'm currently enjoying a collection of Tolstoy's novellas and short stories. They share the same characteristic realism that made him a legend, so I assume this idea of acceptance is present in War and Peace and Anna Karenina as well. The elegance and severity with which it is described has struck me. 

In what I've read, Tolstoy forces his characters to face the harsh realities of life, rationalize what they've experienced, then move on. Accept them. He walks the reader through the thoughts of these people, characters who elicit remarkable empathy due primarily to their relatability. They feel raw and nearly interchangeable with the reader. What they must grapple with are what we all meet in our journeys, eventually; love, death, betrayal, hope, pride.

 

I wonder why these parts of the human experience, quite literally the most common, inescapable, inevitable conditions in life, the fundamental emotions we share with all before and after us, can be so difficult to accept. I image this is because their true manifestations can clash with our notions of how they ought to be. When a fundamental belief is challenged by the facts, I guess, the foundation shakes. The first instinct is to reject reality--to assume what you believe, not what you see, is true. 

The ability to revise deep notions of the workings of the world, of how justice and the personal narrative play out, might be the dividing line between adulthood and childhood. It takes a mammoth excursion of willpower to overwrite an ingrained worldview. Maturity, it might be called.

Then, after experience teaches, the student must react with moderation, for the slope to pointless nihilism awaits. I think teenagers often slip this way before climbing back up to a plateau of reasonableness. It's part of the learning process. It's easy to extrapolate and discard all prior beliefs after witnessing and accepting a reality in contradiction to the world imagined before. Nothing is real and nothing matters because my expectations turned out more fantasy than truth. This view is unproductive but makes sense, to me, in the aftermath of a foundation-shaking realization. 

 

The process of acceptance, with its mental gymnastics and logical jumps, is Tolstoy's mastery. It seems very Russian of him to write about this; from what I know of that country, its culture has a distinct blend of romanticism and realism, a pedestal upholding a brutal history and lofty ideals side-by-side, exquisite ballerinas twirling in the sub-Arctic blizzards. Maybe it's a stereotype. But I get the feeling they place great value in their collective retention of beauty amidst acknowledgment of the harsh real world. The balance makes for a special people, and the balance is what Tolstoy's writing explores.

On Boredom

In a world of never-ending change, of infinite complexity and activity, the existence of boredom is a bit strange. Our time is limited and something is always happening; how could one get bored? The reality, though, is that we all experience tedious, unengaging, monotonous times. Underneath the dynamism of life is a repetitiveness that we quickly acclimate to, and in short order what was newly exciting becomes stale. 

I guess it’s a byproduct of the unbelievable computing power of the human brain. It recognizes patterns with such efficiency, it learns so fast, that near constant novelty is required for stimulation. And finding this novelty takes energy, creativity, and a level of discomfort that clashes with simultaneous desires for stability and safety and calm, a craving for the known. 

How one deals with inevitable boredom ends up being a defining trait. Tolerance of boredom is quantified as our “attention span,” basically an expression of how long one can maintain concentration on the task at hand. This dictates how we act and live: the sorts of jobs we take, the hobbies we enjoy, the depth of our relationships with the world around us, essentially what we like to do and how we fill our days. How we handle boredom, this weird underlying constant that inherently necessitates effort to avoid, is fundamental to our personality. 

A common refrain nowadays is that modern technology has destroyed attention spans, which has dumbed humanity down into a depressed, flaccid mess of confused individuals. At its core, the argument is that we’re more bored than ever, which makes us unfulfilled, despite and because of having easier access to nearly unlimited content. People can’t figure out how to feed their insatiable mind anymore. These sentiments have been taken to another level during COVID lockdowns. 

I’m not so sure about this. Without a doubt we’re more exposed to quick-trigger stimulants, flashing electronic lights and dopamine hits than our ancestors were. Maybe our attention spans are shortened. But I believe in the universality of boredom. I think it’s been present among humans since our first days on Earth, and that its presence has spurred our collective advancement. As long we’ve had these brains, we’ve strived to satisfy them with constant exploration and challenge. 

