My Personalised Zahir

I was starkly reminded of Borges' Zahir recently.

At times this image comes to mind: a coin that has been scratched and perpetually haunts the owner who cannot rid himself of it. The owner does not even want to get rid of it. Yet it weighs so heavily on their mind as to drive them utterly insane.

I actually began to identify a person I knew as my Zahir. Meeting with them upset my nerves and made me very worried. They were like a coin that I could not or chose not to rid myself of. Yet they did nothing whatsoever to justify this. They are a truly brilliant person. The fact is, I saw them as my Zahir because they reminded me that I am a terrible person. My evasion of this person hammers home just the kind of emotionless shell that I am.

This post underlines the fact even more so. The audacity that I have to actually think of a living person with real emotions and a real vivacity as a drain on my existence makes me physically nauseous. How dare I. This is despicable behaviour and my callous rape of this image for writing material is vile. My word, my non-existent reader, my mind: do not make this worse by pitying me. The only Zahir is my utterly rotten mind. I am monstrous.

I am scum.

-The English Student

Social Positioning System

Sometimes I do wish that I could turn my brain off in social situations. It would spare us all these overblown analyses.

I was amongst a group of fairly new friends. Things were going well and there was plenty of enjoyable and pleasant conversation. Two people that I had never met before were introduced to me and my night took a turn. These people were lovely, open and friendly, while I was not. I became quiet, practically mute and watched in awe as a friend, having just met them himself went on to have a brilliant conversation with them. I skulked off to another table without even an excuse or a good-bye. The more I write about this, the more disgusted I get with myself so it is time to move on to the imaginary significance I have dreamed up for this event.

I have always found excuses to be on the outside of social activity. For a long time, being on the outside was a physical alignment. I could not go to certain events because I lived too far away or I would not be able to return home after them. People understood this and recognised what felt like a genuine desire to be a more social person. I believed that this was a reason, when in fact it was an excuse. Perhaps people know this and forgive my anti-social behaviour.

I cannot be entirely scathing to myself on this point. I have made quite a few friends recently and have in a sense, moved closer to the centre of this group of friends. But even if I have moved closer to the centre, that does not mean that I have allowed the group to move closer to my centre. Becoming more honest and more open might let me position myself closer to people.

My word, it might even give me a chance to be happy.

-The English Student

Vanilla Advertising

A seemingly trivial event just happened to me that, as usual, I am about to blow out of all proportion.

I was sitting in a fine establishment waiting for a fine friend of mine. Arriving first, I took a seat at a table and absently watched the nearby television. There was a sporting event on it that I took little notice of and at the finishing of the match, a usual generic series of advertisements began playing. At some point during these advertisements, the sound to the television was remotely turned off and music began playing instead. I did not even notice this change until into the second advertisement. The music so perfectly fit the visuals that the change was negligible until overt.

My initial thought was that the song was just one of those pieces of music that you would expect to hear during an advertisement. It was light, had some inoffensive lyrics and was of a tempo that either matched up well with an advertisement, or served as a suitable contrast to the action of an advertisement. I just assumed that this song was an ideal candidate as an accompaniment to advertisements.

This is probably a harsh judgement on the musician. The more I heard the song the more forgiving I was. In the end, I have to conclude that this little instances makes more of a statement in relation to the advertisements rather than the song. These broadcasts were so generic, so utterly forgettable that I was not even able to discern a difference between them when the same sound was played throughout. I title this piece "Vanilla Advertising" not just because of the implication that all of the broadcasts were essentially the same. I like the taste of vanilla and the effect that this music had on my viewing was also relatively pleasurable. I was able to view them as a whole piece, not containing a contrived agenda and overall, not having any real effect on me.

It is remarkable how small events like this can truly threaten the pull of the advertising world.

-The English Student

What is going on above us?

There have been a plethora of serious air incidents in the past two weeks.

The massive threat from an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up two cargo planes has been well documented. The planes were loaded with explosives that managed to cross various border and security controls and were only found after a tip from a Saudi agent. Following this, a plane crash near Karachi on Friday killed twenty-one people, while a Cuban plane crash killed 68 the previous day. Coupled with the grounding of the Qantas A380s due to engine flaws equates to a terrifying sky-scape.

