Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Amboy Road (New York, N.Y.)"

The relevance of the article is determined by the fact that its topic is in line with the works of Russian researchers of Vladimir Korolenko’s legacy: N. N. Zakirova, S. L. Skopkareva, A. V. Trukhanenko, V. N. Krylov, E. G. Savelyeva, dedicated to the problem of organizing space and time in the writer’s works. The methodological basis for the study was the works of M. M. Bakhtin and Yu. M. Lotman. The purpose of the work was to identify the uniqueness of the chronotope in the story “Makar’s Dream” and the story “Without Language”. It is noted that in the both works the author refers to the chronotope of the road and road meetings. While in “Makar’s Dream” the chronotope of Amga is contrasted with the space and time of the afterlife, in “Without Language” the chronotope of New York is presented in opposition to the chronotope of the heroes’ native Lozishchi. In the both works, one can state the “liminal” state of the hero: Makar’s “fading away,” his “sleep,” and the state of Matvey Lozinsky on the verge of death in a New York park.

Objectives. To evaluate the effects of a comprehensive traffic safety policy—New York City’s (NYC’s) 2014 Vision Zero—on the health of Medicaid enrollees. Methods. We conducted difference-in-differences analyses using individual-level New York Medicaid data to measure traffic injuries and expenditures from 2009 to 2021, comparing NYC to surrounding counties without traffic reforms (n = 65 585 568 person-years). Results. After Vision Zero, injury rates among NYC Medicaid enrollees diverged from those of surrounding counties, with a net impact of 77.5 fewer injuries per 100 000 person-years annually (95% confidence interval = −97.4, −57.6). We observed marked reductions in severe injuries (brain injury, hospitalizations) and savings of $90.8 million in Medicaid expenditures over the first 5 years. Effects were largest among Black residents. Impacts were reversed during the COVID-19 period. Conclusions. Vision Zero resulted in substantial protection for socioeconomically disadvantaged populations known to face heightened risk of injury, but the policy’s effectiveness decreased during the pandemic period. Public Health Implications. Many cities have recently launched Vision Zero policies and others plan to do so. This research adds to the evidence on how and in what circumstances comprehensive traffic policies protect public health. ( Am J Public Health. 2024;114(6):633–641. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307617 )

Heinrich Detering, Was heißt hier “wir”? Zur Rhetorik der parlamentarischen Rechten (Dietzingen: Reclam Press, 2019).Clare Copley, Nazi Buildings: Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).Tobias Schulze-Cleven and Sidney A. Rothstein, eds., Imbalance: Germany’s Political Economy after the Social Democratic Century (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).Benedikt Schoenborn, Reconciliation Road: Willy Brandt, Ostpolitik and the Quest for European Peace (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).Tiffany N. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020).Ingo Cornils, Beyond Tomorrow: German Science Fiction and Utopian Thought in the 20th and 21st Centuries (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020).Christian F. Ostermann, Between Containment and Rollback: The United States and the Cold War in Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021).

The number of women under community supervision in the United States has increased, and this population has a high risk for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We examined STI prevalence and multiple risk factors among drug-involved women under community supervision in New York City. Data were from a randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of a behavioral HIV/STI intervention (Women on the Road to Health [WORTH]) among drug-involved women in the community corrections system in New York City from 2009 to 2012. To be eligible for inclusion, women had to be under community supervision within the past 90 days, have used illicit drugs at least once in the past six months, and have unprotected sex at least once in the past 90 days. Participants completed a survey containing items on STI risk factors and were tested for Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Trichomonas vaginalis. Multivariable regression was used to examine associations between risk factors and STI diagnosis. Of 333 women tested, 89 (26.7%) tested positive for an STI. Ten (3.0%) were positive for C. trachomatis, 4 (1.2%) for N. gonorrhoeae, and 77 (23.1%) for T. vaginalis. Women with any STI were more likely to be black (AOR: 2.02; 95% CI: 1.08–3.77), homeless in the past 90 days (AOR: 2.07; 95% CI: 1.01–4.26), arrested in the past 90 days (AOR: 1.97; 95% CI: 1.14–3.39), and have a greater number of sexual partners in the past 90 days (AOR: 1.24; 95% CI: 1.08–1.42). Drug-using women under community supervision have a high burden of STIs driven by multiple risk factors. Implementing STI screening, prevention, and treatment programs in community supervision settings could facilitate a reduction in STIs among this population.

Seeing Women Migrants in Africa Kalpana Hiralal and Zaheera Jinnah, eds., Gender and Mobility in Africa: Borders, Bodies and Boundaries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), xi + 259 pp., 10 illus., $119Indigenous Mobilities: Thinking Mobility from the South and beyond the Nation-State Rachel Standfield, ed., Indigenous Mobilities: Across and Beyond the Antipodes (Canberra: ANU Press), 279 pp., $50Mobile Dwellings, Standing Still: An Ethnography of Possible Mobility Hege Høyer Leivestad, Caravans: Lives on Wheels in Contemporary Europe (London: Bloomsbury Academic), 192 pp., 20 illus., $102.60Rethinking Exile in and Out of Africa Nathan Riley Carpenter and Benjamin N. Lawrance, eds., Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 337 pp., $35How to Study Roads Anthropologically Dimitris Dalakoglou, The Road: An Ethnography of (Im)mobility, Space, and Cross-Border Infrastructures in the Balkans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 203 pp., 34 illus., £19.99Invisible Cycle Histories for Brighter Mobility Futures Tiina Männistö-Funk and Timo Myllyntaus, eds., Invisible Bicycle: Parallel Histories and Different Timelines (Leiden: Brill, 2018), xii + 282 pp., $133Someone Needs to Care: Caregiving Practices beyond the Family and the State Azra Hromadzic and Monika Palmberger, eds., Care across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 183 pp., 15 illus., $110

Bruce D. Epperson, Bicycles in American Highway Planning: The Critical Years of Policy-Making 1969–1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), 248 pp., $45Carlton Reid, Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists Were the First to Push for Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015), 360 pp., $30Karen O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (London: MIT Press, 2016), 328 pp., £22.95Jason Weems, Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 368 pp., 116 b&w photos, 16 color plates, $122.50 (hardback), $35 (paperback)Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, eds., Airplane Reading (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2016), 213 pp., $22.95 (paperback)Catherine L. Phipps, Empires on the Waterfront: Japan’s Ports and Power, 1858–1899 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 308 pp., 6 maps, 3 tables, $39.95James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 294 pp., $34.95David N. Lucsko, Junkyards, Gearheads, and Rust: Salvaging the Automotive Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 283 + xii pp., 10 illustrations, $44.95Steven E. Alford and Suzanne Ferris, An Alternative History of Bicycles and Motorcycles: Two-Wheeled Transportation and Material Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 189 pp., $80Harald Fischer-Tiné, Pidgin-Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus (Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), 104 pp., €10Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 320 pp., $26.95

Green Street is a very important innovation in managing water run-off from paving or pavement. Green street is basically one that can clean and absorb the results of rainwater runoff or its own through a balanced combination of the same technique. Landscape design for Yasmin area aims to provide innovative K.H. Abdullah Bin Nuh street design as Green Street-based green path with existing problems on tread such as drainage channel obstruction and by applying green street system, including green infrastructure, complete street and placemaking tools. Complete street is a comfortable and safe road design with clear division of motor vehicle and bicycle circulation paths. The placemaking principle is the principle where by the resulting design should provide an identity to the area.The result of the research is the design of road landscape consisting of service space, identity, vehicle, pedestrian, buffer and conservation. The research site located at K.H. Abdullah Bin Nuh street is divided into five segments with various kinds of concepts and designs applied in accordance with green street concept. The main green street concept applied to this site is a rain garden that serves to absorb rainwater runoff. This research produces site plan, planting plan, detail construction and illustration design.Kata-kata Kunci: desain jalan, green street, green infrastructure, lanskap jalan LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN K.H. ABDULLAH BIN NUH STREET BASED ON GREEN STREETGreen Street is a critical innovation in managing water run-off from paving or pavement. Green street is one that can clean and absorb the results of rainwater runoff or its own through a balanced combination of the same technique. Landscape design for Yasmin area aims to provide innovative K.H. Abdullah Bin Nuh street design as Green Street-based green path with existing problems on tread such as drainage channel obstruction and by applying green street system, including green infrastructure, complete street, and placemaking tools. A complete street is a comfortable and safe road design with clear division of motor vehicle and bicycle circulation paths. The placemaking principle is the principle where the resulting design should provide an identity to the area. The result of the research is the design of the road landscape consisting of service space, character, vehicle, pedestrian, buffer, and conservation. The research site located at K.H. Abdullah Bin Nuh street is divided into five segments with various kinds of concepts and designs applied following green street concept. The main green street concept applied to this site is a rain garden that serves to absorb rainwater runoff. This research produces site plan, planting plan, detail construction, and illustration design.Keywords: design street, green street, green infrastructure, landscape street REFERENCES[BAPPEDA] Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Daerah. 2014. Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Kota Bogor Tahun 2015-2019. Bogor (ID): Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Daerah Kota Bogor.Austin G. 2014. Green Infrastructue for Landscape Planning. Glasgow: Bell and Bain Ltd.Booth N K. 1983. Basic Elements of Landscape Architectural Design. Illinois (US): Waveland Press.Carlson et al. 2014. Green Streets Guidebook for the City of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Winter: The Conway SchoolDepartemen Pekerjaan Umum Direktorat Jenderal Bina Marga. 2008. Manual Kapasitas Jalan Indonesia (MKJI). Jakarta (ID) : Departemen Pekerjaan Umum.Laurie. 1986. Pengantar kepada Arsitektur Pertamanan. Bandung: IntermatraSimonds JO and Starke BW. 2006. Landscape Architecture. New York (US): McGraw Hill-Book Co.

Background:Behçet syndrome (BS) is a rare multisystemic vasculitis, most commonly seen in regions along the ancient Silk Road. It runs a relapsing and remitting course. Mucocutaneous disease, consisting of oral ulcers, genital ulcers and skin lesions is often reported. EULAR recommendations advise colchicine and topical agents for the treatment of these lesions.1Not all patients respond adequately, thus, it is important to explore alternative treatment options.Objectives:To study the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) 400 mg daily in patients with mucocutaneous BS.Methods:Data on all patients who presented at the outpatient Behçet clinic in New York were recorded. Patients with a first prescription with HCQ and a follow-up of 3 months (range: 2.75-41.2 months) were included. Patient reported outcomes BSAS and RAPID3 were used to evaluate the effect of HCQ. Results of all patients and of International Study Group (ISG) positive patients were analyzed separately using Wilcoxon rank tests.Results:We included 94 patients with a first prescription of HCQ. 72 patients (76.6%) fulfilled ISG criteria. Mean age was 36.1 years (SD 12.5), 76 patients (80.9%) were female and 11 patients (11.7%) were from Silk Road countries.Mean duration until follow-up was 6.5 months (SD 5.7). Median BSAS scores in ISG+ patients at baseline did not differ significantly from ISG- patients, except for skin lesions (5.0 in ISG+ vs. 0.5 in ISG- p=0.005). BSAS scores at follow-up did not differ significantly (ISG+ vs. ISG-).Median BSAS scores were significantly lower at follow-up compared to baseline for oral ulcers (p=0.010), skin lesions (p=0.018) and overall activity (p=0.019). Regarding genital ulcers there was no significant result, due to only 37 patients reporting complaints of genital ulcers. Performing these analyses in ISG+ patients only did not change these results, except for BSAS overall activity, which lost significance (p=0.057).RAPID3 scores were not statistically different between baseline and follow-up (9.67 vs. 8.75, p=0.145), nor were its separate components function (p=0.67 vs. 0.67, 0.713), pain (4.0 vs. 4.0, p=0.157) and patient global (5.0 vs. 4.5, p=0.095).The majority of patients used prednisone at baseline (58.5%) and at follow-up (57.4%). In 15 patients, prednisone was stopped at follow up, in 13 patients it was started.Table 1.Median BSAS scores of patients treated with HCQ.Baseline(median, IQR)Follow-up 3 months(median, IQR)P-valuesAll patients (n=94)Oral ulcers5.0 (2.00-7.88)3.0 (1.00-6.00)0.010Genital ulcers0.0 (0.00-3.88)0.0 (0.00-3.00)0.371Skin lesions5.0 (1.25-7.00)2.5 (0.00-7.00)0.018Overall activity5.5 (4.00-8.00)5.0 (2.00-7.25)0.019ISG+ patients (n=72)Oral ulcers5.25 (2.00-7.63)3.25 (1.00-6.00)0.007Genital ulcers0.5 (0.00-4.00)0.0 (0.00-3.00)0.684Skin lesions5.0 (2.00-7.13)3.0 (0.00-7.00)0.015Overall activity6.0 (4.00-8.00)5.0 (2.00-7.50)0.057Conclusion:HCQ improves median BSAS scores for oral ulcers, skin lesions and overall activity at 3 months follow-up compared to baseline. These results were similar in ISG+ patients (except for overall activity). Additional research is needed to assess the effect of HCQ in more patients and over multiple time points.References:[1]Hatemi G et al. 2018 update of the EULAR recommendations for the management of Behçet’s syndrome. Ann Rheum Dis 2019;77:808-818Disclosure of Interests:Floor Kerstens: None declared, Shreen Mohamed: None declared, Ingrid Visman: None declared, Franktien Turkstra: None declared, Christopher Swearingen: None declared, Yusuf Yazici Consultant of: BMS, Celgene Corporation, Genentech, Sanofi – consultant, Consultant of: BMS, Celgene Corporation, Genentech, Sanofi – consultant

The paper presents a collection of selected optical systems recently developed in the Institute of Applied Optics-INOS. The collection includes the family of techniques where the continuously modified wavelength facilitates high accuracy measurements of optical and geometrical features of the object in question i.e. the variable wavelength interferometry and confocal chromatic sensors. In addition, the paper refers to the construction of a new type of a spectrometer with rotating plasma and an illumination system supporting the road safety. Full Text: PDF ReferencesM. Pluta, Advanced Light Microscopy (Vol. 3, PWN, Elsevier, Warszawa-Amsterdam-London-New York-Tokyo, 1993). DirectLink M. Pluta, "Object-adapted variable-wavelength interferometry. I. Theoretical basis", Journal of Opt. Soc. Am., A4(11), 2107 (1987). CrossRef M. Pluta, "Variable wavelength microinterferometry of textile fibres", J. Microscopy, 149(2), 97 (1988). CrossRef M. Pluta, "On double‐refracting microinterferometers which suffer from a variable interfringe spacing across the image plane", Journal of Microscopy, 145(2), 191 (1987). CrossRef K. A. El-Farahaty, A. M. Sadik, A. M. Hezma, "Study of Optical and Structure Properties of Polyester (PET) and Copolyester (PETG) Fibers by Interferometry", International Journal of Polymeric Materials 56(7),715 (2007). CrossRef J. Galas, D. Litwin, M. Daszkiewicz, "New approach for identifying the zero-order fringe in variable wavelength interferometry", Proc. SPIE 10142, 101421R (2016). CrossRef A. Sadik, W. A. Ramadan, D. Litwin, "Variable incidence angle method combined with Pluta polarizing interference microscope for refractive index and thickness measurement of single-medium fibres", Measurement Science and Technology, IOP Publishing 14(10), 1753 (2003). CrossRef J. Galas, S. Sitarek; D. Litwin; M. Daszkiewicz, "Fringe image analysis for variable wavelength interferometry", Proc. SPIE 10445, 1044504 (2017). CrossRef D. Litwin, A. M. Sadik, "Computer-aided variable wavelength Fourier transform polarizing microscopy of birefringent fibers.", Optica Applicata 28(2), 139 (1998). DirectLink D. Litwin, J. Galas, N. Błocki, "Automated variable wavelength interferometry in reflected light mode", Proc.SPIE 6188, 61880F (2006). CrossRef M. Pluta, "Variable wavelength interferometry of birefringent retarders", Opt. Laser Technology, 19(3), 131 (1987). CrossRef K. Fladischer et al. "An ellipsoidal mirror for focusing neutral atomic and molecular beams", New journal of Physics, 12(3) 033018 (2010). CrossRef K. Fladischer et al. "An optical profilometer for characterizing complex surfaces under high vacuum conditions", Precision engineering Elsevier 32(3), 182 (2008). CrossRef A.E. Weeks et al. "Accurate surface profilometry of ultrathin wafers", Semiconductor Science and Technology", IOP Publishing, 22(9), 997 (2007). CrossRef D. Litwin et al. "Overview of the measuring systems where a continuously altered light source plays a key role: Part I", Proc. SPIE 10808, 10 8080B (2018). CrossRef D. Litwin et al. "Noise reduction in an optical emission spectrometer with rotating diffraction grating", Proc. SPIE 10142 101421Q (2016). CrossRef D. Litwin et al. "Photonics approach to traffic signs", Proc SPIE 10142 1014214, (2016). CrossRef

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The pandemic of COVID-19 has afflicted every individual and has initiated a cascade of directly or indirectly involved events in precipitating mental health issues. The human species is a wanderer and hunter-gatherer by nature, and physical social distancing and nationwide lockdown have confined an individual to physical isolation. The present review article was conceived to address psychosocial and other issues and their aetiology related to the current pandemic of COVID-19. The elderly age group has most suffered the wrath of SARS-CoV-2, and social isolation as a preventive measure may further induce mental health issues. Animal model studies have demonstrated an inappropriate interacting endogenous neurotransmitter milieu of dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and opioids, induced by social isolation that could probably lead to observable phenomena of deviant psychosocial behavior. Conflicting and manipulated information related to COVID-19 on social media has also been recognized as a global threat. Psychological stress during the current pandemic in frontline health care workers, migrant workers, children, and adolescents is also a serious concern. Mental health issues in the current situation could also be induced by being quarantined, uncertainty in business, jobs, economy, hampered academic activities, increased screen time on social media, and domestic violence incidences. The gravity of mental health issues associated with the pandemic of COVID-19 should be identified at the earliest. Mental health organization dedicated to current and future pandemics should be established along with Government policies addressing psychological issues to prevent and treat mental health issues need to be developed. References World Health Organization (WHO) Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. 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Abstract Unravelling the clinicopathological and functional significance of Replication Protein A (RPA) heterotrimeric complex in sporadic breast cancers Mashael Algethami1, Michael S Toss 1,4, Juliette Brownlie 1, Corinne L Woodcock 1,2, Chandar Jaipal1, Ahmed Shoqafi 1, Katia A Mesquita1, Adel Alblihy1,3, Andrew R Green1, Nigel P Mongan 1,5, Emad A Rakha 1,4, Jennie N Jeyapalan 1,2 and Srinivasan Madhusudan1,6 1 Nottingham Biodiscovery Institute, Academic Unit for Translational Medical Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. 2 Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Centre for Cancer Sciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Sutton Bonington, Leicestershire LE12 5RD, UK 3 Medical Center, King Fahad Security College (KFSC), Riyadh 11461, Saudi Arabia. 4 Department of Pathology, Nottingham University Hospital, City Campus, Hucknall Road, Nottingham NG5 1PB, UK. 5 Department of Pharmacology, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, 10065, USA 6 Department of Oncology, Nottingham University Hospitals, Nottingham NG5 1PB, UK. Introduction: Replication Protein A (RPA) is a critical single-stranded DNA (ssDNA)-binding protein that coats and protects exposed ssDNA from endogenous nucleases. RPA is a heterotrimeric complex consisting of RPA1 (70kDa), RPA2 (32kDa), and RPA3 (14kDa) subunits. RPA provides a platform for recruitment of factors required during replication, checkpoint regulation, DNA repair [including homologous recombination (HR), nucleotide excision repair (NER), base excision repair (BER) and mismatch repair (MMR)], telomere maintenance and retro-transposition. To understand the role of RPA in breast cancer pathogenesis we conducted a comprehensive genomic, transcriptomic, bioinformatic, proteomic and preclinical study. Patients and methods: RPA1, RPA2 and RPA3 protein expression was evaluated in 4221 primary invasive breast carcinomas and 776 breast ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Transcriptomic investigation was completed in the METABRIC cohort (n=1980). Detailed bioinformatics was conducted in the TCGA cohort (n=1090). RPA deficient breast cancer cell lines were tested for Cisplatin, Palbociclib and Olaparib sensitivity. Results: RPA1, RPA2 and RPA3 loss is frequent in DCIS and linked to aggressive phenotype (including high grade, ER and PR negativity) (all p values < 0.01). DCIS with low RPA1 was also associated with poor local recurrence-free interval (p< 0.00001). In invasive breast cancers, low RPA1, low RPA2 and low RPA3 were all associated with larger size, lympho-vascular invasion, higher histological grade, high stage, ER negativity and poor breast cancer specific survival. Transcriptomic alterations in low RPA tumors included those genes involved in steroid hormone biosynthesis, chemical carcinogenesis, and drug metabolism. Pre-clinically, RPA deficient breast cancer cells were sensitive to Cisplatin and Palbociclib (CDK4/6 inhibitor) therapy compared to controls. Additionally, the PARP1 inhibitor Olaparib was synthetically lethal in RPA1 and RPA2 deficient cells compared to controls. Increased Olaparib sensitivity was associated with double strand breaks, S-phase cell cycle arrest and increased apoptosis. Conclusions: We provide the first comprehensive evidence that RPA loss is an early event during breast cancer pathogenesis and promotes aggressive phenotypes. Pre-clinically RPA deficient breast cancer cells were selectively toxic to Cisplatin, Palbociclib and Olaparib. Citation Format: Mashael A. Algethami, Michael Toss, Juliette Brownlie, Corinne L. Woodcock, Chandar Jaipal, AHMED SHOQAFI, Katia Mesquita, Adel Alblihy, Nigel Mongan, Emad Rakha, Jennie N. Jeyapalan, Srinivasan Madhusudan, Andrew R. Green. Unravelling the clinicopathological and functional significance of Replication Protein A (RPA) heterotrimeric complex in sporadic breast cancers [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2022 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2022 Dec 6-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(5 Suppl):Abstract nr P3-05-18.

