The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog

        Filmic language operates through juxtaposition: we interpret meaning by the proximity of images presented in succession. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog film in full, but the logic of cinematography is readily apparent in his The Future of Truth. Herzog’s book is a strange, little volume whose title makes it sound like it would be philosophy—and it kind of is—but it’s one that operates through association.

In the opening to the book, Herzog explains how philosophers have not been able to adequately define truth and so he has no grand ambitions for his own work. All the same, Herzog explores the idea of truth—not an objective truth, but an emotional truth that seems to govern our age. The circuitous route Herzog takes to get there is strange. The chapters are about topics as diverse as expeditions to the top of Mount Everest and Elon Musk’s mission to Mars and the plots of operas. There are a few common threads that pop up: fake identities, fake news, manipulation of reality through technology, but the way they weave together is primarily suggestive. Intuition guides us through.

Herzog shares vignettes that fit within the broader theme. For example, there is a chapter about Family Romance, LLC and Herzog elucidates the layers of deception involved in the project. (I should really watch this film). In reality, there’s a Japanese business that rents out people for special events—if you have someone unpresentable in your family (like an alcoholic father), you can rent out a stand-in, brief them on the background, and save face. In the film, which Herzog said was mistaken for a documentary, the actual owner of the business appears as a key figure in a story of false identities. At the core: everyone is lying. The hired father is a fake, but the woman he works for and her daughter share stories about a trip they never took. Deception operates throughout the film, but then also after the film there was meant to be an interview with Yuichi Ishii (the CEO) and one of the lonely men that uses the service. Yet, the lonely man selected never actually used their service and was in fact one of the rental family members. Herzog reports that it was a scandal and a loss of face. These layers of mistaken identity run through the text in an interesting way; it’s almost like the reverse of a doppelganger narrative.

Herzog also hops between moments in history to show the broader significance of ‘fakes.’ One chapter, for example, is a “history of fake news” starting with the very founding of Rome and depictions of Nero. It’s a weirdly humanizing take on the notoriously awful emperor; Herzog accounts his pleas for suicide and failed attempts. There’s a desperation in the account that’s quite moving—and then a weird account of the four other Neros who tried to take his place, linking them to the multiple Elvises romping around Japan’s downtown hubs. From there, Herzog jumps to Constantinople and competing popes and forged documents that were discovered during the Renaissance. Brief detour: Herzog talks about his meetings with boxer Mike Tyson, who—who knew—became an expert on obscure historical figures while in prison. After that, we get into Potemkin cities and the open secret of those papier-mâché towns and “Peace Village” in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a place built for 200 people with parks for families that has no occupants but is nonetheless swept clean every morning. Herzog links that to The Truman Show and the Enron sham, where they had a dress rehearsal for employees to pretend like business was going great. We hop back and forth and forward and side to side through these moments to, I think, contextualize our current moment of ‘fake news.’ There’s a chilling account, too, of Jean-Bédel Bokassa having one of his political enemies killed and eating half of him, the other half kept in the freezer.

The Bokassa section of the chapter is an incredible historical anecdote. He fathered many children, and in particular a girl named Martine with a Vietnamese woman. As an adult, Martine showed up and was welcomed by her father as her favourite. However, after that, another girl named Martine from Vietnam came forward and announced that she was his real daughter—the first was a fake. Martine2 brought forward an artefact and some knowledge that only the real Martine could have. Bokassa ends up accepting both and married them both off the same day in identical wedding dresses…well, before arresting both husbands and putting them to death. In Herzog’s account, the details are hazy: it sounds like perhaps there was a conspiracy of one husband to kill the child of the opposing Martine. The fake Martine got “sent back to Vietnam” but the private plane was back within half an hour. The power of this story is haunting and absurd to me. It’s one of those situations where the truth is stranger than fiction.

With all this about “Fake News: A Brief History”, what is intriguing to me is that Herzog shows a great deal of restraint. There could easily be a genuine political argument here, a discourse about the value of authenticity or our power to accept delusions. And yet, we are just given stories. Stories with a great deal of evocative power, but without definitive conclusions. This, I believe to be Herzog’s thesis throughout: truth is not that which is objectively provable, but some deeper core.

