So you think you're a Situationalist

I was thrilled to learn, from our last lecture, that my odd habits of mind were similar to those exercised by the likes of Debord and Lefevbre. Validation! For as long as I can remember I have toyed with perspective in transit from point A to point B. For instance, I often imagine myself a tourist in my own neighbourhood ("so, this is how the people here live"). Andy Warhol writes of travel in his collection of thoughts on time. He tries to recall a trip he took to Europe but remembers only a car ride to the ball remarking, "Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life" (180). What if we could make the mundane memorable? Find value in the vapid? Without question we would find our lives more meaningful. I believe one of the most worthwhile effects of travel results from what we do in other countries that is most like what we do in the normal day-to-day at home (having coffee in a cafe, taking a bus, walking). The re-experience of the mundane gives us a new appreciation of our own routine. With this traveler's view, we can re-experience our own city without the need of a passport by merely using our imaginations. When I'm feeling particularly bored with the world I try to picture what Vancouver might look like if the city was abandoned for 20 or 30 years. How would the buildings hold up? Would ivy begin to thrive and set about dragging everything down? Would the deer come back? Below is a photo taken in 1999 of Pripyat , a city in the Ukraine that became a ghost town after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. It seems that, ever since human beings moved out, the city has experienced a "reinvasion of nature".

Sometimes the themes of my derives become a little too real. One morning, in early autumn, I was walking through downtown on my way to work. I had been reading Thomas Friedman's "From Beirut to Jerusalem"and was inspired to envision Vancouver as a city prone to terrorist attacks. The date was September 11, 2001, and little did I know...
What I get out of these journeys of mind(on less dramatic days) is a new sense of connection to my world. I tend to notice rather than expect, get more out of human interactions, and and feel more "present."

Boots or Hearts

In A Philosophy of Boredom, Lars Svendsen cites Karl Rosenkranz's notion that, in contrast to ugliness which he equates with boredom, "the beautiful allows us to forget time, because as something eternal and self-sufficient, it also transports us to eternity and thus fills us with bliss" (94). The same could be said of shoes. Sure, most of us, myself included, would be quick to defend our footwear as being practical, comfortable, and affordable but I argue that out of everything we clothe ourselves in, our shoes are most closely tied to our personal identity. When I worked in retail I was told that to spot a thief, I need only look at his feet. In India, the status of a person is conveyed by their shoes. When entering a home, people remove their shoes to impose a leveling of status. In the game of attraction, a man's "shoe size" gives a girl a hint, however untrue, to the size of his member. In literature, Cinderella and Estrogon find their identities linked closely to footwear. Seeking his true love, the charming prince uses a glass slipper to identify her though one would think facial recognition would have been simpler. In Waiting for Godot, Estragon's boots could be interpreted as a metaphor for his existence. The boots are confining, painful, and rank. When he finally manages to pry them off, Estragon searches around inside them and declares "Nothing [...] There's nothing to show" (4). His life is empty and meaningless.
The foot plods, paces, taps in impatience, and goes nowhere on treadmills. Could the repetition of our step be our most boring movement? Yet the feet can dance, are fetishized, and move at a speed that enables us to take in the world's minutiae. Perhaps we clothe our toes in pleasing styles to create the beauty that "allows us to forget time" and enhances our lackluster indenties. Though I hesitate when I recall the lyrics of Gord Downey: "Boots or hearts, oh when they start, they really fall apart."

Randomness and the Commonplace

Last week our group discussed, among other things, the existence of individual identities within masses of seemingly identical units. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proposed that the typewriter - a machine understood to produce uniform transmissions devoid of the tell-tale inconsistencies of hand written script - varied from machine to machine. This led us further to the notion that what is "common is never the same twice" (S.Brook). How often have we, like Doyle's Watson, read the latest news and felt we could glean the whole story from just the headline? "High school teacher charged with assault," "Parent prime suspect in child's disappearance," "Trench-coat teen guns down classmates." Though the details of each case can vary significantly, we tend to focus on the general rather than the individual providing us a kind of big-bad-world mentality. Ironically, such thoughts are more comforting than the realization that events may not be interconnected - that they are random and meaningless. Literary theorist Stanley Fish experimented with the human capacity for making meaning by testing his students at Harvard. Fish wrote a list of names on the board ("Jacobs-Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, Ohman [...]") and told the class that the list was a poem. The students all found meaning where there was only randomness in the "poem" once they learned of the structure they were to work with.

Creating a cohesive universe of meaning is oh so human. What we are hopeless at is actually recognizing randomness (click here for more on that). But I'm far more interested in what we do within our newly constructed, predictable, and rather boring life cycles. Holmes eluded to one possibility when he said to Watson, "Take a pinch of snuff, doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in example" (courseware 47). No, I'm not championing the use of snuff, it's "oneupmanship" I'm promoting. Stephen Potter (1900-1969), sports writer and satirist, wrote extensively on the topic. He claimed that one need never feel bored or inferior in the company of others as long as one always appears "one-up" over everyone else. In his book "On Lifemanship" (1953), Potter recounts the story of Gattling (a fictional character):

Some of us, though not in fact me, had had some pretty hair-raising experiences on active service; whereas the most dangerous thing that happened to Gattling, I knew to my certain knowledge, was firewatching outside the Sale, two miles beyond the raiding area of Manchester. Without actually lying, Gattling was able to tell the story of this totally uninteresting event, in the presence of three submariners, and a man who had been twice captured by and had twice escaped from the Japanese, and to tell it in such a way that these people began apologizing for their relatively comfortable war. "My God," said Commander Wright, "I never realised it was like that."

"I stamped out the flaming stuff with my foot," said Gattling. Some cinder from a small and distant incendiary had, by a stroke of luck, landed in his garden. "It wasn't a question of feeling frightened, I just found myself doing it. It was as if someone else was acting in my person."

He eventually buried the cinder with a small trowel.

The Devil's in the details....or is he?