Post 10: Plant Food

The Plan
I would like to be cremated once I die. I just don’t see a point in confining bodies in lacquered boxes that take forever to decompose. My dead body won’t even feel the velvet lining of a pretty coffin. Why make my family spend more for a six-foot hole in a grassy field that no one will visit after my grandchildren's passing? My family doesn't exactly practice ancestor worship, so there's no guarantee of a steady stream of visitors throughout the years. Though this article states that elaborate funerals for elders are expected from Chinese families, and that “It is considered good and proper for children to go into debt in order to pay respect for older people,” I would rather not leave my family such a financial responsibility during a time of grief.

No, I’d rather they burn the body and scatter the stuff. I like the idea of being everywhere at once, and nowhere at all. Why should I care where the body goes or looks like? My soul—I—am not there. And we all turn into dirt anyway.

Burial
At this point, I’ll apologize for the morbidity of the subject; but maybe burial is not right for me. It doesn’t matter if the fengshui of the place is good or not. In Chinese custom, many people are buried on hillsides; the higher along the hillside, the better the fengshui, which aids in the passage to the afterlife. But if the fengshui’s that good, I’ll be gone to the afterlife, and I won’t be around to enjoy the beauty of the hillside. It just doesn’t seem right to be buried at a beautiful site that I won’t enjoy, especially when my grave is likely to scare off the little children of picnickers.

Embalmment?
Even if I don’t mind terribly about being interred, there’s something odd about embalming that doesn’t appeal to me. Take a look at this website (albeit quite biased). There are so many chemicals that embalmers inject, spray, and rub onto and into our the bodies, that it can take several decades for an embalmed body to decompose, as opposed to the few years that a normal body takes. If I’m going to be fertilizer, I might as well feed the worms quickly. I wouldn’t relish the idea of being washed up as a perfectly intact body in the event of a flood or earthquake at the site of my cemetery. And nor would the picnickers.

Positives of Embalmment
The whole process is done with a great amount of reverence for the deceased. The body is usually dressed in a formalwear piece from the personal wardrobe of the deceased. Then there’s the cosmetic work: the deceased is moisturized, made up, his/her hair is styled, lipstick is applied for a more natural look.

The purpose for all this is so the family can see the face of their deceased. For many, seeing a beloved’s face finalizes the passing, and may make it easier for family to accept the person’s death.

In the end
There are perfectly good reasons for embalmment: for the family’s sake, cosmetic work may be desirable; and for the crops’ sake, disinfection of the body is a good idea. And the reasons for burial are good, too: that descendants may honor their departed ancestors. But my family doesn't follow the Chinese burial tradition, so I doubt my descendants will be bringing me honeycakes and rice after I pass.

My opposition to burial is not about being squeamish, but about being rejoined with the earth as quickly and as naturally as possible. For my own sake as the dead person, if I’m going to be stuck with needles of formaldehyde and then stuck in a hole…I’ll pass. For the sake of those who will have to deal with my passing, it would be much easier, more economic and less stressful for my family if I'm just cremated.

But it's a strange decision that not many people like to make. Their families are forced to decide what to do with their beloved once he/she has passed. And that is not a time for clear thinking. The responsibility is ours. Will away!

Jiang Qing in Communist China

The Role of Jiang Qing in Communist China

The Gang of Four
Jiang Qing is most famous for creating the group known as the Gang of Four in 1966, which included party leaders Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyan and Wang Hongwen (men who had helped her husband, Mao Zedong, secure Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution). She was active in the Cultural Revolution, and the Gang of Four was largely responsible for both the propaganda during the CR and the lawlessness of the government’s actions during the CR. Toward the end of the CR, a power struggle between the Gang of Four and Mao’s rivals—Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying—took place.

The Fall
Though it is unsure today, the Chinese Communist Party holds that a year before his death, Mao had turned against his wife of nearly forty years and her allies in the Gang of Four; and that after Mao died in 1976, the Gang of Four attempted to seize power.

Imprisonment
With her husband’s death, Jiang now had no justification for her political actions. Hua Guofeng, the new Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, arrested the Gang of Four in October 1976. In 1981, the Gang of Four were tried publicly and convicted for being counter-revolutionaries. Yao and Wang confessed their crimes, and were given twenty years and life in prison; but Jiang and Zhang maintained that they only followed Mao’s orders, so they received death sentences, which later became life sentences to prison. Jiang was accused of persecuting creative artists, hiring people disguised as Red Guards to ransack homes. Later, all four were released.
Jiang was discharged for treatment of the throat cancer she had developed in 1991; she committed suicide ten days after her release.

Info about the Gang of Four

Post 9: Check Yes for Grouchy

All right. So it’s tech week for this play I’m in. Read: I’m tired, I’m loaded to the eyes with homework, and yes, English Class, I am a suffering, whiny mess. For the non-drama-heads, tech week is comparable to hell week for sports. It’s a week of super intense line memorization, onstage blocking, and five hours of quality time spent with our cast members after school every day (which usually ends in the intense desire to rip each other’s heads off because of the stress).