Towards the end of the book, there is some more discussion of Herzog’s own film projects and the implication to me is clear that he’s drawing on a different conception of truth, one he describes as “ecstatic.” The power of film, and stories more generally, is to elevate us to this ecstatic truth that reveals to us something beyond that which is easily comprehended through the lens of fact. It’s an argument that we’ve likely heard before about fiction, but something about Herzog’s presentation allows The Future of Truth to embody that argument. It’s the resonant quality of the anecdotes, the evocative power of the vignettes, the tracing of a historical thread so thin that Constantinople and Mike Tyson can appear in the same sentence. A connective tissue.

Happy reading, truth seekers!

Whetstone by Lorna Crozier

There is a brand of quiet poetry that appeals to and influences me in my own work. To that end, I’ve returned to Lorna Crozier’s work, specifically her collection Whetstone. As with any similar collection, some of the poems resonated and others did not. It’s more about occupying the same psychic space and allowing yourself to be guided along.

The titular poem stands out as one of the highlights for me, particularly because of its vivid first lines: “The stone that sharpens stars, / their slow slice across the sky” (13). Jan Zwicky’s essay about resonance in poetry has proven enduring in the way I think about poems. Resonance often seems to use juxtaposition as a medium for finding connection, and following this idea of a stone sharpening stars in the sky, Crozier says, “it must have mingled with the gravel / on the road I run. Now its light / has reached my eyes” (13). I can see a parallel between the smattering of stars across a night sky and the stream of stones that form the gravel, every once in a while one standing out. There’s also an odd inversion here, though, because typically we’d think of the light from stars’ light taking years to reach our eyes, but the pronoun here refers to the whetstone. It intimates the slow labour of sharpening but at the same time, the stone is placing a demand on the speaker: “What does it want from me? / To be moved into another / galaxy of knives?” (13). Alternatively, the stone could be making a call “to be looked upon and left / where it has found me?” (13). The stone is given agency, while the speaker is being called towards agency. Or, perhaps there’s no difference between them: “Maybe it’s just a stone // among other stones, desireless / and unafflicted” (13). As with other poems in this mode, a small phenomenon is then extended into something much larger, more cosmic. The narrator reflects: “Does it know I am // dulled by God? / His negligence, / his under-use” (13). I think the poem, at its core, is a matter of agency and responsiveness, and ultimately the choice to either act or not act.

Crozier’s mode here feels so similar to Jan Zwicky; I notice her guidance is documented in the acknowledgements of Whetstone. This influence also emerges in the meditations on nature. The book is largely wintery, and “Prayers of Snow” sets that tone, which reads, in part, as follows:

Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,
a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.
It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent
a blizzard returning to the sky. (11)

As I suggested, there’s a kind of cosmic quality imbued to the natural phenomenon. The laws of the universe (gravity) are embodied by a particular, observable phenomenon (snow). Having tangible images like this really gives readers something to latch onto. Imagining snow as a kind of language is also delightful; the snow streams down as a “long loose sentence” and the odd inversion of a blizzard returning to the sky is a nice touch. The poem then reads as a kind of prayer and ultimately the snow “closes the gap / between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy, / the ear and silence” (11). The idea of snow being something that joins disparate phenomena together feels true. Consider the way that an endless stretch of white snow erases distinct features and makes everything into one canvas. Snow becomes “a migration of birds / without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches / on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow / in dreams of waking, you are a star-walker. / It prays to the soft fall of your books” (11). I like the way the snow prays to the world around it and the distinction between snow and other things fades: snow and birds are the same. The idea of being a “star-walker” every time you walk through snow also gives the poem its cosmic quality and makes sense with the idea of snow being star-like in its shape.

There are other poems that have a similar motif: a totalizing phenomenon that reveals connection. In the poem “Solitude,” for example, Crozier describes “Sometimes the dark’s so dark / nothing can move through it” (38). She specifies that the wind and the geese can’t move through it, despite how an hour ago they “charcoaled their journey from star to star” (38). I love noun-verbs, and “charcoaled” here feels evocative. Again, there’s a motif of stars that stand as nodes in a network of connection. The poem then continues to describe in second person that “you love the lake at night / because water keeps its distance / yet carries sound, crackled and clear, from the farthest shore” (38). Again, there’s these spaces that are vast and empty but serve as bridges of connection to the farthest shores. Crozier again gets more precise: “the hard notes of a party / drift through the screen from cabins / on the southern spit” (38). If you’ve ever sat by water in the darkness, you know these two emptinesses that connect: “You said / nothing moves through this dark. / But music does, and voices, / and you go on” (38).