ACOSTA, Corinna. ¿ Qué es la moda?. Expok, México, 12.05.2014. Disponível em: <http://www.expoknews.com/que-es-la-moda-rapida/>. Acesso em: 03 mar. 2017. BBC. Why East Africa wants to ban second-hand clothes, 02.03.2016. Disponível em: <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35706427>. Acesso em: 25 mar. 2017. BCC. Desabamento em Bangladesh revela o lado obscuro da moda, 28.04.2013. Disponível em: <http://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2013/04/130428_bangladesh_tragedia_lado_obscuro>. Acesso em: 03 mar. 2017. BECK, Ulrich. La sociedad de riesgo: hacia una nueva modernidad. Barcelona: Paidós, 1998. BECKERMAN, Wilfred. “How Would You Like Your ‘Sustainability’, Sir? Weak or Strong? A Reply to My Critics”. In: Environmental Values, Cambridge, v. 4, n. 2, p. 169-179, maio 1995. Disponível em: <www.jstor.org/stable/30301474>. Acesso em: 05 jan. 2017. BOSSELMAN, Klaus. O princípio da sustentabilidade: transformando direito e governança. São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 2015. BRASIL. 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We explored the sustainable business practices of selected Philippine corporations that promote the quest for peace. We used three key indicators of sustainable business practices, namely, fostering economic development, espousing corporate citizenship, and respecting the rule of law, as our variables to measure our sustainable business practices construct. On the other hand, we adopted sustainable development and sound business environmental our variables to measure the quest for peace construct. We assumed that sustainable business practices and quest for peace are interlinked and mutually reinforcing. We anchored our study on the Theories of Positive Peace, Sustainable Development, and Humanistic Management. We used the qualitative exploratory research design and the holistic multiple case study research strategy. We used the qualitative exploratory research design and the holistic multiple case study research strategy. We selected through the non-probability purposive sampling technique, the 20 Publicly - Listed Companies in the Philippines. We then, utilized the monomethod as the data collection technique for selecting the Sustainability Reports published in 2018 and uploaded in the websites of the respective corporations. With this deductive approach, we specifically adopted the pattern matching analytical procedure in the process of our content analysis of information from the Sustainability Reports. Results on fostering economic development revealed numerous jobs created, training and development, as well as trade and business development programs and activities executed. Analysis on espousing corporate citizenship disclosed many programs and activities related to encourage the use of voice from the firm, community engagement, and governance implemented. Findings on respecting the rule of law showed also various programs and activities that cover compliance with Philippine laws, international laws, and environmental standards. Findings also indicated that the nexus of sustainable business practices and the quest for peace aims to build companies of enduring greatness by doing good and working toward a sustainable future. In conducting responsible business, they were able to help in attaining positive peace in our coun try, which, in return, is essential for sustainable development, as manifested by their significant contribution in achieving sustainable development/growth, working closely with regulators to achieve shared goals; and protecting the environment and preserving natural resources. We recommend that there should be a coordinated effort of all the stakeholders to ensure that there is an integrated and holistic approach in the sustainability of the business sector to promote positive peace.We also propose to undertake further research on employing quantitative approach by using business, financial, and socio-economic indicators to address the limitations of this study. ReferencesBoulding, E. (2000). Cultures of peace: The hidden side of history. Syracuse University Press. Brauch, H. G., Oswald Spring, U., Grin, J., Scheffran, J. (Ed.). (2016). Handbook on sustainability transition and sustainable peace. Springer.Cortright, D. (2009). Peace: A history of movements and ideas. Cambridge University Press.Creswell, J. (2014). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). Sage Publications.Edralin, D. & Pastrana, R. (2019). Sustainability initiatives and practices of selected top universities in Asia, Europe, and USA. 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Jogo de espelhos e palavras Analogias duma beleza transitiva Foi entre “formigas e cupins”[1] que descobri e inventei por “ver” o que lia. Do jardim a casa, numa aprazível “distração”, li Marina (do latim, marinus, “marinho”). Se ia em busca de cupins, absorvi-me logo numa bela atividade intrínseca de “ler” a natureza humana. Os estados/processos emocionais deram-se ao meu sonho acordado, frente à lua cheia. Por contraste mínimo, o que acontece no sonho propriamente dito é antes uma não narrativa, uma dissociação não controlada, exibida a superfície de fundo inacessível[2], graciosa alternativa criativa à “associação de ideias”. “O sonho de uma sombra”, em Píndaro (522 – 443 a.C.)[3], foi a ofuscação da “verdade” nua e crua. O sonho e a fantasia permitem a estranha fragmentação da sequência do pensamento escorreito, quando se experiencie a realidade de All-Self (ser com tudo em redor). Um efeito é imaginarmos sermos nós aquela “estrela” e recategorizamos algo num “todos juntos”, “transitarmos”[4], sem fixação, encontrado “tudo em tudo”[5]. “Somos plurais”[6] e mutantes sem “coerência”. Colocado a par o ser e o não ser, dada a aparência de Marina, numa superfície lisa refletida, convoca à reflexão que muda, quando “… todos querem, buscam, sonham com você”[7]. Na afirmação do narrador, Celso, é partilhado o desejo de alguém ou dele com “você”. Num detalhe ora geral, ora específico, algo dela poderá ser comparável ou semelhante a outra coisa, uma analogia. No encalço dela, Marco Lucchesi acompanha-nos no “eterno retorno da leitura”[8], trocadas cartas entre Celso e Marina, na década de noventa do século passado[9]. “Rasgadas”, anos passados por ele, entendidas “inúteis e vazias”[10], tendo ela dirigido um e outro e-mail inúteis, para “confissões”, via ”correspondências”[11], em que culpas confessadas nem sejam alheias a “amores mortos”[12]. Anteriormente, Celso chegaria a procurar Marina em “mundos improváveis”. Em locais de sua casa, a falsa presença, inviável, “tão querida”… Possivelmente desejada, chega a ser atingido o paradoxo da perenidade da vida, no espaço exíguo, amor eterno. Marina encontra-se em quase tudo[13]: “Digamos: a) no terreno baldio das gavetas; b) na agenda que perdeu a validade; c) nas fotos inquietas de um álbum (andorinhas em queda: sem cola, pálidas ou saturadas); d) no velho sótão que não tenho.” Como se “pousássemos os pincéis”, em continuidade, o modelo analógico varia no tempo… O escritor acrescenta: “nosso passado é analógico”[14]. Celso escuta cantos, sons e silêncios (a música “dela”?), no aparelho de rádio analógico... “Analogia”, nas nuances de significado no dicionário, são uma entre outras. E dada a representação de um objeto assemelhar-se ao original, pode Marina ser “pintada” em eternas obras de arte. “Vejo-a”, no que vejo e no que leio: “Coroação da Virgem”, de Fra Angélico (1395 — 1455); “A Madona de San Sisto”, de Rafael (1483 — 1520) … Escolho logo a bela Gioventü, de Eliseu Visconti (1866 - 1944). Figura nº 1 – Óleo sobre tela, Gioventü, de Eliseu Visconti (1898) Fonte: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovent%C3%B9 Mas é em Candido Portinari[15], numa obra de 1957 – “O menino com pássaro”, que a voz e ela… se me apagou. Seria recolhida e cuidada por aquele que a encontrasse. Figura nº 2 – Elemento de obra de Candido Portinari (1957) – O menino com pássaro Fonte: https://www.wikiart.org/en/candido-portinari/menino-com-p-ssaro-1957 Numa analogia, a figura oscila de forma contínua, entre passado e presente, imparável no tempo. Sem comparecer perante Celso, também ele num não-lugar se quedou[16]. Os seus braços, “irredentos do todo”[17], vivido um “como se…”, avançariam o distanciamento/estranheza[18] face ao espelhado “teatro de sentimentos”. Fora Marina ferida? Num “jogo de espelhos e palavras”[19], “escrevo por espelhos reticentes, com frases e lacunas movediças” …. “Estendo as mãos para o espelho…”[20]. “Refletida” a escrita em processo, encontro Lucchesi solto no outro. Nos seus termos, a palavra “espelho” dará lugar ao oculto no “jogo de espelho, analogias”[21]. Quando a reflexão teria ainda o Sol no “espelho”, o encontro de ambos jorrava luz. Perdida a década de oitenta, o que é dado, antecipado[22]? Novas luzes e sombras. Celso e Marina foram inicial “espelho de paixão”. Seguiu-se a brecha na paixão. Num salão espelhado da paixão de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo, em 1507, vejo uma figuração pintada por Hans Schäufelein. “Herodes” deu lugar à figuração doutros maus tempos, no “Espelho da Paixão” (Speculum Passionis). Cristo diante de Herodes, o malvado, que morreu com o Eclipse lunar. Num “reflexo“, o culpado, no julgamento em “Herodes”[23], convocara Cristo[24], um culpado. Eu sou o outro do outro eterno Eleia, às portas da atual Itália. Numa primeira estrofe de Poema, a expressão dum outro, Parménides (530 a.C. — 460 a.C.), para quem “deus” não foi gerado, existindo[25] ad eternum... A estaca foi colocada num limiar doutro lugar estranho, em Poema: “Aí se encontram as portas”. Talhada a via inovadora do caminhar, tendemos a cruzar linhagens para não nos perdermos. Nem tudo se desgasta e corrompe, com Parménides. No rumo incerto, outra conquista do explorador Ulisses[26], foi ter encontrado o retorno? Ulisses, Celso, Alice, Marina… Pierre e Natacha, Tristão e Isolda. No desencontro, Molly e Leopold ou Eurídice e Orfeu ... A ficarmos “aos pés da biblioteca”[27], a ler vidas nas figuras centrais, estas oferecem um recuo[28]. Abrem portas. Eternas personagens, nem todas juvenis. Celso, o narrador? Alguém que já teve um “matagal” de cabelo perdido, que “nasceu no coração [uma floresta, cabelos…] … com espinhos” - “O elogio da calvície” [29]. Outra personagem de Marina, Alice, foi um exemplo de ajuda, porto marítimo, seguro, onde atracar? Substitui, sem substituir Marina? Alice adotará, também ela, o enigmático porte de “Gioconda”, “a senhora Lisa, esposa de Giocondo”, representada por técnica do sfumato, de Da Vinci (1452 — 1519). Foi seu o “vaso”[30], que Celso amou - “vasos quebrados” [31]. Acresce que “Alice e o vira-lata branco” encontram-se ambos registados num “resumo” de carta[32], em união, bem juntos. Bem articulado no pensado é o que a carta diz e não diz. Mas quem será aquele outro vira latas? Marina ainda pede foto da outra – Alice[33]. Num e-mail registado: “Se puder [você, Celso], mande-me fotos ou vídeos de Alice. Tenho por ela um profundo afeto. Lembro-me de seu sorriso, ao piano”. Será verdade? Uma inquebrável lembrança de Celso, uma só vez, Marina tocara piano com ele, a quatro mãos[34]. Celso poderá ter reparado (n)o vaso, a dado passo. Pode ter tido outra imagem fixada à Alice, de então. Seria aquele vaso que “amava”, ou Alice[35], uma figura magnética? “Para fugir de mil perigos”, a quem não faltou Alice? Alice usou “ampolas e unguentos, magos e poções”[36]? Cuidadora, Alice, com Celso, representado nos rapazes com pássaros feridos[37]? Em suma, pareceria a Celso não existir punção operada ou poder maior, quando os relacionamentos morrem, ainda que os vasos sejam compostos de cacos que se colam: “Não posso reparar o irreparável”[38]. No entanto, Celso conhecia a técnica das peças coladas do Japão - a técnica do kintsugi[39]. Observou, até mesmo o outro vaso por si trazido com os gerânios, da sua antiga casa… “Distancia que se perde. Vaso que se encontra…”[40] Na ficção, a fiação tudo interliga “Vimos a fiação que tudo interliga. Semântica e sintaxe”[41]. Dos golpes de génio ficcional e da sangrenta História, Marco Lucchesi concebeu comparações, em que “mudam as guerras”[42] e as linguagens. Numa realidade de rapto, guerra e paixão, o poema épico transcende o amor passado que eterniza. Homero fundador da literatura ocidental, numa autêntica carnificina, a incerta “Guerra de Troia”, contou com Ájax[43] dentro do cavalo, dando guerra (infinita)[44] a Heitor, o destemido troiano, incapaz de lhe perfurar o escudo. A guerra teve que ser interrompida ao pôr do sol, intervindo Apolo. Do inicial “pomo de discórdia” entre deusas até aos feitos, nove anos passados em guerra, Ájax é “muralha”. A Ilíada evidencia que esmagou o escudo de Heitor, com uma só pedra. Quem sabe se Celso seria uma barreira inexpugnável, de tão “glacial”[45], que se tornou? Numa contenda, para o romance histórico, de 1865 e 1869, Liev Tolstói cruzou aqueles que se amaram, na passagem do Grande Cometa, em 1811: na invasão napoleónica, em 1812, a personagem recorrente, Pierre encontra-se com a bela Natacha, aparentemente apaixonada por Boris, amada por Denisov. Como foi possível a “guerra sem paz”[46]? Celso e Marina viveram dessa “Guerra de quase e talvez”[47], no que foi a “guerra que nos mata”[48]. Lendários amores infelizes e apaixonados, trágicos, na bárbara Idade Média (século V a século XV)? Tristão («tristeza») e Isolda (“das mãos de fada”)[49]. E o Rei Marcos que a perdeu[50]. Guerras nos ensaios não-ficcionais e nas ficções. Já a estranha paixão da cantora Molly e Leopold termina com o “sim” dela, apenas num solilóquio. O corpo de Molly – no livro de James Joyce - seria “sensual”[51], no que ressalta o “incêndio” interior. Divergências? Foi numa dada “tarde”, vinte anos passados, que a caixa eletrónica de Celso recebe um primeiro e-mail de Marina. Iria acabar com a guerra entre ambos. Não parece de comparar com a ficção? Marina e Celso encontrar-se-iam no fim da “guerra fria”[52], em data marcada pela queda do muro de Berlim, 9 de novembro de 1989. Numa Rádio Londres, com “mensagem de Inglaterra aos aliados”, durante a longínqua Segunda Guerra Mundial, ele passava a escutar outra transmissão no rádio bem comum, no sistema analógico. Um sinal da mensagem dela, vulgar. Metáforas básicas da descrição do real Quando se coloque uma figura de estilo, cujos sentidos figurados utilizem comparações como a “metáfora do corpo em lua cheia”[53], é a Lua “tão nua e desarmada a vaporosa Lua”. A pessoa é então toda inteira, se bem que a Lua seja fragmentada noutra fase lunar. Damo-nos a facetas diversas, também. E a não ser a transição de fase a mesma daquela grande lua, Marco Lucchesi ainda afrontou a perda irreparável de parte dela, por Celso, num desaforo: “se você esperava tapetes e fanfarras, perdeu a viagem. Abandonei a timidez, digo o que penso, e sem rodeios.”[54] Dada a acentuada guerra entre Celso e Marina, ao referencial “real”, preferi antes juntar à lua a palavra “viagem” e a palavra “mundo”, no que coloco mais do que o que (a)parece – numa alegoria. Assim, na minha perceção subjetiva, uma fenomenologia, ocorreu algo mais a aprofundar. Nessa viragem, limito mais do que o que se me abra à fixação de “guerra”, quando se sucedam figuras de estilo, no livro[55]. Num jogo de linguagem, retiro a desafogada imagem concreta: o passeio na praia, junto da Cinelândia e o que faço? No termo metafórico duma “psicologia de viagem-vida”, encontro logo ali o figurativo, portanto, com os rodeios à casa velha de Celso, com os eventos no trânsito, com as margens do mar face à praia. Meios mundos são a frente “subaquático”[56] e outros territórios e sítios. Poderia convocar imensos espaços de transição, imaginando[57] além de um “mundo submarino”[58]. Lucchesi tantas vezes observa “estrelas”, algumas “estrelas não promissoras”[59]… Voltando ao avesso, na Terra, à “viagem à roda do piano e do quarto”[60], essas são breves viagens e têm fim. Contudo, é dada à incompletude a infinita “viagem à roda dos teus olhos, punhado de beleza, informe, passageira”[61]. Numa estranha viagem de recuo (na revirada do avesso), focada uma “correspondência” sem troca, é de antemão inviabilizado o “sim” e a chegada a bom porto[62]? Da presença na ausência de Marina: tempo de sonho e pesadelo Como “resumir” os “20 anos”[63] de afastamento? Um desapego de “dez mil dias”, após o “terremoto”. “Dez mil dias” sem se falarem? Pretendo dar forma ao texto, quando pense que uma correspondência convencionada abranja reciprocidade e presença, ainda que evitada a “literatice”[64] e o “episódico”. Não “agradará” ao narrador contar das cartas, para se livrar efetivamente delas. Ameaça que irá “destruí-las”. Celso foi intempestivo, aquando do primeiro e-mail de Marina[65], após aqueles vinte anos de alheamento dela… O livro Marina reproduz a reduzida “novela”[66] de singelas cartas e e-mails. Passado o texto a pente fino, no segundo e-mail de Celso, este redige uma desculpa: “Perdi tudo, não sei como. Preciso de um novo computador. Como se não bastassem formigas e cupins. Obstinado, insisto e recupero apenas uma parte”[67]. Numa convencional “não-narrativa”, coloco a tónica na congruência e na intencional, quando seja a “dissonância”[68] desarmante de “lirismos”. Alcançada a agressividade, a crítica mordaz, a sagacidade e o ardil… Frente ao quebra-cabeças, pede-se abertura (de espírito), quando se leia o “romance de ideias”, no pensamento do ser (em Parménides e Heidegger). Na dimensão emocional, a obra de resiliência traz-me a consciência da artificialidade da ficção. Cubro de culpas a protagonista Marina. Coloco logo a poção de amor viático, um mantimento para sustento num “líquido destino”[69]. Logo passa a parecer-me que “essa viagem nunca termina”[70], numa entusiástica volta no carrocel do mundo, num “eterno retorno”[71]. Essa segunda vez que é nomeado o eterno, dá-me esperança, ainda que Celso assuma: … “não quero este destino circular”. ~ E eu quero! Se o “nosso encontro não estava escrito [no destino] … Não houve um deus a decidir nosso destino, nem brilho de uma estrela promissora. Deixámos simplesmente de escrevê-lo [ao destino]”[72]. Escrevamos o que desejemos, então, por linhas tortas. Há ocasiões, em que um sonho se repete e elucida algo[73]… As produções estéticas de artistas foram os produtos de imaginações, ainda que acreditassem ser ajudados pelo diabo, por um santo ou pelo próprio sonho avassalador e as visões enigmáticas. Giuseppe Tartini (1692 - 1770), William Blake (1757 - 1827) ou o cavaleiro Adolf von Menzel (1815 - 1905) são exemplos elucidativos do pensamento mágico dominante, nos séculos XVIII e XIX. Há quase 100 anos, o psicanalista Carl Jung[74] escreveu o seguinte, com um sentido determinista do sonho: “uma experiência anómala, que não é compreendida permanece uma mera ocorrência; compreendida torna-se uma experiência [humana excecional] vivida”. Uma característica desse tipo de experiências únicas é serem inefáveis, mal descritas. Inefáveis ilações, na sombra que vira a luz? Posso recuar atrás, ao sonho e ao tempo de Píndaro[75]. O que alcançou aquele da Verdade, quando viveu entre 522 e 443 antes da nossa era? Com Píndaro, ficou assente que “[no humano] sonho é uma sombra”. Assim colocado, “sombra” opõe-se a brilho, a luz, quando a “verdade” seja ofuscada, esboroada na obscuridade. E na medida em que seja ausente um sentido puro para as palavras, damo-nos a alegorias, a metáforas, da “transparência” da palavra, da luz ao sábio recuo paradoxal. Possa o sonho ser “iluminação”, tal Marina, duma “beleza transitiva”[76], entre as luas cheias. Marina conforma aquilo[77], o deslocado pela sombra, quando fuja a juventude, na transitória impermanência. Que espelho da “verdade”? Logo na primeira configuração, se o par não foi (ou foi?) um “espelho inverso”[78], Marina chega a ser retratada no vidro fosco, na “transformação [dela] num espelho”[79]– “uma Gioconda cheia de segredos”, representada pelo impressionista Eliseu Visconti, em Gioventü. Indecidíveis formatos. Como abordar palavras guardadas num “poço” que, a ser “raso”[80], sempre igual e espalmado, lembra o “infinito” do “abismo (líquido)”[81], entre duas pessoas que “comunicam”[82]? 2 Analise textual de marina O método de analisar textos “Coerência” traduz a ideia, cunhada pelo psicoterapeuta Carl Rogers (1902 – 1987), em que o participante apresente um relato de experiência bem estruturada - lógica, a faceta cognitiva e interpretativa, uma significação de peso na experiência “arrumada”. Na narrativa literária, a noção de “coerência” coloca-se, no antigo Dicionário de teoria da narrativa[83]: “texto como unidade no processo comunicativo, resultante de intenções e estratégias comunicativas específicas, ele é também um texto semanticamente coerente... elementos recorrentes… não integralmente redundante… progressão de informação no interior de um texto … na ‘enciclopédia’ do recetor”[84]. Na nova literatura, Marina alude o “vórtice” do redemoinho amoroso de Celso e Marina, o forte movimento do “terramoto” bem rápido, cruzado com a empolgante sonoridade das bravas ondas. Marina retém uma imensa fluidez, em torno dum eixo fixado ao vórtice entre ambos. Sorvida a voragem sentimental no turbilhão do mar, noutra asserção a “vórtice” – um turbilhão, o fenómeno “incoerente” trespassa a vitalidade dos movimentos guerreiros de “homens”, nos tempos atuais. Onde encontrar uma “secreta harmonia”[85]? Em mulheres, no desaguisado com homens? “Sem que você soubesse, caminhamos lado a lado”[86]. Seremos bem menos coerentes do que se pensou, tanto mulheres quanto homens. Todos nós, humanos, somos sujeitos de analogias. Com o “corpo inelutável”[87] de Marina, que foi o “corpo em fuga” e se encontra ao lado do seu, Celso é já do outro lado. Seja que suba ele à Tocata e Fuga em ré menor, de Bach[88]? A inconsistência é presente na ausência de outrem. Outra mexida foi dada ao mundo amoroso, com as híbridas histórias-ficções, realidades e alternativas. Na alternativa ao modo de organização de “identidade do ‘eu’ estacionário”, sem fluidez de maior, teríamos a fixação eterna. Um risco pode ser nem encararmos a vida sujeita a contingências/acasos – o sem ganhar folgo, “… e, de repente… o sobressalto”. Em Marina, o leitor transcende o sabido (ontológico) e o instituído “romance”, o que não pressupõe que todos os planos sejam antecipadamente traçados. Não sabemos se Marina nos deixou. Ela foi a “glória de um destino”[89]? Um famigerado destino? Um Deus não decide do destino do par amoroso[90]. “Desconheço a direção [do futuro, indeterminado]. Soubesse de uma senha [mágica, um código … e o controlaria Celso. No fluxo permanente de mudança, já o passado e o devir são escapes [na aparente “fuga”], uma “disfunção” no presente [na fantasia inviável]. Porque não viver o aqui-e-agora? Amplificado o tempo, a “hipertrofia…”, é inviável a luta interior, “contra a qual luta o presente”[91]. “Deu-se por fim a glória de um destino. Porque, Marina, os relógios não morrem”[92]. “O vento segue os rumos do destino [ou da predisposição de sorte]”[93], tão mais improvável do que a precisão do tempo dos relógios. Abordagem narrativa na psicologia Numa aproximação literária, na psicologia narrativa, “as personagens são os elementos permanentes que sustentam o desenrolar do enredo”[94]. Nem as personagens fogem, nem restam fragmentadas, na “transparência da voz”[95]. Quem fale no esqueleto narrativo, pensa em episódios de um “guião” (scripts) identitário ou coletivo e, para a “narrativa de perda”, em Celso, congrega-se uma “organização de significado”, no que dê conta de mudanças dessa organização afetiva e psicológica, tão frequente e intensa de privação, podendo tornar-se duradoura ou reatar uma mera ocorrência súbita. O presente texto sobre Marina apresenta “fenómenos” talhados. Dito de outro modo, dá corpo a “ideias centrais, ao happening, ao incidente em torno do qual um conjunto de ações e de interações são dirigidas, com vista a serem reconhecidas, geridas e integradas, ou com as quais um conjunto de ações se relaciona”[96]. Numa forma de encontrar e descobrir ocorrências, farei um parêntesis para o que sabemos de um autor. Na sua suspensão de ideias feitas, como nos “lugares comuns”, nos “hiatos” e nos “silêncios”, o que “lemos” nos não ditos, sem um código? Para o efeito enredado, temos a ajuda de comparações constantes, numa “codificação aberta” do texto. Utilizam-se atributos/características para as palavras todas inteiras e para a variabilidade de significados não ficar de fora. E as “palavras (sem) envelope”, plenas de pregnância e fugidias, impõem afundar numa rigorosa análise linha-a-linha. Haverá ainda que conceber dimensões gerais, para “linhas-da-história”, duma ou doutra mini narrativa ou história, em Marina, o “tempo eterno” e o imparável “relógio dos ponteiros”; a vida e a morte; a terra e o mar, a nuvem e a pedra, o fogo do amor e as suas cinzas… Ao “questionar” os dados/textos, no aprofundamento que se justifica, efetuam-se as aludidas “comparações constantes entre fenómenos”. Da projeção, da narrativa e do episódio Em Marina, identificam-se esparsas narrativas míticas, nas guerras e nos amores. No amor, o “projetado” Orfeu[97] chega a parecer ser Celso, na sua ânsia de que Marina não morra …[98]. Celso poder-se-á sentir, noutra volta, um Marcus[99], chegando tarde, perdida Isolda, amante de Tristão[100]. “Pobre rei Marcos. Tão tarde descobriu o desamor”[101]. Marina não é escrito na primeira pessoa, autorreferenciada. Discriminada a faceta “projetiva” (ex.: uma pessoa não específica ou segunda pessoa, outros, alguém de quem se fala ou escreve): Marina ou Alice descobrem-se entre uma “Gioconda cheia de segredos”, uma Molly, o “verbo infinito”, na “voz” da cantora. Um eco repetido da voz dela, Marina. O narrador e Marina “nadam no monólogo de Molly”[102]. É preciso dizer que “não sei até que ponto lembro da tua voz [Marina]”[103]. Dito de outro modo, Celso mal se recorda do que Marina “disse/diz”, repetidamente. Falhou a voz e “deixou de dizer”[104]. Por seu lado, os episódios reais reportam-se às mínimas ações/interações, as quais podem ser relatos de experiências significativas, por vezes truncadas nas premissas, donde a maior ou menor coerência lógica ou consistência lógica. Quando as palavras chegam a mudar de estado, digamos, aluadas, tornam-se “líquidas, turvas, transparentes”[105]. Passam palavras estranhas pela fluência de selves (“múltiplos eus”, mentais e subjetivos), transformações identitárias. Apreender-se-ão coerências doutros implícitos, aspetos tácitos e inaudíveis da daqui e dali. Narrativa episódica A partir dos fenómenos esparsos, no grosso volume da vida, alcançamos registos de realizações pessoais e dos impedimentos, destinos e acasos, sortes e desaires. Foi a partir dessas constatações que distingui os fenómenos de meros episódios, nas narrativas/histórias, que lembram “todo o texto mostrar de forma holística as cognições e os processos emocionais do autor”[106]. O que se designou de plot (na língua inglesa) para um “episódio”, portanto, vai de encontro à narrativa, ao deparar-se o leitor com uma sequência de eventos ao longo do tempo (“sucessão”), para um “texto”[107], mesmo no mínimo “enredo”[108]. Na forma bem estruturada, visou-se o elemento sequencial e dinâmico, na literatura (na lógica, “gramática” ou “sintaxe”), considerado o episódio o “único esqueleto indispensável” e “menos variável”[109]. A variabilidade de Marina encontra-se nas intercaladas unidades de significado/segmentos de tópico, nas breves temáticas, as quais identificam a substituição de conteúdos, nos registos escritos por Celso. Acresce haver processos narrativos de vários modos evidenciados, no sentir, no experienciar e no pensar: a “descrição externa/concreta de acontecimentos de vida (atuais ou imaginados / passados, presentes ou futuros); a “descrição interna experiencial” (subjetiva), de episódios/narrativas, com a identificação verbal de “reações afetivas e/ou estados emocionais” (ex.: “triste”, “zangado”, “frustrada”, etc.); e a “análise reflexiva/interpretativa da descrição de eventos e/ou da experiência subjetiva, sendo os eventos presentes, passados ou futuros”[110]. No primeiro domínio narrativo, a ênfase no sentir alcança menor complexidade do que o experienciar (interno) e o refletir/pensar. Episódios mínimos Após o desenlace por afastamento, surge um episódio elaborado quase no final do livro. Possui a tónica na conduta de Celso, antes da adesão ao refletido, somente após a imersão interior num quadro e num cenário: Episódio - Título Promessa de calor na aflição dela: “Antes do amanhecer, sacudo meus ossos na areia. O mundo frio no vapor das ondas [do mar], enquanto o sol desponta, bem depois, nas rochas que me vedam o horizonte [limite]. Sem que você soubesse, caminhamos lado a lado. Não sei até que ponto lembro tua voz. Tudo que diz e deixa de dizer [adiante, eco repetido]. O modo, sobretudo a transparência da voz. Como o menino e o pássaro de Portinari. Te vejo, assim, ferida, a proteger-te. Promessa de calor. Será difícil atravessar a noite (p. 91). Registei outros episódios relatados, com mais de “vinte anos”, exceto o primeiro, possivelmente mais recente: (1) Aflições de Celso no mar[111]; (2) Celso e Marina nadaram no mar e, sentir-se-iam “alegres”, possivelmente ao saírem para a praia[112]; (3) “Mística do encontro” de dois “tímidos” (“dissemos algo escasso, imponderável ... o clima, as gentes, a história”)[113]; e (4) Aludidos passeios de bicicleta[114]. Na narrativa criam-se então replays de experiência, quando se atenda ao “eu” subjetivo frente ao quotidiano, a rituais e a “inéditos”, como nos encontros a dois. Somente o episódio de Celso sozinho e aflito no mar não correu bem. Será invencível o revolto mar e a doença de coração: “… ao dorso da onda fria, apressa o coração”[115]. E se é tremendo o risco de morte no mar bravo, não é impossível lutar a dois contra o tempestuoso. O que nem quer dizer deixar de ter mão para apagar aquela ou outra terrível imagem recordada. Afinal, qualquer um sonha com “você”[116]. Ora aquele primeiro “episódio de ‘sonho’”, mas pavoroso, é ilustrativo do mundo irreal, na forma “narrativa”[117]: “um belo dia quase me fui na onda[118] de seis metros. Eu me livrei a muito custo. Um sonho breve que o sal interrompeu. Vantagem provisória...” é acordar. Já o fustigou o voraz turbilhão real da ameaça e perigo no medo da morte dela, quando volte a passar ao mar… Deixar de ser, naquela praia – que “quase levou” Marina … e que é a mesma praia, que “seduz” o narrador[119]. O perigo de afogar-se na praia é real e irreal. Anotei ilações, decorrentes interpretações do texto, nas expressões do autor: (1) Risco frente ao mar[120]; (2) Juventude, em que se possa morrer com alegria[121]; (3) Encontros, fruto de “um milagre matemático… acaso e o seu mistério”[122]; e (4) A bicicleta que “morreu”[123]? A bicicleta? Um indicador do encontro com Marina: “Passeio de bicicleta. Voa o vestido azul. Essa viagem nunca termina”[124]. Noutra apropriação do contexto, o par poderia [ver] “baleias”, ao longe, “delicadas” [125], quando iam pedalando na “bicicleta” … Num contrassenso forjado na comparação, a bicicleta dele era um “cavalo”[126]? Antes dela “morrer”[127], melhor dito, “enferrujar”[128]. Na transição de pensamentos, afetos à morte: “Não há resumo para a última carta. Porque esta é uma carta definitiva. Porque se trata da morte de Marina”[129]. E adiante: “Imploro, Marina, que não morras antes de morrer”[130]. Ficaria ela sem maior sentido de vida? A viragem de alegre “surpresa” chegou a ser concebida, numa anterior “carta destroçada”, restos do que ficou dentro do “caderno escolar” e “cujos pedaços recomponho num mosaico bizantino”[131]: “Carta de amor (desesperado) que rasguei: “...pousa nos lábios uma estrela... secreta harmonia... deserto amanhecer... teu corpo inelutável... lagoa iluminada e seios úmidos... bosque sutil... pequena morte... jogo de espelhos e palavras... teu rosto desenhado no meu peito... à mesa um copo de absinto... duas palavras e voltamos a dormir... infame precipício...” (p. 86). Os procedimentos de análise de experiências são guias de leitura, no que prendem o elucidado “desespero”, o isolamento e o limitado prazer de Celso, quando a vida pudesse afigurar-se um pesado fardo, irado contra Marina, contra o violento mar, o amor eterno… A súmula de alegria - a “surpresa” … Num resumo analítico[132], estabelecem-se relações entre um fenómeno, no sentido da conceção de um episódio. Donde, uma ilustração de seis fatores envolvidos, no episódio Promessa de calor na aflição dela[133]: - Condições causais antecedentes, para a ocorrência reportada (antes do amanhecer, já levantado Celso da areia da praia onde dormiu, ao despontar do sol); - Fenómeno per se (“sacudidos ossos” ao sol, no limite do ser, entre eternas rochas, com a ausência de Marina); - Contexto (a praia junto ao mar ensoleirado); - Estratégias somente idealizadas de ação interativa (ser tomada Marina por indefesa a proteger, no que Celso escreve da sua possibilidade de “ajuda”); - Condições intervenientes (quadro “menino com pássaro” de Portinari…), - O que constrange ou facilita o incidente/fenómeno (recordações de encontros com Marina, num local partilhado e o fenómeno de imaginar um quadro) e - Condições consequentes (a dificuldade de continuar pela noite, sem a presença de Marina e a fixada promessa de calor humano). Nessa leitura duma abstração da experiência, um episódio pode ser idealmente estruturado, se bem que escapem as estratégias de ação interativa. Noutra margem encontram-se a filosofia (de Parménides e Heidegger), o jogo com textos míticos (Ájaz, Rei Marcus…). No “romance de ideias” de Marco Lucchesi, são vastos os domínios de conhecimento. Com o autor aprendi que, ao não aceder a “coisas em si”, tenho as coisas para mim e, talvez, nos apareçam amores e guerras, por prismas do entendimento e da sensibilidade. Dos fenómenos - as aparências - “O que sei?” No quotidiano, sei que vivemos de forma a criarmos conexões entre inauditos episódios, flashbacks, substituições de interesses/temáticas nem buscadas, redundâncias e omissões (como “lacunas de memória”), numa apreensão do que nisso assuma perene “relevância”. O núcleo duro, o “essencial”[134], segundo o autor? “Perdemos as palavras essenciais”[135]. Perdemos “baleias” naquele mar alto, enferrujaram-se as “bicicletas” e desapareceu o “corpo feminino em fuga”[136]. As cartas dizem muito “mais do que parece”[137]. 3 Do mundo poético “Tornei-me um leitor de Parmênides”[138] e de Heidegger No mundo eterno, Parménides colocou o “motor imóvel” do tempo, o “livre-arbítrio”[139], o “cálculo integral”[140] … “causa e concausa”[141] … “tudo em tudo”[142]… Bastará “puxarmos o fio…”[143]? Numa passagem paradoxal da breve (?) “novela”[144], logo vemos como “tudo muda” no (des)encontro, a par de “rádios, guerras, amores”[145]. Não há confissão, não há reparação, na “narrativa não projetiva”. As “narrativas” antes partem dela[146], nos “lugares comuns”[147], registados nas mensagens. O que procura despertar Celso? “A voz de quem morreu, não as histórias”[148]. Bastaria o alcance da superfície, na “voz” dela[149]… No início de Marina, nem se espera a finalização do encontro. Não é desejado o fim do amor. Um mal irremediável. Terá morrido? Obra de “criatividade” dissonante face a espectativas de cartas de amor, Marco Lucchesi coloca-nos a margem de manobra, uma deriva, mudado Celso em permanência e, nesse sentido, as suas posições emocionais básicas são sublevadas e revoltosas, sublimadas, substituídas. Existentia, como a explicitar? Quando numa página inicial, não numerada, o autor nomeia um filósofo italiano, Emanuele Severino (1929 - 2020), que escreveu sobre Martin Heidegger, que exploração de fenómenos “metafísicos”? Martin Heidegger[150], de que trata? Li algures que Heidegger se interessou por “atualidade, realidade, em oposição a possibilidade concebida como ideia”. Ser é a totalidade do que existe. “Aí onde está cada um de nós” - da sein, seria o lugar da nossa presença, duplicada pela sombra da subjetividade. Subjetividade é o vivido que torna algo maior, quanto dá à presença novas formas afetivo-cognitivas. Mundos universais musicais Tenho aquela “vontade” de mudar o passado[151] e de criar uma ideia prospetiva de florescimento. Do mito de amor a Marina, nem estranho virem três damas dar uma flauta a um príncipe, Tamino, que buscará a sua amada. A harmonia da música condensa o “universal”, atingidos géneros e variadas “vozes” trocadas, na “Flauta Mágica”, de Mozart (1756 – 1791). O poder unificador da música é uma metáfora para o príncipe neutralizar o mal. Outra das óperas que acompanham Celso? A ópera de Verdi (1813 – 1901)? Recuo, à procura de La forza del destino, de 1862, cantado por Galina Gorchakova. Será que soubemos escutar o ciciado na voz da atualidade e o que nem se abra ao previsível, no acaso, sem destino[152]? Vozes pessoais de visionários? Na aparência, as palavras são soltas numa poéticas. Meia página abala o leitor. Meia página, umas quantas linhas de “voz”[153] , “voz marinha”, vinda do mar, submarina. Marina. Na “poética da dissonância”, fica aberta a superfície ao “espaço descontínuo”, criado por Lucchesi para ela[154]. A inatingível voz dela? Não sabemos. Na aceção do termo “fragmento”, Heidegger sublinharia essa origem deslocada de textos únicos e incompletos, que deixam espaço por concretizar. Escritores como Lucchesi, coligindo fragmentos, escapam às “correntes literárias”, “movimentos identitários” e “evidências” repetidas. Um significado de recusa de continuidade no vestígio escrito, fragmentado, foi adquirido no mar, que não é terra firme. Todavia, com “intencionalidade”[155] na voz, “nunca poderemos deixar o mundo, o que nunca deixámos”[156], o mundo terreno. Numa particular fenomenologia[157], poder-se-á conceber a “suspensão de julgá-lo”. Como não julgar o mundo do pensamento oblíquo, da metafísica passada? Ficando pela rama, na área concreta, terrena (não marítima, à beira mar, o que “sobrenada” ...). No que importa, não estamos nós fora de água? É de todo difícil alcançar maneira de arrancar o “pensamento de superfície”, também a superfície da página de Marina encante, pela superfície que cobre os reflexos incessantes, os jogos de reflexos, como ilusões e evasões, que surgem e desaparecem. Se não for atingido o que aparece antes do fundo das letras, ficamos aquém de imergir: foi muito antes que Parménides e Heidegger viveram. É preciso dizer que a superfície não se confunde com a aparência - a realidade energética, a dança terreste, da vida dançante[158]. A máscara de Marina já arrasta a ilusão do que aflora (a superfície) – a “transparência da voz”[159]. Esconde-se ela algures, no “re-dobrar” do seu ser[160]. A sua aparência causar-me-ia a diligência em “lê-la” a preceito. A voltar a Parménides e Heidegger, a profundidade[161] do livro dá antes a explorar o ser e as coisas[162], ao invés da superfície (mas com a superfície), a sua luminosidade. Quando a metáfora da luz (do dia, do Sol, da Lua promissora do brilho dos olhos verdes…) não encontra um reino perdido que persiga o ser, quantas ideias ficam subterradas e obscuras ao leitor? Foi a partir daquele ilusório mundo de reflexos (a superfície), que alcancei a incerta profundidade. Será o outro mundo (“marinho”) contrastado ao ilusório da realidade e ainda aquele outro mundo perdura, mutável e instável, matizado de cor intensa e de brilho ténue de águas passadas. Quanto ao retorno à superfície, ao aparecer, no emergir de novo, volta a agitação do mar emocional, que se ressente, no que permanece do eterno esvaziamento. Ficou um poço vazio daquele outro momento de amor ou do que dele reste nas rochas imutáveis. “Tenho por ela um profundo afeto. Lembro-me de seu sorriso, ao piano”[163]. Quando “aparecer é um compromisso metafísico”? A “metafísica” foi além de physis. Cientistas designam a metafísica de “especulação” de ideias, tantas vezes incertas, com que se debatam. O que se entende por “real” é, nesse segundo sentido, o que ultrapassa a “realidade” que conhecemos por perceção (inter)subjetiva. O real é um referencial profundo[164]e infinito; a realidade é o que conhecemos ou julgamos conhecer. Numa mediação poética para a metafísica, “aparecer” situa a presença original no mundo do ser, sendo que o mundo adote a incerteza na errância (e na morada no novo mundo). ~ Quanto “aparecer” vive acima da superfície e da aparência das coisas, é o ser que reflete um inóspito caminho de linguagem reflexiva, aproximativa e assintótica[165]. No ato de escrever, Marco Lucchesi delineou-me a possibilidade de especulação, a liberdade crítica e a ironia, abertas portas à metafísica fenomenológica. O existir em processo trouxera-me antes outros saberes e, nos espaços do mundo daqui, foi indicada a deslocação para a saída de “ex-” (em “existir”). Entretanto, aprendi que existir alcança o sentido de “pôr-se de pé”, de acordo com a etimologia. Num apelo a erguer-se (pondo-se de pé), já o próprio ser permanece em lugar recôndito, na condição de vir a aliar o desvelamento do ente – objeto, coisa, um ser, Marina... Outros “reivindicam” para si o “estar-aí” (da-sein), dito que todos “querem, buscam, sonham com você” [Marina], um corpo no que não “fuja”[166], na errância noturna. Consequência da fuga da luz? Será ela dada a “despertar” outra, a emergente Marina de Celso? Encontra-se ela ausente, no que seria de voltar a abordar a limpidez, a superfície, a “transparência”[167] da constelação “prometida” de dois seres. Uma forma de profundidade incompleta. Numa lúcida forma de escrita, patamar de sonho lúcido, Celso encontra-se em guarda. O narrador não deseja “despertar [vidas escritas]” … Talvez busque tão somente a “voz” dela, naquele eco, em que ressoa a limpidez, alcançará outra “voz”. A quem dar “voz”? A Molly, no seu solilóquio, na primeira pessoa[168]. Molly, uma inigualável cantora de ópera; Marina, de que nem sabe Celso se se lembra… da voz, dada à imagem fugidia na melodia, ao piano[169]. O que passou não se encravou. No ser em mudança, serão cristalizadas mínimas recordações, rareando “o caminho da verdade”[170], sem saída (uma aporia) tantas vezes paradoxal. Guerras dos mundos de ideias As ideias “verdadeiras” e as guerras de “opiniões” não se consolidam, nas correntes do paradoxo. Conjugam batalhas sem fim: Parménides e Zenão vs. Platão; Nicolau de Cusa vs. os que não cooperavam… Numa oposição ao seu tempo, questão cerrada e a descoberto, foi a permanência e a transformação. Parménides reteve a pura permanência, unilateral. Exigente na “ponderação”, Platão (428/427 – 348/347 a.C.) dedicou-lhe um diálogo inteiro - Parménides, em que Sócrates levou uma revisão verbal dum oponente, Zenão de Eleia (século V a.C.), para o efeito de inquirir o sentido do Uno, cujas “absurdas consequências seguem (ou não seguem?) em contradição com a referida doutrina”[171]. E se o ser é múltiplo? “Parménides”, um arauto da “revolução”? Esse é um ponto de um “resumo” do livro. Sendo que o germe da destruição estivesse plantado[172], que revisões foram geradas, a propósito das suas ideias? O que queriam mostrar os eleatas, com Zenão adiante das forças, o arauto da geometria e dos estranhos números, o infinito e o zero? Uma revolução, no conceito de tempo: fluxo constante e deixa de haver presente? O paradoxo de Zenão assinala o contrário à opinião recebida e comum, para o tempo virar uma sequência de mínimos momentos separados, donde vivermos o presente e a mudança ser ilusão. Quanto ao espaço? Sendo uno, não dá condições a haver “lugar” e “aqui”. No espaço fragmentado só há “aqui”, ausente o movimento. A revolução tem sentido no paradoxo, forjadas inesperadas dissensões. “Mudam [os tempos e] as guerras”[173]. No século XV, novo sobressalto. Gerador de ódios por contemporâneos, Nicolau de Cusa (1401 – 1464) alarmou muitos, pelo acento na compatibilidade entre extremos. Encarou a conjetura de “opostos”[174], dicotomizado o mundo por valores antagónicos, quando se creia num ponto de vista considerado válido. Nova batalha. Era Napoleónica, em França e na Europa, no ano VIII (ou, no calendário vigente, datado a 9 de novembro de 1799). Contrastaram adesões e oposições a Napoleão, herói e anti-herói, arrebatado o poder no golpe “18 do Brumário”[175]. As mudanças foram inquestionáveis, com a chefia e as saradas guerras. A guerra entre Marina e Celso não foi uma constante, também não persistiu. No foco da maior peleja, a distância a Marina[176] antecedeu outra circunstância: o entendimento de “como [Celso] se vê”[177]. Num “sinal de transição, de deslocamento”[178], veio de Celso a afirmação séria, numa trégua consigo mesmo: “já não habito na distância”[179]. Anteriormente, despedir-se-ia dela, como um Catulo[180], numa linguagem coloquial, sem intensidade e sem profundidade maior… Poderia estar a recuperar o “habitar”, junto dela. Existirem compatibilizados, nas suas oposições, requer o significado: “habitar”. Talvez se encontre algures, na linguagem. Para “morar”, fica bem longínqua a raiz etimológica, no sânscrito - vatami -, cujo termo alemão é wesen. Dir-se-ia que Celso possa já “estar-aí” (da-sein)[181]. No seu lugar - aí -, à fluência não lhe faltará diferença. Como expor uma diferença melhor do que com o ruído feito pelas diferenças da fala e do canto de Celso e Marina? Revejo a aliança, a separação, o que nem quer significar uma divisão de opostos. Há uma distinção nas “vozes”, para um sistema caótico, em várias escalas de linguagens. A organização de mundos No século XXI, em 2023, há ordem para parar e avançar no terreno do ser. “Há mais de dois milénios…”. Heidegger[182] introduziu essa conjetura perdurante[183], nas primeiras palavras de Ser e Tempo. Fora há muito “esquecido” o que surgira em Parménides, uma abstração – Poema – “onde se encontra o ser e o ente”? Ente pode ser objeto, coisa, ser … E o ser é o mais próximo do ser humano, sem que seja “um Deus ou um fundamento do mundo”[184]. Não existe um ente sem um ser. Acresce perguntar: “o que significa pensar?”[185]. Pensa-se em alguém, um ser, enquanto as guerras matam pessoas. Desde que a nossa imaginação pejou o mundo de deuses, entre ninfas, dragões ou quimeras, foi feita a equação, pelo menos: esquecido o humano. Não neutro, mas esclarecido, Heidegger rebelou-se contra ter sido minada essa incógnita do mundo – o ser, o guardião da questão[186]. Colocado o tão saliente à parte (o ser) e juntas as palavras a ideais, “ordenaram-se” melhor as coisas. Nessa incessante transformação, contra as utopias, foram cometidas “supressões” de coisas, acrescentos de quimeras, os “suplementos”, esquecidas possíveis “deformações”[187]. Aguardado o alvorecer da modernidade líquida, após a linha humanista dos anos sessenta do século passado, ainda seria antecipado o outro tempo do ser frágil, das diferenças e vulnerabilidades acrescidas. Vemos superada a razão não linear, o princípio da não-contradição[188], a alinhar o excluído. Arrastamos até mesmo para a paz a “coincidência de opostos”[189]. No reiterado pensamento ímpar de Lucchesi, um visionário de saberes ontológicos, preside o ser humano que é pensado, dito que ser e não ser não sejam iguais. Os seus conhecimentos são buscados entre um que é muitos[190]: ser e não ser e “ser de todo o ser”, na expressão de Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600). Ruínas e salvação Um genial revolucionário, Giordano Bruno, foi o que retomara o ser, em On the infinite universe and worlds (“Sobre o infinito, o universo e os mundos”). Recordado num post scriptum[191], o opositor, Bruno, foi morto. Para mais escrevera “A ceia das cinzas”[192], em gritante contraste com o fogo da paixão. Deu-se ao desfecho inolvidável, à morte horrenda, após outra intrincada conjetura resistente à “ignorância” por dogmatismo e ceticismo do tempo. Bem além e aquém do “estar aí“, em substancial presença, o que resiste à fixação ao lugar encontra-se na imaginação, em múltiplas superfícies, no não linear, cujas diversas escalas se coloca Marina. Celso vive numa efetiva transição temporal, quando “o agora é um índice [indicador] da eternidade”[193]. Quando ainda se creia na “eternidade do mundo”[194], uma exceção. Enquanto nos insurgimos, Marina poderia “fixá-lo” ao passado em comum[195]. Na “correspondência” truncada, o narrador assumirá a perspetiva de “crer na eternidade do ser. Mundo sem fim e sem Deus. Essa é a ideia que me salva”[196]. Ademais, imaginar a “eternidade” não diz que não se “aclare a contingência” [197], o acaso, por contemplação intuitiva[198] e sensível. No perpétuo salto entre histos, reparo no ocaso do relacionamento, na paragem e esgotamento dum percurso: “[As cartas de Marina, “ibérica prudência”?] Terminam com abraço afetuoso, promessas impagáveis e mil beijos de Catulo. Cartas inúteis e vazias! Abracem do não ser a eternidade!!”[199]. Creio no indecidível. Não cumpriremos todas as “promessas”, as coisas voltarão a ser as mesmas nas guerras e nos amores à beira mar: o “vestido azul”, a “pedra”, os “passeios” e as “bicicletas”[200]. Recordações e ilusões para “todas as cartas em princípio circular”[201]. “Quem sabe se…”[202], se “tudo se passa aquém da superfície”[203]? A verdade - domínio duplicado da aparência - agarra o “desvendamento”[204]. Da substância/essência não temos algo, além da aparência. E ainda que deixássemos há muito de atingir “as coisas em si”, vivemos demasiado no escuro em volta. Quanto muito, realizemos nova viragem às partes, quando “o passado é órfão do presente [índice de eternidade]”[205], no mundo compartimentado. Vivemos num “tempo inabordável”[206]. De forma paradoxal, deixámos o “museu”[207] e as “espécies” à solta, que diminuem com seres impreparados. Do ser e tempo[208] à nova hermenêutica, reatada “presença”, o que “aparece” no “compromisso metafísico” com o ser[209]? Numa filosofia para o século XX, o existencialismo ainda contou para O ser e o nada[210], no que importou o significado, o valor e o propósito da vida. Na época, avançado distanciamento/estranheza[211] face ao “teatro de sentimentos”. Na Europa, tanto “narrativa”, quanto “ficção” deram lugar ao “novo romance”[212], uma mistura de atores sociais e coletivos, de géneros misturados, uma “polifonia”[213]. A psicologia da vontade e a narrativa Na psicologia então emergente, William James[214] discriminara a “vontade de acreditar” do que queremos fazer “desacreditar” - o que seja convencionado para a época ou para a “troca” correspondida de “cartas” a e-mails, o que escape à explicação e/ou à compreensão[215]. Narrativa, na psicologia pós-racionalista, congregou a ideia de que “contadores de histórias” seriam os que estariam incrustados ao amor e ao sofrimento. Como sublinhado, nas teorias semânticas, havia outras “vozes” e “polifonias”, quando um discurso se enuncie. Fora enunciado. Ademais as (re)autorias e sensibilidades eram provenientes doutros domínios de saber, tomadas por empréstimo (nas teorias feministas, na narratologia, nas ciências sociais e humanas…). As temáticas ganharam sentidos segundos, o significado de ridículo e a ironia alcançou outra voz crítica, ainda com o romance de ideias. Com Laurence Stern[216] é possível “justificar” uns “resumos” dum Celso[217]. Os condensados foram ordenados, entre “ideias confusas”[218] dum amor límpido. Num modelo dos mundos emocionais e do “eu em processo”, as “organizações de significado pessoal” (OSP) remeteram, em fim de século, a "metáforas básicas da descrição do real”. Traduziram apreensões dinâmicas para “estrutura da personalidade” e consumaram “significados”, para formas de dar sentido à vida. O modelo OSP, de Vittorio Guidano Vittorio Guidano foi um psicoterapeuta romano, que viu a criatividade como possibilidade de transitarmos duma para outra organização de “significado pessoal”, da falta e perda à reorganização noutra emoção, talvez pelo receio da distanciação. Correu na margem de entendimentos do corpo e da culpa. Concebeu uma epistemologia, com Leslie Greenberg, Humberto Maturana, Michael Mahoney e Óscar Gonçalves. Numa visão emocional integradora, a faceta de experienciar a vida (I, em inglês; o nível de “eu experiencial”) nem se opôs mais a “significar” a experiência (a narrativa da experiência). Pode ser dado o exemplo buscado no que conheci em Guidano e num seu amigo, Leslie Greenberg, de saúde mental. Quando com eles estudei, partiram dde G. H. Mead[219], entre muitos outros. No sul africano Leslie Greenberg[220] senti a primazia conferida a existir, tão visceral, no âmago da experiência imediata, o "eu". Frente a frente ao vivido subjetivo, Vittorio Guidano[221] colocava-se noutro plano de conhecimento: o “mim reflexivo” (me, em inglês). Contrastava na relação à energia de Greenberg, uma “presença” por inteiro, uma conexão no momento, em níveis diversos (físico, emocional, cognitivo e espiritual), ou seja, havia uma consciência da plena experiência corporal e emocional, vontade de escuta ativa, busca de compreensão. Modelos para fazer mundo Na distância cavada, lemos que “a gota do mar é pequena, quando o tempo de ausência seja longo.” A memória nem se esvai na comparação e compreendido desgaste. O “piano – sobrenada”[222] … – voga à tona de água, assim sendo a memória[223], num “abismo líquido”[224]. Poderia ser a voz “atemporal”[225], inesquecível, aquela voz entretanto quebrada de Marina? Tendo lá permanecido uma presença, não se cravou… No incomensurável passar dos anos, quais “cardumes de palavras”[226], arrastaram “o vazio”[227]. A eternidade deixou de ser. Morreu um mundo terreno junto do mar. O eco imaginário de Marina, na ausência quedou-se. Existem as “rochas” [que] continuam imutáveis[228], fustigadas por ventos e marés. Do revolto mar à mata-bioma e às pedras encalhadas, sobressai o abandono, nas “correntes indomáveis”[229]. Celso, continente/recetáculo, sem mãos. Haja o que desapareça e volte com a “correnteza”[230]. Sem alcance do “mundo submarino”[231], as águas não brilham. Somente na “superfície” são “transparentes” [232] águas, para um mundo que foi desarticulado e fragmentado em partes. Como referido, no uno, teríamos um mundo total e eterno. Numa perspetiva particular, um amigo meu acentuou a condição física, metafórica e metafísica (“especulativa”) do ser. Sem ler Marina, António Maurício enfatizou o transitório – o humano para “ondas do mar” (o seu mundo parcial). Na expressão oral, coloquei as suas palavras de permeio, com parênteses retos, para elucidar o refletido do infinito: Em resumo, e metaforicamente, parece-me que [esse processo humano, dinâmico instável] tem semelhanças com o que acontece às ondas do mar[233] (…) configurações/formas locais e transitórias desse mar/suporte e alimento de todas as outras formas/configurações potencialmente possíveis do mesmo. Que podem nascer, crescer, viver/existir, reproduzir-se e morrer/deixar de ser/existir, porque são fenómenos/seres transitórios. (…) Mas não é por isso [por haver formas locais e transitórias de mar], que o mar/vácuo quântico/TAO/[234]o sem nome/... (pressuposto background/suporte/meio/ e fim de tudo o que é possível, e por isso intemporal, Total, global, cognoscível e/ou incognoscível), sem ser… seja redutível a qualquer aspeto antropomórfico[235] .... mas contendo-os... O meu amigo tem uma conceção física e de recipiente – o “vaso vazio”, o inamovível Uno[236]. Nessa substância, Maurício faz conter os mundos parciais contrastantes. Na “leitura desviante”, colocamos “entrelinhas”[237]. A “colocar parêntesis” no que se saiba ou julgue saber, houve um retorno ao mundo, no abalo cultural da consciência. Na aproximação a coisas[238], podemos condensar “cardumes de palavras”[239], no que sobreviveu unido, o par que se afastou: As “cartas deitam iodo [como o mar] e sal… [como lágrimas] [240]… novo sal”[241] Crescem as ondas que me arrastam para dentro [daquele mundo submerso]. Põe-se Celso “a nadar“[242]. [No mar] Haveria “… a correnteza“… e entretanto “as ondas sobem cada vez mais altas… Já não encontro salva-vidas. [Celso dirigindo-se a Marina, pede-lhe uma vez:] Nademos juntos”[243]… No relacionamento, terá havido … um “naufrágio e tempestade”[244]. Até no “perigo de [Celso] afogar-se na praia”[245]. Ergue-se, subleva-se ele, humano, que “não tem guelras nem escamas”[246] … No salva-vidas da terrena praia, onde não “para de chover” … “mal sei nadar em tanto azul… [Celso] Andava a saltar “nas rochas, acima do cinturão das algas”, mas mergulhara no mar, “quando é escassa a correnteza”[247]. “Caminho sobre a chuva, ondas revoltas [no mar], branca espuma”[248] … “nadar [para] tão longe” …[249]. Na deriva, as “leituras desviantes” de uma temática[250], colocam vários caminhos de leitura. Não fosse o vazio deixado de palavras… [Sempre permanecem] “As pedras [que] rugem no bater das ondas”[251] [instáveis]. [Muda o significado de] “Praia - Cadeia alimentar, baleias, pescadores”[252] … “Sinto no meu corpo a maresia [que muda também, após a vazante, de cheiro intenso do mar] e assim transformo o sal em novo sal”[253] [Em casa] O “relógio de areia” de Celso, quando se encontrava com Marina, no passado, “ficava na estante” … [porque o tempo era subjetivo]. “Um belo dia [a ampulheta] quebrou-se” … “Vinte anos” separaram [Celso e Marina] … quantos “grãos” de areia [na ampulheta] são necessário” para tanto tempo passado?[254] “… ao dorso da onda fria, apressa o coração”[255], sendo que o sal eliminado, baixe a pressão[256] [arterial] e “transformo o sal em novo sal”[257]. Nova vida. As palavras vão e vêm, na modernidade líquida. A tornarem-se as palavras “úmidas”, é o sinal de sofrimento no “sal” e na “lágrima” salgada. Qual garrafa que se joga ao mar? Flutuaram ambos num domínio intemporal, deram-se a palavras inevitavelmente “fartas de imprecisão, saudosas da beleza”[258]. E que “cartas” se virão a “salvar” do mar do esquecimento, com agrestes “ventos do Atlântico”? Na insana movimentação vital, Celso “decide [a dado momento] atravessar a maresia”[259] e quedou-se o mar de distância entre si e Marina[260], ao primeiro e-mail dela, seguido-das imagens coloridas, palavras dela. Marina aparecer-lhe-ia na imaginação dovbelo solilóquio de Molly Bloom[261], um encantatório eco. É dele o repente, quando não queira voltar ao passado: “Não me afasto deste mundo de areia… Passam navios à distância”[262]. Em terra firme, Celso, não sai de si mesmo. No final do livro, arredio, Celso dará conta do inesquecível mau tempo, em que se sentira “naufrago”, abraçado ao não-lugar[263]: “Passada a tempestade, me afogo nos teus olhos [verdes e do mar]”[264], olhos de luz fina e penetrante. Do repetido reparo no olhar de lince, o que ficamos cientes do passado na marinha de salinas, na praia e noutras paragens? A lembrança foi ter à imagem da “jovem” Lívia, sua prima e amiga de Marina… [Lívia] “deu-se às ondas”[265]. Deixou de ser. Condenado, Marcus, perdeu alguém; Celso perdeu Marina, não fossem as “fugas” intempestivas. Anunciado casamento ou “condenação”, na escuta de Grande Missa em Dó Menor, K 427[266], de Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791), o significado diverge, para o cineasta Robert Bresson[267]. A perda não justifica uma causa, que seja culpa de falta de pontualidade dela ou o atraso dele. Preso ao antecipado mito: “Cheguei tarde como o Rei Marcus”[268], já que a bela Isolda amava Tristão e vogariam num barco do amor à beira mar[269]. No enlevo por Isolda, Celso assumia encontrar-se na condição do rei[270]. Outro fora a lição de Orfeu[271], que olhou para trás… “Não se ergueu” (no existir). E como a palavra concretiza o pensamento (quando o alcance), em inumeráveis mundos atingimos a parte num ou noutro fator – o mar subterrâneo, o envelope na palavra, uma sinédoque. A crer na memória “líquida”, mais uma vez, em imaginação de Marina[272], Celso “lembrou-a” de que já teriam pisado as pedras até à onda, ao imenso mar[273] Quando o a sair último apaga a luz Na ausência de fundamentos externos e de princípios internos, temos o reino perdido do ser. No mundo abandonado, aliado no estranhamento, é o esquecimento (“o fundador”) uma implicação do recuo do ser[274]. Como constatado, em Heidegger[275], surgiu o ser, um dos seus dois temas constantes. Como ser nem seja fundamento, nem seja princípio, incorreria na dobra original “ser-ente”[276]. Donde, a possibilidade de “re-dobra” do ser em Marina. Para o incauto efeito, somente desviando-se um autor, poderá recuar o ser, em que as hierarquias da existência passam a ser independentes (ser e ente), deixando de fazer sentido o que veio primeiro. Nenhum deus alguma vez pode unir o disperso, nos tempos que correm. Em Heidegger (1986 [1982]), para quê escrever “Porquê poetas”. Andaria o filósofo nos caminhos da floresta obscura, no que recuaria e o conduziu a Hölderlin (1770 — 1843): “E porquê poetas em tempos atribulados?[277]” Além da destroçada condição de “autor-idade”, o autor deslocou-se à poesia de vestígios inacessíveis. Marco Lucchesi pode ter atendido ao segundo tema de Heidegger, quando foque o eterno, em Parménides[278]. Visado fundamento do enigmático “pensamento”: leu as primeiras descobertas nos fragmentos ou vestígios escritos. De Marina, Lucchesi arrasta já o leitor às primeiras interrogações, como nos ousados fragmentos pré-socráticos incompletos, desbravados e arredios a um ponto, excêntrico a linhagens ou a “influências”. Ocorre pensar noutro ângulo de visão criativa, sem articulação entre o próximo e o longínquo, alcançado um brilho lateral, que perpassa na contemporaneidade. Qual será o derradeiro lugar em que pulse o pensar? – Pergunte-se. Em Poema, de Parménides, fragmento de conceitos acutilantes. Possuímos além da “dobra” constitutiva do ser (nos limites entre ser e ente), a prerrogativa de interrogar, de hesitar, de duvidar e de afirmar. Em que mundos desaparece e reaparece a consciência? Resposta: Nos dias que se sucedem a noites, a alternância revela-se à consciência, no sonho e na realidade percetiva. Da diferença entre mundos, Marina, o que perdura na ausência? Memórias de palavras “recorrentes: o nada, a Morte, abismos e fantasmas”[279]. Perdura o “sonho” no eterno “menino”[280]. Em Marina, o coprotagonista Celso, um retirado fazedor de “não histórias”, afigura-se retirado, o que não significa derrotado. Noutra asserção crítica, quando não se bata em retirada, poderão ser dados saltos na compreensão duma obra de múltiplas leituras. Foi no Prefácio à segunda edição de Crítica da razão pura, que Kant alertou para o pensamento, cujos “saltos temerários” nem seriam escusados. Poder-se-ia ir mais longe, no arriscando, nas nossas frágeis sociedades, a ponto de nem ser dito o que se pense, nem ousar-se o criticar. [1] Lucchesi, Marco. Marina. Santo André (SP): Rua do Sabão, 2023, p. 89. Quanto à “romaria de formigas” (p. 78), a ser desfeita, “vivo em guerra contra os cupins…” (p. 23). “Só as cartas ficaram intactas. Desprezadas até pelos cupins” (p. 24). “Pobres cartas! Ai de nós! Indigestão de todos os cupins” (p. 28). Afinal, outra maçada, será o velho computador perder cartas, “perder tudo” (p. 89). [2] A crença no acesso à profundidade teve os seus dias melhores, quando se acreditou numa via única, uma dimensão da base ao topo, entretanto barrados os códigos e a exatidão, buscada na modernidade. [3] Marina, p. 73. [4] Marina, p. 56: Marina possui uma “beleza transitiva”. Marina, p. 60: “Sou trilho morto, intransitivo [que não chega a ela]. Se não te alcanço não me basto”. Marina, p. 71: o caráter transitivo, sendo o que muda, aproximou-se de “sinal de transição, deslocamento”. [5] Marina, p. 27. [6] Marina, p. 76. [7] Marina, p. 76. [8] Marina, p. 15. [9] Marina, p. 13. [10] Marina, p. 87. [11] Marina, p. 13, p. 17. [12] Marina, p. 67. [13] Marina, p. 85. [14] Marina, p. 85. [15] Marina, p. 91. [16] Marina, p. 55. [17] Marina, p. 87. [18] Marina, p. 54: “Distância na distância da distância. Porque o demónio é filho do silêncio. António Vieira dixit”. O silêncio marca a distância tão grande entre ambos, gerador do mal. Mas Celso foi um menino com “fome da distância” (p. 63). Um dia, deixou de “habitar na distância… distância que se perde” (pp. 97-98). [19] Marina, p. 86. [20] Marina, p. 72. [21] Marina, p. 69. [22] Marina, p. 84. [23] Marina, p. 33. [24] Na alusão do autor, a xilogravura de 1507, de Hans Schäufelein the Elder? Um idoso, “o mais velho” (the elder). Ou “Cristo diante de Anás, do espelho da paixão de Nosso Senhor Jesus Cristo”, também de 1507? [25] Marina, p. 22. Parménides é também referido na p. 35 e na p. 98. [26] Marina, p. 49). Ulisses representa o que enfrentou perigos e riscos do mar, explorando o mundo. Escritores foram “navegadores”, por caminhos sem guia e sem antecipação, como James Joyce (1882 – 1941). [27] Marina, p. 49. [28] Marina, p. 71. Celso efetua ainda um recuo, quando “uma janela abre-se ao vento” e se desfaz o enlevo com Marina. Concretamente, recuo terá o sentido militar, na guerra. [29] Marina, pp. 34-34. [30] O vaso é um recetáculo, um contentor para as coisas sensíveis, no Timeu de Platão, datado de 360 a.C. Identifica a chora, no que acolhe as coisas em devir. [31] Marina, p. 89. [32] Marina, p. 77. Nas folhas ímpares, são dados a ler “resumos”, como o da página 27: “Sobre a morte das cigarras e o motor imóvel. As garras do leão. Livre-arbítrio, borboleta e tempestade. Software e cálculo integral. Termina com um verso de Mallarmé.” Geralmente, os “resumos” são ampliados em textos de duas páginas. [33] Marina, p. 81. [34] Marina, p. 43. [35] Marina, p. 89. [36] Marina, p. 78. [37] Marina, p. 67, post scriptum: “Leitor de pássaros, sou como um áugure romano a decifrar tua mensagem”. Na Roma antiga, desde o século VIII a.C., os sacerdotes tornar-se-iam augures, tirando presságios, partindo dos voos, do canto e das entranhas de pássaros, entre outras aves. [38] Marina, p. 89. [39] Marina, p. 87. [40] Marina, post scriptum, p. 98. [41] Marina, p. 50. Na perspetiva computacional, disse-me um informático, a diferença é nítida entre significado e semântica: “fornece-se uma semântica para um argumento (ou seja lá o que for), quando se fornece um método de traduzir os símbolos, que contém para qualquer coisa que tenha significado: dar uma semântica para uma linguagem pressupõe, ou envolve, uma Teoria do Significado. Contrasta com a sintaxe, que é apenas a gramática formal do sistema, que determina que os símbolos estão corretamente juntos ou não. Pode assim seguir-se uma sintaxe do sistema sem ter a mínima ideia da sua semântica”. [42] Marina, p. 43. [43] Marina, p. 18. Na Ilíada, poema homérico, salienta-se o belo e valente Ájax, com que lutou Heitor, sem vencedor ou vencido. [44] Marina, p. 53. [45] Marina, p. 35. [46] Marina, p. 36. [47] Marina, p. 83. [48] Marina, p. 39. [49] Marina, p. 79. [50] Marina, p. 86. [51] Marina, p. 49. [52] Marina, p. 18. A Guerra Fria, tensão geopolítica, no final da Segunda Guerra Mundial (1945), abrangeu Os Estados Unidos da América e a União das Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas (URSS), desde a Presidência de Truman, em 1947, tendo fim na dissolução da URSS. [53] Marina, p. 31. [54] Marina, p. 35. [55] Quando a alegoria apresenta dois significados, literal e figurado, as palavras, cujo significado seja literal, devem dar lugar ao significado alegórico (figurado). [56] Por extensão, ao mundo subaquático, Marina, p. 50: “… o abismo líquido”. Marina, p. 37: “um líquido destino terra adentro. Marina, p. 79: “Presumo que se lembre (ó, líquida memória!) da onda que das pedras nos levou ao mar.” [57] Imagino até mesmo O mundo à minha procura, de Ruben A, um relato autobiográfico em que o escritor dá conta da vida e da escola, que “esquece os livros”. [58] Marina, p. 49. [59] Marina, p.54. [60] Marina, p. 65. [61] Marina, p. 65. [62] Marina, p. 13. [63] Marina, p. 27, p. 29. Na mesma página 29: “de dez mil dias” …, após o “terremoto” - “uma “falha sísmica”. [64] Castro, Ruy. A vida por escrito: ciência e arte da biografia. Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2023., p. 16. A “literatice” passa pela ideia de um biógrafo atravessar a pessoa-personagem, para dela extrair o que não saiba de si mesma nos pormenores, para o efeito de conceção de episódios “inesquecíveis”. [65] Marina, p. 16. [66] Marina, p. 13. [67] Marina, p. 89. [68] Marina, p. 13. [69] Marina, p. 37. [70] O interminável percurso, é destacado na página 93. O texto continua com a presença do tempo, para “Zenão de Eleia: Aquiles corre com a tartaruga”, um paradoxo da verdade de Parménides, numa demonstração “por absurdo”. [71] Marina, p. 16. [72] Marina, p. 54. [73] Durante uma noite, após ter querido escrever insistentemente uma sonata, o compositor italiano Giuseppe Tartini compô-la a dormir e a sonhar. Intitulada O Trilo do Diabo, imaginou que o próprio maligno lhe apareceu em pessoa para tocar violino e o “ajudar”. Ele não era capaz de terminar a obra musical, mas quando acordou conseguiu acabá-la com a única parte da música de que se lembrava. [74] Jung, Carl. (1954 [1951], p. 123) [75] Marina, p. 73. [76] Marina, p. 56. [77] Marina, pp. 55-56: “A jovem [caveira sem carne] cedeu sua beleza ao brinquedo”, tratando-se de morta, que na urna funerária tinha a sua boneca de marfim, segundo Marco Lucchesi, preservada do Tempo dos antoninos, na Roma antiga, pelo autor. Portanto, aquilo, demarca a figura histórica, no achado brinquedo, que a acompanhou na urna. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crepereia_Tryphaena [78] Marina, p. 56. O “espelho inverso”, do aveso, passa o par a dois contrários ou simetricamente opostos. [79] Marina, p. 69. Quem diga a transformação dela alude à sua representação no quadro de outra. [80] Um poço é um recetáculo, a chora, em Platão. Um continente retém um conteúdo, as ideias sensíveis. [81] Marina, p. 50. [82] Marina, p. 96. Nessa página, é salientada a comunicação, quando gatos ronronam e cães latem. [83] Reis, Carlos, & Lopes, Ana Cristina M. Dicionário da teoria da narrativa. Coimbra: Almedina, 1987, pp. 152-155. [84] Idem, pp. 152-153. [85] Marina, p. 86. [86] Marina, p. 91. [87] Marina, p. 86. [88] Marina, p. 63. [89] Marina, p. 95. [90] Marina, p. 54. [91] Marina, p. 73. [92] Marina, p. 96. [93] Marina, post scriptum, p.97. [94] Reis, Carlos & Lopes, Ana Cristina M. Dicionário da teoria da narrativa. Coimbra: Almedina, 1987, p. 154. [95] Marina, p. 91. [96] Strauss, Anselm, & Corbin, Juliet. Basics for qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990, p. 96. [97] Marina, p. 95. Numa intercalação da história de Proteu com o mito de Orfeu, essa invenção do poeta romano Virgílio (70 a.C. — 19 a. C.), encontra-se nos versos de número 453 a 527 do Livro IV, das Geórgicas. [98] Marina, pp. 71-72. Vale ouvir a rádio Orfeu … Ouço distante a voz de Orfeu. [99] Marina, p. 80, p. 86. [100] Marina, pp. 79-80. [101] Marina, p. 80. [102] Marina, p. 49. [103] Marina, p. 91. [104] Marina, p. 91. [105] Marina, p. 49. [106] Neymeyer, Robert A. & Mahoney, Michael. Construtivismo em psicoterapia. Tradução de Mônica Giglio Armando e Fábio Appolinário. Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul: Artes Médicas, 1997, p. 173. [107] Quem diga texto, poderia referir-se a trabalhos com que um texto se cruza, num filme, romance ou peça de teatro. [108] Forster, Eduard Morgan. Aspects of the novel. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927. O “enredo” (plot) distingue-se da “história” (story), na medida em que o enredo ordena os acontecimentos de forma temporal e de forma causal, mas a “história” limita-se a ordená-los no tempo. [109] Scholes, Robert, & Kellogg, Robert. The nature of narrative. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 207, pp. 238-239. [110] Angus, Lynne; Lewin, Jennifer; Boritz, Tali; Bryntwick, Emily; Carpenter, Naomi; Watson-Gaze, James, & Greenberg, Leslie. Narrative Processes Coding System: A Dialectical Constructivist Approach to Assessing Client Change Processes in Emotion-Focused Therapy of Depression. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome 2012, 15(2), 54–61. DOI: 10.7411/RP.2012.006 [111] Marina, p. 23. [112] Marina, pp. 79-80. [113] Marina, p 83. [114] Marina, p. 94. [115] Marina, p. 71. [116] Marina, post scriptum, p. 76. [117] Marina, p. 23. [118] No risco de morte no mar bravo, noutro lugar: “… ao dorso da onda fria, apressa o coração” (Lucchesi, 2023, p. 71). [119] Marina, p. 23. [120] Marina, p. 23. [121] Marina, p. 80. A expressão é atribuída pelo autor a um livre pensador, Lucilio Vanini (1585 – 1619), que se autodenominou outro, nas obras publicadas como Giulio Cesare Vanini. [122] Marina, p. 83. [123] Marina, p. 93. [124] Marina, p. 93. [125] Marina, p. 14, p. 79. As baleias primam nos seus “afetos radicais” (p. 79). [126] Marina, p. 93. [127] Marina, p. 93. [128] Marina, p. 93. [129] Marina, p. 95. [130] Marina, post scriptum, p. 99. [131] Marina, pp. 85-86. [132] Strauss, Anselm. Qualitative analysis for social scientists. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 32. [133] Marina, p. 91: “Antes do amanhecer, sacudo meus ossos na areia. O mundo frio no vapor das ondas [do mar], enquanto o sol desponta, bem depois, nas rochas que me vedam o horizonte [limite]. Sem que você soubesse, caminhamos lado a lado. Não sei até que ponto lembro tua voz. Tudo que diz e deixa de dizer [adiante, num eco repetido]. O modo, sobretudo a transparência da voz. Como o menino e o pássaro de Portinari. Te vejo, assim, ferida, a proteger-te. Promessa de calor. Será difícil atravessar a noite”. [134] Marina, pp. 13-14. [135] Marina, p. 54. [136] Marina, p. 14. [137] Marina, p. 13. [138] Marina, p. 22. [139] A noção de “livre arbítrio contracausal” indica a decisão livre, não determinada por uma causa, um motor. [140] No cálculo integral, pensa-se na heurística, de Arquimedes (287 – 212 a.C.) , com a finalidade inicial de calcular áreas e volumes e seguir a pista e gravar o movimento dos corpos celestes, do sol, da lua e dos planetas, no que se partiu da aritmética e da geometria. [141] Concausa introduz a causa, que coexiste com outra causa, cujo efeito seja conjugado. [142] Marina, p. 27. [143] Marina, p. 27. [144] Marina, p. 13. A brevidade contrasta como o longo tempo que passou, após o encontro prolongado. [145] Marina, p. 43. [146] Marina, p. 69: “Teus olhos sabem narrativas”. [147] Marina, p. 87. [148] Marina, p. 91. [149] Marina, p. 91. [150] Heidegger, Martin. Lettre sur l’Humanism. Paris: Aubier, (1970 [1947]), p. 65. [151] Marina, p. 75. [152] “O acaso dá-nos os pensamentos, o acaso retira-no-los”. Esse é um pensamento de Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662). [153] Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986. Partindo de “géneros de fala”, certas vozes farão coisas diferentes. A noção de “voz” tornou-se um conceito adequado e útil para a caracterização do narrador num texto: “quem ‘fala’”. “Quem é ‘ouvido’”, “quem expressou algo” … A ser “dada uma voz”, a “voz”, conduziu à critica de uma só voz, com Bakhtin. Na conexão de “voz”, com as ciências sociais, avançamos entre “múltiplas vozes”. [154] Marina, p. 13. [155] A “intencionalidade” em Edmund Husserl (1859 – 1938) e) colocou-se em “Meditações cartesianas”, para a forma basilar da consciência e dos processos psíquicos: “consciência de alguma coisa”. Donde, a proximidade das coisas. [156] Lévêque, Jean. ABCedário da filosofia. Lisboa: Reborn e Publico, 2001, p. 13. [157] O mundo e a consciência veem em conjunto, dum único golpe: se o mundo é exterior/interior à consciência, o que escape é o ribombar de “tempestade”, o espanto perante uma explosão, o ribombar do trovão. [158] Marina, p. 75. [159] Marina, p. 91. [160] A ser retomado o sentido do ser (do ser em si mesmo, do ser do “homem” e do ser do pensamento), com Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), a “metafísica” ganhou terreno, na tradição filosófica. Ficou a crítica ao que tenha sido “esquecido” - o ser, com frequência, entre Platão (428/427 – 348/347 a.C.) e Nietzsche (1844 – 1900). [161] Na etimologia de “profundidade”, “pro” indica uma direção a, e “fundus” é o esvaziamento, por extensão de fundo. [162] Na especificidade, “coisa” denota o objeto natural. Acresce o tratamento dado ao objeto ou ao termo natural-artificial, ao real-irreal, ao mental-físico. Na filosofia, “coisa” incorre numa aparição, vaga presença, quando faltem as palavras, por incerteza na “errância”, falhado o alvo … Uma tempestade abrupta, uma explosão. Coisa chega a ser conhecimento, imaginação, vontade... [163] Marina, p. 81. [164] Num referencial da personalidade do adulto, adiante aludido, a psicologia pós-racionalista enquadra um modelo da realidade humana, que conjuga a experiência e o significado da experiência (“eu-mim reflexivo”). À superfície emocional da infância, estudada em John Bowlby, o psiquiatra Vittorio Guidano, aliou a “organização do significado pessoal” (OSP). [165] Uma assíntota, na geometria, para uma curva plana, é uma linha que explora uma distância infinita em relação a um ponto (P), quando esse ponto se distancia ao infinito, sem jamais encontrar a linha. [166] Marina, post scriptum, p. 76. [167] Marina, p. 91. [168] Galindo, Caetano W. Sim, eu digo sim: Uma visita guiada ao Ulysses de James Joyce. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016, pp. 1104-1106. [169] Marina, p. 43. [170] Parménides. Fragments du poème de Parménides. Paris: PUF, 1996. Na primeira parte do poema, foi concebido um saber puro, a “verdade”, que afeta a via dos jogos de aparência das coisas, vindo a duplicar as aparências, no “desvendamento” (a-letheia, no grego clássico). O Uno, em Parménides, deixou-nos a mensagem fragmentada, na “revelação”, a “abertura”, a verdade escrita, no poema Sobre a natureza. Tanto as diversidades do mundo exterior, quanto as “opiniões dos mortais” (referidas num décimo da segunda parte da obra – o mundo da aparência), foram distanciadas da contemplação. Parménides inspirou a noção de Platão, para a dialética (partindo de duas ideias opostas, gerada uma síntese). [171] Platón. Parménides. Tradução de Guillermo R. de Echandía. Madrid: Alianza, 1987, pp. 55-56. [172] Na circunstância, as tensões antagónicas, entre a unidade e a diversidade, haviam sido protagonizadas por Parménides e Heráclito (cerca de 500 – 450 a.C.). Forçada a ultrapassagem da disputa inicial? [173] Marina, p. 43. [174] Nicolau de Cusa manifestou a sua forma de pensar num mundo em transição, tendo defendido a necessidade de contingência (coincidentia oppositorum), por parte da natureza e aderiu à contemplação intuitiva, em que o conhecimento fosse a unidade dos contrários (no livro Docta ignorantia, “Sobre a ignorância aprendida/sobre a ignorância científica”). [175] Marina, p. 35. [176] Marina, p. 31. [177] Marina, pp. 27-36. Na página 27, assumido ter-se tornado “perigosos”, na página 35, Celso diz ter medo de si mesmo. [178] Marina, p. 71. [179] Marina, post scriptum, p. 97. [180] Marina, p. 87: “[As cartas] Terminam com abraço afetuoso, promessas impagáveis e mil beijos de Catulo”. Catulo foi um poeta romano (87/84 a.C. – 57/54 a.C.), entre outros “modernos”, criticados por Marco Cícero, um contemporâneo, escritor e autor de cartas, mas que mudou a literatura europeia, com impacto no século XVIII. [181] Heidegger, Martin. Lettre sur l’Humanism. Paris: Aubier, 1970 [1947]. Na parte final de Carta sobre humanismo, Heidegger esclareceu: “não eis-me aqui! mas sim, se posso expressar-me num francês obviamente impossível, ‘être le là’ e o ‘aí’ é precisamente a-letheia. Como esquecer que da-sein representa o “estar aí”, o “habitar”? [182] Heidegger, Martin. Être et temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. [183] Uma ontologia dedicada ao ser, existência e realidade. [184] Heidegger, Martin. Lettre sur l’Humanism. Paris: Aubier, 1970, p. 77. [185] Heidegger, Martin. Que veut dire penser? In Essais et conferences. Paris: Gallimard, 1958. [186] O ser foi abandonado, quando se colocou adiante o ousia. No saber dos ousiai, enfatizadas substâncias. [187] Goodman, Nelson. Ways of world making. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1985, pp. 7-17. [188] Marina, p. 93. Na lógica clássica, uma proposição não pode ser, em simultâneo, “verdadeira” e “falsa” (princípio da não contradição). Uma proposição é falsa ou é verdadeira (princípio do terceiro excluído). [189] Marina, p. 89. Em De docta ignorantia, de 1449, Nicolau de Cusa criou três momentos do “espírito” no itinerário, uma hermenêutica, ora voltado para o “exterior”, ora para o “interior”. Importa para a coincidência de sorte, em não serem anulados pontos de vista diferentes (opostos), do ser humano ao infinito. [190] Marina, p. 89. [191] Marina, post scriptum, p. 62. [192] Marina, p. 89. [193] Marina, p. 73. [194] Marina, p. 35. [195] Marina, p. 35. [196] Marina, p. 93. “Salva-nos” pensar que a unidade primeira não torne a escamotear o ser, frente ao ente, em Deus. A base da metafísica, ciência do ser, foi por muitos anos o debate de “substâncias”, para o que se mantenha por baixo, o “elemento” permanente da coisa. Embora o ser tenha múltiplas aceções, formulam-se todas para um princípio (arché) único, material e definido. Na “correspondência”, o ser não pretende servir a ideia de “ser para Deus”, de ser a pessoa concreta, o que se mantém (ousia, “substância”, “no bem fundo”). [197] Marina, p. 96. [198] Como Nicolau de Cusa, que viu nesse acaso o conhecimento de Deus. [199] Marina, p. 87. [200] Marina, p. 93. [201] Marina, p. 98. [202] Marina, p. 17. [203] Marina, p. 18. [204] O “desvendamento” - aletheia, no remoto Poema de Parménides, um saber do Uno, entretanto desfeito,encontra-se antes de recolocada a ordem do vivido, ou seja, “todas as formas de presença afetivas e intelectuais”, em Jean Lévèque. Lévèque, Jean. ABCedário da filosofia. Lisboa: Reborn e Público, p. 114. [205] Marina, p. 73. [206] Marina, p. 95. [207] Marina, p. 73. [208] Heidegger, Martin. Être et temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. [209] Marina, p. 22. [210] Marina, p. 93. “Não ser” tem no francês a palavra “néant”. E “nada” encontra-se em mè eon (“o não-ente”), em grego. Nem sendo a chora, o “nada”, o não-ente, nem chega a ser privação do ser, porque o “lugar” não tem qualquer objeto. O vazio de um contentor – o “vaso” - é diferente: possui forma, é chora. [211] Marina, p. 54: “Distância na distância da distância. Porque o demónio é filho do silêncio. António Vieira dixit”. O silêncio marca a distância tão grande entre ambos, gerador do mal. Mas Celso foi um menino com “fome da distância” (p. 63). Um dia, deixou de “habitar na distância… distância que se perde” (pp. 97-98). [212] Kundera, Milan. 1988. A arte do romance. Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1988. Nessa obra, o “romance” é de ideias, a partir de Cervantes (1547 – 1616), por longo tempo “aguardada” a inspiração de Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768), em D. Quixote. Ao romance de ideias foi dada outra linhagem, na marcação francesa: François Rabelais (1494 — 1553) e Denis Diderot (1713 — 1784), quando alcançaram liberdade crítica e ironia revolucionária, no renascimento e no século XVIII. O multifacetado Rabelais cruzou até as facetas na palavra, ora erudita, ora aventureira, percorrendo o lado festivo e o lado religioso e solene. [213] Marina, post scriptum, p. 76: “São minhas essas vozes: que me indagam, enlaçam, apertam, comprimem. Polifonia da gente que me habita. Mas todos querem, buscam, sonham com você”. [214] James, William. The will to believe and other essays in popular philosophy. New York, NY: Longmans, 1897. [215] Marina, p. 49. Para Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961), a “humanidade” dividiu-se em duas partes: nos que “nadariam”, com James Joyce, no Ulisses, havendo quem se “afogasse” (numa autoridade, num qualquer saber dogmático). No Ulisses, é o monólogo de Molly Bloom condutor a um “sim”. [216] A obra de Lucchesi remete a Viktor Shklovsky. um crítico literário russo, em paralelo a Laurence Stern, autor de dissonantes observações, no que este último escreveu “A vida e as opiniões do cavalheiro Tristram Shandy”, um novo Quixote.” [217] Marina, p. 17: “Cada qual começa com um resumo”. [218] Marina, pp. 29-30. [219] Mead, George Herbert. Works of George Herbert Mead. Vol. 1 Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviourist. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1967. A explicação das diferenças entre si e Greenberg, foi esclarecida por Guidano, que utilizou os termos de George Herbert Mead – I (“eu”) e me (“mim”), frente a Greenberg. Mead (1863 — 1931) concebeu o self social (Mead, 1913), no sentido de sermos a única espécie que usa a linguagem, aquisição a partir da qual planeamos, pensamos e comunicamos a experiência. A vida de uma pessoa não seria um atributo individual e privado em Mead, cuja narrativa seja uma autoexpressão, envolvendo o controlo da informação do self. [220] Geller, Shari M. & Greenberg, Leslie S. (2012). Therapeutic presence: A mindful approach to effective therapy. American Psychology Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/13485-000 [221] Guidano, Vittorio. The self in process: Towards a post-racionalist therapy. New York, NY: Guilford, 1991. [222] O que seja acima do nada, sobrenada num “lugar” das coisas sensíveis, que soam e ressoam. [223] Marina, p. 43. [224] Marina, p. 50. [225] Marina, p. 49. “Persegue os temporais”, os maus tempos de vendavais no passado-presente-futuro. [226] Marina, p. 18. [227] Marina, p. 49. [228] Marina, p. 73. [229] Marina, p. 73. [230] Marina, p. 18. [231] Marina, p. 49. [232] Marina, p. 73. [233] Tanto “mar” quanto o cérebro são “suportes físicos” e “alimentos”. A imensidão das “ondas do mar” e da mente em movimento configuram um fluxo movediço e inatingível, em que o ser é originariamente “bem-fundo”, a “substância” (no latim, ousia), para o que sejam variações e transformações das coisas. [234] Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Capítulo 4, n.d. http://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching/IV. No mundo parcial ancestral chinês, pensar é agir. Reiterada a filosofia no T’ai Chi, a conexão ocorrida no Universo propicia a combinação de mente (li) e matéria (chi), “realidade última”, numa acomodação da unidade do Tao, à semelhança do “ancestral das dez-mil-coisas”: O Tao é um vaso vazio // Cujo uso nunca transborda. // Abismo! // Parece o ancestral das dez-mil-coisas! // Abranda o cume; Desfaz o emaranhado; Modera o brilho; Une o pó. // Profundo! // Parece existir algo! // Eu não sei de quem o Tao é filho. // Parece ser o anterior ao Ancestral. [235] Antropomorfismo para uma forma de pensamento em que elementos da natureza ou figuras de deuses alcançam características humanas. [236] O princípio da identidade, em Parménides, assumiu que todo o objeto é idêntico a si próprio. [237] Marina, p. 18. [238] Sartre, Jean-Paul. Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl, l’intentionalité. La Nouvelle Revue Française, 1939, 304(1), 129-132. Na medida em que a consciência traduz uma aproximação às coisas, poderá “ser algo que não ela própria”. [239] Marina, p. 18. [240] Marina, p. 18. [241] Marina, p. 37. [242] Marina, p. 18 [243] Marina, p. 18. [244] Marina, p. 21. [245] Marina, p. 23. [246] Marina, p. 23. [247] Marina, p. 23. [248] Marina, p. 26. [249] Marina, p. 28. [250] Marina, p. 28. [251] Marina, p. 28. [252] Marina, p. 29. [253] Marina, p. 37. [254] Marina, p. 42. [255] Marina, p. 71. [256] Marina, p. 37. [257] Marina, p. 37. [258] Marina, p. 49. [259] Marina, p. 16. [260] Marina, pp. 16-18. [261] Marina, p. 49. Na obra publicada em 1922, Molly Bloom, cujo nome verdadeiro era Marion, é a personagem de Ulisses, de James Joyce, uma cantora de ópera, reconhecida em Dublin, na Irlanda. No monólogo, é colocado um “fluxo de consciência”, sem parágrafos e sem pontuação de vírgulas e travessões. [262] Marina, p. 55. [263] Marina, p. 55. [264] Marina, p. 95. [265] Marina, p. 61. [266] Marina, p. 95. [267] Casar não foi contemplado por Mozart, tendo vivido poucos mais anos que Jesus. Bresson utilizou a música de Mozart, em 1956, no filme “Um condenado à morte escapou”, passado durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939 a 1945), nomeadamente no Kyrie, de Mozart (caso vocativo da palavra grega kyrios, para “senhor”). No Antigo Testamento, utilizou-se Kyrie na mais antiga tradução grega (Septuaginta), para traduzir a palavra hebraica Yahweh. No Novo Testamento, Kyrie foi o título dado a Cristo, como em Filipenses 2:11. [268] Marina, p. 86. [269] Marina, p. 86. [270] Marina, p. 79. [271] Marina, p. 95. [272] Marina, p. 79. [273] Marina, p. 79. [274] Marina, p. 55: “Ao não lugar me abraço como um náufrago”. No recuo do ser, não será “dispensado” o ser, no que me recorda o protagonista e narrador de Marina, encontrado num não lugar, sob um batimento da “pressão”. [275] Heidegger, Martin. Être et temps. Paris: Gallimard, 1980, pp. 88-89. [276] A dobra é franzida. “Eu-ente”, um depósito material insolúvel, na dobra existe o “sedimento”, em Ensaios e conferências, de Heidegger. [277] No Romantismo, após o Século das Luzes (século XVIII), Hölderlin viveria já ao “cair da noite”. Teriam deixado o mundo três deuses “fraternos” – “Héracles, Dionísio e Cristo”. Acresce dizer, sem romantismo, que alcançada a “noite”, perdermos as referências-guias, as linhagens e ficamos sós. Deixa-se de referir a autoridade (“quem sabe”) e configura-se um destino nem certo, nem seguro. Na incerteza da errância, falharia o alvo que seja excessivamente arriscado. [278] Marina, p. 22, p. 35 e p. 98. [279] Marina, p. 76. [280] Marina, p. 78.