An ancient, extroverted shepherd whose livelihood demanded he keep watch over grazing ruminants all day, every day, watching the sun move across the sky in the quiet still meadows, must have felt boredom akin to what someone might feel today. A young, curious housewife obligated to stay home instead of in school must understand boredom regardless of what era she lived in. 

Maybe the scale of the phenomenon is larger than before, that more people are more often bored than during previous times. How to even begin measuring this is beyond me. But on an individual level, I think we ultimately face the same conundrums humans have always faced. We're more similar than different.  

I got to this topic while reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, a book essentially about boredom in contemporary life. He sets the story in just about the most bland, unremarkable place imaginable: an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, a flat expanse of Kafkaesque bureaucracy and mind-numbing work. He humanizes the employees by showing how they deal with boredom—their inner thoughts, their interaction on breaks, their histories, their gossip, their hopes. In a way he valorizes these oddballs who do what most of us cannot, facing tedium head-on and conquering it. 

Wallace makes the reader grapple with boredom, too. He wrote a dense book with loads of detail on accounting and the IRS structure. Parts are difficult to get through. But this is the point. I think he wanted us to really feel what he was writing about, to grapple with it like his characters do and understand ourselves more fully as a result. It reminded me of ASAP Rocky’s album Testing in that both feel like a challenge from the creator to his audience to self-reflect. Both works grew on me over time as I recognized their interactive nature. 

I think it’s unsustainable to rely on external forces as a salve to boredom. The most infallible solution, I believe, is changing our own mindset about the whole thing. We can train our brains to focus, to find the specific originality of every moment we’re alive. We can’t really escape boredom, but I believe we can learn to embrace the oft-ignored details that make up life. Instead of settling into the familiar patterns our brains create, we can examine our lives in more minute and expansive ways. In these investigations we can find endless wonders. 

What is Learning

The basic structure of a novel, or really any story, requires a change. The characters go through some process and come out the end different than they were in the beginning. Usually this is experiential, meaning something happens, resulting in a new knowledge or mindset. This is the core of the story. 

The role learning plays in this change is central but usually implied. For example, "growing up," does refer to learning about life, but more directly it refers to the social and physical experiences that transform a child into an adult. The experiences are what one focuses on because the learning derives from them. 

I'm interested in the nature of learning. What the process itself means and does to the human mind. I guess this is called epistemology. I tend to stray from formal terms like that, though, because I feel they can complicate ideas that are simpler and more universal. Philosophical texts seem to do that often. Maybe it's just too dense for me. I prefer fiction as a way to examine such topics. 

My friend recommended Flowers for Algernon years ago, and I finally got around to reading it. In this book, learning itself is the star of the show; it is the act of gaining knowledge, not as a repercussion of other events but as its own endeavor, that drives the character's changes. A retarded man named Charlie undergoes a procedure that makes him a genius. He becomes a voracious learner and the purpose of his life becomes acquiring and contributing to human knowledge. EQ begins to lag behind IQ, and he becomes more dissatisfied with his circumstances as he learns more.

In a recommendation from another friend, Persepolis, an upper-class Tehrani girl grows and watches and learns in the 1980s through pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. This happens in the empirical way of a classic coming-of-age story. Eventually she outgrows the bounds of conservative culture and has to leave the country, her progressive stubbornness threatening her sanctity under the Ayatollah's regime. 

 

Her intellectual growth, in conjunction with emotional growth and maturity, was part of her loss of innocence. The more she learned about all facets of life, the more dissatisfied she became with the state of Iran. It was a sad rift between an individual and her home played out in graphic novel form, which I'd never read before. 

I found it striking that both protagonists, as different as their stories are, became more cynical, a touch more arrogant and vindictive, and I think unsatisfied in a deep, non-material way, as they learned more. Not that ignorance is better (though this is something both ruminate over)--but the parallels brought me to "epistemelogical" questions. 