One more poem I’d like to comment on is “The Physics of the Rose.” The poem opens with an epigraph about the electron and us living in different worlds. In describing the rose, Crozier says “each petal [is] an eyelid, blood-fused, over what / invisible eyes!” (24). The idea of an eyelid sealed shut by blood is both beautiful and horrific. Continuing to describe the rose, “fold after fold, its silence so enclosed / it seems a kind of speaking, light’s muted // hallelujah brought inside” (24). Crozier reads into silences and finds their voice. She looks into the quiet phenomena and imbues them with a voice, just as these roses speak in the silence of their folds. Later in the short poem, she describes it as “the antithesis of absence, / of stillness, its red fist unfurling / this, this and this, a daring to be open / so immoderate you want to say outrageous, / you want to say ridiculous, but can’t” (24). The idea of the rose being the antithesis of absence is a compelling phrase and emulates Crozier’s philosophy. Despite the silence, the rose speaks. Despite this, there’s a dark tone that gets couched in pretty imagery. Crozier describes the rose as “shocking as a heart cut out and set in glass” (24). The gruesome undertone draws attention to that which is otherwise quiet. The final lines of the poem then invert our expectations: suddenly we are the one being watched. She writes, “Clothed or not, you stand naked in its eyes. / Small and unadorned, / without a lover” (24). We are no longer the observer; the brilliant presence of the rose is observing us…I suppose when you stare into the rose long enough the rose stares back?

Throughout the collection, there were a number of poems I liked, a few that I loved, and a few I failed to linger on. It’s a good collection and, as with all poetry, the more time I spent thinking through it the more I was able to see what Crozier’s mission might be. It’s worth reading and I’ll stand by my philosophy that poems are best read as part of a full collection. The more time you spend with a voice, the more you’re able to hear its nuances.

Happy reading!

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman

  Take a moment to recall everything you know about René Descartes. “I think therefore I am” and all that. Did his means of death make your list? That he was poisoned by a Catholic priest who laced the communion wafer with arsenic? …What?! This is one of the surprising details that emerges in Robert Chapman’s impressive historical analysis Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism.

This nonfiction text essentially posits the thesis that the rise of capitalism created a normalizing framework that produces out-groups of disability that it subsequently exploits for its own wealth-generated ends. The book then champions the idea of reshaping society in a way that is more accessible for the neurodiversity inherent in our society. Ultimately, when we consider “disability,” or discuss ill mental health, the questions are: on what grounds? according to whom? They give the example of autism, which is seen as a disability because the world is not structured to respond to it. The fault lies with our structures, not the individuals who have been excluded from them.

The argument of the book is persuasive in its own right, but what I thought was most fascinating about the text were the historical parallels and the extraordinarily clear articulation of the central points.

In this history, Chapman describes the relationship of people in feudal society to work and disability. The thesis here is that people with disabilities were accommodated in the early days of feudalism—if you had mobility issues, you were given work in the home like sewing, while if you had difficulty in thinking clearly you might still be able to complete the menial tasks of farm life. The conception is probably a little idyllic, but nonetheless effectively establishes that each person had their place irrespective of disabilities.

Chapman then proceeds to explore the transition into a more capitalist and exclusionary mode. Returning to Descartes, for example, we see a concise and precise discussion of the philosopher’s contributions to conceptions of identity. Chapman outlines how Descartes initiated a conception of the human body which is mechanistic. (Chapman makes reference to Descartes’ interest in creating an automaton version of his daughter, though this anecdote appears to be debunked.) In any case, Descartes saw the body as animated not by a soul but by its own machinery. This emerges alongside increasing mechanization of work (and therefore the workforce). When the human body is nothing special, it becomes a machine that can be exploited for the ends of capitalism. 