To date, discrete event stochastic simulations of large scale biological reaction systems are extremely compute-intensive and time-consuming. Besides, it has been widely accepted that spatial factor plays a critical role in the dynamics of most biological reaction systems. The NSM (the Next Sub-Volume Method), a spatial variation of the Gillespie’s stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA), has been proposed for spatially stochastic simulation of those systems. While being able to explore high degree of parallelism in systems, NSM is inherently sequential, which still suffers from the problem of low simulation speed. Fine-grained parallel execution is an elegant way to speed up sequential simulations. Thus, based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II, we design and implement a PDES (Parallel Discrete Event Simulation) TW (time warp) simulator to enable the fine-grained parallel execution of spatial stochastic simulations of biological reaction systems using the ANSM (the Abstract NSM), a parallel variation of the NSM. The simulation results of classical Lotka-Volterra biological reaction system show that our time warp simulator obtains remarkable parallel speed-up against sequential execution of the NSM.I.IntroductionThe goal of Systems biology is to obtain system-level investigations of the structure and behavior of biological reaction systems by integrating biology with system theory, mathematics and computer science [1][3], since the isolated knowledge of parts can not explain the dynamics of a whole system. As the complement of “wet-lab” experiments, stochastic simulation, being called the “dry-computational” experiment, plays a more and more important role in computing systems biology [2]. Among many methods explored in systems biology, discrete event stochastic simulation is of greatly importance [4][5][6], since a great number of researches have present that stochasticity or “noise” have a crucial effect on the dynamics of small population biological reaction systems [4][7]. Furthermore, recent research shows that the stochasticity is not only important in biological reaction systems with small population but also in some moderate/large population systems [7].To date, Gillespie’s SSA [8] is widely considered to be the most accurate way to capture the dynamics of biological reaction systems instead of traditional mathematical method [5][9]. However, SSA-based stochastic simulation is confronted with two main challenges: Firstly, this type of simulation is extremely time-consuming, since when the types of species and the number of reactions in the biological system are large, SSA requires a huge amount of steps to sample these reactions; Secondly, the assumption that the systems are spatially homogeneous or well-stirred is hardly met in most real biological systems and spatial factors play a key role in the behaviors of most real biological systems [19][20][21][22][23][24]. The next sub-volume method (NSM) [18], presents us an elegant way to access the special problem via domain partition. To our disappointment, sequential stochastic simulation with the NSM is still very time-consuming, and additionally introduced diffusion among neighbor sub-volumes makes things worse. Whereas, the NSM explores a very high degree of parallelism among sub-volumes, and parallelization has been widely accepted as the most meaningful way to tackle the performance bottleneck of sequential simulations [26][27]. Thus, adapting parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) techniques to discrete event stochastic simulation would be particularly promising. Although there are a few attempts have been conducted [29][30][31], research in this filed is still in its infancy and many issues are in need of further discussion. The next section of the paper presents the background and related work in this domain. In section III, we give the details of design and implementation of model interfaces of LP paradigm and the time warp simulator based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II; the benchmark model and experiment results are shown in Section IV; in the last section, we conclude the paper with some future work.II. Background and Related WorkA. Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES)The notion Logical Process (LP) is introduced to PDES as the abstract of the physical process [26], where a system consisting of many physical processes is usually modeled by a set of LP. LP is regarded as the smallest unit that can be executed in PDES and each LP holds a sub-partition of the whole system’s state variables as its private ones. When a LP processes an event, it can only modify the state variables of its own. If one LP needs to modify one of its neighbors’ state variables, it has to schedule an event to the target neighbor. That is to say event message exchanging is the only way that LPs interact with each other. Because of the data dependences or interactions among LPs, synchronization protocols have to be introduced to PDES to guarantee the so-called local causality constraint (LCC) [26]. By now, there are a larger number of synchronization algorithms have been proposed, e.g. the null-message [26], the time warp (TW) [32], breath time warp (BTW) [33] and etc. According to whether can events of LPs be processed optimistically, they are generally divided into two types: conservative algorithms and optimistic algorithms. However, Dematté and Mazza have theoretically pointed out the disadvantages of pure conservative parallel simulation for biochemical reaction systems [31]. B. NSM and ANSM The NSM is a spatial variation of Gillespie’ SSA, which integrates the direct method (DM) [8] with the next reaction method (NRM) [25]. The NSM presents us a pretty good way to tackle the aspect of space in biological systems by partitioning a spatially inhomogeneous system into many much more smaller “homogeneous” ones, which can be simulated by SSA separately. However, the NSM is inherently combined with the sequential semantics, and all sub-volumes share one common data structure for events or messages. Thus, directly parallelization of the NSM may be confronted with the so-called boundary problem and high costs of synchronously accessing the common data structure [29]. In order to obtain higher efficiency of parallel simulation, parallelization of NSM has to firstly free the NSM from the sequential semantics and secondly partition the shared data structure into many “parallel” ones. One of these is the abstract next sub-volume method (ANSM) [30]. In the ANSM, each sub-volume is modeled by a logical process (LP) based on the LP paradigm of PDES, where each LP held its own event queue and state variables (see Fig. 1). In addition, the so-called retraction mechanism was introduced in the ANSM too (see algorithm 1). Besides, based on the ANSM, Wang etc. [30] have experimentally tested the performance of several PDES algorithms in the platform called YH-SUPE [27]. However, their platform is designed for general simulation applications, thus it would sacrifice some performance for being not able to take into account the characteristics of biological reaction systems. Using the similar ideas of the ANSM, Dematté and Mazza have designed and realized an optimistic simulator. However, they processed events in time-stepped manner, which would lose a specific degree of precisions compared with the discrete event manner, and it is very hard to transfer a time-stepped simulation to a discrete event one. In addition, Jeschke etc.[29] have designed and implemented a dynamic time-window simulator to execution the NSM in parallel on the grid computing environment, however, they paid main attention on the analysis of communication costs and determining a better size of the time-window.Fig. 1: the variations from SSA to NSM and from NSM to ANSMC. JAMES II JAMES II is an open source discrete event simulation experiment framework developed by the University of Rostock in Germany. It focuses on high flexibility and scalability [11][13]. Based on the plug-in scheme [12], each function of JAMES II is defined as a specific plug-in type, and all plug-in types and plug-ins are declared in XML-files [13]. Combined with the factory method pattern JAMES II innovatively split up the model and simulator, which makes JAMES II is very flexible to add and reuse both of models and simulators. In addition, JAMES II supports various types of modelling formalisms, e.g. cellular automata, discrete event system specification (DEVS), SpacePi, StochasticPi and etc.[14]. Besides, a well-defined simulator selection mechanism is designed and developed in JAMES II, which can not only automatically choose the proper simulators according to the modeling formalism but also pick out a specific simulator from a serious of simulators supporting the same modeling formalism according to the user settings [15].III. The Model Interface and SimulatorAs we have mentioned in section II (part C), model and simulator are split up into two separate parts. Thus, in this section, we introduce the designation and implementation of model interface of LP paradigm and more importantly the time warp simulator.A. The Mod Interface of LP ParadigmJAMES II provides abstract model interfaces for different modeling formalism, based on which Wang etc. have designed and implemented model interface of LP paradigm[16]. However, this interface is not scalable well for parallel and distributed simulation of larger scale systems. In our implementation, we accommodate the interface to the situation of parallel and distributed situations. Firstly, the neighbor LP’s reference is replaced by its name in LP’s neighbor queue, because it is improper even dangerous that a local LP hold the references of other LPs in remote memory space. In addition, (pseudo-)random number plays a crucial role to obtain valid and meaningful results in stochastic simulations. However, it is still a very challenge work to find a good random number generator (RNG) [34]. Thus, in order to focus on our problems, we introduce one of the uniform RNGs of JAMES II to this model interface, where each LP holds a private RNG so that random number streams of different LPs can be independent stochastically. B. The Time Warp SimulatorBased on the simulator interface provided by JAMES II, we design and implement the time warp simulator, which contains the (master-)simulator, (LP-)simulator. The simulator works strictly as master/worker(s) paradigm for fine-grained parallel and distributed stochastic simulations. Communication costs are crucial to the performance of a fine-grained parallel and distributed simulation. Based on the Java remote method invocation (RMI) mechanism, P2P (peer-to-peer) communication is implemented among all (master-and LP-)simulators, where a simulator holds all the proxies of targeted ones that work on remote workers. One of the advantages of this communication approach is that PDES codes can be transferred to various hardwire environment, such as Clusters, Grids and distributed computing environment, with only a little modification; The other is that RMI mechanism is easy to realized and independent to any other non-Java libraries. Since the straggler event problem, states have to be saved to rollback events that are pre-processed optimistically. Each time being modified, the state is cloned to a queue by Java clone mechanism. Problem of this copy state saving approach is that it would cause loads of memory space. However, the problem can be made up by a condign GVT calculating mechanism. GVT reduction scheme also has a significant impact on the performance of parallel simulators, since it marks the highest time boundary of events that can be committed so that memories of fossils (processed events and states) less than GVT can be reallocated. GVT calculating is a very knotty for the notorious simultaneous reporting problem and transient messages problem. According to our problem, another GVT algorithm, called Twice Notification (TN-GVT) (see algorithm 2), is contributed to this already rich repository instead of implementing one of GVT algorithms in reference [26] and [28].This algorithm looks like the synchronous algorithm described in reference [26] (pp. 114), however, they are essentially different from each other. This algorithm has never stopped the simulators from processing events when GVT reduction, while algorithm in reference [26] blocks all simulators for GVT calculating. As for the transient message problem, it can be neglect in our implementation, because RMI based remote communication approach is synchronized, that means a simulator will not go on its processing until the remote the massage get to its destination. And because of this, the high-costs message acknowledgement, prevalent over many classical asynchronous GVT algorithms, is not needed anymore too, which should be constructive to the whole performance of the time warp simulator.IV. Benchmark Model and Experiment ResultsA. The Lotka-Volterra Predator-prey SystemIn our experiment, the spatial version of Lotka-Volterra predator-prey system is introduced as the benchmark model (see Fig. 2). We choose the system for two considerations: 1) this system is a classical experimental model that has been used in many related researches [8][30][31], so it is credible and the simulation results are comparable; 2) it is simple but helpful enough to test the issues we are interested in. The space of predator-prey System is partitioned into a2D NXNgrid, whereNdenotes the edge size of the grid. Initially the population of the Grass, Preys and Predators are set to 1000 in each single sub-volume (LP). In Fig. 2,r1,r2,r3stand for the reaction constants of the reaction 1, 2 and 3 respectively. We usedGrass,dPreyanddPredatorto stand for the diffusion rate of Grass, Prey and Predator separately. Being similar to reference [8], we also take the assumption that the population of the grass remains stable, and thusdGrassis set to zero.R1:Grass + Prey ->2Prey(1)R2:Predator +Prey -> 2Predator(2)R3:Predator -> NULL(3)r1=0.01; r2=0.01; r3=10(4)dGrass=0.0;dPrey=2.5;dPredato=5.0(5)Fig. 2: predator-prey systemB. Experiment ResultsThe simulation runs have been executed on a Linux Cluster with 40 computing nodes. Each computing node is equipped with two 64bit 2.53 GHz Intel Xeon QuadCore Processors with 24GB RAM, and nodes are interconnected with Gigabit Ethernet connection. The operating system is Kylin Server 3.5, with kernel 2.6.18. Experiments have been conducted on the benchmark model of different size of mode to investigate the execution time and speedup of the time warp simulator. As shown in Fig. 3, the execution time of simulation on single processor with 8 cores is compared. The result shows that it will take more wall clock time to simulate much larger scale systems for the same simulation time. This testifies the fact that larger scale systems will leads to more events in the same time interval. More importantly, the blue line shows that the sequential simulation performance declines very fast when the mode scale becomes large. The bottleneck of sequential simulator is due to the costs of accessing a long event queue to choose the next events. Besides, from the comparison between group 1 and group 2 in this experiment, we could also conclude that high diffusion rate increased the simulation time greatly both in sequential and parallel simulations. This is because LP paradigm has to split diffusion into two processes (diffusion (in) and diffusion (out) event) for two interactive LPs involved in diffusion and high diffusion rate will lead to high proportional of diffusion to reaction. In the second step shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between the speedups from time warp of two different model sizes and the number of work cores involved are demonstrated. The speedup is calculated against the sequential execution of the spatial reaction-diffusion systems model with the same model size and parameters using NSM.Fig. 4 shows the comparison of speedup of time warp on a64X64grid and a100X100grid. In the case of a64X64grid, under the condition that only one node is used, the lowest speedup (a little bigger than 1) is achieved when two cores involved, and the highest speedup (about 6) is achieved when 8 cores involved. The influence of the number of cores used in parallel simulation is investigated. In most cases, large number of cores could bring in considerable improvements in the performance of parallel simulation. Also, compared with the two results in Fig. 4, the simulation of larger model achieves better speedup. Combined with time tests (Fig. 3), we find that sequential simulator’s performance declines sharply when the model scale becomes very large, which makes the time warp simulator get better speed-up correspondingly.Fig. 3: Execution time (wall clock time) of Seq. and time warp with respect to different model sizes (N=32, 64, 100, and 128) and model parameters based on single computing node with 8 cores. Results of the test are grouped by the diffusion rates (Group 1: Sequential 1 and Time Warp 1. dPrey=2.5, dPredator=5.0; Group 2: dPrey=0.25, dPredator=0.5, Sequential 2 and Time Warp 2).Fig. 4: Speedup of time warp with respect to the number of work cores and the model size (N=64 and 100). Work cores are chose from one computing node. Diffusion rates are dPrey=2.5, dPredator=5.0 and dGrass=0.0.V. Conclusion and Future WorkIn this paper, a time warp simulator based on the discrete event simulation framework JAMES II is designed and implemented for fine-grained parallel and distributed discrete event spatial stochastic simulation of biological reaction systems. Several challenges have been overcome, such as state saving, roll back and especially GVT reduction in parallel execution of simulations. The Lotka-Volterra Predator-Prey system is chosen as the benchmark model to test the performance of our time warp simulator and the best experiment results show that it can obtain about 6 times of speed-up against the sequential simulation. The domain this paper concerns with is in the infancy, many interesting issues are worthy of further investigated, e.g. there are many excellent PDES optimistic synchronization algorithms (e.g. the BTW) as well. Next step, we would like to fill some of them into JAMES II. 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In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian outback as displaying a “Weird Melancholy” (qtd. in Gelder 116). The strange sights, sounds, and experiences of Australia’s rural locations made them ripe for the development of the European genre of the Gothic in a new location, a mutation which has continued over the past two centuries. But what does it mean for Australia’s Gothic landscapes to be associated with the affective qualities of the melancholy? And more particularly, how and why does this Gothic effect (and affect) appear in the most accessible Gothic media of the twenty-first century, the television series? Two recent Australian television adaptations, Wake in Fright (2017, dir. Kriv Stenders) and Mystery Road (2018, dir. Rachel Perkins) provoke us to ask the question: how does their pictorial representation of the Australian outback and its inhabitants overtly express rage and its close ties to melancholia, shame and violence? More particularly, I argue that in both series this rage is turned inwards rather than outwards; rage is turned into melancholy and thus to self-destruction – which constructs an allegory for the malaise of our contemporary nation. However, here the two series differ. While Wake in Fright posits this as a never-ending narrative, in a true Freudian model of melancholics who fail to resolve or attend to their trauma, Mystery Road is more positive in its positioning, allowing the themes of apology and recognition to appear, both necessary for reparation and forward movement.Steven Bruhm has argued that a psychoanalytic model of trauma has become the “best [way to] understand the contemporary Gothic and why we crave it” (268), because the repressions and repetitions of trauma offer a means of playing out the anxieties of our contemporary nation, its fraught histories, its conceptualisations of identity, and its fears for the future. Indeed, as Bruhm states, it is precisely because of the way in which “the Gothic continually confronts us with real, historical traumas that we in the west have created” that they “also continue to control how we think about ourselves as a nation” (271). Jerrold E. Hogle agrees, noting that “Gothic fiction has always begun with trauma” (72). But it is not only that Gothic narratives are best understood as traumatic narratives; rather, Hogle posits that the Gothic is uniquely situated as a genre for dealing with the trauma of our personal and national histories because it enables us to approach the contradictions and conflicts of traumatic experience:I find that the best of the post-9/11 uses of Gothic in fiction achieve that purpose for attentive readers by using the conflicted un-naturalness basic to the Gothic itself to help us concurrently grasp and conceal how profoundly conflicted we are about the most immediate and pervasive cultural “woundings” of our western world as it has come to be. (75)Hogle’s point is critical for its attention to the different ways trauma can be dealt with in texts and by readers, returning in part to Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: where mourning is the ‘healthy’ process of working through or narrativising trauma. However, melancholia coalesces into a denial or repression of the traumatic event, and thus, as Freud suggests, its unresolved status reappears during nightmares and flashbacks, for example (Rall 171). Hogle’s praise for the Gothic, however, lies in its ability to move away from that binary, to “concurrently grasp and conceal” trauma: in other words, to respond simultaneously with mourning and with melancholy.Hogle adds to this classic perspective of melancholia through careful attention to the way in which rage inflects these affective responses. Under a psychoanalytic model, rage can be seen “as an infantile response to separation and loss” (Kahane 127). The emotional free-rein of rage, Claire Kahane points out, “disempowers us as subjects, making us subject to its regressive vicissitudes” (127; original emphasis). In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explicates this in more detail, making clear that this disempowerment, this inability to clearly express oneself, is what leads to melancholia. Melancholia, then, can be seen as a loss or repression of the identifiable cause of the original rage: this overwhelming emotion has masked its original target. “Insofar as grief remains unspeakable”, Butler posits, “the rage over the loss can redouble by virtue of remaining unavowed. And if that very rage over loss is publicly proscribed, the melancholic effects of such a proscription can achieve suicidal proportions” (212). The only way to “survive” rage in this mutated form of melancholia is to create what Butler terms “collective institutions for grieving”; these enablethe reassembling of community, the reworking of kinship, the reweaving of sustaining relations. And insofar as they involve the publicisation and dramatisation of death, they call to be read as life-affirming rejoinders to the dire psychic consequences of a grieving process culturally thwarted and proscribed. (212-13)Butler’s reading thus aligns with Hogle’s, suggesting that it is in our careful attendance to the horrific experience of grief (however difficult) that we could navigate towards something like resolution – not a simplified narrative of working through, to be sure, but a more ethical recognition of the trauma which diverts it from its repressive impossibilities. To further the argument, it is only by transforming melancholic rage into outrage, to respond with an affect that puts shame to work, that rage will become politically effective. So, outrage is “a socialised and mediated form of rage … directed toward identifiable and bounded others in the external world” (Kahane 127-28). Melancholia and shame might then be seen to be directly opposed to one another: the former a failure of rage, the latter its socially productive incarnation.The Australian Gothic and its repetition of a “Weird Melancholy” exhibit this affective model. Ken Gelder has emphasised the historical coincidences: since Australia was colonised around the same time as the emergence of the Gothic as a genre (115), it has always been infused with what he terms a “colonial melancholia” (119). In contemporary Gothic narratives, this is presented through the repetition of the trauma of loss and injustice, so that the colonial “history of brutal violence and exploitation” (121) is played out, over and over again, desperate for resolution. Indeed, Gelder goes so far as to claim that this is the primary fuel for the Gothic as it manifests in Australian literature and film, arguing that since it is “built upon its dispossession and killings of Aboriginal people and its foundational systems of punishment and incarceration, the colonial scene … continues to shadow Australian cultural production and helps to keep the Australian Gothic very much alive” (121).That these two recent television series depict the ways in which rage and outrage appear in a primal ‘colonial scene’ which fixes the Australian Gothic within a political narrative. Both Wake in Fright and Mystery Road are television adaptations of earlier works. Wake in Fright is adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name (1961), and its film adaptation (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff). Mystery Road is a continuation of the film narrative of the same name (2013, dir. Ivan Sen), and its sequel, Goldstone (2016, dir. Ivan Sen). Both narratives illustrate the shift – where the films were first viewed by a high-culture audience attracted to arthouse cinema and modernist fiction – to the re-makes that are viewed in the domestic space of the television screen and/or other devices. Likewise, the television productions were not seen as single episodes, but also linked to each network’s online on-demand streaming viewers, significantly broadening the audience for both works. In this respect, these series both domesticate and democratise the Gothic. The televised series become situated publicly, recalling the broad scale popularity of the Gothic genre, what Helen Wheatley terms “the most domestic of genres on the most domestic of media” (25). In fact, Deborah Cartmell argues that “adaptation is, indeed, the art form of democracy … a ‘freeing’ of a text from the confined territory of its author and of its readers” (8; emphasis added). Likewise, André Bazin echoes this notion that the adaptation is a kind of “digest” of the original work, “a literature that has been made more accessible through cinematic adaptation” (26; emphasis added). In this way, adaptations serve to ‘democratise’ their concerns, focussing these narratives and their themes as more publically accessible, and thus provoking the potential for a broader cultural discussion. Wake in FrightWake in Fright describes the depraved long weekend of schoolteacher John Grant, who is stuck in the rural town of Bundinyabba (“The Yabba”) after he loses all of his money in an ill-advised game of “Two Up.” Modernising the concerns of the original film, in this adaptation John is further endangered by a debt to local loan sharks, and troubled by his frequent flashbacks to his lost lover. The narrative does display drug- and alcohol-induced rage in its infamous pig-shooting (originally roo-shooting) scene, as well as the cold and threatening rage of the loan shark who suspects she will not be paid, both of which are depicted as a specifically white aggression. Overall, its primary depiction of rage is directed inward, rather than outward, and in this way becomes narrowed down to emphasise a more individual, traumatic shame. That is, John’s petulant rage after his girlfriend’s rejection of his marriage proposal manifests in his determination to stolidly drink alone while she swims in the ocean. When she drowns while he is drunk and incapable to rescue her, his inaction becomes the primary source of his shame and exacerbates his self-focused, but repressed rage. The subsequent cycles of drinking (residents of The Yabba only drink beer, and plenty of it) and gambling (as he loses over and over at Two-Up) constitute a repetition of his original trauma over her drowning, and trigger the release of his repressed rage. While accompanying some locals during their drunken pig-shooting expedition, his rage finds an outlet, resulting in the death of his new acquaintance, Doc Tydon. Like John, Doc is the victim of a self-focused rage and shame at the death of his young child and the abdication of his responsibilities as the town’s doctor. Both John and Doc depict the collapse of authority and social order in the “Weird Melancholy” of the outback (Rayner 27), but this “subversion of the stereotype of capable, confident Australian masculinity” (37) and the decay of community and social structure remains static. However, the series does not push forward towards a moral outcome or a suggestion of better actions to inspire the viewer. Even his desperate suicide attempt, what he envisions as the only ‘ethical’ way out of his nightmare, ends in failure and is covered up by the local police. The narrative becomes circular: for John is returned to The Yabba every time he tries to leave, and even in the final scene he is back in Tiboonda, returned to where he started, standing at the front of his classroom. But importantly, this cycle mimics John’s cycle of unresolved shame, suggests an inability to ‘wake’ from this nightmare of repetition, with no acknowledgement of his individual history and his complicity in the traumatic events. Although John has outlived his suicide attempt, this does not validate his survival as a rebirth. Rather, John’s refusal of responsibility and the accompanying complicity of local authorities suggests the inevitability of further self-damaging rage, shame, and violence. Outback NoirBoth Wake in Fright and Mystery Road have been described as “outback noir” (Dolgopolov 12), combining characteristics of the Gothic, the Western, and film noir in their depictions of suffering and the realisation (or abdication) of justice. Greg Dolgopolov explains that while traditional “film noir explores the moral trauma of crime on its protagonists, who are often escaping personal suffering or harrowing incidents from their pasts” (12), these examples of Australian (outback) noir are primarily concerned with “ancestral trauma – that of both Indigenous and settler. Outback noir challenges official versions of events that glide over historical massacres and current injustices” (12-13).Wake in Fright’s focus on John’s personal suffering even as his crimes could become allegories for national trauma, aligns this story with traditional film noir. Mystery Road is caught up with a more collectivised form of trauma, and with the ‘colonialism’ of outback noir means this adaptation is more effective in locating self-rage and melancholia as integral to social and cultural dilemmas of contemporary Australia. Each series takes a different path to the treatment of race relations in Australia within a small and isolated rural context. Wake in Fright chooses to ignore this historical context, setting up the cycle of John’s repression of trauma as an individual fate, and he is trapped to repeat it. On the other hand, Mystery Road, just like its cinematic precursors (Mystery Road and Goldstone), deals with race as a specific theme. Mystery Road’s nod to the noir and the Western is emphasised by the character of Detective Jay Swan: “a lone gunslinger attempting to uphold law and order” (Ward 111), he swaggers around the small township in his cowboy hat, jeans, and boots, stoically searching for clues to the disappearance of two local teenagers. Since Swan is himself Aboriginal, this transforms the representation of authority and its failures depicted in Wake in Fright. While the police in Wake in Fright uphold the law only when convenient to their own goals, and further, to undertake criminal activities themselves, in Mystery Road the authority figures – Jay himself, and his counterpart, Senior Sergeant Emma James, are prominent in the community and dedicated to the pursuit of justice. It is highly significant that this sense of justice reaches beyond the present situation. Emma’s family, the Ballantynes, have been prominent landowners and farmers in the region for over one hundred years, and have always prided themselves on their benevolence towards the local Indigenous population. However, when Emma discovers that her great-grandfather was responsible for the massacre of several young Aboriginal men at the local waterhole, she is overcome by shame. In her horrified tears we see how the legacy of trauma, ever present for the Aboriginal population, is brought home to Emma herself. As the figurehead for justice in the town, Emma is determined to label the murders accurately as a “crime” which must “be answered.” In this acknowledgement and her subsequent apology to Dot, she finds some release from this ancient shame.The only Aboriginal characters in Wake in Fright are marginal to the narrative – taxi drivers who remain peripheral to the traumas within the small town, and thus remain positioned as innocent bystanders to its depravity. However, Mystery Road is careful to avoid such reductionist binaries. Just as Emma discovers the truth about her own family’s violence, Uncle Keith, the current Aboriginal patriarch, is exposed as a sexual predator. In both cases the men, leaders in the past and the present, consider themselves as ‘righteous’ in order to mask their enraged and violent behaviour. The moral issue here is more than a simplistic exposition on race, rather it demonstrates that complexity surrounds those who achieve power. When Dot ultimately ‘inherits’ responsibility for the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission this indicates that Mystery Road concludes with two female figures of authority, both looking out for the welfare of the community as a whole. Likewise, they are involved in seeking the young woman, Shevorne, who becomes the focus of abuse and grief, and her daughter. Although Jay is ultimately responsible for solving the crime at the heart of the series, Mystery Road strives to position futurity and responsibility in the hands of its female characters and their shared sense of community.In conclusion, both television adaptations of classic movies located in Australian outback noir have problematised rage within two vastly different contexts. The adaptations Wake in Fright and Mystery Road do share similar themes and concerns in their responses to past traumas and how that shapes Gothic representation of the outback in present day Australia. However, it is in their treatment of rage, shame, and violence that they diverge. Wake in Fright’s failure to convert rage beyond melancholia means that it fails to offer any hope of resolution, only an ongoing cycle of shame and violence. But rage, as a driver for injustice, can evolve into something more positive. In Mystery Road, the anger of both individuals and the community as a whole moves beyond good/bad and black/white stereotypes of outrage towards a more productive form of shame. In doing so, rage itself can elicit a new model for a more responsible contemporary Australian Gothic narrative.References Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” Film Adaptation. 1948. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2000. 19-27.Bruhm, Steven. “The Contemporary Gothic: Why We Need It.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 259-76.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge, 1993.Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Ed. Deborah Cartmell. Chichester: Blackwell, 2012. 1-13.Dolgopolov, Greg. “Balancing Acts: Ivan Sen’s Goldstone and ‘Outback Noir.’” Metro 190 (2016): 8-13.Gelder, Ken. “Australian Gothic.” The Routledge Companion to Gothic. Eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy. London: Routledge, 2007. 115-23.Hogle, Jerrold E. “History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions.” The Gothic World. Eds. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend. London: Routledge, 2014. 72-81.Kahane, Claire. “The Aesthetic Politics of Rage.” States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change. Eds. Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison. New York: New York UP, 1996. 126-45.Perkins, Rachel, dir. Mystery Road. ABC, 2018.Rall, Denise N. “‘Shock and Awe’ and Memory: The Evocation(s) of Trauma in post-9/11 Artworks.” Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 163-82.Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Stenders, Kriv, dir. Wake in Fright. Roadshow Entertainment, 2017.Ward, Sarah. “Shadows of a Sunburnt Country: Mystery Road, the Western and the Conflicts of Contemporary Australia.” Screen Education 81 (2016): 110-15.Wheatley, Helen. “Haunted Houses, Hidden Rooms: Women, Domesticity and the Gothic Adaptation on Television.” Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives. Eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. 149-65.