Why does knowledge seem to breed this sense of disappointment? Is it because life is fundamentally tragic? Do people develop a nostalgia for an earlier time when optimism had more legitimacy because knowledge allows for more precise identification of faults? Is it the infinite room for improvement of self and environment? Does this sadness fade over time as one becomes attuned to the imperfections of existence? As if plotting the shape of knowledge to contentment returns a U-shaped parabola. 

Of course it must depend on the person. But there appears a connection between learning and disillusionment. My friend who recommended Persepolis told me last we met that he sometimes wishes he knew just a bit less so he wouldn't be as jaded. Does it have to be this way? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One of the lessons we can gain from recognizing that to change is to learn and vice versa is that this is always an option for us. We aren't stuck in a certain attitude or inescapable circumstance. We can push ourselves to learn more, explore, gather knowledge, and in this way we can change and so will the world around us, which we know is perceived through the filter of our intelligence. And even if that knowledge results in an uncomfortable transition of cynicism and frustration, learning more is the only way out. Keep moving forward. 

I don't think anyone regrets knowing more than they did before, even if the saying grants bliss in ignorance. In my opinion, overcoming the challenges of the mind through learning ends up being the most rewarding thing. The confusion and hurt that comes with it is a necessary hurdle, and it helps make knowledge the sweetest of all fruits.

My punctuation

The following is all the punctuation, in order, I've used in my previous posts. Someone made this website to filter out the words you enter, leaving only the grammatical markings within the text as output. It's a strange sight. These signs are integral to my writing. Without them the ideas would be unintelligible, the words functionally useless. 

 

I can see my style--rife with commas (,) and parenthesis (). I tend to write long sentences embedded with multiple clauses, multiple points jammed in together. The research-heavy posts are visible by the presence of percent signs (%) and quotation marks ("). I'm more inclined to questions (?) than exclamations (!). It's sort of a reflection of the way I think, which is a bit unnerving to see plastered out like this in a linguistic code. It feels like a raw view of my writing and my brain.

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Indus Valley Civilization

I'm pretty skeptical of glorification of a prior era. As if people back then had it all figured out, were more functional than we could imagine from our toxic modernity. Lost gardens of paradise. The way I see it, the walls constituting our memories, collective and individual, have been far too graffitied to accurately make out the original mural. That place, and what it was really like, is now inaccessible, buried forever beneath layers of time. I think nostalgia for a better epoch is dangerous. 

My curiosity about how our predecessors lived, however, remains unbounded. As of late I've been intrigued by the Harappans of the Indus River Valley. 

We don't hear much about them because nobody knows much about them. Their writing is indecipherable, their remnants more sparse than those of contemporaries in the Middle East. But these South Asians were on the forefront of human possibility. Around 5,000 years ago, the level at which they were farming and organizing and trading was matched only by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians.

 

I don't think South Asian civilization is thought of, generally, as one of those legendary ancient agrarian civilizations. But it's older than China, the Mesoamericans, the Greeks. It was also larger than anything else had ever been, spanning from arid Balochistan (western Pakistan) to the Yamuna River (near Delhi).

 

Harappans had cutting edge urban planning, standardized units of weight and measurement, granaries to store surplus barley and wheat from irrigated fields, and networks of trade reaching the other wealthy clusters in Iraq and Egypt.  

Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, their two most famous cities, are notable for their impressive infrastructure. They had sewage drainage systems, trash collection, public baths, street grids, and tens of thousands of residents. Their ruins were uncovered during British railroad construction in 19th century colonial times when workers began unearthing oddly uniform bricks. These were Harappan bricks, and their repetitiveness indicated the existence of an ancient shared mathematical system across the region; people had developed uniform standards to measure and build over vast swaths of land. They were trading raw materials and finished goods like metals and precious stones, timber, textiles, and animals throughout the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, laying the foundations for the Indian Ocean trade networks that have flourished for thousands of years since. 

But what really caught my attention about the Harappans is what they didn't have. There was a degree of wealth inequality, as seen by different-sized houses, but there is no evidence of a centralized political entity, a King or ruling religious elite, in any of their excavated sites.