The problem then becomes one of standardization. Again, the historical backdrop is pretty interesting. They describe how statistics emerged as a discipline from astronomers and astrologers trying to account for the variable appearance of astral bodies. They were searching for regularity and predictability. With the emergence of statistics as a field of study, it also led to the idea of standardization. It became a quest for the average. Capitalist logics adopted the idealism of the ‘average’ in order to increase its profitability: you produce products that appeal to the ‘average’ person. Some people argue that capitalism breeds innovation, but really it breeds the most easily sellable products on a mass-scale, meaning that the consumers which deviate from a conception of the ‘average’ user of product are left out of capitalism’s priorities. Capitalism looked for the ‘average’ needs of consumers and used statistics to render brains and consumers ‘normal’ in their consumption. This becomes even worse following Fordism and the standardized production process.

The trajectory Chapman sets out has a kind of clarity in its logic, and the byproduct is that capitalism creates in-groups and out-groups. The in-groups are people who are neurotypical and able to operate within capitalism’s structures—that is, until they burnout and enter the out-group neurodivergent class. The neurodivergent class is created as an outgroup that needs to access wellness through consumption. Capitalism wins its producers and consumers.

I appreciated that Chapman includes a chapter that addresses the nuances of mental illness. Seeing that capitalism benefits from broadening its conception of disability to create an excluded class, the temptation is to dismiss the psychiatry movement. Chapman, though, reserves a chapter for arguing against the anti-psychiatry movement. I have my own difficulties with the psychiatry movement; Foucault’s critique of the Power-Knowledge that informs the DSM always stuck with me. It does appear that psychiatry aims to normalize the human experience, which feels problematic. But, ignoring the real and authentic suffering of people with mental health concerns seems nearly as problematic as allowing capitalism to exploit them.

One interesting anecdote is Chapman’s account of the alliance between queer folk and the antipsychiatry movement. As many of you surely know, the DSM originally included homosexuality as a mental disorder and we see how antipsychiatry’s objection to the DSM formed an alliance with queer people who might otherwise want to access mental health supports but who object to the DSM’s construction of disorder. When the APA voted to remove homosexuality from the DSM, it should feel like a win, but it opened the question of how mental illness is distinct from other non normative ways of being. It created a conception of the psychiatry industry as arbitrary.

Chapman also looks at the intersection of race and neurodiversity. They provide some historical notes about how antislavery movements and civil rights movements have long been at the forefront of disability advocacy. I’m confident that an entire book could be written on the intersection of disability and antiracism advocacy; Chapman offers a brief but welcome glimpse into that story. There’s also a fair amount of commentary on the development of eugenics movements—even within supposedly liberal spaces—and different philosophies towards treating psychological afflictions (or ‘problems in living’). 

Ultimately, Chapman finds a balance between a questioning of neuronormativity while still holding space for the genuine afflictions in peoples’ lives, especially those that have been exacerbated by capitalism (cf. Mark Fisher re: depression within capitalist structures). As the world becomes more reified, the notion is that minds also must become more reified. Championing neurodiversity means that we recognize a philosophy towards society: different kinds of minds are suited to different kinds of tasks.

The book was really insightful into the historical context for neurodiversity and presents a persuasive argument for the connection between the standardization of capitalism and the production of out-groups (potentially stretching the definition of mental health so far as to render everyone disabled and thus consumers within the capitalist models). I really appreciated how thoughtful Chapman is in his approach and how applicable the text feels for engaging in advocacy both against capitalism and in favour of a neurologically diverse population.

Happy reading!

courbure de la terre par jonas fortier

  My reviews of French poetry books are always the most niche, but at least once a year I try to expand my horizons and practice my second language…so here we go with courbure de la terre par jonas fortier.

courbure de la terre essentially translates to “curvature of the earth.” The title feels appropriate not only because so many of the poems feature round elements, curves along the horizon, but because there’s something about the tone of the poems that also feels soft. fortier is not a writer of hard edges but of gentle invitations. The poet takes on a mode that feels like some early French symbolists, drawing inspiration from things like the moon or rain drops and finding the deeper significance that is sometimes unspeakable.

There’s a layer of irony to me making that statement, though. There’s a sequence of poems in which fortier reflects on writing directly and provides a list of the types of poet he is not, outlining both motivations and processes for writing. He’s not a poet that works in a factory in unimaginable conditions; he’s not the poet that stays up all night and kills himself at twenty three. These tropes of the depressive and the isolated don’t reflect him, so while there are some symbols that are resonant with classic poetry, he still distances himself from their tradition.