Truth be told, I don’t feel like doing anything. I’m shivering from cold, but I’m too tired to get some socks on. My hands feel gross because I haven’t washed them in five hours, but I can’t wash them because I’ll spend too much time on that when I have to finish this blog by the deadline. (Notice the run-on sentences? An observation of mine: when people are tired, they generally answer in either very short or very long sentences. I am a long-sentence person.)

Now normally I’m not a big fan of whining, and I know that Rower probably won’t be too happy after reading this—didn’t anything about the unattractiveness of a constantly complaining person go into my head this week? Well, you know what? Complaining is a release. It’s an outlet that allows people to harmlessly let out whatever has been bothering us (though abuse of this outlet comes at the expense of our own social demise). And knowing how unbecoming complaining is, I’ll probably edit this post later so that I don’t sound like such a grouch.

See, if I don’t get it all out now, you’ll just be wondering at the rain cloud over me tomorrow morning. Plus I’m not allowed to complain at home. Never was. I was supposed to use my grown-up tone, or something. Did this actually work? Sure; but not when I was a child. Like this website says, “Asking a cranky child to justify his feelings or to explain what he wants is fruitless: it will only frustrate the child even more.”

Okay. Maybe I should just stop while the run-on sentence count is still below ten.

Post 8: Too Much of a Good Thing

An article I read in Newsweek (March 23rd edition) called “Jihad Chic Comes to London” tells of the author, Sami Yousafzai’s, time in London after fleeing Peshawar, Pakistan. While in London, Yousafzai met several young Afghans promoting the cause of the Taliban; this came as a shock to see the very people Yousafzai had been trying to escape.

Supporters of the Taliban rule initially consisted mainly of Sunni Pashtuns and deeply religious students who were educated and trained in Pakistan. These days, support of the Taliban is something Americans tend only to expect from raging-religious, dangerously fundamental Islamic terrorists; but this article reminds us not to be so ready with the tape to stick labels on people. Yousafzai’s article gave some insight about who might support the Taliban rule of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and what their reasons may be.

The need for the preservation of identity, Yousafzai believes, may be at the root of the fervor of so many young Afghans far from home. Often, Islamic immigrants still have very deep roots in their old lives. Tradition does not fade for them because they still see themselves as separate from the Western world.

In London, Yousafzai found one such man, nicknamed Talib Jan. Jan, only twenty-three, steadfastly follows his religion and firmly believes in Taliban practices of brutality against immoral Muslims. He stands outside mosques to hand out flyers that outline the utopia he believes Mullah Mohammed Omar (spiritual and military leader of the Taliban) will bring.

The man harasses Afghans in London about socializing with European women, shaping their beards, wearing Western clothing, or touching hands with women; he threatens that their infidelity to Islam will cause trouble for their families in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet London police “regard him as a deeply religious man…or at least as a harmless eccentric.” Well, religious? An understatement. But he’s a little more than just harmless.

And Jan proudly states, "I'm winning converts to a holy cause every day.” But I think that there are those who might be—just possibly—put off by Jan’s radical behavior. There is such a thing as being too fervent.

Everyone is entitled to his or her own beliefs, of course. But if one’s beliefs cause him to act in a way by which others feel threatened, there may be something something wrong.

Post 7: Cabbage and Clocks

The Devil in the Belfry
Vondervotteimittiss is a little town in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Devil in the Belfry.” The sixty houses in the town all face the steeple of the House of the Town Council, which houses an all-important bell, whose ringing dictates what must be done.

Now even though the members that form the Town Council are “little, round, oily, intelligent men, with big saucer eyes and fat double chins, and have their coats much longer and their shoe-buckles much bigger than the ordinary inhabitants of Vondervotteimittiss,” (read: the most respectable citizens of the town), they are really enslaved. The whole borough is enslaved to the demands of the bell in the tower.

Everyone waits for a few minutes before each hour. It’s a New Years’ countdown, but for every hour. When the belfry-man strikes the time, everyone counts the number of strikes and expects to go about their business according to what time of day it is.

This short story actually portrays Dutch burghers quite stereotypically. In addition to the stereotypical physical description of the stocky, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking towners, the short story gives these towners an unnatural obsession with 1) the time and 2) cabbage (for their sauer-kraut, of course).

In fact, the good people’s enslavement to both time and cabbage can be summed up in the Town Council’s three declarations:
"That it is wrong to alter the good old course of things:"
"That there is nothing tolerable out of Vondervotteimittiss:" and-
"That we will stick by our clocks and our cabbages."

The first statement may seem a traditional view, but it applies to nearly all humanity. Humans don’t like change. And picture-perfect Vondervotteimittiss is not unlike the rest of humanity, despite their funny vesture.

Secondly, the inhabitants also believed that the only good already rested in Vondervotteimittiss (things not from Vondervotteimitts cannot be good); and Poe foreshadows the arrival of the devilish stranger.

Thirdly, the burghers were fully satisfied with their lives; they saw no need to change and no need to look beyond the hills of Vondervotteimittiss for further fulfillment.