Introduction In a period marked by the pervasiveness of new mobile technologies saturating urban areas of the Asia-Pacific region, it can be easy to forget the realities of life in the rural areas. In a location such as Australia, in which 80% of the population lives in urban areas, one must be reminded of the sociotechnological realities of rural existence where often-newer mobile communication devices cease to function. This paper focuses on these black spots – and often forgotten areas – where examples of older, mediated technologies such as UHF Citizen Band (CB) radios can be found as integral to practices of everyday rural life. As Anderson notes, constructs of the nation are formed through contested notions of what individuals and communities imagine and project as a sense of place. In Australia, one of the dominant contested imageries can be found in the urban and rural divide, a divide that is not just social and cultural but technological; it is marked by a digital divide. This divide neatly corresponds to the images of Australia experienced by Australians (predominantly living in urban areas) and exported tourist images of the rugged vast rural landscapes. The remote Australia Outback is a popular destination for domestic tourists. Its sparsely populated and rough terrain attracts tourists seeking a quintessentially Australian experience. Roads are often unmade and in poor condition. Fuel and food supplies and health services are widely separated and there is almost no permanent accommodation. Apart from a small number of regional centres there is no access to mobile phones or radio broadcasts. As a consequence tourists must be largely self sufficient. While the primary roads carry significant road traffic it is possible to drive all day on secondary roads without seeing another person. Isolation and self-sufficiency are both an attraction and a challenge. Travelling in campervans, towing caravans or camper trailers and staying in caravan parks, national parks, roadside stops or alone in the bush, tourists spend extended times in areas where there are few other tourists. Many tourists deal with this isolation by equipping their vehicles with CB radios. Depending on the terrain, they are able to listen to, and participate in conversations with other CB users within a 10-20 kilometre range. In some areas where there are repeater stations, the range of radio transmissions can be extended. This paper examines the role of these CB radios in the daily life of tourists in the Australian Outback. Theoretical Issues The links between travel, the new communications technologies and the diminished spatial-time divide have been explored by John Urry. According to Urry, mobile electronic devices make it possible for people “to leave traces of their selves in informational space” (266). Using these informational traces, mobile communication technologies ‘track’ the movements of travellers, enabling them to communicate synchronously. People become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ (266). Another consequence of readily available communication independent of location is for the meaning of social connections. Social encounters provide tourists with the opportunity to develop and affirm understandings of their shared common occupation of unfamiliar social and cultural landscapes (Harrison). Both transitory and enduring relationships provide information, companionship and resources that allow tourists to create, share and give meaning to their experiences (Stokowski). Communication technology also enables individuals to enter and remain part of social networks while physically absent and distant from them (Johnsen; Makimoto and Manners, Urry). The result is a “nomadic intimacy” in an everyday social and physical environment characterised by extended spaces and individual freedom to move around in these spaces (Fortunati). For travellers in the Australian Outback, this “nomadic intimacy” is both literal and metaphorical. Research has shown that travellers use mobile communications services and a range of other communication strategies to maintain a “symbolic proximity” with family, friends and colleagues (Wurtzel and Turner) and to promote a sense of “presence while absent”, or ‘co-presence’ (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”; White and White, “Home and Away”). Central to the original notion of co-presence was that it was contingent on those involved in a given communication both being and feeling close enough to perceive each other and to be perceived in the course of their activities (Goffman). That is, the notion of co-presence initially referred to physical presence in face-to-face contact and interactions. However, increasing use of mobile phones in particular has meant that this sense of connection can be affirmed at a distance. But what happens when travellers do not have access to mobile phones and the Internet, and as a consequence, do not have access to their networks of family, friends and colleagues? How do they deal with travel and isolation in a harsh environment? These issues are the starting point for the present paper, which examines travellers’ experience of CB radio in the remote Australian Outback. This exploration of how the CB radio has been incorporated into the daily lives of these travellers can be seen as a contribution to an understanding of the domestication of mobile communications (Haddon). Methodology People were included in the study if they used CB radios while travelling in remote parts of Western Australian and the Northern Territory. The participants were approached in caravan parks, camping grounds and at roadside stops. Most were travelling in caravans while others were using camper trailers and campervans. Twenty-four travellers were interviewed, twelve men and twelve women. All were travelling with partners or spouses, and one group of two couples was travelling together. They ranged in age from twenty five to seventy years, and all were Australian residents. The duration of their travels varied from six weeks to eleven months. Participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. The interviews were transcribed and then thematically coded with respect to regularly articulated points of view. Where points of view were distinctive, they were noted during the coding process as contrasting instances. While the relatively small sample size limits generalizability, the issues raised by the respondents provide insights into the meaning of CB radio use in the daily life of travellers in the Australian Outback. Findings Staying Safe The primary reason given for travelling with a CB radio was personal safety. The tourists interviewed were aware of the risks associated with travelling in the Outback. Health emergencies, car accidents and problems with tyres in a harsh and hot environment without ready access to water were often mentioned. ‘If you call a May Day someone will come out and answer…” (Female, 55). Another interviewee reported that: Last year we helped some folk who were bogged in the sand right at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. The wife just started calling the various channels explaining that they were bogged and asking whether there was anyone out there….We went and towed them out. …. It would have been a long walk for them to get help. (Female, 55) Even though most interviewees had not themselves experienced a personal emergency, many recounted stories about how CB radio had been used to come to the aid of someone in distress. Road conditions were another concern. Travellers were often rightly very concerned about hazards ahead. One traveller noted: You are always going to hear someone who gives you an insight as to what is happening up ahead on the road. If there’s an accident up ahead someone’s going to get on the radio and let people know. Or there could be road works or the road could be shitty. (Male, 50) Safety arose in another context. Tourists share the rough and often dusty roads with road trains towing up to three trailers. These vehicles can be 50 metres long. A road train creates wind turbulence when it passes a car and trailer or caravan and the dust it raises reduces visibility. Because of this car drivers and caravanners need to be extremely careful when they pass or are passed by one. Passing a road train at 100 km can take 2.5km. Interviewees reported that they communicated with road train drivers to negotiate a safe time and place to pass. One caravanner noted: Sometimes you see a road train coming up behind you. You call him up and say ” I’ll pull over for you mate and slow down and you go”. You use it a lot because it’s safer. We are not in a hurry. Road trains are working and they are in a hurry and he (sic.) is bigger, so he has the right of way. (Male, 50) As with the dominant rationale for installing and using a CB radio, Rice and Katz showed that concern about safety is the primary motive for women acquiring a mobile phone, and safety was also important for men. The social contact enabled by CB radio provided a means of tracking the movements of other travellers who were nearby. This tracking ability engendered a sense of comfort and enabled them to communicate and exchange information synchronously in a potentially dangerous environment. As a consequence, a ‘metaworld’ (Suvantola) of ‘informational traces’ (Urry) was created. Making Oneself Known All interactions entail conventions and signals that enable a conversation to commence. These conventions were also seen to apply to CB conversations. Driving in a car or truck involves being physically enclosed with the drivers and passengers being either invisible or only partially visible to other travellers. Caravanners deal with this lack of visibility in a number of ways. Many have their first names, the name of their caravan and the channel they use on the rear of their van. A typical sign was “Bill and Rose, Travelling Everywhere, Channel 18” or “Harry and Mary, Bugger Work, Gone Fishing”, Channel 18” clearly visible to anyone coming from behind. (The male partner’s name was invariably first.) A sign that identified the occupants was seen as an invitation to chat by other travellers. One traveller said that if he saw such a sign he would call up by saying: “Hello Harry and Mary”. From then on who knows where it goes. It depends on the people. If someone comes back really cheery and a bit cheeky I can be cheery and cheeky back. (Male, 50) The names of caravans were used in other more personal ways. One couple from South Africa had given their van a Zulu name and that was seen as a way of identifying their origins and encouraging a specific kind of conversation while they were on the road. This couple reported that People call us up and ask us what it means. We have lots of calls about that. We’ve had more conversations about that than anything else. (Male, 67) Another caravanner reported that he had seen a van with “Nanna and Poppa’ on the back. They used that as a cue to start a conversation about their grandchildren. But caravan names linked to their CB radio channel can have a deeper personal meaning. One couple had their first names and the number 58 on the rear of their van. (The number 58 is beyond the range of CB channels.) On further questioning the number 58 was revealed to be the football club number of a daughter who had died. The sign was an attempt to deal with their grief and its public display a way of entering into a conversation about grief and loss. It has probably backfired because it puts people back into their shell because they think “We don’t want to talk about death”. But because of the sign we’ve met people who’ve lost a child too. (Male, 50) As Featherstone notes, drivers develop competence in switching between a range of communicative modes while they are travelling. These range from body gestures to formal signalling devices on other cars. Signage on caravans designed to invite conversation was a specialised signalling device specific to the CB user. Talking Loneliness was another theme emerging from the interviews. One of the attractions of the Outback is its sparse population. As one interviewee noted ‘You can travel all day and not see another soul’ (Female, 35). But this loneliness can be a challenge. Some of these roads are pretty lonely, the radio lets you know that there’s somebody else out there. (Male, 54) Hearing other travellers talk was comforting. As with previous research showing that travellers use mobile communications services to maintain a “symbolic proximity” (Gergen; Lury; Short, Williams and Christie; White and White, “Keeping Connected”) the CB conversations enabled the travellers to feel this sense of connection. These interactions also offered them the possibility of converting mediated relationships into face-to-face encounters along the road. That is, some travellers reported that CB-based chats with people while they were driving would lead to a decision to stop along the road for a shared morning tea or lunch. Conventions governed the use of specific channels. Some of these are government regulated, while others are user generated. For instance, Channels 18 and 40, were seen as ‘working channels’. Some interviewees felt very strongly about people who ‘cluttered up’ these channels and moved to another unused channel when they wanted to have an extended conversation. One couple was unaware of the local convention and could not understand why no one was calling them up. They later discovered that they were on the ‘wrong channel’. Interviewees travelling in a convoy would use the standard channel for travellers and then agree to move to another channel of their choice. When we travelling in a convoy we go off Channel 18 and use another channel to talk. The girls love it to talk about their knitting and work out what they’ve done wrong. We sometimes tell jokes. Also we work out what we are going to do in the next town. (Male, 67) These extended conversations parallel the lengthy conversations between drivers equipped with CB radio in the United States during the 1970’s which Dannaher described as ‘as diverse as those found at a cocktail party’. They also provided a sense of the “nomadic intimacy” described by Fortunati. Eavesdropping While travellers used Channel 18 for conversations they set their radio to automatically scan all forty channels. When a conversation was located the radio would stop scanning and they could listen to what was being said. This meant that travellers would overhear conversations between strangers. We scan all the channels so you can hear anyone coming up behind, especially trucks and you can hear them say “that damn caravan” and you can say ’ that damn caravan will pull over at the first opportunity.” (Female, 44) But the act of listening in to other people’s conversations created moral dilemmas for some travellers. One interviewee described it as “voyeurism for the ears”. While she described listening to farm conversations as giving her an insight into daily life on huge cattle station she was tempted to butt into one conversation that she was listening to. On reflection she decided against entering the conversation. She said: I didn’t want them to know that we were eavesdropping on their conversation. I’d be embarrassed if a third-party knew that we were listening in. I guess that I’ve been taught that you shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversations. It’s not good manners… (Female, 35) When travellers overheard conversations between road train or truck drivers they had mixed responses. These conversations were often sexually loaded and seen as coarse by the middle class travellers. Some were forgiving of the conversational excesses, distinguishing themselves from the rough and tumble world of the ‘truckies’. One traveller noted that the truck drivers use a lot of bad language, but you’ve got to go with that, because that’s the type of people they are. But you have to go with the flow. We know that we are ‘playing’ and the truckies are ‘working’ so you have to be considerate to them. (Female, 50) While the language of the truck drivers was often threatening to middle class travellers, overhearing their conversations was also seen as a comfort. One traveller remarked that sometimes you hear truckies talking about their families and they obviously know each other. It’s kind of nice to see how they think. (Female, 50) Travellers had similar feelings when they overheard conversations from cattle stations. Also, local cattle station workers and their families would use CB radios for their social and working communications. Travellers would often overhear these conversations. One traveller noted that when we are driving through a cattle station we work out which channel they are using, and we lock it on that one. And then we listen until they are out of range. We are city people and listening to the station chatter gives us a bit of an insight into what it must be like as a farmer working land out here. And then we talk about the farmers’ conversations. (Female, 35) Another traveller noted: If you are travelling and there’s nothing you can see you can listen to the farmer talking to his wife or the kids. It’s absolutely awesome to hear conversations on radio. (Female, 67) This empathic listening allows the travellers to imagine the lives of others in settings quite different from those with which they are familiar. Furthermore, hearing farmers talking about fixing the fence in the left paddock or rounding up strays makes ‘you feel that you’re not alone’. The networking of the travellers’ social life arising from listening in to others meant that they were able to learn about the environment in which they found themselves, as well as enabling them to feel that they continued to remain embedded or ‘co-present’ in social relationships in circumstances of considerable physical isolation. Conclusions The accounts provided by tourists illustrated the way communications technologies – in this case, CB radio – enabled people to become ’nodes in multiple networks of communication and mobility’ described by Urry and to maintain ‘co-presence’. The CB radio allowed tourists to remain part of social networks while being physically absent from them (Gergen). Their responses also demonstrated the significance of CB radio in giving meaning to the experience of travel. The CB radio was shown to be an important part of the travel experience in the remote Australian Outback. The use of CB made it possible for travellers in the Australian Outback to obtain information vital for the safe traverse of the huge distances and isolated roads. The technology enabled them to break down the atomism and frontier-like isolation of the highway. Drivers and their passengers could reach out to other travellers and avoid remaining unconnected strangers. Long hours on the road could be dealt with by listening in on others’ conversations, even though some ambivalence was expressed about this activity. Despite an awareness that they could be violating the personal boundaries of others and that their conversations could be overheard, the use of CB radio meant staying safe and enjoying guilty pleasures. Imagined or not. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Community. London: Verso, 1983 Dannefer, W. Dale. “The C.B. Phenomenon: A Sociological Appraisal.” Journal of Popular Culture 12 (1979): 611-19. Featherstone, Mike. “Automobilities: An Introduction.” Theory, Culture and Society 21.4/5 (2004): 1-24. Fortunati, Leopoldina. “The Mobile Phone: Towards New Categories and Social Relations.” Information, Communication and Society 5.2 (2002): 513-28. Gergen, Kenneth. “The Challenge of Absence Presence.” Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communications, Private Talk, Public Performance. Ed. James Katz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 227-54. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. Haddon, Leslie. “Domestication and Mobile Telephony.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James E. Katz. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 43-55. Harrison, Julia. Being a Tourist: Finding Meaning in Pleasure Travel. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2003. Johnsen, Truls Erik. “The Social Context of Mobile Use of Norwegian Teens.” Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology. Ed. James Katz. London: Transaction Publishers, 2003. 161-69. Ling, Richard. “One Can Talk about Common Manners! The Use of Mobile Telephones in Inappropiate Situations.” Communications on the Move: The Experience of Mobile Telephony in the 1990s (Report of Cost 248: The Future European Telecommunications User Mobile Workgroup). Ed. Leslie Haddon. Farsta, Sweden: Telia AB, 1997. 97-120. Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel.” Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory. Eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge, 1997. 75-95. Rice, Ronald E., and James E. Katz. “Comparing Internet and Mobile Phone Usage: Digital Divides of Usage, Adoption and Dropouts.” Telecommunications Policy 27 (2003): 597-623. Short, J., E. Williams, and B. Christie. The Social Psychology of Telecommunications. New York: Wiley, 1976. Stokowski, Patricia. “Social Networks and Tourist Behavior.” American Behavioural Scientist 36.2 (1992): 212-21. Suvantola, Jaakko. Tourist’s Experience of Place. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Urry, John. “Mobility and Proximity.” Sociology 36.2 (2002): 255-74. ———. “Social Networks, Travel and Talk.” British Journal of Sociology 54.2 (2003): 155-75. White, Naomi Rosh, and Peter B. White. “Home and Away: Tourists in a Connected World.” Annals of Tourism Research 34. 1 (2007): 88-104. White, Peter B., and Naomi Rosh White. “Keeping Connected: Travelling with the Telephone.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 11.2 (2005): 102-18. Williams, Stephen, and Lynda Williams. “Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone.” The Sociological Review 53.2 (2005): 314-31. Wurtzel, Alan H., and Colin Turner. “Latent Functions of the Telephone: What Missing the Extension Means.” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. 246-61. Citation reference for this article MLA Style White, Peter B., and Naomi White. "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>. APA Style White, P., and N. White. (Mar. 2007) "Staying Safe and Guilty Pleasures: Tourists and CB Radio in the Australian Outback," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/11-white-white.php>.