In these grand cities and alluvial plains, archaeologists have found no temples or palaces, no great monuments, no signs of an army, no lavish burials. No artwork revering such institutions or powerful individuals. No sign of any of it.  

 

Those are the first things we come across in ancient ruins. Monuments to religion and state are the first things people will come across in the ruins of DC and Beijing and Moscow and every other major city inhabited today. People in the Indus Valley seem to have lived relatively equally and peacefully, especially compared to Babylon and Pharaonic Egypt. Even though they had the resources and technical prowess, they weren't building grandiose structures to a god or a divine ruler.

Could there really have been a flourishing group of more than 5 million people across thousands of square miles, in contact with other strong states, with metallurgic technology and standard brick sizes and written language, without centralized, political religion? Worship of the military? A King or warlord? Is this possible? A civilization that lasted around 2,000 years? 

 

Nobody really knows how the Harappans lived or were governed. I'm not suggesting this was an egalitarian utopia. But it seems clear from what we do know that their priorities, what they dedicated resources to, were not the same as other similarly-complex societies. Their mystery may persist until the end of time.

untitled

Deep down, it seems everyone simply wants to be liked by others. All of us humans carry this built-in, pervasive itch day after day, across ages and thousands of miles. It must be related to survival strategies developed over millennia, a foundational aspect of our inescapable social nature. At some level, I think we can recognize this hope for acceptance in ourselves and others when we genuinely interact with people, even if it's buried under layers of denial and scar tissue. At least I believe we can train ourselves to think this way. 

I listened to a talk by Charles Yu, an author who recently won a National Book Award for Interior Chinatown, which I haven't read (yet). He was a corporate lawyer for over a decade before switching to writing full-time. He discussed his struggles during that time to embody what he imaged a lawyer to be: someone more aggressive or assertive or domineering, not a "quiet Asian guy" like himself. 

He said his efforts to align with an image of who he should be, this twisted mental game, held him back personally and professionally. He boxed himself into a corner, erecting the slippery walls himself. Looking back, he said, when he opened up and showed people who he really was, told them that he liked writing, they actually liked him more than when he was hiding, and they shared details about themselves in return. He ended up doing his job better because of it. His self-imposed facade, a defense against potential persecution, had transformed into a weight holding him down. 

It a paradox how we hurt ourselves by stifling the authentic self, when releasing it ended up yielding the very things hoped for, the things we thought we could gain only through this stringency.

 

Authenticity is palpable and inspirational, which is why I think it's powerful. So much more is achievable when those walls are taken down and rest replaces the defenses. We all know this well, but it still takes bravery to follow-through. 

 

My sister and I watched The Green Knight last week. Like so many tales before, it has a message warning  against living a lie. Doing so eats everything around you, slowly. Better to face the demon and win peace of mind. Then comes the good stuff.

National Identities

I was sitting in the Tuileries Garden, the sun tucked behind puffy clouds yet still radiant, fiery. My friend, donning Ray-Bans, short hair on his cheeks and long hair on his head, was saying something along the lines of:

    "People have died for ideas. But what even is an idea? A nation is an idea. Everything is an idea."

 

I was in France for the first time in August. I quickly noticed a strong reverence for precedent there. Legitimacy is proven by the idea that a place, or food, or ideology, or language, or style, has been tried and tested by a long line of predecessors. An unambiguous pride stems from heritage. I got the impression that the French nation is defined by a lore, a history more than cherished but quite deliberately placed centrally in their society like the Black Stone in the Kaaba; a people who root themselves in camaraderie with the countless that came before. 

 

This sacred historical mythos, the national religion, comes in a different, still patriotic form on this side of the pond. For better or worse, I think ours is more future-oriented with a healthy dollop of underdog, rags-to-riches, land of endless potential rhetoric. Our possibilities unite us, not a shared past. All nations are ideas, after all. 

I also saw that conflict is an essential ingredient to the conception of the nation-state in both countries. At Versailles there's a hall of paintings glorifying the major French battles up to Napoleon. The story of France. In Washington DC, a visitor walks up the National Mall, strolling from Lincoln to the Capitol, through a series of memorials for our 20th century wars. The story of America. 

