Archives for February, 2009

No, this was the passage I meant to share; I don’t know why I put that other one up.

“In a war,” he said, “you come to terms with the positive side of death. That death doesn’t mean a thing. You get to a point where you become a continuum; otherwise you can’t fight the war. Death and life are in one continuum; when you are in a group, you see death and life as a continuum. [Back then] I just [had to] come to terms with [the] physical aspect of death.

- Whitaker, Mark. Learning Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 109.

Quoted verbatim, including all the ellipses and everything within brackets.

Sivaram went on to argue that death got reconfigured in a war. ‘Culturally, death assumes a different meaning altogether. It’s a cultural thing, no? The concept of “our death,” the death of the self, is a cultural concept. The fact that it is a cultural concept makes it possible for another … culturally different concept of death [to replace it]. [Take] the LTTE, for example. Their new concept of death involves a combination of fairly conventional national renaissance ideology with a warrior ethic reclaimed from “ancient Tamil culture” as portrayed in the ancient poetry of the Tamils. (“Here,” wrote Sivaram in 1995, “I am talking about the LTTE. I am just making a comment about them; this has nothing to do with me.) The LTTE refers to dying as being “sown” (vitaital) and dead bodies as “seeds” (vittukal).So you can see this development particularly clearly [in the] culture of war that the LTTE has. That is the argument in my book.’
But, he asserted, all this was not unique to Sri Lanka. ‘I think it must be common to all fighting. If you had gone and lived with that fellow – that bloody Christian pastor [David Koresh] who built up a fortress and blew up the whole thing – you could see … those people were just part of [his] committing suicide. So I think now all organisations at one point culturally also push that line: that your death is not your death.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Neither have my friends,’ he muttered, softly.

- Whitaker, Mark. Learning Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka. London: Pluto Press, 2007. 109.

I was thinking about this earlier in the day, and then I read this and forgot what my particular train of thought had been.

II.

When my father began teaching us math, he started with the basics. I couldn’t have been more than 8, my brother a couple of years younger. Wapa came home one night with huge sketch pads, the kind you buy at art stores, and a cluster of thick markers. We spread sheets of newsprint between the paper to catch the ink, and this commenced what would be several years of daily math lessons.

We started with the construction of 1. Pausing often, he taught us about the borders of things: what separates one object from the next, what makes a thing discrete, itself, and therefore quantifiable. Actually, he didn’t teach us about them, so much as he taught us that there are borders, that there are the limits to an object’s being, beyond which it does not exist, and that these limits are how we recognise its existence.

Having established that objects can be in the world in isolation from each other, we began to count. Because we were here, at this bedrock level where the rules we’d accepted as fundamentals were revealed to be merely assumptions, we never took for granted that because we had ten fingers, ten must necessarily be a number of some import. Instead, we spent months creating and then deconstructing the binary system, learning to add and subtract in 1s and 0s, thinking like computers until we moved to 2s and thus onwards, until finally we arrived at the decimal system and it felt like that was merely an afterthought, a pleasing coincidence of toes and digits.
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