I appreciate the art of quiet poems. fortier has a real observational quality in his work, rendering clouds and rain drops into art. The poem sequences are often untitled, and it blurs the line between individual poems and sequences of connected pieces, but the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>> contains a piece that feels representative of the precise quality of fortier’s style. The piece reads, in part, as follows:

cette peine-là
est de saison, brume
démanchée contre le ciel
il se met à pleuvoir de minuscules araignées
des étoiles comme nous mais mieux
des gouttelettes encore poudreuses
comme des briques muettes
des flèches d’averse
viennent crever dans nos bras faibles
et nous portons à nos lèvres
des souvenirs d’herbes (54)

The description has that touch of tenderness and devastation that characterizes what I often think about in terms of a “poetic mode.” I particularly appreciate the rain being described like tiny spiders, rendering the droplets somewhat creepy, but also as stars “like us but better.” The line breaks sometimes make the lines read ambiguously, but the poem goes on to describe the droplets like falling arrows or bricks and there’s a heaviness there that counterbalances the softness of the powdery rain drops.

The section <<Vérités permanentes>> has some of my favourite pieces, which extend fortier’s motifs about the sky and clouds. In one piece, the speaker identifies himself and another (<<nous>>) as parallel to clouds, carrying the names of their fathers and the clothes of their mothers and big beards that have grown over time and having bodies like grapes where you can’t see inside. The poem’s volta explores a new angle and fortier explores the future, made of houses with hard planks that speak as you step on them. He talks about the opening of the house, the opening of the future, letting the wind speak through open doors and windows. The poem ends on the idea of the moon guiding people to the house alongside thin, key-like trees. It reads better in French: <<d’arbres minces / comme des clés>> (62). The extended metaphor works beautifully and mimics fortier’s approach: you are being trained as a reader how to listen to space, how to hear messages from your environment. It’s hard to translate here but there’s also an aural quality to the work, where particular sounds echo with a slight difference: dures / dureté, de soi / ce soir, and so on. These give the poem a coherence that feels like it touches on something other-worldly. 

The collection also reflects a fair deal on language itself. The section <<Vérités permanentes>> opens with a reflection on grammar:

il y a un temps
grammatical
qu’on appelle
vérité permanente

je n’en avais jamais entendu parler
jusqu’à ce qu’un Bescherelle
me révèle son nom

c’est arrivé par surprise
comme la lettre d’un ami cher
après des années passées
dans la contemplation
d’un pays lointain

j’ai eu une émotion très positive
bien que si proche de la tristesse
en apprenant que la vérité
peut être temps présent (59)

There’s a nostalgia to the piece that resonated with me, namely the idea of learning grammar from a Bescherelle (French Immersion kids represent!). I like, too, the sense of revelation that studying grammar brings and the reality that opens up. I also appreciate the tenuousness of the border between positive emotions and sadness and the way those converge at moments of clarity.

I can’t pretend that I understood the nuances of each of the poems in this collection. I do feel that the tone read as tender and a little tragic, but reflective and appreciative of the world. I flagged one of the early poems in the collection because I felt I didn’t have the vocabulary to really delve in. As I translated it a little more, the imagery stood out more dramatically: it was about kids “chained to strollers” watching birds and knowing that life is invented by the spirits of our dead, who have become <<essaims d’abeilles>> (24)—that is, swarms of bees. The poem took on a new philosophic intensity and then becomes a reflection on time reflected in the northern hemisphere collapsing like wet butter on the sidewalk. 

Another piece I revisited reinforced the idea of the poet as a wanderer. I’m tempted to put him alongside Baudelaire as a flanneur, but I’ll resist easy categorization. Essentially, there’s a poem about wandering but then clinging to certain phenomena, including the increasingly strange—like urine accumulating in ant nests (37). There’s an endless searching and a turning up of the speaker’s eyes to the stars…but we’d call them eggs (37). It’s an odd line to end on, a bit of cheekiness that I feel undermines the self-seriousness of the wandering poet’s approach.

Returning to the section <<Le sommeil est le neveu de la mort>>, there’s a piece that ties these elements together. There’s a roundness to the piece, the observational quality, and the sense of wandering and searching that fortier highlights. The poem has a simplicity to it: it lists different types of droplets—respiration, cuts and injuries, brilliant drops (52). The poet rolls like a dice all while marching on, ready to scale mountains and appreciating the thyme growing at the side of the sidewalk.