Deliberate effort is exerted to unite the mass of individuals with a shared idea. A nation is far more capable than the sum of its parts. That seems to be what politics is all about. From my limited exposure, it seems the French have created a sturdy, gravitational, pervasive idea to define themselves; forged through centuries of war and power struggle, but also the stroke of paintbrushes and pens.

The Importance We Give Places

Some months ago I was looking for a book with the most up-to-date story on Texan independence. Nothing stood out to me so I let the urge pass. 

 

Not long after, the provocatively-titled Forget the Alamo began riding the critical circuit, gaining steam with every bemoan from ticked off right-wing Texas government folk. It was perfect timing; I put in an early hold at the library and a few weeks later it was in my apartment. 

 

I've publicly lamented about the fairy-tale narrative around the Alamo, the Republic of Texas, the whole grand parade of "freedom" and "liberty" evoked in seemingly any circumstance. Freedom and liberty to enslave, to properly complete the idea. 

I'm glad the truth behind the legend is being unearthed and shared with the public. Because the toxic propaganda was masked as fact for so long. It still is, amazingly. The way symbols have been used to keep other people down in this country should be universally known; that's the way their oppressive power ceases. This book does that in a casual yet well-researched manner, and I think access to work like this goes a long way in raising interest and care for historical narratives.

It is incredible, though, to see how tied people get to the idea of a place. It gets personal real quick. We imbue meaning in the world around us, greatly so in physical locations. Threatening one's understanding of a place must be a destabilizing force in a human psyche with few equals. I guess I get why traditionalists refuse to see the Alamo as a military blunder by half-drunk criminals and slave owners fighting for a militant, deeply racist society built on the shared value of making money on the backs of black people. Doesn't make their purposeful ignorance right, though. 

 

I was reading through this book while at my childhood home in San Antonio, alone there for the first time in years. It was strange to feel the duality of a place--a potent symbol sharing a town with an ordinary home and human being, the name San Antonio standing in for both that and this. Nothing in life is experienced the same way twice. 

Old Movies & Modernity

Old movies can be inaccessible to a modern audience for a number of legit reasons. The pacing can be uncomfortably slow, the graphics archaic, the acting a touch too dramatic, the relationships impalpable to 21st century sensibilities. There's also a pretentiousness around watching them, which I know I risk entering by writing this. 

They're much harder to swallow than an old book, I think, because the medium of film/TV changes with relentless pace. Old movies are clearly old. A book, on the other hand, is the same word-on-paper format whether it's 10 or 1000 years old. The words may make the age obvious, but at a sensory level there's no difference between the two. You read and imagine with the turn of a page.

But there are old movies that can seem strikingly contemporary in theme and content. I think the first one I ever saw where I felt that way was Taxi Driver. It follows a reclusive, disillusioned, alienated guy driving a taxi in NYC. I was shocked by how similar this character is to school-shooter types littered around today, how in line it was with the current loneliness epidemic in the wealthy world. Though the prominence of such fringe members of society may be uniquely modern, the presence of them isn't new at all. 

 

I've written on this before, about the clutch of recency bias, how pretty much everything that's happening on a macro, thematic level, and even more so everything about human nature, has happened before. Nothing new under the sun, as they say. I think I've come to a point where I can get past the outdated parts of old movies to recognize the commonalities between our times. 

Two I recently watched: Chinatown and The Bridge on the River Kwai. 

Chinatown is about this PI in LA who gets embroiled in a deep web of corruption that, in timeless fashion, is about water rights and money. There's injustice and the weight of history and the hopelessness of fighting power--it's dark in the way we expect only of our jaded coevals. Both it and Taxi Driver were made during the decay of the 70s, so they're not that old, but 50 years is a long time to still be relevant in the mechanized era. 

The other, The Bridge, is about a captured British battalion in WWII tasked with building a railroad for the Japanese in Burma. This one's got all the classics of mankind--pride, masculinity, honor, control, dominance. The same sort of movie could be made today to rave reviews, I think. Some things never go out of style.