With globalization, the university-work transition has become increasingly challenging for graduates and employers. In the new context, the mission of university has shifted, and knowledge is no longer considered as singular [1]. The traditional role of universities in producing knowledge has changed to give more focus on the demands of society. The “codified knowledge” acquired from didactic teaching in universities can be at odds with the often “informal and tacit” knowledge required in the workplace. The development of information technology makes the nature of work changing very fast; graduates need to achieve attributes that help them not only do the work corresponding with their disciplines, but be able to learn new skills and new knowledge. This paper presents the primary results of a questionnaire survey among 25 employers of VNU School of Law’s graduates to explore employers’ evaluation of the employability of graduates from Vietnam National University Hanoi. Applying theories of graduate attributes [2], employability [3] and graduate transferable skills [4], [5], the survey explores the gap between university study and the requirements at the work market of graduates. This paper argues that there is considerable distance between university knowledge and skills and the nature of the work. Graduates lack transferable skills, those that allow them to acquire the necessary skills, to satisfy the requirements of the morden workplace, to transfer abstract cognitive skills. These skills are needed before the graduates enter the work market as the employers expect them to practice these skills competently at work. Although these skills can be generated through work, the employers do emphasise their importance for univesrity graduates. Therefore the university teaching and learning process should be reviewed and revised (if necessary) to develop these transferable skills during the time at the university. Keywords Graduate attributes, employability, Vietnam, general competences, transferable skills References [1] Bennett, N., Dunne, E., Carré, C. (2000). Skills development in higher education and employment, (Buckingham; Philadelphia, PA :, Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press).[2] Barrie, S. (2006). Understanding What We Mean by the Generic Attributes of Graduates. Higher Education, 51(2), 215-241. [3] Knight, P. T., & Yorke, M. (2002). Employability through the curriculum. Tertiary Education & Management, 8(4), 261-276.[4] Bennett, R. (2002). Employers' Demands for Personal Transferable Skills in Graduates: a content analysis of 1000 job advertisements and an associated empirical study, Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 54:4, 457-476, DOI: 10.1080/13636820200200209[5] Harvey, L. (2005). Embedding and integrating employability. New Directions for Institutional Research. (128), 13-26. doi:10.1002/ir.160[6] Sen, A. (2002). How to judge globalism. The American Prospect Online. Online resource. http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/1/sen-a.html. Accessed on 30 March 2013.[7] Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.[8] Marginson, S., & van der Wende, M. (2009). The new global landscape of nations and institutions. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Higher education to 2030, 2(Globalization), 17-62.[9] Altbach, P. G. (2010). The realities of mass higher education in a globalized world. In D. B. Johnstone, M. d'Ambrosio & P. J. Yakoboski (Eds.), Higher education in a global society (pp. 25-41). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.[10] Marginson, S. (2008). Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(3), 303 - 315.[11] Douglass, J., Thomson, G., & Zhao, C.-M. (2012). The learning outcomes race: the value of self-reported gains in large research universities. Higher Education, 64(3), 317-335.[12] Eraut, M. (2004). Transfer of knowledge between education and workplace settings. In H. Rainbird, A. Fuller & A. Munro (Eds.), Workplace learning in context (pp. 201-221). London ; New York: Routledge.[13] Hernández-March, J., Martín del Peso, M., & Leguey, S. (2009). Graduates’ Skills and Higher Education: The employers’ perspective. Tertiary Education and Management, 15(1), 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13583880802699978[14] Harvey, L., Moon, S., Geall, V., & Bower, R. (1997). Graduates' Work: Organisational Change and Students' Attributes. Centre for Research into Quality, 90 Aldridge Road, Perry Barr, Birmingham B42 2TP, England, United Kingdom (5 British pounds).[15] Holden, R., & Jameson, S. (2002). Employing graduates in SMEs: towards a research agenda. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, 9(3), 271-284.[16] Fallows, S., & Steven, C. (2013). Integrating key skills in higher education: Employability, transferable skills and learning for life. Routledge.[17] Haigh, M. J., & Kilmartin, M. P. (1999). Student perceptions of the development of personal transferable skills. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 23(2), 195-206. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/214735353?accountid=39811[18] Lowden, K., Hall, S., Elliot, D., & Lewin, J. (2011). Employers’ perceptions of the employability skills of new graduates. London: Edge Foundation.[19] Suleman, F. (2016). Employability skills of higher education graduates: Little consensus on a much-discussed subject. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 228, 169-174. Paper presented in the Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd´16, 21-23 June 2016, València, Spain.[20] Little, B. (2006). Employability and work-based learning. York: Higher Education Academy, 2006.[21] Stephenson, J. (2013). “The Concept of Capability and Its Importance in Higher Education,” in Capability and quality in higher educationJ. Stephenson and M. Yorke, Eds. Routledge, pp. 1-13.[22] Yorke, M., & Harvey, L. (2005). Graduate Attributes and Their Development. In R. A. Voorhees & L. Harvey (Eds.), Workforce development and higher education: a strategic role for institutional research (pp. 41-58). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.[23] Maclean, R., & Ordonez, V. (2007). Work, skills development for employability and education for sustainable development. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 6(2), 123-140.[24] De Weert, E. (2007). Graduate Employment in Europe: The Employers' Perspective. In U. Teichler (Ed.), Careers of University Graduates (Vol. 17, pp. 225-246): Springer Netherlands.[25] Tran Quang Trung, & Swierczek, F. W. (2009). Skills development in higher education in Vietnam. Asia Pacific Business Review, 15(4), 565-586.[26] Nguyen Thi Thanh Hong. (2008). “Factors influencing the self-study quality for education theory subject of the students at Universities of Education”. Vietnamese Education Review, vol. 182, no.2, pp. 22-24.[27] World Bank. (2008). Vietnam - Higher education and skills for growth. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008.[28] Mai Thi Quynh Lan (2017). The ‘person-in-between’ role of young graduates at INGOs in Vietnam. Journal of Teaching and Learning for Graduate Employability, 8(1), 137-151. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/jtlge2017vol8no1art626[29] World Bank. (2013). Vietnam development report: preparing the work force for a modern market economy: Main report. Washington DC; World Bank, vol. 2.