I admit I’m not the perfect audience for this book; I appreciate the language, but am not apt enough to appreciate its nuances and possibilities. The poems felt tender and beautiful and quiet, with flashes of the philosophical, which I tend to enjoy. It’s a nice collection and if you’re a reader of French, I’d love to hear you extend the conversation.

Happy reading!

Strange News from Another Star by Herman Hesse

  Herman Hesse was one of my first entry points into philosophical literature and I have fond memories of Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, and Demian among others. That said, it has been years—decades, even—since I’ve last picked up one of his books. After my lengthy hiatus, I’ve picked up Strange News from Another Star, a collection of short stories that was fine, but not as affecting as his more substantial works.      

        The collection revolves around a few key themes, including outlandish wishes, mystical journeys into the beyond, and the hidden significance of seemingly everyday phenomena. The tone reads very much like a book of fairytales where an objective and factual tone recounts details that are unrealistic. There are some stories that are more introspective in nature and narrated in first person. Whether inward- or outward-focused, the book reaches for the allegorical, the eternal, and the strange.

Two of the stories that were most engaging to me were “Augustus” and “Faldum”, both of which revolve around odd wishes. In the case of “Augustus,” a mother is granted the ability to make a wish for her son (the actual mechanics are thankfully never explained). In a panic, she makes the wish that everyone will love him. Augustus then follows a hedonistic and philandering path similar to that of Dorian Gray. He’s given the opportunity to make a wish of his own and starts to turn his path around. The premise works, even if it’s essentially just a “monkey’s paw” premise. “Faldum,” by contrast, involves wishes fulfilled. Everyone in this strange village is able to make a wish from a wandering merchant—and their wishes are instantly granted. It’s a little mysterious that they don’t all wish for something more ambitious. Most just ask for a modest sum of money and then go about their way. The wishes that matter are for those of two hermits. One wants nothing more than to talk to nobody and play his violin, so he ascends into the sky and is never seen again. The other hermit wishes to become a mountain—and does, literally. He’s a mountain for ages until many generations of people die and he erodes and then is given the chance to reunite with the music, essentially become music, alongside the violinist. It’s a strange, if engaging, concept.

“Faldum” also stands out in the collection due to the richness of its imagery. The whole opening sequence offers a frame narrative replete with description of the main character’s journey to Faldum. Several other stories have lush passages, including “A Dream Sequence” and “Iris.” I was surprised by how focused Hesse was on the details; I typically think of his writing as more broad strokes with more emphasis on philosophical exposition.

“A Dream Sequence” and “Flute Dream” were stories of less impact on me. They’re imagistic, symbolic, and mystical in nature, offering suggestions of deeper meaning. The challenge with stories like this (and dream sequences in general) is that their internal coherence is often lacking. We have to accept that the symbols have significance despite not having the same access to the writer’s inner states.

“Strange News from Another Star” and “Iris” are somewhat more memorable since they have a more clear focus. While maintaining some aspects of the dreamy free association of Hesse’s more esoteric works, there’s a little more narrative development. In “Strange News from Another Star,” the character goes in search of flowers in far and distant lands because nothing is worse than not adorning their dead with flowers—meanwhile, he arrives in lands full of war and death. “Iris,” meanwhile, follows a man who is drawn into the iris flower and falls in love with a woman named Iris, who refuses to marry him because he can’t commit to her spontaneous inclinations, favouring instead a life of the mind.

Hesse’s novels often revolve around duality. To my recollection, Narcissus and Goldmund, Demian, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game all revolve around the idea that the mind and the body exist in a challenging duality. There’s the implication that intellect and hedonism exist at opposite ends of a spectrum that struggle against one another within people. The same exploration happens in stories like “Iris” but the story isn’t quite as developed.

A few of the stories address the great beyond; there’s a common motif of crossing a threshold into the unknown and the conflation of death and open gates to the great beyond pop up as mutual metaphors. 

Overall, it was nice to revisit Hesse’s writing. The short stories are a quick entry point into some of the major themes in Hesse’s oeuvre. The lush descriptions are a delight, and I did find myself thinking as I read, particularly around which wishes I would make, given the opportunity, that would not end in disaster.

If you’re looking for an early entry point to Hesse, or if you’re a completionist of his oeuvre, Strange News from Another Star may be worth your while—but in my humble opinion, it would be better to read at least a few of his novels first.