The fragility of this mode of transport is in one sense quite shocking. Plane travel is a standard method of travel. While it can be a nuisance, it is a necessary nuisance of modern life. The benefits of flight have far outweighed the inconvenience of it. However, when you scale things back and look at the actual process of flight, the whole prospect is far more terrifying. We get into large metal containers, strap rockets to them and hope to survive the natural conditions of weather and gravity that would utterly annihilate the attempt when given the chance.

It takes a string of high profile incidents for unobservant people like myself to actually notice this fragility. Perhaps it is better this way. After all, we do not want to take the place of McEwan's protagonist in Saturday; thinking a plane will crash and therefore causing it to do so. All of these fragile modern conveniences teeter on the brink of destruction and threaten to sweep our entire method of life away with it.

Is it better then to grieve the loss and destruction caused by these incidents than to dwell on the fragile systems that caused them? Doing so creates an argument that some life is expendable so long as it maintains the structures of life.

-The English Student

Academic Inferiority. Intellectual Inferiority.

Compensating for your failures is a massive part of life.

I can hold my hands up to many examples of my many failings, yet I have begun to doubt a foundation I would usually fall back on. My grades in school and college have all generally been quite high, and while I never deluded myself into thinking that I was very intelligent, I did believe I could effectively play the academic game. If I felt I was lacking in a certain area I would simply sit down and beat it into myself. In short, when I saw an academic problem I believed that I had the tools to solve it.

I now question this. I am currently surrounded by a host of brilliant people and am beset by what seems to be an academic mountain. I have begun to wonder if I never really had the right equipment to scale such peaks or if my own training was somehow flawed. Perhaps other things have begun to distract me or perhaps I was always destined to struggle in this situation.

More worrying is the possibility that it is not an academic issue, but an intellectual one. At my current point I am determined to employ my past tactics of throwing myself into a certain area to absorb absolutely everything that I can. Should this fail, I will be in serious trouble. So this post is a mantra, a demand, a spark.

I will do my best.

-The English Student

An Assault on the Humanities

The economic tide seems to be turning very sharply away from the humanities.

In various countries in the last few months, a trend of cutting back money going to this area in local culture and universities has become obvious. Governments are clawing back funding and placing it into areas that they deem to be more economically fruitful. These include most notably the sciences and the effort for these countries to create unique selling points through technology. The hope is that these measures will create new jobs and allow these countries to once again flourish.

Well pardon my obvious bias, but this is absolute nonsense. How can anyone possibly make a judgement on what projects and areas will become profitable when they are in their genesis? In fact, massive 'economic worth' has been gained through breakthroughs in the humanities, that bring in academics from all corners of the world, sell books and give more monetary value to a country's culture.

This is a fine argument that many more intelligent than I will be able to properly mount and pursuit. I find myself reluctant to give my full backing to it however, as it engages these governments in their own discourse. That is truly what is at stake here, a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of the humanities. People are taught another method of thinking. Whether you agree or not with a certain thinker is almost irrelevant in many academic circles, the important point is how you create an argument to defend your position. Thinking outside formulaic scientific discourse is so important that an assassination of the humanities amounts to a direct attack on our ability to think and articulate new things.

This is not an attack on the humanities, it is an attack on Humanity.

-The English Student

Face Association Game

I like word association games.

They test the mind, force you to think of synonyms and antonyms and increase your overall vocabulary. I have found however, the I have begun to play a face association game that has far less benefits. When I see people walking near me, or down the street I have begun to naturally compare them to other people that I know. A part of me thinks "that is" a certain person even though that is nigh on impossible in my current situation. So in effect, I associate their faces with those that I am familiar with.

Instead of increasing my knowledge as word association does, face association decreases it. People are not so easily typified as words and as such, I am forcing them into certain groups that in reality do not exist. I show a severe lack of creativity and indeed, a fear of new people if I perpetually go to pre-existing knowledge to perceive them.

There is an even worse example of this 'game' that I caught myself playing a few days ago. Two people that I had newly met became associated in my mind with others I knew previously. In the one case, I disliked the person I knew originally and had to force myself not to feel this way about the new person, who incidentally is completely opposite. In the other case I associated this person with someone that I greatly liked and in that way did not give this new person a chance to impress their own benefits on me. Thankfully I have recognised this and taken steps to rectify it.

However, I must be diligent in my avoidance of this face association game.

-The English Student