Introduction: Conceptualizing DisabilityThe two most prominent models for understanding disability are the medical model and the social model (“Disability”). The medical model locates disability in the person and emphasises the possibility of a cure, reinforcing the idea that disability is the fault of the disabled person, their body, their genes, and/or their upbringing. The social model, formulated as a response to the medical model, presents disability as a failure of the surrounding environment to accommodate differently abled bodies and minds. Closely linked to identity politics, the social model argues that disability is not a defect to be fixed but a source of human experience and identity, and that to disregard the needs of people with disability is to discriminate against them by being “ableist.”Both models have limitations. On the one hand, simply being a person with disability or having any other minority identity/-ies does not by itself lead to exclusion and discrimination (Nocella 18); an element of social valuation must be present that goes beyond a mere numbers game. On the other hand, merely focusing on the social aspect neglects “the realities of sickness, suffering, and pain” that many people with disability experience (Mollow 196) and that cannot be substantially alleviated by any degree of social change. The body is irreducible to discourse and representation (Siebers 749). Disability exists only at the confluence of differently abled minds and bodies and unaccommodating social and physical environs. How a body “fits” (my word) its environment is the focus of the “ecosomatic paradigm” (Cella 574-75); one example is how the drastically different environment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) reorients the coordinates of ability and impairment (Cella 582–84). I want to examine a novel that, conversely, features a change not in environment but in body.Alien LegsTim Farnsworth, the protagonist of Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed (2010), is a high-powered New York lawyer who develops a condition that causes him to walk spontaneously without control over direction or duration. Tim suffers four periods of “walking,” during which his body could without warning stand up and walk at any time up to the point of exhaustion; each period grows increasingly longer with more frequent walks, until the fourth one ends in Tim’s death. As his wife, Jane, understands it, these forced excursions are “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter” (24). The direction is not random, for his legs follow roads and traffic lights. When Tim is exhausted, his legs abruptly stop, ceding control back to his conscious will, whence Tim usually calls Jane and then sleeps like a baby wherever he stops. She picks him up at all hours of the day and night.Contemporary critics note shades of Beckett in both the premise and title of the novel (“Young”; Adams), connections confirmed by Ferris (“Involuntary”); Ron Charles mentions the Poe story “The Man of the Crowd” (1845), but it seems only the compulsion to walk is similar. Ferris says he “was interested in writing about disease” (“Involuntary”), and disability is at the core of the novel; Tim more than once thinks bitterly to himself that the smug person without disability in front of him will one day fall ill and die, alluding to the universality of disability. His condition is detrimental to his work and life, and Stuart Murray explores how this reveals the ableist assumptions behind the idea of “productivity” in a post-industrial economy. In one humorous episode, Tim arrives unexpectedly (but volitionally) at a courtroom and has just finished requesting permission to join the proceedings when his legs take him out of the courtroom again; he barely has time to shout over his shoulder, “on second thought, Your Honor” (Ferris Unnamed 103). However, Murray does not discuss what is unique about Tim’s disability: it revolves around walking, the paradigmatic act of ability in popular culture, as connoted in the phrase “to stand up and walk.” This makes it difficult to understand Tim’s predicament solely in terms of either the medical or social model. He is able-bodied—in fact, we might say he is “over-able”—leading one doctor to label his condition “benign idiopathic perambulation” (41; my emphasis); yet the lack of agency in his walking precludes it from becoming a “pedestrian speech act” (de Certeau 98), walking that imbues space with semiotic value. It is difficult to imagine what changes society could make to neutralize Tim’s disability.The novel explores both avenues. At first, Tim adheres to the medical model protocol of seeking a diagnosis to facilitate treatment. He goes to every and any (pseudo)expert in search of “the One Guy” who can diagnose and, possibly, cure him (53), but none can; a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine documents psychiatrists and neurologists, finding nothing, kicking the can between them, “from the mind to body back to the mind” (101). Tim is driven to seek a diagnosis because, under the medical model, a diagnosis facilitates understanding, by others and by oneself. As the Farnsworths experience many times, it is surpassingly difficult to explain to others that one has a disease with no diagnosis or even name. Without a name, the disease may as well not exist, and even their daughter, Becka, doubts Tim at first. Only Jane is able to empathize with him based on her own experience of menopause, incomprehensible to men, gesturing towards the influence of sex on medical hermeneutics (Mollow 188–92). As the last hope of a diagnosis comes up empty, Tim shifts his mentality, attempting to understand his condition through an idiosyncratic idiom: experiencing “brain fog”, feeling “mentally unsticky”, and having “jangly” nerves, “hyperslogged” muscles, a “floaty” left side, and “bunched up” breathing—these, to him, are “the most precise descriptions” of his physical and mental state (126). “Name” something, “revealing nature’s mystery”, and one can “triumph over it”, he thinks at one point (212). But he is never able to eschew the drive toward understanding via naming, and his “deep metaphysical ache” (Burn 45) takes the form of a lament at misfortune, a genre traceable to the Book of Job.Short of crafting a life for Tim in which his family, friends, and work are meaningfully present yet detached enough in scheduling and physical space to accommodate his needs, the social model is insufficient to make sense of, let alone neutralize, his disability. Nonetheless, there are certain aspects of his experience that can be improved with social adjustments. Tim often ends his walks by sleeping wherever he stops, and he would benefit from sensitivity training for police officers and other authority figures; out of all the authority figures who he encounters, only one shows consideration for his safety, comfort, and mental well-being prior to addressing the illegality of his behaviour. And making the general public more aware of “modes of not knowing, unknowing, and failing to know”, in the words of Jack Halberstam (qtd. in McRuer and Johnson 152), would alleviate the plight not just of Tim but of all sufferers of undiagnosed diseases and people with (rare forms of) disability.After Tim leaves home and starts walking cross-country, he has to learn to deal with his disability without any support system. The solution he hits upon illustrates the ecosomatic paradigm: he buys camping gear and treats his walking as an endless hike. Neither “curing” his body nor asking accommodation of society, Tim’s tools mediate a fit between body and environs, and it more or less works. For Tim the involuntary nomad, “everywhere was a wilderness” (Ferris Unnamed 247).The Otherness of the BodyProblems arise when Tim tries to fight his legs. After despairing of a diagnosis, he internalises the struggle against the “somatic noncompliance” of his body (Mollow 197) and refers to it as “the other” (207). One through-line of the novel is a (failed) attempt to overcome cartesian duality (Reiffenrath). Tim divides his experiences along cartesian lines and actively tries to enhance while short-circuiting the body. He recites case law and tries to take up birdwatching to maintain his mind, but his body constantly stymies him, drawing his attention to its own needs. He keeps himself ill-clothed and -fed and spurns needed medical attention, only to find—on the brink of death—that his body has brought him to a hospital, and that he stops walking until he is cured and discharged. Tim’s early impression that his body has “a mind of its own” (44), a situation comparable to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886; Ludwigs 123–24), is borne out when it starts to silently speak to him, monosyllabically at first (“Food!” (207)), then progressing to simple sentences (“Leg is hurting” (213)) and sarcasm (“Deficiency of copper causes anemia, just so you know” (216)) before arriving at full-blown taunting:The other was the interrogator and he the muttering subject […].Q: Are you aware that you can be made to forget words, if certain neurons are suppressed from firing?A: Certain what?Q: And that by suppressing the firing of others, you can be made to forget what words mean entirely? Like the word Jane, for instance.A: Which?Q: And do you know that if I do this—[inaudible]A: Oof!Q: —you will flatline? And if I do this—[inaudible]A: Aaa, aaa…Q: —you will cease flatlining? (223–24; emphases and interpolations in original except for bracketed ellipsis)His Jobean lament turns literal, with his mind on God’s side and his body, “the other”, on the Devil’s in a battle for his eternal soul (Burn 46). Ironically, this “God talk” (Ferris Unnamed 248) finally gets Tim diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he receives medication that silences his body, if not stilling his legs. But when he is not medicated, his body can dominate his mind with multiple-page monologues.Not long after Tim’s mind and body reach a truce thanks to the camping gear and medication, Tim receives word on the west coast that Jane, in New York, has terminal cancer; he resolves to fight his end-of-walk “narcoleptic episodes” (12) to return to her—on foot. His body is not pleased, and it slowly falls apart as Tim fights it eastward cross-country. By the time he is hospitalized “ten miles as the crow flies from his final destination”, his ailments include “conjunctivitis”, “leg cramps”, “myositis”, “kidney failure”, “chafing and blisters”, “shingles”, “back pain”, “bug bites, ticks, fleas and lice”, “sun blisters”, “heatstroke and dehydration”, “rhabdomyolysis”, “excess [blood] potassium”, “splintering [leg] bones”, “burning tongue”, “[ballooning] heels”, “osteal complications”, “acute respiratory distress syndrome”, “excess fluid [in] his peritoneal cavity”, “brain swelling”, and a coma (278–80)—not including the fingers and toes lost to frostbite during an earlier period of walking. Nevertheless, he recovers and reunites with Jane, maintaining a holding pattern by returning to Jane’s hospital bedside after each walk.Jane recovers; the urgency having dissipated, Tim goes back on the road, confident that “he had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it” (303). A victory for mind over body? Not quite. The ending, Tim’s death scene, planned by Ferris from the beginning (Ferris “Tracking”), manages to grant victory to both mind and body without uniting them: his mind keeps working after physical death, but its last thought is of a “delicious […] cup of water” (310). Mind and body are two, but indivisible.Cartesian duality has relevance for other significant characters. The chain-smoking Detective Roy, assigned the case Tim is defending, later appears with oxygen tank in tow due to emphysema, yet he cannot quit smoking. What might have been a mere shortcut for characterization here carries physical consequences: the oxygen tank limits Roy’s movement and, one supposes, his investigative ability. After Jane recovers, Tim visits Frank Novovian, the security guard at his old law firm, and finds he has “gone fat [...] His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back”; recognising Tim, Frank “lifted an inch off [his] chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place” (297; my emphases). Frank’s physical state reflects the state of his career: settled. The mind-body antagonism is even more stark among Tim’s lawyer colleagues. Lev Wittig cannot become sexually aroused unless there is a “rare and extremely venomous snak[e]” in the room with no lights (145)—in direct contrast to his being a corporate tax specialist and the “dullest person you will ever meet” (141). And Mike Kronish famously once billed a twenty-seven-hour workday by crossing multiple time zones, but his apparent victory of mind over matter is undercut by his other notable achievement, being such a workaholic that his grown kids call him “Uncle Daddy” (148).Jane offers a more vexed case. While serving as Tim’s primary caretaker, she dreads the prospect of sacrificing the rest of her life for him. The pressures of the consciously maintaining her wedding vows directly affects her body. Besides succumbing to and recovering from alcoholism, she is twice tempted by the sexuality of other men; the second time, Tim calls her at the moment of truth to tell her the walking has returned, but instead of offering to pick him up, she says to him, “Come home” (195). As she later admits, asking him to do the impossible is a form of abandonment, and though causality is merely implied, Tim decides a day later not to return. Cartesian duality is similarly blurred in Jane’s fight against cancer. Prior to developing cancer, it is the pretence for Tim’s frequent office absences; she develops cancer; she fights it into remission not by relying on the clinical trial she undergoes, but because Tim’s impossible return inspires her; its remission removes the sense of urgency keeping Tim around, and he leaves; and he later learns that she dies from its recurrence. In multiple senses, Jane’s physical challenges are inextricable from her marriage commitment. Tim’s peripatetic condition affects both of them in homologous ways, gesturing towards the importance of disability studies for understanding the experience both of people with disability and of their caretakers.Becka copes with cartesian duality in the form of her obesity, and the way she does so sets an example for Tim. She gains weight during adolescence, around the time Tim starts walking uncontrollably, and despite her efforts she never loses weight. At first moody and depressed, she later channels her emotions into music, eventually going on tour. After one of her concerts, she tells Tim she has accepted her body, calling it “my one go-around,” freeing her from having to “hate yourself till the bitter end” (262) to instead enjoy her life and music. The idea of acceptance stays with Tim; whereas in previous episodes of walking he ignored the outside world—another example of reconceptualizing walking in the mode of disability—he pays attention to his surroundings on his journey back to New York, which is filled with descriptions of various geographical, meteorological, biological, and sociological phenomena, all while his body slowly breaks down. By the time he leaves home forever, he has acquired the habit of constant observation and the ability to enjoy things moment by moment. “Beauty, surprisingly, was everywhere” (279), he thinks. Invoking the figure of the flâneur, which Ferris had in mind when writing the novel (Ferris “Involuntary”), Peter Ferry argues that “becoming a 21st century incarnation of the flâneur gives Tim a greater sense of selfhood, a belief in the significance of his own existence within the increasingly chaotic and disorientating urban environment” (59). I concur, with two caveats: the chaotic and disorienting environment is not merely urban; and, contrary to Ferry’s claim that this regained selfhood is in contrast to “disintegrating” “conventional understandings of masculinity” (57), it instead incorporates Tim’s new identity as a person with disability.Conclusion: The Experience of DisabilityMore than specific insights into living with disability, the most important contribution of The Unnamed to disability studies is its exploration of the pure experience of disability. Ferris says, “I wanted to strip down this character to the very barest essentials and see what happens when sickness can’t go away and it can’t be answered by all [sic] of the medical technology that the country has at its disposal” (“Tracking”); by making Tim a wealthy lawyer with a caring family—removing common complicating socioeconomic factors of disability—and giving him an unprecedented impairment—removing all medical support and social services—Ferris depicts disability per se, illuminating the importance of disability studies for all people with(out) disability. After undergoing variegated experiences of pure disability, Tim “maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, […] and he persevered in this manner of living until his death” (Ferris Unnamed 306). This is an ideal relation to maintain between mind, body, and environment, irrespective of (dis)ability.ReferencesAdams, Tim. “The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris.” Fiction. Observer, 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/feb/21/the-unnamed-joshua-ferris>.Burn, Stephen J. “Mapping the Syndrome Novel.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Eds. T.J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 35-52.Cella, Matthew J.C. “The Ecosomatic Paradigm in Literature: Merging Disability Studies and Ecocriticism.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3 (2013): 574–96.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1980. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.Charles, Ron. “Book World Review of Joshua Ferris’s ‘The Unnamed.’” Books. Washington Post 20 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/19/AR2010011903945.html>.“Disability.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 17 Sep. 2018. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability>.Ferris, Joshua. “Involuntary Walking; the Joshua Ferris Interview.” ReadRollShow. Created by David Weich. Sheepscot Creative, 2010. Vimeo, 9 Mar. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.vimeo.com/10026925>. [My transcript.]———. “Tracking a Man’s Life, in Endless Footsteps.” Interview by Melissa Block. All Things Considered, NPR, 15 Feb. 2010. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123650332>.———. The Unnamed: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.Ferry, Peter. “Reading Manhattan, Reading Masculinity: Reintroducing the Flâneur with E.B. White’s Here Is New York and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed.” Culture, Society & Masculinities 3.1 (2011): 49–61.Ludwigs, Marina. “Walking as a Metaphor for Narrativity.” Studia Neophilologica 87.1 (Suppl. 1) (2015): 116–28.McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006.McRuer, Robert, and Merri Lisa Johnson. “Proliferating Cripistemologies: A Virtual Roundtable.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 149–69.Mollow, Anna. “Criphystemologies: What Disability Theory Needs to Know about Hysteria.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.2 (2014): 185–201.Murray, Stuart. “Reading Disability in a Time of Posthuman Work: Speed and Embodiment in Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed and Michael Faber’s Under the Skin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37.4 (2017). 20 May 2018 <http://dsq–sds.org/article/view/6104/4823/>.Nocella, Anthony J., II. “Defining Eco–Ability: Social Justice and the Intersectionality of Disability, Nonhuman Animals, and Ecology.” Earth, Animal, and Disability Liberation: The Rise of the Eco–Ability Movement. Eds. Anthony J. Nocella II, Judy K.C. Bentley, and Janet M. Duncan. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 3–21.Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” 1845. PoeStories.com. 18 Sep. 2018 <https://poestories.com/read/manofthecrowd>.Reiffenrath, Tanja. “Mind over Matter? Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed as Counternarrative.” [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation 5.1 (2014). 20 May 2018 <https://www.sic–journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=305/>.Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737–54.“The Young and the Restless.” Review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris. Books and Arts. Economist, 28 Jan. 2010: n. pag. 19 Sep. 2018 <https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2010/01/28/the-young-and-the-restless>.

The rise of expertise in the lives of women is a complex and prolonged process that began when the old networks through which women had learned from each other were being discredited or destroyed (Ehrenreich and English). Enclosed spaces of expert power formed separately from political control, market logistics and the pressures exerted by their subjects (Rose and Miller). This, however, was not a question of imposing expertise on women and forcing them to adhere to expert proclamations: “the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out, and … organised to promote their influence” (Ehrenreich and English 28). Women’s continuing enthusiasm for self-help books – and it is mainly women who buy them (Wood) – attests to the fact that they are still welcoming expertise into their lives. This paper argues that a major factor in the popularity of self-help is the reversal of the conventional ‘priestly’ relationship and ethic of confession, in a process of conversion that relies on the enthusiasm and active participation of the reader.Miller and Rose outline four ways in which human behaviour can be transformed: regulation (enmeshing people in a code of standards); captivation (seducing people with charm or charisma); education (training, convincing or persuading people); and conversion (transforming personhood, and ways of experiencing the world so that people understand themselves in fundamentally new ways). Of these four ways of acting upon others, it is conversion that is the most potent, because it changes people at the level of their own subjectivity – “personhood itself is remade” (Miller and Rose 35). While theories of conversion cannot be adequately discussed here, one aspect held in common by theories of religious conversion as well as those from psychological studies of ‘brainwashing’ is enthusiasm. Rambo’s analysis of the stages of religious conversion, for example, includes ‘questing’ in an active and engaged way, and a probable encounter with a passionately enthusiastic believer. Melia and Ryder, in their study of ‘brainwashing,’ state that two of the end stages of conversion are euphoria and proselytising – a point to which I will return in the conclusion. In order for a conversion to occur, then, the reader must be not only intellectually convinced of the truth, but must feel it is an important or vital truth, a truth she needs – in short, the reader must be enthused. The popularity of self-help books coincides with the rise of psy expertise more generally (Rose, "Identity"; Inventing), but self-help putatively offers escape from the experts, whilst simultaneously immersing its readers in expertise. Readers of self-help view themselves as reading sceptically (Simonds), interpretively (Rosenblatt) and resistingly (Fetterly, Rowe). They choose to read books as an educational activity (Dolby), rather than attending counselling or psychotherapy sessions in which they might be subject to manipulation, domination and control by a therapist (Simonds). I have discussed the nature of the advice in relationship manuals elsewhere (Hazleden, "Relationship"; "Pathology"), but the intention of this paper is to investigate the ways in which the authors attempt to enthuse and convert the reader.Best-Selling ExpertiseIn common with other best-selling genres, popular relationship manuals begin trying to enthuse the reader on the covers, which are intended to attract the reader, to establish the professional – or ‘priestly’ – credentials of the author and to assert the merit of the book, presenting the authors as experienced professionally-qualified experts, and advertising their bestseller status. These factors form part of the marketing ‘buzz’ or collective enthusiasm about a particular author or book.As part of the process of establishing themselves in the priestly role, the authors emphasise their professional qualifications and experience. Most authors use the title ‘Dr’ on the cover (Hendrix, McGraw, Forward, Gray, Cowan and Kinder, Schlessinger) or ‘PhD’ after their names (Vedral, DeAngelis, Spezzano). Further claims on the covers include assertions of the prominence of the authors in their field. Typical are DeAngelis’s claim to being “America’s foremost relationships expert,” and Hendrix’s claim to being “the world’s leading marital therapist.” Clinical and professional experience is mentioned, such as Spezzano’s “twenty-three years of counseling experience” (1) and Forward’s experience as “a consultant in many southern California Medical and psychiatric facilities” (iii). The cover of Spezzano’s book claims that he is a “therapist, seminar leader, author, lecturer and visionary leader.” McGraw emphasises his formal qualifications throughout his book, saying, “I had more degrees than a thermometer” (McGraw 6), and he refers to himself throughout as “Dr. Phil,” much like “Dr Laura” (Schlessinger). Facts and SecretsThe authors claim their ideas are based on clinical practice, research, and evidence. One author claims, “In this book, there is a wealth of tried and accurate information, which has worked for thousands of people in my therapeutic practice and seminars over the last two decades” (Spezzano 1). Another claims that he “worked with hundreds of couples in private practice and thousands more in workshops and seminars” and subsequently based his ideas on “research and clinical observations” (Hendrix xviii). Dowling refers to “four years of research … interviewing professionals who work with and study women.” She went to all this trouble because, she assures us, “I wanted facts” (Dowling, dust-jacket, 30).All this is in order to assure the reader of the relevance and build her enthusiasm about the importance of the book. McGraw (226) says he “reviewed case histories of literally thousands and thousands of couples” in order “to choose the right topics” for his book. Spezzano (7) claims that his psychological exercises come from clinical experience, but “more importantly, I have tested them all personally. Now I offer them to you.” This notion of being in possession of important new knowledge of which the reader is unaware is common, and expressed most succinctly by McGraw (15): “I have learned what you know and, more important, what you don't know.” This knowledge may be referred to as ‘secret’ (e.g. DeAngelis), or ‘hidden’ (e.g. Dowling) or as a recent discovery. Readers seem to accept this – they often assume that self-help books spring ‘naturally’ from clinical investigation as new information is ‘discovered’ about the human psyche (Lichterman 432).The Altruistic AuthorOn the assumption that readers will be familiar with other self-help books, some authors find it necessary to explain why they felt motivated to write one themselves. Usually these take the form of a kind of altruistic enthusiasm to share their great discoveries. Cowan and Kinder (xiv) claim that “one of the wonderful, intrinsic rewards of working with someone in individual psychotherapy is the rich and intense relationship that is established, [but] one of the frustrations of individual work is that in a whole lifetime it is impossible to touch more than a few people.” Morgan (26) assures us that “the results of applying certain principles to my marriage were so revolutionary that I had to pass them on in the four lesson Total Woman course, and now in this book.”The authors justify their own addition to an overcrowded genre by delineating what is distinctive about their own book, or what other “books, articles and surveys missed” (Dowling 30) or misinterpreted. Beattie (98-102) devotes several pages to a discussion of Dowling to assert that Dowling’s ‘Cinderella Complex’ is more accurately known as ‘codependency.’ The authors of another book admit that their ideas are not new, but claim to make a unique contribution because they are “writing from a much-needed male point of view” (Cowan and Kinder, back cover). Similarly, Gray suggests “many books are one-sided and unfortunately reinforce mistrust and resentment toward the opposite sex.” This meant that “a definitive guide was needed for understanding how healthy men and women are different,” and he promises “This book provides that vision” (Gray 4,7).Some authors are vehement in attacking other experts’ books as “gripe sessions,” “gobbledegook” (Schlessinger 51, 87), or “ridiculous” (Vedral 282). McGraw (9) writes “it is amazing to me how this country is overflowing with marital therapists, psychiatrists and psychologists, counselors, healers, advice columnists, and self-help authors – and their approach to relationships is usually so embarrassing that I want to turn my head in shame.” His own book, by contrast, will be quite different from anything the reader has heard before, because “it differs from what relationship ‘experts’ tell you” (McGraw 45).Confessions of an Author Because the authors are writing about intimate relationships, they are also keen to establish their credentials on a more personal level. “Loving, losing, learning the lessons, and reloving have been my path” (Carter-Scott 247-248), says one, and another asserts that, “It’s taken me a long time to understand men. It’s been a difficult and often painful journey and I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way in my own relationships” (DeAngelis xvi). The authors are even keen to admit the mistakes they made in their previous relationships. Gray says, “In my previous relationships, I had become indifferent and unloving at difficult times … As a result, my first marriage had been very painful and difficult” (Gray 2). Others describe the feelings of disappointment with their marriages: We gradually changed. I was amazed to realize that Charlie had stopped talking. He had become distant and preoccupied. … Each evening, when Charlie walked in the front door after work, a cloud of gloom and tension floated in with him. That cloud was almost tangible. … this tension cloud permeated our home atmosphere … there was a barrier between us. (Morgan 18)Doyle (14) tells a similar tale: “While my intentions were good, I was clearly on the road to marital hell. … I was becoming estranged from the man who had once made me so happy. Our marriage was in serious trouble and it had only been four years since we’d taken our vows.” The authors relate the bewilderment they felt in these failing relationships: “My confusion about the psychology of love relationships was compounded when I began to have problems with my own marriage. … we gave our marriage eight years of intensive examination, working with numerous therapists. Nothing seemed to help” (Hendrix xvii).Even the process of writing the relationship manual itself can be uncomfortable: This was the hardest and most painful chapter for me to write, because it hit so close to home … I sat down at my computer, typed out the title of this chapter, and burst into tears. … It was the pain of my own broken heart. (DeAngelis 74)The Worthlessness of ExpertiseThus, the authors present their confessional tales in which they have learned important lessons through their own suffering, through the experience of life itself, and not through the intervention of any form of external or professional expertise. Furthermore, they highlight the failure of their professional training. Susan Forward (4) draws a comparison between her professional life as a relationship counsellor and the “Susan who went home at night and twisted herself into a pretzel trying to keep her husband from yelling at her.” McGraw tells of a time when he was counselling a couple, and: Suddenly all I could hear myself saying was blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah. As I sat there, I asked myself, ‘Has anybody noticed over the last fifty years that this crap doesn’t work? Has it occurred to anyone that the vast majority of these couples aren’t getting any better? (McGraw 6)The authors go to some lengths to demonstrate that their new-found knowledge is unlike anything else, and are even prepared to mention the apparent contradiction between the role the author already held as a relationship expert (before they made their important discoveries) and the failure of their own relationships (the implication being that these relationships failed because the authors themselves were not yet beneficiaries of the wisdom contained in their latest books). Gray, for example, talking about his “painful and difficult” first marriage (2), and DeAngelis, bemoaning her “mistakes” (xvi), allude to the failure of their marriage to each other, at a time when both were already well-known relationship experts. Hendrix (xvii) says: As I sat in the divorce court waiting to see the judge, I felt like a double failure, a failure as a husband and as a therapist. That very afternoon I was scheduled to teach a course on marriage and the family, and the next day, as usual, I had several couples to counsel. Despite my professional training, I felt just as confused and defeated as the other men and women who were sitting beside me.Thus the authors present the knowledge they have gained from their experiences as being unavailable through professional marital therapy, relationship counselling, and other self-help books. Rather, the advice they impart is presented as the hard-won outcome of a long and painful process of personal discovery.Peace and PassionOnce the uniqueness of the advice is established, the authors attempt to enthuse the reader by describing the effects of following it. Norwood (Women 4) says her programme led to “the most rewarding years of my life,” and Forward (10) says she “discovered enormous amounts of creativity and energy in myself that hadn't been available to me before.” Gray (268) asserts that, following his discoveries “I personally experienced this inner transformation,” and DeAngelis (126) claims “I am compassionate where I used to be critical; I am patient where I used to be judgmental.” Doyle (23) says, “practicing the principles described in this book has transformed my marriage into a passionate, romantic union.” Similarly, in discussing the effects of her ideas on her marriage, Morgan (26) speaks of “This brand new love between us” that “has given us a brand new life together.” Having established the success of their ideas and techniques on their own lives, the authors go on to relate stories about their successful application to the lives and relationships of their clients. One author writes that “When I began implementing my ideas … The divorce rate in my practice sharply declined, and the couples … reported a much deeper satisfaction in their marriages” (Hendrix xix). Another claims “Repeatedly I have heard people say that they have benefited more from this new understanding of relationships than from years of therapy” (Gray 7). Morgan, describing the effects of her ‘Total Woman’ classes, says: Attending one of the first classes in Miami were wives of the Miami Dolphin football players … it is interesting to note that their team won every game that next season and became the world champions! … Gals, I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for the Superbowl … (Morgan 188)In case we are still unconvinced, the authors include praise and thanks from their inspired clients: “My life has become exciting and wonderful. Thank you,” writes one (Vedral 308). Gray (6) talks of the “thousands of inspirational comments that people have shared” about his advice. Vedral (307) says “I have received thousands of letters from women … thanking me for shining a beam of light on their situations.” If these clients have transformed their lives, the authors claim, so can the reader. They promise that the future will be “exceptional” (Friedman 242) and “wonderful” (Norwood, Women 257). It will consist of “self fulfilment, love, and joy” (Norwood, Women 26), “peace and joy” (Hendrix xx), “freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope and happiness” (Beattie), “peace, relief, joy, and passion that you will never find any other way” (Doyle 62) – in short, “happiness for the rest of your life” (Spezzano 77).SummaryIn order to effect the conversion of their readers, the authors seek to create enthusiasm about their books. First, they appeal to the modern tradition of credentialism, making claims about their formal professional qualifications and experience. This establishes them as credible ‘priests.’ Then they make calculable, factual, evidence-based claims concerning the number of books they have sold, and appeal to the epistemological authority of the methodology involved in establishing the findings of their books. They provide evidence of the efficacy of their own unique methods by relating the success of their ideas when applied to their own lives and relationships, and those of their clients and their readers. The authors also go to some lengths to establish that they have personal experience of relationship problems, especially those the reader is currently presumed to be experiencing. This establishes the ‘empathy’ essential to Rogerian therapy (Rogers), and an informal claim to lay knowledge or insight. In telling their own personal stories, the authors establish an ethic of confession, in which the truth of oneself is sought, unearthed and revealed in “the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage” (Foucault, History 59). At the same time, by claiming that their qualifications were not helpful in solving these personal difficulties, the authors assert that much of their professional training was useless or even harmful, suggesting that they are aware of a general scepticism towards experts (cf. Beck, Giddens), and share these doubts. By implying that it is other experts who are perhaps not to be trusted, they distinguish their own work from anything offered by other relationship experts, thereby circumventing “the paradox of self-help books’ existence” (Cheery) and proliferation. Thus, the authors present their motives as altruistic, whilst perhaps questioning the motives of others. Their own book, they promise, will be the one (finally) that brings a future of peace, passion and joy. Conversion, Enthusiasm and the Reversal of the Priestly RelationshipAlthough power relations between authors and readers are complex, self-help is evidence of power in one of its most efficacious forms – that of conversion. This is a relationship into which one enters voluntarily and enthusiastically, in the name of oneself, for the benefit of oneself. Such power enthuses, persuades, incites, invites, provokes and entices, and it is therefore a strongly subjectifying power, and most especially so because the relationship of the reader to the author is one of choice. Because the reader can choose between authors, and skip or skim sections, she can concentrate on the parts of the therapeutic diagnosis that she believes specifically apply to her. For example, Grodin (414) found it was common for a reader to attach excerpts from a book to a bathroom mirror or kitchen cabinet, and to re-read and underline sections of a book that seemed most relevant. In this way, through her enthusiastic participation, the reader becomes her own expert, her own therapist, in control of certain aspects of the encounter, which nonetheless must always take place on psy terms.In many conversion studies, the final stage involves the assimilation and embodiment of new practices (e.g. Paloutzian et al. 1072), whereby the convert employs or utilises her new truths. I argue that in self-help books, this stage occurs in the reversal of the ‘priestly’ relationship. The ‘priestly’ relationship between client and therapist, is one in which in which the therapist remains mysterious while the client confesses and is known (Rose, "Power"). In the self-help book, however, this relationship is reversed. The authors confess their own ‘sins’ and imperfections, by relating their own disastrous experiences in relationships and wrong-thinking. They are, of course, themselves enthusiastic converts, who are enmeshed within the power that they exercise (cf. Foucault History; Discipline), as these confessions illustrate. The reader is encouraged to go through this process of confession as well, but she is expected to do so privately, and to play the role of priest and confessor to herself. Thus, in a reversal of the priestly relationship, the person who ‘is knowledge’ within the book itself is the author. It is only if the reader takes up the invitation to perform for herself the priestly role that she will become an object of knowledge – and even then, only to herself, albeit through a psy diagnostic gaze provided for her. Of course, this instance of confession to the self still places the individual “in a network of relations of power with those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their possession of the keys to interpretation” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 174), but the keys to interpretation are provided to the reader by the author, and left with her for her own safekeeping and future use. As mentioned in the introduction, conversion involves questing in an active and engaged way, and may involve joy and proselytising. Because the relationship must be one of active participation, the enthusiasm of the reader to apply these truths to her own self-understanding is critical. Indeed, the convert is, by her very nature, an enthusiast.ConclusionSelf-help books seek to bring about a transformation of subjectivity from powerlessness to active goal-setting, personal improvement and achievement. This is achieved by a process of conversion that produces particular choices and types of identity, new subjectivities remade through the production of new ethical truths. Self-help discourses endow individuals with new enthusiasms, aptitudes and qualities – and these can then be passed on to others. Indeed, the self-help reader is invited, by means of the author’s confessions, to become, in a limited way, the author’s own therapist – ie, she is invited to perform an examination of the author’s (past) mistakes, to diagnose the author’s (past) condition and to prescribe an appropriate (retrospective) cure for this condition. Through the process of diagnosing the author and the author’s clients, using the psy gaze provided by the author, the reader is rendered an expert in therapeutic wisdom and is converted to a new belief system in which she will become an enthusiastic participant in her own subjectification. ReferencesBeattie, M. 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Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.Ehrenreich, B., and D. English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women. London: Pluto, 1988.Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.———. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Polity, 1991.Gray, J. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. London: HarperCollins, 1993.Grodin, D. “The Interpreting Audience: The Therapeutics of Self-Help Book Reading.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8.4 (1991): 404-420.Hamson, S. “Are Men Really from Mars and Women From Venus?” In R. Francoeur and W. Taverner, eds. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Human Sexuality. 7th ed. Conneticut: McGraw-Hill, 2000.Hazleden, R. “The Pathology of Love in Contemporary Relationship Manuals.” Sociological Review 52.2 (2004). ———. “The Relationship of the Self with Itself in Contemporary Relationship Manuals.” Journal of Sociology 39.4 (Dec. 2003). Hendrix, H. Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. New York: Pocket Books, 1997.Lichterman, Paul. "Self-Help Reading as a Thin Culture." Media, Culture and Society 14.3 (1992): 421-447. Melia, T., and N. Ryder. Lucifer State: A Novel Approach to Rhetoric. Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1983.Miller, P., and N. Rose. “On Therapeutic Authority: Psychoanalytical Expertise under Advanced Liberalism.” History of the Human Sciences 7.3 (1994): 29-64. McGraw, P. Relationship Rescue: Don’t Make Excuses! Start Repairing Your Relationship Today. London: Vermilion, 2001.Morgan, M. The Total Woman. London: Harper Collins, 1973.Norwood, R. Letters From Women Who Love Too Much. New York: Pocket Books, 1988. ———. 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Biopunk is an intriguing development of that essential cultural reference point for the information age: cyberpunk. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) did more than popularise the phrase cyberspace, it laid the basis for a genre that went on to capture the turbulent zeitgeist of a new digital age in which the promises of the much-vaunted, information society finally seemed possible. Karl Marx used the phrase "All that is solid melts into air..."1 to describe the profound social changes wrought by capitalism. It is also a fitting description of the apparent technology-induced paradigm shift in our contemporary perception of the world. Increasingly, solid, material structures are viewed in immaterial, informational terms and the boundaries between previously distinct categories are blurring. This paradigm shift has produced attendant tensions and the significance of biopunk resides in its cultural representation or 'playing out' our contemporary ontological confusion: physicality's newly problematic status. This article briefly samples the work of the British writers Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith to argue that in the rapidly-approaching era of a fully-mapped human genome, biopunk provides a much-needed cathartic imaginative outlet for our growing confusion about the status of the physical in our brave new digital world. Viral Times -- Hybrid Confusion In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles it seems to me have been reversed ... the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. (Ballard 5) The notion that biopunk's imaginative excesses can provide potentially useful insights into the contemporary condition is backed by the sense that the traditional boundary between the real and imagined worlds has become irretrievably blurred. Thus J.G. Ballard suggests that the ubiquity and pervasiveness of modern technology has reversed our usual ontological categories, a sentiment endorsed by Columbus, a character from Noon's novel Pollen, who asserts that "what is presently inside the head will shortly be outside the head. The dream! The dream will live!" (193). The increasing perception of such an ontological reversal is reflected in claims that cyberpunk can be viewed as social theory (Burrows) whereas "Baudrillard's futuristic postmodern social theory can be read in turn as science fiction" (Kellner 299). Cyberpunk fiction utilises the pace of technological change as a permanent narrative back-drop, and having identified various social trends within late capitalism re-presents them with an 'exaggerated clarity' that has become its hallmark. Biopunk takes such exaggerations even further. It metaphorises cyberpunk's social instabilities into an alarming maelstrom of biological uncertainty: exaggerated clarity becomes exaggerated anxiety. Biopunk develops the informationally saturated mise-en-scène of cyberpunk by exploring further the implications of the increasing convergence between information as an abstract entity and its embodied manipulation in biological DNA. It pursues Marx's previously cited image of melting ephemerality with fictional fervour: "These days the doors between the two worlds were slippery, as though the walls were going fluid" (Noon, Pollen 92)2. Biopunk's fictional emphasis upon disorienting levels of fluidity reflects non-fictional concerns about the potential information overloading tendencies of digital technologies: "the tie between information and action has been severed ... we are glutted with information, drowning in information, we have no control over it, don't know what to do with it" (Postman 6). In Pollen, Noon provides a grotesque metaphorical representation of Postman's fears in his portrayal of a near-future Manchester struggling to cope with the after-effects of the widespread dispersal of a powerful fertility drug called Fecundity 10. The city is over-run by exponentially proliferating flora and fauna that combine in a frenetic confusion of unlikely hybrid genetic couplings. Noon uses a blurring of previously distinct genetic categories to symbolise society's inability to control the growth of information. His fiction 'fleshes out' digitally-induced anxieties with a sustained depiction of futuristic Hieronymous Bosch-like febrility and fecundity, or, to use a phrase of Baudrillard's, 'organic delirium': The Zombies were dancing and blooming around the shit and the dust, flowers sprouting from their tough skins, petals falling from their mouths. It was a fine show of fauna and flora, all mixed into one being. New species ... It was a time of happenings and flower power. A time of changes. That's why this hayfever wave is exciting me so much, despite the danger. It's got me in two minds, this fever. The flowers are making a come back, and the world is getting messier. The barricades are coming down. This city is so fucking juicy right now. (Noon, Pollen 117 & 166) Noon's Nymphomation is set in a near-future Manchester that is the testing site for a national lottery based upon a domino-like game. The neologism that provides the novel's title, continues his key theme of fecundity, it is used: ... to denote a complex mathematical procedure where numbers rather than being added together or multiplied or whatever, were actually allowed to breed with each other, to produce new numbers, which had something to do with 'breeding ever more pathways towards the goal'. (Noon, Nymphomation 119) Fecundity in this setting does not only apply to the mating of informational and biological entities but is also apparent in the meme-like transmission of a pervasive copulatory capitalist zeitgeist: "the naked populace, making foreplay to the domiviz, bone-eyed and numberfucked ... Even the air had a hard-on, bulging with mathematics. Turning the burbflies into a nympho-swarm, liquid streets alive with perverts ..." (Noon, Nymphomation 65) General fecundity is specifically manifested in a glut of commercial activity which the authorities no longer seem able to control: "the streets of Blurbchester were thick with the mergers, a corporate fog of brand images. People had to battle through them ... The Government was at a loss regarding the overwhelming messages; they knew the experiment had gone wrong ... but how to right it?" (240). Informational overload becomes a reproductive frenzy whereby corporate messages breed literally like flies. Gibson's dance of biz becomes an actual buzz: As the burbflies went out of control, blocking out the streetlights, making a cloud of logos. It was rutting season for the living verts, and all over the city the male blurbs were riding on the backs of females. Biting their necks, hoping for babyverts. The city, the pulsating city, alive with the rain and colours and the stench of nymphomation Mathemedia. Here we go, numberfucked ... (Noon, Nymphomation 159) In the real world, the process of technological change causes flux and confusion. Cyberpunk fiction represents this by describing dystopian social environments. Its protagonists revel in the loss of traditional and coherent social values such as law and order and community where its protagonists revel in an unlimited smorgasboard of privatised formerly public services. Biopunk's distinctive quality stems from its own peculiar perspective on such confusion, manifested in a distinctive attention to bodily substance and a whole bestiary of new hybrid life-forms. Fleshy Contempt For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson, Neuromancer 12) This early passage from Neuromancer describes its protagonist's addictive relationship to the Matrix and provides a neat summary of cyberpunk's perspective on the growing subordination of the physical. Digital pleasure is experienced at the expense of alienation with the material environment. In Douglas Coupland's 'factional' work Microserfs (1995) the excessively manicured lawns at Microsoft headquarters merely represent an epiphenomenon of a more deeply-rooted societal trend towards the diminished importance of our physical sensibilities. Lego, or 'Satan's playtoy', is humorously identified as an emblematic commodity of this tendency due to the way in which it is responsible for brainwashing entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular ... Lego is, like, the perfect device to enculturate a citizenry intolerant of smell, intestinal by-products, nonadherence to unified standards, decay, blurred edges, germination and death. Try imagining a forest made of Lego. Good luck. Do you ever see Legos made from ice? dung? wood? iron? and sphagnum moss? No -- grotacious, or what? (Coupland 258) A typically distinguishing feature of biopunk is its willingness to stretch such aspects of the digital zeitgeist to their limits. In contrast to Coupland's easy humour and cyberpunk's "relaxed contempt for the flesh", biopunk refashions sentiments of unease with physical immediacy to take the form of nauseating disgust with the biological per se. In Spares, this is vividly embodied when, for example, objects fall into reality from the cyberspatial Gap: It was a bird, of a kind. A bird or a cat, either way. It was featherless, but stood a foot tall on spindly jointed legs; its face was avian but -- like the body -- fat and dotted with patchy, moulting orange fur. Two vestigial wings poked out of its side at right angles, looking as if they had been unceremoniously amputated with scissors and then re-cauterized. Most of the creature's skin was visible, an unhealthy white mess that appeared to be weeping fluid. The whole body heaved in and out as it sat, as if labouring for breath, and it gave of a smell of recent decay -- as if fresh-minted for death ... its beak opened. The hole this revealed looked less like a mouth than a churned wound, and the eyes, though vicious, were faltering ... The bird tried to take a step towards us, but the effort caused one of its legs to break. The top joint teetered in its socket and then popped out. The creature flopped onto its side. The skin over the joint tore like an over-ripe fruit, releasing a gout of matter that resembled nothing so much as a heavy period mixed with sour cream. (Smith 162) Biopunk's almost neo-gnostic distaste for flesh has arguably become increasingly apparent in William Gibson's later work. In Neuromancer, for example, the tone of 'relaxed contempt' is still evident in his description of the population's consumer demand: "Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification" (60). However, his vision is certainly less relaxed when, by the time of Idoru (1996), he describes how the media's audience ... is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the annointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth ... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. (28-9) Conclusion Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance. (McLuhan 12) McLuhan's image of the dramatic visibility of sound right at the moment of its imminent supercedance is a useful way of conceptualising the significance of biopunk and its obsessive highlighting of bodies and their metaphoric power. Perhaps as we leap-frog the mechanical technologies of modernity into a postindustrial world where information attains the status of the fourth element, biopunk is performing an idiosyncratic eulogy at the funeral of physicality. Footnotes Marshall Berman uses this phrase for the title of his historical, socio-cultural exploration of capitalism and its effects. Further examples include: ... the world is getting very fluid these days. Very fluid. Dangerously so (Noon, Pollen 101) ... It was a fluid world and there was danger for everybody living there. (157) ... the real world is up for grabs, especially since the world has become so fluid. (200) ... Even time was becoming fluid under the new map (246) ... Coyote is howling now, turning the road into liquid so he can glide down its throat. (254) The world was dissolving and the new day bled away ... safety, the rules, cartography, instruction ... all the bad things were peeling away (278) References Ballard, J.G. Crash. London: Vintage, 1995. Berman, M. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. London: Verso, 1983. Burrows, R. "Cyberpunk as Social Theory." Imagining Cities. Eds. S. Westwood and J. Williams. London: Routledge, 1997. Coupland, D. Microserfs. London: Flamingo, 1995. Gibson, W. Neuromancer. London: Grafton, 1984. ---. Idoru. London:Viking, 1996. Kellner, D. Media Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. McLuhan, M. Understanding Media. New York: New American Library, 1964. Noon, Jeff. Vurt. Manchester: Ringpull, 1993. ---. Pollen. Manchester: Ringpull, 1995. ---. Nymphomation, London: Corgi, 1997. Postman, N. "Informing Ourselves to Death." German Informatics Society, Stuttgart. 1990. 26 June 2000 <http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Criticisms/informing_ourselves_to_death.paper>. Smith, M. M. Spares. London: HarperCollins, 1996. Stephenson, N. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Paul Taylor. "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php>. Chicago style: Paul Taylor, "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Paul Taylor. (2000) Fleshing Out the Maelstrom: Biopunk and the Violence of Information. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]).

