I find myself this morning with two trains of thought throttling through my head, although ‘throttling’ may not be the proper term, as a lot of crisp spring air is sweeping through those trains.

Living as beyond authorizing the authentic moment

This is related to PostColonialism.

The first quote is from The Empire Writes Back:

“The process of recovering the past, whether in its earliest or in some arbitrarily designated later form (e.g. ‘We should arrive at an intellectual articulation of our literary sensibility as it was before the British advent. Sixteenth or seventeenth century would serve as a promising starting point’ – Patankar 1984*) has been very tempting to contemporary Indian critics. Despite the obvious objective to such a suggestion – that it merely authroizes, arbitrarily, one moment of culture as ‘essential’ and so ignores the inevitable syncretic nature of a post-colonial culture – it offers some clear advances in its practice… In practice it has been suggested that such a recovery will work best if the concepts of the traditional aesthetics are subject to adaptation and change. They can be discovered and kept alive, Patankar suggests, not be academic study, but by being ‘lived’ and moulded through use.” p. 119-120
(*Patankar, R.B. (1984). ‘The three alternatives’ in Narasimhaiah and Srinath, 1984.)

And the second is from Trinh T. Minh-ha, who i’ve been touching on a lot lately.

“When one says man-made is all artificial, one is not necessarily implying that nature is truer. For ultimately, it is in producing the artificial that one manifest “truth” and gives shapes to one’s situation…”

“it turns everything into a matter of techniques in the process of totalizing meaning.”

“Perhaps the only “natural” element or event is this energy, this force that exists in no single material form, but thank to which things materialize, take form, mutate and disintegrate.”

- from Inappropriate/d Artificiality, an interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha conducted by Marina Grzinic.

The point, related to TheySaySmall as a futuristic PostColonial narrative of course*, is that both support this notion of authenticity living not in the rehash or examination of a once-lived-now-remembered only-cuz-gramma-told-me if-I’d-only-cared-when-she-was-actually-alive, but of authencity as living in the continued mutations of a culture as it develops. So, The Brethren in their quest for that authentic period of their heritage when humnans have bodies must create their own existence as they assume it was, traveling back in time. What starts as a misinformed reinvention of corporeal humanity becomes a genuine culture of its own. As they must compose the world they travel through from the raw material of uninhabited time, they literally give shape to their situation. And while their forms change from biotech electrons of information to imagined human forms to actual matter, their unique energies drive through all of these processes.

Now, I’ve got to get specific…

*of course