Happy reading!

In Praise of Shadows by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

        I am sometimes blessed with the rare pleasure of seeing a book I hadn’t previously heard of suddenly mentioned in wildly different contexts. It feels like encouragement from the fates to pick it up, a kind of organic process of magical discovery that even the best algorithms can’t replicate. This time, the universe led me to In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. I think my initial exposure to it was in Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, but there have been at least two or three other references or contexts (another book? the writing on an art gallery wall?) to Tanizaki’s philosophy on shadows.

Tanizaki is a true aesthete. He offers such lush, poetic descriptions of shadows but also how they manifest across different facets of Japanese culture. I myself am drawn to the alluring ambiguity of shadows, though Tanizaki also makes it a matter of national character which leads to some ideas that feel a little spurious.

I’ll start with some of the more engaging parts. Tanizaki reads almost like Walter Benjamin or Roland Barthes in that he provides focused commentary on oft-overlooked elements of our culture. For instance, in an early chapter we see Tanizaki discussing the elegance of Japanese toilets. He discusses their placement in fragrant groves, where people on the toilet get lost in meditation outdoors. Elegance, he says, is frigid. He sees toilets as a most aesthetic object, where that which is unsanitary becomes elegance and an opportunity to reflect on the beauties of nature, suggesting a connection between toilets and the haiku as a poetic form. 

There’s another chapter in which he discusses the difference between lacquered dishware and porcelain. In addition to the disdain he feels towards the clinking and scraping of porcelain utensils, he also talks about the infinite depths of a lacquered bowl. He talks about Japanese soup in such bowls that appear to reflect infinite depths. When you lift the bowl to your face, you look into the cloudy darkness of the soup and it stretches on forever against the lacquered finish. Passages like that reflect also the depths of Tanizaki’s sensuality and read as a poetic philosophy.

In another area, Tanizaki describes the brightness of paper and the darkness of ink and how the technology of writing developed around flecked and tinted paper vs. bright white. He describes how the way pens developed was rooted in the relationship between light and shadow and how those pens changed the way we communicate—how the characters of different languages are shaped, ultimately, by the darkness of ink and the tools to disperse it.

I also loved the way he philosophized about polishing silver. Essentially, Tanizaki feels distaste for the shine, preferring cloudiness and jade’s shadowy surface. He elevates the idea of grime. The oils on peoples’ hands, for example, give statues polish. Grime makes things glow. It’s a reversal of how we often think about polish. 

As a broader aesthetics, Tanizaki points to the necessity of darkness to illuminate that which it enshrouds. I think there’s a lot of merit to that idea and when I consider the role of darkness in some of my favourite artworks, there is something about shining shadows.

Where Tanizaki’s philosophy loses me a little bit is when he ties things back to national character or racial traits. There are a number of unsupported generalities about Western and Japanese character. Some of the claims are interesting points of contrast. For instance, he talks about the dense gardens in Japan relative to the plain manicured lawns of the West. He talks about how in Western culture ghosts are transparent while in Japan they are footless and dark. There are a number of more spurious claims, however. For instance, he suggests that the “yellow” faces (his word) and black hair of the Japanese led to changes in the development of their culture. He also argues that “Orientals” (again, his word) are content to find pleasure in how things are, while Westerners find pleasure in what things can be—hence why the West is so replete with artificial light. He talks about the way bright lights produce heat—and don’t even get him started on the air conditioned nightmare that has taken over that renders all heating artificial.

There’s a lot to like about this sensual aesthetic philosophy. The series of short chapters and vignettes offers focused insight into different aspects of culture, and I really liked that level of phenomenological exploration. I read it with a grain of salt; I’m not sure how I would have received the book when it was originally published in 1933, but in 2026 a lot of the racial and cultural generalizations feel either dated or incomplete. I imagine, too, that with cultural influences being more widely available globally, some of the distinctions that might have previously existed are no longer as pronounced as they might have been.

If you’re also a fan of The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, this book captures that same deep consideration of phenomena and bridges the worlds poetics and philosophy. It’s worth the hour or two it will take to read—despite all the shadows, it may prove illuminating.

Happy reading!

Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek

  It’s been a while since I’ve read any of Slavoj Žižek’s work一by my reckoning, 2020 when I reread Welcome to the Desert of the Real in the hopes that it would help with my Master’s thesis for some reason. I’m revisiting some of his work via this short book of essays, Zero Point, which has proved serendipitous to some of my more recent reading memories, which I’ll circle back to shortly.

Zero Point is divided essentially in two sections. The first set of essays deals primarily with the (re)rise of Donald Trump from a Marxist-psychoanalytical lens. Of the early essays, the most interesting claim I thought Žižek presented was how the purported left has fed into the rise of Trump particularly by capitalizing on his flaws. Consider, for example, how late night comedians have routinely pointed to Trump’s personal and moral flaws. They’re not wrong about their assessment, but Žižek suggests that their form of critique actually exacerbated his supporters’ feelings of identification. Essentially, the argument runs that people identify more with others’ failures than with their successes, so that by highlighting all of Trump’s flaws, people came to see him as more reflective of their interests (while that factually remains untrue). 

Some of Žižek’s claims about Trump are frustrating and run counter to “common sense” understandings of political phenomena. In particular, Žižek objects to calling Trump a fascist and instead suggests that Trump is an extreme liberal on the grounds that he prioritizes letting big business do as they please. I’m not sure I agree, especially when considered in light of Trump’s tariffs. I also find some of Žižek’s claims about the Right and Left dubious. At one point he points to what appears to me a misinterpretation of the Left. I forget if he suggests a contradiction because the Left supports both Israel-Ukraine or Palestine-Russia; whichever the combination was, I think he’s wrong on that front. In other respects, Žižek is prescient. For instance, in one essay he predicts that the United States is setting up Iran to be their next enemy and tease war. And, well, here we are.

The second and more substantial section of the book is an exploration of the conflict in Israel and Palestine. Like the conflict, the inception of this Žižek collection requires some contextualizing. In 1949, a bedouin girl between the ages of 10-15 was gang raped and murdered by twenty men in the Israeli Defence Force. In 2017, Palestinian author Adania Shibli wrote the book Minor Detail based on the event, which I read by coincidence in 2024. In 2023, Shibli was awarded the 2023 LiBeraturpreis but the Frankfurt Book Fair ceremony at which she was to be honoured was “postponed” and then canceled with the excuse to not overshadow the then-recent Hamas attack against Israel.

Žižek’s collection of essays here is a response to these events, namely because he was delivering a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair when he was heckled and ushered offstage. That piqued my curiosity. The essay is replicated in full at the end of the book and, honestly, it’s a lot less controversial than I expected. Essentially, following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th, Žižek suggests that we ought to also consider the plight of the Palestinians. He was told that this was not the time to talk about it.

So, when is the right time to talk about it?

Arguably, Žižek essentially takes a middle-ground. He opposes antisemitism, of course. He also opposes the slaughter of Palestinians. There are some controversial claims, like how Netanyahu (whom Žižek refers to as a war criminal) wants and requires war, how he is happy to have Hamas as an enemy that justifies all his own horrors. At the core, he suggests that mutual recognition is required to move forward, but that there are factors that obscure that possibility. Paradox runs through the text: Germany reinscribes antisemitism in the unequivocal support it provides to Israel while the United Nations, precisely because they have no power and are not formally accountable, provide the hope of speaking the truth. Solutions are not forthcoming.

I appreciate that Žižek has a degree of focus in this collection, even if his usual topic-hops still crop up. What is a bit of an issue is that Žižek repeats himself across the essays, even going so far as to repeat some anecdotes word for word (e.g. the one about Biden embarrassing himself by claiming to have seen pictures of beheaded children following Hamas’ October 7th attack only for Israel to admit that no such pictures ever existed). Žižek has always had a bit of a repetitious streak; across books, including this one, he repeats the same jokes to illustrate points. The repetitiousness becomes more noticeable in a short collection. Yet, for all that repetition, there is very little by way of definitive, declarative, unambiguous conclusions. The essays do not feel actionable in the same way that more polemical texts sometimes do.

I suppose I’m also ambivalent. Žižek’s work often inspires reflection, and he’s not someone I can wholeheartedly endorse nor dismiss out of hand. His perspective is worth considering and, for a few hours’ worth of reading, Zero Point offers a reasonable, if repetitious focus. It’s contemporary and timely—a blessing and a curse for a work of philosophy. 

Happy reading!