This paper argues that artist Dope Saint Jude is transforming South African hip-hop by queering a genre that has predominantly been male and heteronormative. Specifically, I analyse the opening skit of her music video “Keep in Touch” in order to unpack the ways which she revives Gayle, a gay language that adopted double-coded forms of speech during the apartheid era—a context in which homosexuals were criminalised. The use of Gayle and spaces close to the city centre of Cape Town (such as Salt River and Woodstock) speaks to the city as it was before it was transformed by the decline of industries due to the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics and, more recently, by the gentrification of these spaces. Dope Saint Jude therefore reclaims these city spaces through her use of gay modes of speech that have a long history in Cape Town and by positioning her work as hip-hop, which has been popular in the city for well over two decades. Her inclusion of transgender MC and DJ Angel Ho pushes the boundaries of hegemonic and binary conceptions of gender identity even further. In essence, Dope Saint Jude is transforming local hip-hop in a context that is shaped significantly by US cultural imperialism. The artist is also transforming our perspective of spaces that have been altered by neoliberal economics.Setting the SceneDope Saint Jude (DSJ) is a queer MC from Elsies River, a working class township located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa. Elsies River was defined as a “coloured” neighbourhood under the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which segregated South Africans racially. With the aid of the Population Registration Act, citizens were classified, not merely along the lines of white, Asian, or black—black subjects were also divided into further categories. The apartheid state also distinguished between black and “coloured” subjects. Michael MacDonald contends that segregation “ordained blacks to be inferior to whites; apartheid cast them to be indelibly different” (11). Apartheid declared “African claims in South Africa to be inferior to white claims” and effectively claimed that black subjects “belonged elsewhere, in societies of their own, because their race was different” (ibid). The term “coloured” defined people as “mixed race” to separate communities that might otherwise have identified as black in the broad and inclusive sense (Erasmus 16). Racial categorisation was used to create a racial hierarchy with white subjects at the top of that hierarchy and those classified as black receiving the least resources and benefits. This frustrated attempts to establish broad alliances of black struggles against apartheid. It is in this sense that race is socially and politically constructed and continues to have currency, despite the fact that biologically essentialist understandings of race have been discredited (Yudell 13–14). Thanks to apartheid town planning and resource allocation, many townships on the Cape Flats were poverty-stricken and plagued by gang violence (Salo 363). This continues to be the case because post-apartheid South Africa's embrace of neoliberal economics failed to address racialised class inequalities significantly (Haupt, Static 6–8). This is the '90s context in which socially conscious hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City or Black Noise, came together. They drew inspiration from Black Consciousness philosophy via their exposure to US hip-hop crews such as Public Enemy in order to challenge apartheid policies, including their racial interpellation as “coloured” as distinct from the more inclusive category, black (Haupt, “Black Thing” 178). Prophets of da City—whose co-founding member, Shaheen Ariefdien, also lived in Elsies River—was the first South African hip-hop outfit to record an album. Whilst much of their work was performed in English, they quickly transformed the genre by rapping in non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and by including MCs who rap in African languages (ibid). They therefore succeeded in addressing key issues related to race, language, and class disparities in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire). However, as is the case with mainstream US hip-hop, specifically gangsta rap (Clay 149), South African hip-hop has been largely dominated by heterosexual men. This includes the more commercial hip-hop scene, which is largely perceived to be located in Johannesburg, where male MCs like AKA and Cassper Nyovest became celebrities. However, certain female MCs have claimed the genre, notably EJ von Lyrik and Burni Aman who are formerly of Godessa, the first female hip-hop crew to record and perform locally and internationally (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166; Haupt, “Can a Woman in Hip-Hop”). DSJ therefore presents the exception to a largely heteronormative and male-dominated South African music industry and hip-hop scene as she transforms it with her queer politics. While queer hip-hop is not new in the US (Pabón and Smalls), this is new territory for South Africa. Writing about the US MC Jean Grae in the context of a “male-dominated music industry and genre,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls contends,Heteronormativity blocks the materiality of the experiences of Black people. Yet, many Black people strive for a heteronormative effect if not “reality”. In hip hop, there is a particular emphasis on maintaining the rigidity of categories, even if those categories fail [sic]. (87) DSJ challenges these rigid categories. Keep in TouchDSJ's most visible entry onto the media landscape to date has been her appearance in an H&M recycling campaign with British Sri Lankan artist MIA (H&M), some fashion shoots, her new EP—Reimagine (Dope Saint Jude)—and recent Finnish, US and French tours as well as her YouTube channel, which features her music videos. As the characters’ theatrical costumes suggest, “Keep in Touch” is possibly the most camp and playful music video she has produced. It commences somewhat comically with Dope Saint Jude walking down Salt River main road to a public telephone, where she and a young woman in pig tails exchange dirty looks. Salt River is located at the foot of Devil's Peak not far from Cape Town's CBD. Many factories were located there, but the area is also surrounded by low-income housing, which was designated a “coloured” area under apartheid. After apartheid, neighbourhoods such as Salt River, Woodstock, and the Bo-Kaap became increasingly gentrified and, instead of becoming more inclusive, many parts of Cape Town continued to be influenced by policies that enable racialised inequalities. Dope Saint Jude calls Angel Ho: DSJ: Awêh, Angie! Yoh, you must check this kak sturvy girl here by the pay phone. [Turns to the girl, who walks away as she bursts a chewing gum bubble.] Ja, you better keep in touch. Anyway, listen here, what are you wys?Angel Ho: Ah, just at the salon getting my hair did. What's good? DSJ: Wanna catch on kak today?Angel Ho: Yes, honey. But, first, let me Gayle you this. By the jol by the art gallery, this Wendy, nuh. This Wendy tapped me on the shoulder and wys me, “This is a place of decorum.”DSJ: What did she wys?Angel Ho: De-corum. She basically told me this is not your house. DSJ: I know you told that girl to keep in touch!Angel Ho: Yes, Mama! I'm Paula, I told that bitch, “Keep in touch!” [Points index finger in the air.](Saint Jude, Dope, “Keep in Touch”)Angel Ho's name is a play on the male name Angelo and refers to the trope of the ho (whore) in gangsta rap lyrics and in music videos that present objectified women as secondary to male, heterosexual narratives (Sharpley-Whiting 23; Collins 27). The queering of Angelo, along with Angel Ho’s non-binary styling in terms of hair, make-up, and attire, appropriates a heterosexist, sexualised stereotype of women in order to create room for a gender identity that operates beyond heteronormative male-female binaries. Angel Ho’s location in a hair salon also speaks to stereotypical associations of salons with women and gay subjects. In a discussion of gender stereotypes about hair salons, Kristen Barber argues that beauty work has traditionally been “associated with women and with gay men” and that “the body beautiful has been tightly linked to the concept of femininity” (455–56). During the telephonic exchange, Angel Ho and Dope Saint Jude code-switch between standard and non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans, as the opening appellation, “Awêh,” suggests. In this context, the term is a friendly greeting, which intimates solidarity. “Sturvy” means pretentious, whilst “kak” means shit, but here it is used to qualify “sturvy” and means that the girl at the pay phone is very pretentious or “full of airs.” To be “wys” means to be wise, but it can also mean that you are showing someone something or educating them. The meanings of these terms shift, depending on the context. The language practices in this skit are in line with the work of earlier hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap, to validate black, multilingual forms of speech and expression that challenge the linguistic imperialism of standard English and Afrikaans in South Africa, which has eleven official languages (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire; Williams). Henry Louis Gates’s research on African American speech varieties and literary practices emerging from the repressive context of slavery is essential to understanding hip-hop’s language politics. Hip-hop artists' multilingual wordplay creates parallel discursive universes that operate both on the syntagmatic axis of meaning-making and the paradigmatic axis (Gates 49; Haupt, “Stealing Empire” 76–77). Historically, these discursive universes were those of the slave masters and the slaves, respectively. While white hegemonic meanings are produced on the syntagmatic axis (which is ordered and linear), black modes of speech as seen in hip-hop word play operate on the paradigmatic axis, which is connotative and non-linear (ibid). Distinguishing between Signifyin(g) / Signification (upper case, meaning black expression) and signification (lower case, meaning white dominant expression), he argues that “the signifier ‘Signification’ has remained identical in spelling to its white counterpart to demonstrate [. . .] that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (Gates 49). The meanings of terms and expressions can change, depending on the context and manner in which they are used. It is therefore the shared experiences of speech communities (such as slavery or racist/sexist oppression) that determine the negotiated meanings of certain forms of expression. Gayle as a Parallel Discursive UniverseDSJ and Angel Ho's performance of Gayle takes these linguistic practices further. Viewers are offered points of entry into Gayle via the music video’s subtitles. We learn that Wendy is code for a white person and that to keep in touch means exactly the opposite. Saint Jude explains that Gayle is a very fun queer language that was used to kind of mask what people were saying [. . .] It hides meanings and it makes use of women's names [. . . .] But the thing about Gayle is it's constantly changing [. . .] So everywhere you go, you kind of have to pick it up according to the context that you're in. (Ovens, Saint Jude and Haupt)According to Kathryn Luyt, “Gayle originated as Moffietaal [gay language] in the coloured gay drag culture of the Western Cape as a form of slang amongst Afrikaans-speakers which over time, grew into a stylect used by gay English and Afrikaans-speakers across South Africa” (Luyt 8; Cage 4). Given that the apartheid state criminalised homosexuals, Gayle was coded to evade detection and to seek out other members of this speech community (Luyt 8). Luyt qualifies the term “language” by arguing, “The term ‘language’ here, is used not as a constructed language with its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, but in the same way as linguists would discuss women’s language, as a way of speaking, a kind of sociolect” (Luyt 8; Cage 1). However, the double-coded nature of Gayle allows one to think of it as creating a parallel discursive universe as Gates describes it (49). Whereas African American and Cape Flats discursive practices function parallel to white, hegemonic discourses, gay modes of speech run parallel to heteronormative communication. Exclusion and MicroaggressionsThe skit brings both discursive practices into play by creating room for one to consider that DSJ queers a male-dominated genre that is shaped by US cultural imperialism (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166) as a way of speaking back to intersectional forms of marginalisation (Crenshaw 1244), which are created by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 116). This is significant in South Africa where “curative rape” of lesbians and other forms of homophobic violence are prominent (cf. Gqola; Hames; Msibi). Angel Ho's anecdote conveys a sense of the extent to which black individuals are subject to scrutiny. Ho's interpretation of the claim that the gallery “is a place of decorum” is correct: it is not Ho's house. Black queer subjects are not meant to feel at home or feel a sense of ownership. This functions as a racial microaggression: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 60). This speaks to DSJ's use of Salt River, Woodstock, and Bo-Kaap for the music video, which features black queer bodies in performance—all of these spaces are being gentrified, effectively pushing working class people of colour out of the city (cf. Didier, Morange, and Peyroux; Lemanski). Gustav Visser explains that gentrification has come to mean a unit-by-unit acquisition of housing which replaces low-income residents with high-income residents, and which occurs independent of the structural condition, architecture, tenure or original cost level of the housing (although it is usually renovated for or by the new occupiers). (81–82) In South Africa this inequity plays out along racial lines because its neoliberal economic policies created a small black elite without improving the lives of the black working class. Instead, the “new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the reinforcing cleavages between rich whites and poor blacks without having to make more radical changes” (MacDonald 158). In a news article about a working class Salt River family of colour’s battle against an eviction, Christine Hogg explains, “Gentrification often means the poor are displaced as the rich move in or buildings are upgraded by new businesses. In Woodstock and Salt River both are happening at a pace.” Angel Ho’s anecdote, as told from a Woodstock hair salon, conveys a sense of what Woodstock’s transformation from a coloured, working class Group Area to an upmarket, trendy, and arty space would mean for people of colour, including black, queer subjects. One could argue that this reading of the video is undermined by DSJ’s work with global brand H&M. Was she was snared by neoliberal economics? Perhaps, but one response is that the seeds of any subculture’s commercial co-option lie in the fact it speaks through commodities (for example clothing, make-up, CDs, vinyl, or iTunes / mp3 downloads (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45). Subcultures have a window period in which to challenge hegemonic ideologies before they are delegitimated or commercially co-opted. Hardt and Negri contend that the means that extend the reach of corporate globalisation could be used to challenge it from within it (44–46; Haupt, Stealing Empire 26). DSJ utilises her H&M work, social media, the hip-hop genre, and international networks to exploit that window period to help mainstream black queer identity politics.ConclusionDSJ speaks back to processes of exclusion from the city, which was transformed by apartheid and, more recently, gentrification, by claiming it as a creative and playful space for queer subjects of colour. She uses Gayle to lay claim to the city as it has a long history in Cape Town. In fact, she says that she is not reviving Gayle, but is simply “putting it on a bigger platform” (Ovens, Saint Jude, and Haupt). The use of subtitles in the video suggests that she wants to mainstream queer identity politics. Saint Jude also transforms hip-hop heteronormativity by queering the genre and by locating her work within the history of Cape hip-hop’s multilingual wordplay. ReferencesBarber, Kristin. “The Well-Coiffed Man: Class, Race, and Heterosexual Masculinity in the Hair Salon.” Gender and Society 22.4 (2008): 455–76.Cage, Ken. “An Investigation into the Form and Function of Language Used by Gay Men in South Africa.” Rand Afrikaans University: MA thesis, 1999.Clay, Andreana. “‘I Used to Be Scared of the Dick’: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity.” Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology. Ed. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elain Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist. California: Sojourns, 2007.Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. 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New York: New York UP, 2007.Smalls, Shanté Paradigm. “‘The Rain Comes Down’: Jean Grae and Hip Hop Heteronormativity.” American Behavioral Scientist 55.1 (2011): 86–95.Visser, Gustav. “Gentrification: Prospects for Urban South African Society?” Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2003): 79–104.Williams, Quentin E. “Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: a Metapragmatic Analysis.” Sociolinguistic Studies 10.1 (2016): 109–33.Yudell, Michael. “A Short History of the Race Concept.” Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.InterviewsOvens, Neil, Dope Saint Jude, and Adam Haupt. One FM Radio interview. Cape Town. 21 Apr. 2016.VideosSaint Jude, Dope. “Keep in Touch.” YouTube. 23 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ux9R839lE>. H&M. “H&M World Recycle Week Featuring M.I.A.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg>. MusicSaint Jude, Dope. Reimagine. 15 June 2016. <https://dopesaintjude.bandcamp.com/album/reimagine>.

When I saw the word ‘bubbles’ my immediate thought went to the painting by John Millais of a child blowing bubbles that subsequently became part of the advertising campaign for Pears soap. Bubbles blown by children, as we all once did, last but a few seconds and lead on naturally to the theme of transience and constant change. Nothing lasts forever, even if human beings make attempts to impose permanence on the world. A child’s disappointment at having a soap bubble burst represents a deep human desire for permanence which is the focus of this article. Before the modern age, human life could be considered to be somewhat like a bubble in that it could be pricked at any time. This was especially the case with babies and young children who could be easily carried off. As Jeremy Taylor put it: but if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a child, of a careless nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents. (9) More generally, human beings understood that there was nothing permanent about their existing circumstances and that the possibility of famine, disease and, even war was ever present. Pax Romana, which is eulogised by Edward Gibbon as a felicitous time, did not suffer much in the way of war, famine, or epidemics but it was still a time when many Romans would have suffered from a range of diseases and not always have been well nourished. It was, however, a time of considerable security for most Romans who did not need to fear a band of marauders turning up on their doorstep. Disease and war would follow in the wake of climate change during the next century (Harper). Pax Romana was a bubble of relative tranquillity in human history. For a short period of time, climatic conditions, economic circumstances and political stability coalesced to still the winds of time temporarily. But such bubbles were unusual in the European context, which was usually riven by war. Peace reigned, by and large, in the long nineteenth century and in the period following World War II, to which it is possible to attach the name ‘pax moderna’. In China, much longer bubbles have been the norm, but they were succeeded by terrible periods of famine, dislocation, and war. The Ming bubble burst in the seventeenth century amidst a time of cold, famine, and plague (Parker 115-151). In such circumstances there was an appreciation of the precariousness of human existence. This had two major effects: A search for permanence in a world of change and uncertainty, a means of creating a bubble that can resist that change. When living in a time of relative stability, dealing with the fear that that stability will only last so long and that bad things may be just around the corner. These two matters form the basis of this article. Human beings create bubbles as they attempt to control change. They then become attached to their bubbles, even to the extent of believing that their bubbles are the real world. This has the effect of bubbles continuing to exist even if they harm human understanding of the world rather than enhancing it. Impermanence is the great reality of human existence; as Heraclitus (Burnet 136) correctly stated, we cannot place our foot in the same river twice. The extraordinary thing is that human beings possess a plastic nature that allows them to adapt to that impermanence (Melleuish & Rizzo ‘Limits’). The plasticity of human beings, as expressed in their culture, can be seen most clearly in the way that human languages constantly change. This occurs both in terms of word usage and grammatical structure. English was once an inflected language but cases now only really survive in personal pronouns. Words constantly change their meanings, both over time and in different places. Words appear to take on the appearance of permanence; they appear to form bubbles that are encased in lead, even when the reality is that words form multiple fragile bubbles that are constantly being burst and remade. The changing nature of the meaning of words only becomes known to a literate society, in particular a literate society that has a genuine sense of history. In an oral society words are free to change over time and there is little sense of those changes. Writing has the effect of fixing texts into a particular form; at the very least it makes creative reworking of texts much more difficult. Of course, there are counter examples to such a claim, the most famous of which are the Vedas which, it is argued, remained unchanged despite centuries of oral transmission (Doniger104-7). This fixed nature could be achieved because of the strict mode of transmission, ensuring that the hymns did not change when transmitted. As the Vedas are linked to the performance of rituals this exactness was necessary for the rituals to be efficacious (Olivelle xli-xlv). The transmission of words is not the same thing as the transmission of meaning. Nor does it mean that many words that today are used as seemingly universal ideas have always existed. Religion (Nongeri), state (Melleuish, ‘State’), civilisation, and culture (Melleuish, ‘Civilisation’) are all modern creations; ‘identity’ is only about sixty years old (Stokes 2). New words emerge to deal with new circumstances. For example, civilisation came into being partially because the old term ‘Christendom’ had become redundant; ‘identity’ replaced an earlier idea of national character. Words, then, are bubbles that human beings cast out onto the world and that appear to create the appearance of permanence. These bubbles encase the real world giving the thing that they name ‘being’, even as that thing is in flux and a condition of becoming. For Parmenides (loc. 1355-1439), the true nature of the world is being. The solidity provided by ‘being’ is a comfort in a world that is constantly changing and in which there is a constant threat of change. Words and ideas do not form stable bubbles, they form a string of bubbles, with individuals constantly blowing out new versions of a word, but they appear as if they were just the one bubble. One can argue, quite correctly, I believe, that this tendency to meld a string of bubbles into a single bubble is central to the human condition and actually helps human beings to come to terms with their existence in the world. ‘Bubble as being’ provides human beings with a considerable capacity to gain a degree of control over their world. Amongst other things, it allows for radical simplification. A.R. Luria (20-47), in his study of the impact of literacy on how human beings think, noted that illiterate Uzbeks classified colour in a complex way but that with the coming of literacy came to accept the quite simple colour classifications of the modern world. Interestingly, Uzbeks have no word for orange; the ‘being’ of colours is a human creation. One would think that this desire for ‘being’, for a world that is composed of ‘constants’, is confined to the world of human culture, but that is not the case. Everyone learns at school that the speed of light is a constant. Rupert Sheldrake (92-3) decided to check the measurement of the speed of light and discovered that the empirical measurements taken of its speed actually varied. Constants give the universe a smooth regularity that it would otherwise lack. However, there are a number of problems that emerge from a too strong attachment to these bubbles of being. One is that the word is mistaken for the thing; the power of the word, the logos, becomes so great that it comes to be assumed that all the objects described by a word must fit into a single model or type. This flies in the face of two realities. One is that every example of a named object is different. Hence, when one does something practically in the world, such as construct a building, one must adjust one’s activities according to local circumstances. That the world is heterogeneous explains why human beings need plasticity. They need to adapt their practices as they encounter new and different circumstances. If they do not, it may be the case that they will die. The problem with the logos introduced by literacy, the bubble of being, is that it makes human beings less flexible in their dealings with the world. The other reality is human plasticity itself. As word/bubbles are being constantly generated then each bubble will vary in its particular meaning, both at the community and, even, individual, level. Over time words will vary subtly in meaning in different places. There is no agreed common meaning to any word; being is an illusion. Of course, it is possible for governments and other institutions to lay down what the ‘real’ meaning of a word is, much in the same way as the various forms of measurement are defined by certain scientific criteria. This becomes dangerous in the case of abstract nouns. It is the source of ‘heresy’ which is often defined in terms of the meaning of particular words. Multiple, almost infinite, bubbles must be amalgamated into one big bubble. Attempts by logos professionals to impose a single meaning are often resisted by ordinary human beings who generally seem to be quite happy living with a range of bubbles (Tannous; Pegg). One example of mutation of meaning is the word ‘liberal’, which means quite different things in America and Australia. To add to the confusion, there are occasions when liberal is used in Australia in its American sense. This simply illustrates the reality that liberal has no specific ‘being’, some universal idea of which individual liberals are particular manifestations. The problem becomes even worse when one moves between languages and cultures. To give but one example; the ancient Greek word πολις is translated as state but it can be argued that the Greek πολις was a stateless society (Berent). There are good arguments for taking a pragmatic attitude to these matters and assuming that there is a vague general agreement regarding what words such as ‘democracy’ mean, and not to go down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of infinite bubbles. This works so long as individuals understand that bubbles of being are provisional in nature and are capable of being pricked. It is possible, however, for the bubbles to harden and to impose on us what is best described as the ‘tyranny of concepts’, whereby the idea or word obscures the reality. This can occur because some words, especially abstract nouns, have very vague meanings: they can be seen as a sort of cloudy bubble. Again, democracy is good example of a cloudy bubble whose meaning is very difficult to define. A cloudy bubble prevents us from analysing and criticising something too closely. Bubbles exist because human beings desire permanence in a world of change and transience. In this sense, the propensity to create bubbles is as much an aspect of human nature as its capacity for plasticity. They are the product of a desire to ‘tame time’ and to create a feeling of security in a world of flux. As discussed above, a measure of security has not been a common state of affairs for much of human history, which is why the Pax Romana was so idealised. If there is modern ‘bubble’ created by the Enlightenment it is the dream of Kantian perpetual peace, that it is possible to bring a world into being that is marked by permanent peace, in which all the earlier horrors of human existence, from famine to epidemics to war can be tamed and humanity live harmoniously and peacefully forever. To achieve this goal, it was necessary to ‘tame’ history (Melleuish & Rizzo, ‘Philosophy’). This can be done through the idea of progress. History can be placed into a bubble of constant improvement whereby human beings are constantly getting better, not just materially but also intellectually and morally. Progress very easily turns into a utopian fantasy where people no longer suffer and can live forever. The horrors of the first half of the twentieth century did little to dent the power of this bubble. There is still an element of modern culture that dreams of such a world actually coming into being. Human beings may try to convince themselves that the bubble of progress will not burst and that perpetual peace may well be perpetual, but underlying that hope there are deep anxieties born of the knowledge that ‘nothing lasts forever’. Since 1945, the West has lived through a period of peace and relative prosperity, a pax moderna; the European Union is very much a Kantian creation. Underneath the surface, however, contemporary Western culture has a deep fear that the bubble can burst very easily and that the veneer of modern civilisation will be stripped away. This fear manifests itself in a number of ways. One can be seen in the regular articles that appear about the possibility of a comet or asteroid hitting the earth (Drake). Such a collision will eventually occur but it is sixty five million years since the dinosaurs became extinct. Another is the fear of solar storm that could destroy both electricity grids and electronic devices (Britt). Another expression of this fear can be found in forms of artistic expression, including zombie, disaster, and apocalypse movies. These reveal something about the psyche of modernity, and modern democracy, in the same way that Athenian tragedy expressed the hopes and fears of fifth-century Athenian democracy through its elaboration of the great Greek myths. Robert Musil remarks in The Man without Qualities (833) that if humanity dreamed collectively it would dream Moosbrugger, a serial murderer. Certainly, it appears to be the case that when the modern West dreams collectively it dreams of zombies, vampires, and a world in which civilised values have broken down and everyone lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, the war of all against all (Hobbes 86-100). This theme of the bursting of the ‘civilised bubble’ is a significant theme in contemporary culture. In popular culture, two of the best examples of this bursting are the television shows Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead. In Galactica, human beings fall prey to the vengeful artificial creatures that they have created and mistreated. In The Walking Dead, as in all post-apocalyptic Zombie creations, the great fear is that human beings will turn into zombies, creatures that have been granted a form of immortality but at the cost of the loss of their souls. The fear of death is primal in all human beings, as is the fear of the loss of one’s humanity after death. This fear is expressed in the first surviving work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh goes unsuccessfully in search of immortal life. In perhaps the bleakest modern portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, we encounter the ultimate Hobbesian universe. This is a world that has undergone an apocalypse of unknown origin. There is only darkness and dust and ash; nothing grows any longer and the few survivors are left to scavenge for the food left behind in tins. Or they can eat each other. It is the ultimate war of all against all. The clipped language, the lack of identity of the inhabitants, leads us into something that is almost no longer human. There is little or no hope. Reading The Road one is drawn back to the ‘House of Darkness’ described in The Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the afterlife in terms of dust (“The Great Myths”): He bound my arms like the wings of a bird, to lead me captive to the house of darkness, seat of Irkalla:to the house which none who enters ever leaves, on the path that allows no journey back, to the house whose residents are deprived of light, where soil is itself their sustenance and clay their food,where they are clad like birds in coats of feathers, and see no light, but dwell in darkness. The Road is a profoundly depressing work, and the movie is barely watchable. In bursting the bubble of immortality, it plays on human fears and anxieties that stretch back millennia. The really interesting question is why such fears should emerge at a time when people in countries like America are living through a period of peace and prosperity. Much as people dream of a bubble of infinite progress and perpetual peace, they instinctively understand that that particular bubble is very fragile and may very easily be punctured. My final example is the less than well-known movie Zardoz, dating from the 1970s and starring Sean Connery. In it, some human beings have achieved ‘immortality’ but the consequences are less than perfect, and the Sean Connery character has the task, given to him by nature, to restore the balance between life and death, just as Gilgamesh had to understand that the two went together. There are some bubbles that are meant to be burst, some realities that human beings have to face if they are to appreciate their place in the scheme of things. Hence, we face a paradox. Human beings are constantly producing bubbles as they chart their way through a world that is also always changing. This is a consequence of their plastic nature. For good reasons, largely out of a desire for stability and security, they also tend to bring these infinite bubbles together into a much smaller number of bubbles that they view as possessing being and hence permanence. The problem is that these ‘bubbles of being’ are treated as if they really described the world in some sort of universal fashion, rather than treated as useful tools. Human beings can become the victims of their own creations. At the same time, human beings have an instinctive appreciation that the world is not stable and fixed, and this appreciation finds its expression in the products of their imagination. They burst bubbles through the use of their imagination in response to their fears and anxieties. Bubbles are the product of the interaction between the changing nature of both the world and human beings and the desire of those human beings for a degree of stability. 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This paper is about the relationships between infrastructural, interzonal spaces and the communities and individuals that interact with them. It attempts to describe the politics of their aesthetics and their legitimation as two aspects of the same process of semiological warfare and its governance. For example, think about a street-corner, preferably one in a big city. Consider the processes and operations that occur there, who creates them, legitimates them, and what they mean. For the sake of this paper, the road, the sidewalk, the streetlights with their cabling and electrical grid, the sewers and their gutters, are all infrastructural zones, and they come together and intermix to form the interzone. That is, the complex assemblage of meanings, things, and peoples, that is at once the street-corner and beyond it. Zones are inscribed through codes and conventions to form pragmatic regimes through which we enact our lives and our roles (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9-15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Though these zones are integral to our lives, the deterritorialisation of these zones has dispersed them throughout our world, splintering and disintegrating the meanings we can assign to them, thus forcing the perpetual re-creation of new zones and interzones across spaces and times. Through this dispersal, the integrated world capitalism in which we live, allows us to be ignorant of their processes as the experience of the zones are removed from our subjective experiences (Guattari, The Three Ecologies 137). Because our ignorance of and alienation from our infrastructural zones, a subpolitics forms and spawns semiologic warfare for our attention and disattention that causes us to be “zoned out” about the zones in which we live (Beck 35). Instead of zoning out, this paper zones in on infrastructure zones and interzones. An interzone is an interstitial zone of extraterratoriality governed by a broader set of rules, as with international zones such as the infamous Green Zone in Iraq or the international zone of Tangiers made famous by William Burroughs (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5). Interzones are the territories between zones that we project our subjectivities through. They cut or splinter the empty spaces of the dispersed and fragmented zones of our capitalist realities. Our subjective projection of these interzones creates and requires modes of interpretation and governance that comes into being as we share our knowledge of them. As interzones become reified through our shared interpretations and governance, they become zones themselves, forming a pragmatic regime of codes and conventions that eventually is alienated from our experience. This perpetual passage from zone to interzone based on our spatial subjectivities, requires significant amounts of work—intellectual and other. Without this work, interzones are entropic and temporary; fading from our shared memories. But even as they fade, interzones have changed the zones around them, transforming the necessities of their governance through the vacating of the semiological and social spaces the interzone once occupied with its own processes.This paper confronts these interzones that are frequently within a five-minute walk from anywhere humans inhabit. These interzones contain infrastructures such as sidewalks, roads, sewers, passageways, or in the digital world web servers, routers, and fibre optic cabling. As we pass through these zones and have the opportunity to interact with them, we occasionally intermix them, creating new possibilities of understanding and operating; this is the creation of an interzone. The interzone exists when we make it and share it from the zones we inhabit, transforming their infrastructures through our interaction with them. However, our actions tend to be vitalist and pluralist in that our interactions with infrastructures tend to create a multiplicity of livable interzones existing between the zones as new spaces of autonomy, occupation, and legitimising politics. This plurality combined with our immersion within infrastructural zones provides the living semiological space of self-legitimation in which we deny the existence of the very infrastructural zones it requires: In the “private,” in the “domestic” sphere (and so also in the environment of objects) in which the individual lives as a refuge zone, as an autonomous field of needs and satisfactions, below or beyond social constraints, the individual nevertheless always continues to evince or to claim a legitimacy and to assure it by signs. In the least of behaviors, through the least of objects, he or she translates the immanence of a jurisdiction which in appearance is rejected. (Baudrillard 40) Our objects; our actions within this domestic environment constitute elements of several zones and provide our own subjective system of legitimation within them, and our autonomy within that space is guaranteed by our ignorance of the operation of that system of legitimation. It is only our situatedness through our inscriptions and actions within these spaces that gives us the ability to read the codes that we co-construct through these spaces. (Thévenot, “Rules and Implements” 9–15; Thévenot, “Pragmatic Regimes” 64–5) This situatedness allows us this sense of refuge, safety, and in the end as Baudrillard claims, this refuge zone allows for us to exist socially, if ignorantly within the infrastructures we require. (Baudrillard 40, 49) But even in our ignorance, infrastructural zones still provide us with the background necessities of our everyday lives; eliminating dangers and constituting a significant part of our artifactual world (Star 377-90; Star and Ruhleder 253-64; Hunsinger 277-79). As Paul Edwards says: Infrastructures constitute an artificial environment, channeling and/or reproducing those properties of the natural environment that we find most useful and comfortable; providing others that the natural environment cannot; and eliminating features we find dangerous, uncomfortable, or merely inconvenient. In doing so, they simultaneously constitute our experience of the natural environment, as commodity, object of romantic or pastoralist emotions and aesthetic sensibilities, or occasional impediment. (189) Zones too are artificial environments, performing the same sort of functions as described by Edwards above. Zones operate through their semiological form as desire/seduction and they operate through their borders where their aesthetization is at play. More specifically how we imagine and react to zones and interzones, and who and what occupies their border spaces, defines the interoperation of their interpretation, their aesthetisation, and their governance. Edges and borders define the relations of zones; the screen of the monitor is like a wall with a window that defines our access to cyberinfrastructures beyond, much like the curb or ditch defines the edge of the street or road. These borders and edges are more than spaces of interoperation, they are spaces of politics. It is through these borders, and the actions we can pursue through them, where the operations of legitimacy will be most tested and transgressed. Infrastructural zones operate in and across those borders both as real and phantasmal aesthetics that operate as a becoming system of governance and interpretation. They operate as a cross-ecologic, semiological, and pragmatic regime that is established in relation to production of subjectivity in their cultural milieu. The zones and interzones articulate a form of alienated subjectivity in all cultural milieus. This is an articulation of our acted environment that is assembled through our distributed cognition of zones and interzones, which as part of the politics of legitimation, we inscribe, erase, and re-inscribe in perpetual semiological warfare until the zones fade into the background losing their salience. Edwards agrees with this lack of salience, “The most salient characteristic of technology in the modern (industrial and postindustrial) world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for most people, most of the time” (184). Even without particular salience to most people, infrastructural zones are spaces and aggregations of perceived fixity or normality demarcated by their transgression. The modes of transgression that demarcate them can occur in any part of our experience. Normally the boundaries are constructed in the forms of visibility and knowability centered on questions of expertise and/or professionalism amongst other boundary processes (Star and Griesemer 387–420; Star and Ruhleder 253–64 ; Gieryn 791–2). Plumbers, for instance, confront a reality of certain infrastructures on a daily basis, as do other professionals such as those that work at Internet service providers. As outsiders to these epistemic communities, we are made aware of zones when we transgress in or through them as we are breaking rules or borders that define these communities define and in part communicate to us. It is through our actions and transgressions that we enact and inscribe interzones in our subjective world, but it is through our reactions and transgressions also that they are territorialized and deterritorialized in our social world. Zones, then are constructs of our purported, construed, and communicated phantasmal objectivities and beyond that they are the aesthetization of our shared needs and satisfactions. By recognizing them, we transform them in to actants in our social world, and by communicating our experience of them, we construct them as codes and conventions that add meaning to that social world. One way to imagine these infrastructural manifestations is through thinking about them as substrates. People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for many purposes—turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. (Star 380) As substrates, these infrastructures form a pragmatic regime, or zone through which we pass, which exists underneath the strata that is our everyday life. The faucet is part of the strata of our everyday lives, like the sidewalk, while the pipes and the standards of plumbing form a space of expertise as they do with sidewalks. The operations of expertise cultures on specific sets of infrastructures helps to disperse and fragment the knowledge of the various strata involved, especially the substrates. Experts knowledgeable of these substrates will have come to their knowledge by transgressing the borders, by witnessing and inscribing the objects, the aestheticisations, and the other border processes with meanings that the community of experts share amongst themselves and isolate from the public at large (Illich et al. 15–20). Expertise becomes complicit in the processes of the zone and its interzones. This complicity, if reflexive, will come to question the system of integrated world capitalism in which this zone is established as a form of semiological warfare against other zones and regimes (Guattari, “The Three Ecologies” 1989 137). In other words, experts on infrastructural zones have to come to terms not only with the knowing of the previously unknown, but also the know-how that the unknown plays into the broader culture and capitalist system in which it operates. However, while experts might zone in on infrastructural zones and their contexts, most people continue to be zoned out. Even for experts in infrastructures, some infrastructures get far less investigation than others, and like all zones, they eventually are forgotten and experts become ignorant of them (Hunsinger 277–79). The challenge of knowing or bringing attention to the infrastructural zones and their interzones is a challenge of territorialisation and thus of subjective awareness. Knowingly operating with subjective awareness within them is a form of semiological warfare that we can perpetrate, because by establishing the semiological subjective space, we reconstruct a system of interpreting and governing the territory and thus establishing political importance and awareness of our techno-semiological existence. For the territory to be won, the war and its strategies have to be taken to the public arena and brought forth in political discourse as a purposive politics. We must resist the temptation to forget and remain ignorant, which as Ulrich Beck points out, relegates this political space to corporations and other non-public entities as a form of subpolitics. We need to take back the politics and subpolitics of infrastructure and recognize the choices or lack thereof that we are making across all ecological systems (Beck 38; Beck, Giddens and Lash 24–36). In conclusion, this exposition on zones, interzones, and infrastructures is meant to challenge us to rethink our subjective positions in relation to zones, their aesthetics, and their legitimation as functions of semiological warfare. We need to find new opportunities to make a mess of these spaces, to transgress, and create new spaces of autonomy for ourselves and future participants in the zones. We have to move beyond the appreciation of “this is a street-corner” and into the realm of “this is our street-corner and we know how it works.” This act will create a new interzone, which will be a new space of possibility for our lives. We cannot rely on our everyday experiences to guide us through these zones or the construction of interzones, because they will certainly only reflect our normal, accepted behaviors within the established pragmatic regimes and as such, lead to an ongoing ignorance of the operation of these interzones and infrastructures. Our challenge is to transgress and thus deterritorialise these semiological zones, and perhaps through this transgression transform the interzones into zones better reflecting our aesthetics, our desires, and our satisfactions. References Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Missouri: Telos Press, 1981. Beck, Ulrich. Democracy without Enemies. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 1998. Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Edwards, Paul. N. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” Modernity and Technology. Eds. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge: MIT P, 2004. Gieryn, Thomas F. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983): 781–95. Guattari, Felix. “The Three Ecologies.” New Formations 8 (Summer 1989): 131–47. ———. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Gary Genosko. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Hunsinger, Jeremy. “Toward a Transdisciplinary Internet Research.” The Information Society 21.4 (2005): 277–79. Illich, Ivan, et al. Disabling Professions. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1977. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43.3 (1999): 377-91. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387–420. Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-Scale Collaborative Systems.” Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work. North Carolina, 1994. 253–64. Thévenot, Laurent. “Rules and Implements: Investment in Forms.” Social Science Information 23.1 (1984): 1–45. ———. “Pragmatic Regimes Governing the Engagement with the World.” The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. Eds. Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny. New York: Routledge, 2001. 56–73.