Do you see the problem with such beliefs?
And so, perfectly content with their cabbages and their clocks, the burghers are astounded when a dark, hook-nosed stranger (whose out-of-time hops betray a disregard for timing) fandangos and pirouettes into town. His haphazard way of walking shows his disdain for keeping the right time, and therefore his contempt for order. This disdain is finally manifested through the stranger’s violent assault of the innocent belfry-man.

No one stopped the stranger from killing the belfry-man because they were too preoccupied with the countdown to twelve o’clock noon. As a result, the stranger seizes control of the bell tower and rings the bell an extra time. The town is thrown into an uproar at the thirteenth ring: the old men complain that their pipes must have been lit for too long if it its thirteen o’clock, little boys complain that they must be hungry since it is thirteen o’clock, and the middle-aged complain that their sauer-kraut must be overcooked because it is thirteen o’clock. No one takes notice that thirteen o’clock doesn’t exist; they are upset because too much time has gone by.

Poe ends with a plea for all good people to expel the stranger who has control of the bell tower, and to return the good order. With an ending like this, there must be some sort of message that Poe wants to get across.

Meaning
On a broad note, this seems to me to be a warning against the obsession with useless things. The cabbage symbolizes our needs and what physically sustains us. So the townsmen like their cabbage—fine. But it is not right to be utterly consumed by what you consume.

The clocks are the indicators of a well-ordered society, structured to the second. But time is a human invention, and all things human are imperfect in some way. Laughably, the townspeople try to put time (and thus their whole lives) into a little controlled box with a pendulum. They pretend that they can control their lives if they can just control time. The townspeople don’t understand that things happen. Time is. We can measure it, but we cannot dictate it. And we must not let it dictate us.

Post 6: Genius and Mad

Hieronymous Bosch, Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allan Poe... What do these people have in common? Brilliance and possible insanity. There are many artists, musicians, writers, scientists and criminal minds that have been blessed with genius and also touched with madness.

Vincent van Gough was a gifted painter and committed suicide. Albert Einstein (eccentric and socially unconventional) and Isaac Newton (paranoid) have been associated with cases of schizophrenia. And think of the countless rock stars brimming with talent who have either done themselves in with the same guns they sing about or done themselves up with the same drugs they warn against.

What cruel part of fate is responsible for the pairing of the traits of talent with the predisposition to depression?

Is it the fame?
1) It must be frustrating to be an artist with without the distinction of genius. Many genii have gone unrecognized because society is simply “not that into” whatever their strong suits happen to be. To know that you possess talent and still aren’t able to sell must be maddening.

2) And once a genius has been discovered, he must undoubtedly feel pressure from a society that always expects great things of him. After years and years of writing and drawing, the only poem that earned Edgar Allan Poe renown during his lifetime was “The Raven,” about his dying wife. (And there’s definitely some deficiency in logic in that one. Talking birds?) After that, society took notice of him, and things spiraled down. Poe became an alcoholic, suffered hallucination, and died four years later, never writing quite so well.

Maybe it’s just plain, old depression.
It’s not law that an artist has to go crazy while creating art. Why can’t a person just be crazy, and then create art?

Call it the tortured artist effect, but creativity actually flows rather well from depression. Damien Rice, an Irish songwriter, may well fall under this category. Deep, introspective songs with heartbreaking honesty would never mean as much as they do if the writer were an extremely satisfied person at peace. Rice’s melancholy is the key (now this is personal opinion) to his creativity. Referring to “Grey Room,” which is about Rice’s songwriting process, the gloom of his grey room (which is a state of mind) brings him his colorful words. Dr. Jamison Kay supports the idea that melancholia permits emotions to flow properly:

"The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage - fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand, a restless and feverish temperament - commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and, occasionally, bouts of 'madness.'"

Jamison, Kay. Touched with Fire:
Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. 1993. McMan's Depression
and Bipolar Web. 10 Feb. 2008. 3 Mar. 2009 .

Or is it the money?
Though he was a talented writer, Stephen Crane never made enough money to live comfortably with his common-law wife Cora. More than once Crane (1871-1900) was forced to write novels that he didn’t particularly like in order to generate cash for his family. His stories like Maggie, a Girl of the Streets: a Story of New York (1893) failed, not because they lacked literarily, but because the realism was too grim and depressing for audiences’ taste. But if Crane felt moved enough to feel that he could change society’s perspective and order to write about poor, the impoverished, or Maggie, a prostitute—who were the editors to censor, and who were the publishers to reject?

When you have something brilliant, you can’t swallow it. No matter how bizarre the unibrow, Frida Kahlo had to express the pain of her life-changing bus accident in 1925 in a way unique to her. Have you ever listened to a Nirvana album? Kurt Cobain (arguably one of the most iconic alternative rock musicians) was something amazing; yet it took more than just a little self-doubt to put a gun to his skull. No, the creativity is innate. Whether it comes out in a burst of madness or as a result of madness, genius mustn’t be stifled.


Interested in the thoughts of a madman? Creativity and madness from Van Gough’s perspective.