- "Retreats of the live creature" - reflections on the the body's work to save itself amidst ugliness and menace
- Poems: Marge Piercy's "The Low Road," Shao Yanxiang "My Optimism," Bertolt Brecht's "When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain"
- Ashis Nandy's article "Gandhi After Ghandi" on the uses and abuses of Gandhi in India.
- A tour through the New India megalopolis Gurgaon, one of our possible futures.
- New photographs.
Why this blog?
This blog might have been called bursting the foundations, after D.H. Lawrence's 1925 declaration, written as he witnessed Fascist gangs take over the streets of Italy, that "The whole great form of our era will have to go. And nothing will really send it down but the new shoots of life springing up and slowly bursting the foundations. And one can do nothing but fight tooth and nail to defend the new shoots of life from being crushed out, and let them grow. We can't make life. We can but fight for the life that grows in us."
The blog looks in two directions: into our era - its allure, its historical memories and fantasies, and its built-in catastrophic qualities and dilemmas - and towards signs of shoots of life. It combines structural (the foundations) and experiential-creaturely perspectives. It suggests that art work (novels, poetry, the visual arts), elements of the anarchist tradition of reflection and experiment, and the dialogic qualities of cross-cultural experience evident in the work of some anthropologists, can be among our best teachers.
Why roadstained? Because each of us also lives among these foundations - and lives with them inside us - even as we are also the sources of new life growing inside and between us. We are not above or outside the pathologies of our culture. Just as the traveler can be smeared with the muck of a passing truck, or breath in the deadly air of any modern megalopolis, or attempt to shut down her senses against the culture's many aggressive, overwhelming surfaces, so we live roadstained in our bodies and within in our thoughts and responses.
And yet independent shoots of life can burst forth - in relationships, in dialogue, in imagination, in raw exasperation ... often from places we haven't known existed, and often revealing experiential places that the culture debases or dismisses as unrealistic. Somewhere here is what John Dewey calls the live creature, calling out, appealing to the dialogical, associative, playful, nostalgic and imagining capacities of our intelligence.
This blog is an experiential, reflective, critical, archaeological journey along these cracks in the foundation of our era, between the forces of death and life. Where are we? it asks. How do we live? And how could we live?
Who created this blog?
Tom Morris worked as a campaigner and publicist with Amnesty International Canada; has taught in the humanities at various universities in Canada and abroad; travels independently, mostly by foot and local transportation, in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas; and has interests in writing, literature, the visual arts, photography, wayfinding and mapping, cultural criticism, gardening, walking and canoeing. He is married with two sons.
Another way of thinking about the author of this blog is through Meera
Mukherjee's Sitting Woman (shown on the right-hand side of the blog’s banner). I imagine her sitting
with others, myself among them, history's creaturely witnesses - in defiant, sometimes furious, sometimes calm immovability - staring out towards another
approaching made calamity, our very form or bearing sowing doubts in several of those being given orders to clear the way. One further way of considering the author might be found in the following story ...
… and when the traveller returned to town, we asked about what he had experienced, the dangers of the road, do
people out there really live as we hear. We're now sure he invented much
of what he told us - the kindly people, the wonders, certain
similarities with our own lives. He was always a day-dreamer. But strangest of all was the fact that
his stories from afar were no less full of curiosities than the ones he
sometimes told of our own world, stories that several of our town folk even responded to as if with some personal recognition, although most listened with impatience and sometimes with anger.
Remarkable too was how, now at home among familiar people and things, he often appeared perplexed, sometimes melancholy, sometimes astonished, his speech full of hesitation … unsettled, one person said. How his eyes and brow would sometimes seem to say so this is how it is, how he muttered indecipherable phrases – the difficulty of finding one’s self amongst all this familiarity … border crossings among the great negations of life … so many places stained by empire. Such nonsense.
The notebooks he was rarely without - wayfinding journals, he called them - were said to be thick with page after page of hand-written notes, along with cryptically-titled photographs and diagrams, and other images that seemed quite at odds with common understanding ... such was the pasted-in water-colour of an emaciated man, paint brush in hand, sitting in ruins, staring astonished at his canvas which has a great hole as if blasted through its centre by some terrible weapon.
These are the real dangers of travelling, one person said, wisely, remembering this drawing and hearing another of the traveller's stories.
Of course the sensible among us soon lost all interest and got on with our lives.The others will have to speak for themselves.
Remarkable too was how, now at home among familiar people and things, he often appeared perplexed, sometimes melancholy, sometimes astonished, his speech full of hesitation … unsettled, one person said. How his eyes and brow would sometimes seem to say so this is how it is, how he muttered indecipherable phrases – the difficulty of finding one’s self amongst all this familiarity … border crossings among the great negations of life … so many places stained by empire. Such nonsense.
The notebooks he was rarely without - wayfinding journals, he called them - were said to be thick with page after page of hand-written notes, along with cryptically-titled photographs and diagrams, and other images that seemed quite at odds with common understanding ... such was the pasted-in water-colour of an emaciated man, paint brush in hand, sitting in ruins, staring astonished at his canvas which has a great hole as if blasted through its centre by some terrible weapon.
These are the real dangers of travelling, one person said, wisely, remembering this drawing and hearing another of the traveller's stories.
Of course the sensible among us soon lost all interest and got on with our lives.The others will have to speak for themselves.
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