Literary critics have mainly read Herman Melville’s short story “I and My Chimney” (1856) as allegory. This article elaborates on the tradition of interpreting Melville’s text allegorically by relating it to Fredric Jameson’s post-structural reinterpretation of allegory. In doing so, it argues that the story is not a simple example of allegory but rather an auto-reflexive engagement with allegory that reflects the cultural and historical ambivalences of the time in which Melville was writing. The suggestion is that Melville deliberately used signifiers (or the lack thereof) of directionality and place to reframe the overt context of his allegory (Civil War divisions of North and South) through teasing reference to the contemporaneous emergence of Manifest Destiny as an East-West historical spatialization. To this extent, from a literary-historical perspective, Melville’s text presents as an enquiry into the relationship between the obvious allegorical elements of a text and the literal or material elements that may either support or, as in this case, problematize traditional allegorical modes. In some ways, Melville’s story faintly anticipates Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory as produced over a century later. “I and My Chimney” may also be linked to later texts, such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which shift the directionality of American Literary History, in a definite way, from a North-South to an East-West axis. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books may also be mentioned here. While, in recent years, some literary critics have produced readings of Melville’s story that depart from the traditional emphasis on its allegorical nature, this article claims to be the first to engage with “I and My Chimney” from within an allegorical perspective also informed by post-structural thinking. To do this, it focuses on the setting or directionality of the story, and on the orientating details of the titular chimney.Written and published shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), which pitted North against South, Melville’s story is told in the first person by a narrator with overweening affection for the chimney he sees as an image of himself: “I and my chimney, two gray-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day” (327). Within the merged identity of narrator and chimney, however, the latter takes precedence, almost completely, over the former: “though I always say, I and my chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, I and my King, yet this egotistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hardly borne out by the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence of me” (327). Immediately, this sentence underscores a disjunction between words (“the above phrase”) and material circumstances (“the facts”) that will become crucial in my later consideration of Melville’s story as post-structural allegory.Detailed architectural and architectonic descriptions manifesting the chimney as “the one great domineering object” of the narrator’s house characterize the opening pages of the story (328). Intermingled with these descriptions, the narrator recounts the various interpersonal and business-related stratagems he has been forced to adopt in order to protect his chimney from the “Northern influences” that would threaten it. Numbered in this company are his mortgagee, the narrator’s own wife and daughters, and Mr. Hiram Scribe—“a rough sort of architect” (341). The key subplot implicated with the narrator’s fears for his chimney concerns its provenance. The narrator’s “late kinsman, Captain Julian Dacres” built the house, along with its stupendous chimney, and upon his death a rumour developed concerning supposed “concealed treasure” in the chimney (346). Once the architect Scribe insinuates, in correspondence to the chimney’s alter ego (the narrator), “that there is architectural cause to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet” the narrator’s wife and daughter use Scribe’s suggestion of a possible connection to Dacres’s alleged hidden treasure to reiterate their calls for the chimney’s destruction (345):Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. Scribe’s, yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and second, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposition than the secret closet. (347)To protect his chimney, the narrator bribes Mr. Scribe, inviting him to produce a “‘little certificate—something, say, like a steam-boat certificate, certifying that you, a competent surveyor, have surveyed my chimney, and found no reason to believe any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it’” (351). Having enticed Scribe to scribe words against himself, the narrator concludes his tale triumphantly: “I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender” (354).Despite its inherent interest, literary critics have largely overlooked “I and My Chimney”. Katja Kanzler observes that “together with much of [Melville’s] other short fiction, and his uncollected magazine pieces in particular, it has never really come out of the shadow of the more epic texts long considered his masterpieces” (583). To the extent that critics have engaged the story, they have mainly read it as traditional allegory (Chatfield; Emery; Sealts; Sowder). Further, the allegorical trend in the reception of Melville’s text clusters within the period from the early 1940s to the early 1980s. More recently, other critics have explored new ways of reading Melville’s story, but none, to my knowledge, have re-investigated its dominant allegorical mode of reception in the light of the post-structural engagements with allegory captured succinctly in Fredric Jameson’s work (Allison; Kanzler; Wilson). This article acknowledges the perspicacity of the mid-twentieth-century tradition of the allegorical interpretation of Melville’s story, while nuancing its insights through greater attention to the spatialized materiality of the text, its “geomorphic” nature, and its broader historical contexts.E. Hale Chatfield argues that “I and My Chimney” evidences one broad allegorical polarity of “Aristocratic Tradition vs. Innovation and Destruction” (164). This umbrella category is parsed by Sealts as an individualized allegory of besieged patriarchal identity and by Sowder as a national-level allegory of anxieties linked to the antebellum North-South relationship. Chatfield’s opposition works equally well for an individual or for communities of individuals. Thus, in this view, even as it structures our reception of Melville’s story, allegory remains unproblematized in itself through its internal interlocking. In turn, “I and My Chimney” provides fertile soil for critics to harvest an allegorical crop. Its very title inveigles the reader towards an allegorical attitude: the upstanding “I” of the title is associated with the architecture of the chimney, itself also upstanding. What is of the chimney is also, allegorically, of the “I”, and the vertical chimney, like the letter “I”, argues, as it were, a north-south axis, being “swung vertical to hit the meridian moon,” as Melville writes on his story’s first page (327). The narrator, or “I”, is as north-south as is his narrated allegory.Herman Melville was a Northern resident with Southern predilections, at least to the extent that he co-opted “Southern-ness” to, in Katja Kanzler’s words, “articulate the anxiety of mid-nineteenth-century cultural elites about what they perceive as a cultural decline” (583). As Chatfield notes, the South stood for “Aristocratic Tradition”; the North, for “Innovation and Destruction” (164). Reflecting the conventional mid-twentieth-century view that “I and My Chimney” is a guileless allegory of North-South relations, William J. Sowder argues that itreveals allegorically an accurate history of Southern slavery from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth—that critical period when the South spent most of its time and energy apologizing for the existence of slavery. It discloses the split which Northern liberals so ably effected between liberal and conservative forces in the South, and it lays bare the intransigence of the traditional South on the Negro question. Above everything, the story reveals that the South had little in common with the rest of the Union: the War between the States was inevitable. (129-30)Sowder goes into painstaking detail prosecuting his North-South allegorical reading of Melville’s text, to the extent of finding multiple correspondences between what is allegorizing and what is being allegorized within a single sentence. One example, with Sowder’s allegorical interpolations in square brackets, comes from a passage where Melville is writing about his narrator’s replaced “gable roof” (Melville 331): “‘it was replaced with a modern roof [the cotton gin], more fit for a railway woodhouse [an industrial society] than an old country gentleman’s abode’” (Sowder 137).Sowder’s argument is historically erudite, and utterly convincing overall, except in one crucial detail. That is, for a text supposedly so much about the South, and written so much from its perspective—Sowder labels the narrator a “bitter Old Southerner”—it is remarkable how the story is only very ambiguously set in the South (145). Sowder distances himself from an earlier generation of commentators who “generally assumed that the old man is Melville and that the country is the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where Melville lived from 1850 to 1863,” concluding, “in fact, I find it hard to picture the narrator as a Northerner at all: the country which he describes sounds too much like the Land of Cotton” (130).Quite obviously, the narrator of any literary text does not necessarily represent its author, and in the case of “I and My Chimney”, if the narrator is not inevitably coincident with the author, then it follows that the setting of the story is not necessarily coincident with “the foothills of the Massachusetts Berkshires.” That said, the position of critics prior to Sowder that the setting is Massachusetts, and by extension that the narrator is Melville (a Southern sympathizer displaced to the North), hints at an oversight in the traditional allegorical reading of Melville’s text—related to its spatializations—the implications of which Sowder misses.Think about it: “too much like the Land of Cotton” is an exceedingly odd phrase; “too much like” the South, but not conclusively like the South (Sowder 130)! A key characteristic of Melville’s story is the ambiguity of its setting and, by extension, of its directionality. For the text to operate (following Chatfield, Emery, Sealts and Sowder) as a straightforward allegory of the American North-South relationship, the terms “north” and “south” cannot afford to be problematized. Even so, whereas so much in the story reads as related to either the South or the North, as cultural locations, the notions of “south-ness” and “north-ness” themselves are made friable (in this article, the lower case broadly indicates the material domain, the upper case, the cultural). At its most fundamental allegorical level, the story undoes its own allegorical expressions; as I will be arguing, the materiality of its directionality deconstructs what everything else in the text strives (allegorically) to maintain.Remarkably, for a text purporting to allegorize the North as the South’s polar opposite, nowhere does the story definitively indicate where it is set. The absence of place names or other textual features which might place “I and My Chimney” in the South, is over-compensated for by an abundance of geographically distracting signifiers of “place-ness” that negatively emphasize the circumstance that the story is not set definitively where it is set suggestively. The narrator muses at one point that “in fact, I’ve often thought that the proper place for my old chimney is ivied old England” (332). Elsewhere, further destabilizing the geographical coordinates of the text, reference is made to “the garden of Versailles” (329). Again, the architect Hiram Scribe’s house is named New Petra. Rich as it is with cultural resonances, at base, Petra denominates a city in Jordan; New Petra, by contrast, is place-less.It would appear that something strange is going on with allegory in this deceptively straightforward allegory, and that this strangeness is linked to equally strange goings on with the geographical and directional relations of north and south, as sites of the historical and cultural American North and South that the story allegorizes so assiduously. As tensions between North and South would shortly lead to the Civil War, Melville writes an allegorical text clearly about these tensions, while simultaneously deconstructing the allegorical index of geographical north to cultural North and of geographical south to cultural South.Fredric Jameson’s work on allegory scaffolds the historically and materially nuanced reading I am proposing of “I and My Chimney”. Jameson writes:Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (73)As American history undergoes transformation, Melville foreshadows Jameson’s transformation of allegory through his (Melville’s) own transformations of directionality and place. In a story about North and South, are we in the south or the north? Allegorical “equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text” (Jameson 73). North-north equivalences falter; South-south equivalences falter.As noted above, the chimney of Melville’s story—“swung vertical to hit the meridian moon”—insists upon a north-south axis, much as, in an allegorical mode, the vertical “I” of the narrator structures a polarity of north and south (327). However, a closer reading shows that the chimney is no less complicit in the confusion of north and south than the environs of the house it occupies:In those houses which are strictly double houses—that is, where the hall is in the middle—the fire-places usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another member, the former’s own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a hearth in the south wall—the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? (328)Here, Melville is directly allegorizing the “sulky” state of the American nation; the brothers are, as it were, North and South (328). However, just as the text’s signifiers of place problematize the notions of north and south (and thus the associated cultural resonances of capitalized North and South), this passage, in queering the axes of the chimneys, further upsets the primary allegory. The same chimney that structures Melville’s text along a north-south or up-down orientation, now defers to an east-west axis, for the back-to-back and (in cultural and allegorical terms) North-South brothers, sit at a 90-degree angle to their house’s chimneys, which thus logically manifest a cross-wise orientation of east-west (in cultural and allegorical terms, East-West). To this extent, there is something of an exquisite crossover and confusion of cultural North and South, as represented by the two brothers, and geographical/architectural/architectonic north and south (now vacillating between an east-west and a north-south orientation). The North-South cultural relationship of the brothers distorts the allegorical force of the narrator’s spine-like chimney (not to mention of the brother’s respective chimneys), thus enflaming Jameson’s allegorical equivalences. The promiscuous literality of the smokestack—Katja Kanzler notes the “astonishing materiality” of the chimney—subverts its main allegorical function; directionality both supports and disrupts allegory (591). Simply put, there is a disjunction between words and material circumstances; the “way of speaking… is hardly borne out by the facts” (Melville 327).The not unjustified critical focus on “I and My Chimney” as an allegory of North-South cultural (and shortly wartime) tensions, has not kept up with post-structural developments in allegorical theory as represented in Fredric Jameson’s work. In part, I suggest, this is because critics to date have missed the importance to Melville’s allegory of its extra-textual context. According to William J. Sowder, “Melville showed a lively interest in such contemporary social events as the gold rush, the French Revolution of 1848, and the activities of the English Chartists” (129). The pity is that readings of “I and My Chimney” have limited this “lively interest” to the Civil War. Melville’s attentiveness to “contemporary social events” should also encompass, I suggest, the East-West (east-west) dynamic of mid-nineteenth century American history, as much as the North-South (north-south) dynamic.The redialing of Melville’s allegory along another directional axis is thus accounted for. When “I and My Chimney” was published in 1856, there was, of course, at least one other major historical development in play besides the prospect of the Civil War, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny ran, not to put it too finely, along an East-West (east-west) axis. Indeed, Manifest Destiny is at least as replete with a directional emphasis as the discourse of Civil War North-South opposition. As quoted in Frederick Merk’s Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Senator Daniel S. Dickinson states to the Senate, in 1848, “but the tide of emigration and the course of empire have since been westward” (Merk 29). Allied to this tradition, of course, is the well-known contemporaneous saying, “go West, young man, go West” (“Go West, Young Man”).To the extent that Melville’s text appears to anticipate Jameson’s post-structural theory of allegory, it may be linked, I suggest, to Melville’s sense of being at an intersection of American history. The meta-narrative of national history when “I and My Chimney” was produced had a spatial dimension to it: north-south directionality (culturally, North-South) was giving way to east-west directionality (culturally, East-West). Civil War would soon give way to Manifest Destiny; just as Melville’s texts themselves would, much later admittedly, give way to texts of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, including Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Equivalently, as much as the narrator’s wife represents Northern “progress” she might also be taken to signify Western “ambition”.However, it is not only that “I and My Chimney” is a switching-point text of geo-history (mediating relations, most obviously, between the tendencies of Southern Exceptionalism and of Western National Ambition) but that it operates as a potentially generalizable test case of the limits of allegory by setting up an all-too-simple allegory of North-South/north-south relations which is subsequently subtly problematized along the lines of East-West/east-west directionality. As I have argued, Melville’s “experimental allegory” continually diverts words (that is, the symbols allegory relies upon) through the turbulence of material circumstances.North, or north, is simultaneously a cultural and a geographical or directional coordinate of Melville’s text, and the chimney of “I and My Chimney” is both a signifier of the difference between N/north and S/south and also a portal to a 360-degrees all-encompassing engagement of (allegorical) writing with history in all its (spatialized) manifestations.ReferencesAllison, J. “Conservative Architecture: Hawthorne in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” South Central Review 13.1 (1996): 17-25.Chatfield, E.H. “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Imago 19.2 (1962): 163-69.Emery, A.M. “The Political Significance of Melville’s Chimney.” The New England Quarterly 55.2 (1982): 201-28.“Go West, Young Man.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 29 Sep. 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_West,_young_man>.Jameson, F. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88.Kanzler, K. “Architecture, Writing, and Vulnerable Signification in Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Studies 54.4 (2009): 583-601.Kerouac, J. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Melville, H. “I and My Chimney.” Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 2004: 327-54.Merk, F. Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.Sealts, M.M. “Herman Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney.’” American Literature 13 (May 1941): 142-54.Sowder, W.J. “Melville’s ‘I and My Chimney:’ A Southern Exposure.” Mississippi Quarterly 16.3 (1963): 128-45.Wilder, L.I. Little House on the Prairie Series.Wilson, S. “Melville and the Architecture of Antebellum Masculinity.” American Literature 76.1 (2004): 59-87.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. 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Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. References Bates, Daisy. “Fanny Balbuk-Yooreel: The Last Swan River (Female) Native.” The Western Mail 1 Jun. 1907: 45.———. “Oldest Perth: The Days before the White Men Won.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1909: 16–17.———. “Derelicts: The Passing of the Bibbulmun.” The Western Mail 25 Dec. 1924: 55–56. ———. “Aboriginal Perth.” The Western Mail 4 Jul. 1929: 70.———. “Hooper’s Fence: A Query.” The Western Mail 18 Apr. 1935: 9.———. The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, 1966.Bekle, Hugo. “The Wetlands Lost: Drainage of the Perth Lake Systems.” Western Geographer 5.1–2 (1981): 21–41.Bekle, Hugo, and Joseph Gentilli. “History of the Perth Lakes.” Early Days 10.5 (1993): 442–60.Bobbink, Roland, Boudewijn Beltman, Jos Verhoeven, and Dennis Whigham, eds. Wetlands: Functioning, Biodiversity Conservation, and Restoration. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006. Carter, Bevan, and Lynda Nutter. Nyungah Land: Records of Invasion and Theft of Aboriginal Land on the Swan River 1829–1850. Guildford: Swan Valley Nyungah Community, 2005.Chinna, Nandi. “Swamp.” Griffith Review 47 (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://griffithreview.com/articles/swamp›.Department of Environment and Conservation. Geomorphic Wetlands Swan Coastal Plain Dataset. Perth: Department of Environment and Conservation, 2008.Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema, and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Forster, Clive. Australian Cities: Continuity and Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996. ———. Forrestdale: People and Place. Bassendean: Access Press, 2006.———. Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.———. Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Chapter 2.Graham, Mary. “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2008/graham.html›.Gregory, Jenny. “Remembering Mounts Bay: The Narrows Scheme and the Internationalization of Perth Planning.” Studies in Western Australian History 27 (2011): 145–66.Independent Journal of Politics and News. “Perth Town Trust.” The Perth Gazette and Independent Journal of Politics and News 8 Jul. 1848: 2–3.Moore, George Fletcher. Extracts from the Letters of George Fletcher Moore. Ed. Martin Doyle. London: Orr and Smith, 1834.Morel-EdnieBrown, Felicity. “Layered Landscape: The Swamps of Colonial Northbridge.” Social Science Computer Review 27 (2009): 390–419. Nannup, Noel. Songlines with Dr Noel Nannup. Dir. Faculty of Regional Professional Studies, Edith Cowan University (2015). 29 Sep. 2015 ‹https://vimeo.com/129198094›. (Quoted material transcribed from 3.08–3.39 of the video.) O’Connor, Rory, Gary Quartermaine, and Corrie Bodney. Report on an Investigation into Aboriginal Significance of Wetlands and Rivers in the Perth-Bunbury Region. Perth: Western Australian Water Resources Council, 1989.Reece, Bob. “‘Killing with Kindness’: Daisy Bates and New Norcia.” Aboriginal History 32 (2008): 128–45.Rose, Deborah Bird. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.Sanderson, Eric. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2009.Sandgroper. “Gilgies: The Swamps of Perth.” The West Australian 4 May 1935: 7.Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen, 1974.Seddon, George. Sense of Place: A Response to an Environment, the Swan Coastal Plain, Western Australia. Melbourne: Bloomings Books, 2004.South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and John Host with Chris Owen. “It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country:” The Single Noongar Claim History. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009.Urban Bushland Council. “Bushland Issues.” 2015. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.bushlandperth.org.au/bushland-issues›.Welborn, Suzanne. Swan: The History of a Brewery. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 1987.Weller, Richard. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City. Crawley: U of Western Australia P, 2009. Whish-Wilson, David. Perth. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013.

On the night of 31 August, 1888, Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols was found murdered in Buck’s Row, her throat slashed and her body mutilated. She was followed by Annie Chapman on 8 September in the year of 29 Hanbury Street, Elizabeth Stride in Dutfield’s Yard and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square on 30 September, and finally Mary Jane Kelly in Miller’s Court, on 9 November. These five women, all prostitutes, were victims of an unknown assailant commonly referred to by the epithet ‘Jack the Ripper’, forming an official canon which excludes at least thirteen other cases around the same time. As the Ripper was never identified or caught, he has attained an almost supernatural status in London’s history and literature, immortalised alongside other iconic figures such as Sherlock Holmes. And his killing ground, the East End suburb of Whitechapel, has become notorious in its own right. In this article, I will discuss how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as 'Ripperature'. I will begin by speaking to the turn of Gothic literature towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space, before arguing that Whitechapel's development into a Gothic location may be attributed to the threat of the Ripper and the literature which emerged during and after his crimes. As a working class slum with high rates of crime and poverty, Whitechapel already enjoyed an evil reputation in the London press. However, it was the presence of Jack that would make the suburb infamous into contemporary times. The Gothic Space of the City In the nineteenth century, there was a shift in the representation of space in Gothic literature. From the depiction of the wilderness and ancient buildings such as castles as essentially Gothic, there was a turn towards the idea of the city as a Gothic space. David Punter attributes this turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The wild landscape is no longer considered as dangerous as the savage city of London, and evil no longer confined only to those of working-class status (Punter 191). However, it has been argued by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard that Charles Dickens may have been the first author to present London as a Gothic city, in particular his description of Seven Dials in Bell’s Life in London, 1837, where the anxiety and unease of the narrator is associated with place (11). Furthermore, Thomas de Quincey uses Gothic imagery in his descriptions of London in his 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, calling the city a “vast centre of mystery” (217). This was followed in 1840 with Edgar Allen Poe’s story The Man of the Crowd, in which the narrator follows a stranger through the labyrinthine streets of London, experiencing its poorest and most dangerous areas. At the end of the story, Poe calls the stranger “the type and the genius of deep crime (...) He is the man of the crowd” (n. p). This association of crowds with crime is also used by Jack London in his book The People of the Abyss, published in 1905, where the author spent time living in the slums of the East End. Even William Blake could be considered to have used Gothic imagery in his description of the city in his poem London, written in 1794. The Gothic city became a recognisable and popular trope in the fin-de-siècle, or end-of-century Gothic literature, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. This fin-de-siècle literature reflected the anxieties inherent in increasing urbanisation, wherein individuals lose their identity through their relationship with the city. Examples of fin-de-siècle Gothic literature include The Beetle by Richard Marsh, published in 1897, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year. Evil is no longer restricted to foreign countries in these stories, but infects familiar city streets with terror, in a technique that is described as ‘everyday Gothic’ (Paulden 245). The Gothic city “is constructed by man, and yet its labyrinthine alleys remain unknowable (...) evil is not externalized elsewhere, but rather literally exists within” (Woodford n.p). The London Press and Whitechapel Prior to the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel had already been given an evil reputation in the London press, heavily influenced by W.T. Stead’s reports for The Pall Mall Gazette, entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, in 1885. In these reports, Stead revealed how women and children were being sold into prostitution in suburbs such as Whitechapel. Stead used extensive Gothic imagery in his writing, one of the most enduring being the image of London as a labyrinth with a monstrous Minotaur at its centre, swallowing up his helpless victims. Counter-narratives about Whitechapel do exist, an example being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, who attempted to demystify the East End by walking the streets of Whitechapel and interviewing its inhabitants in the 1860’s. Another is Arthur G. Morrison, who in 1889 dismissed the graphic descriptions of Whitechapel by other reporters as amusing to those who actually knew the area as a commercially respectable place. However, the Ripper murders in the autumn of 1888 ensured that the Gothic image of the East End would become the dominant image in journalism and literature for centuries to come. Whitechapel was a working-class slum, associated with poverty and crime, and had a large Jewish and migrant population. Indeed the claim was made that “had Whitechapel not existed, according to the rationalist, then Jack the Ripper would not have marched against civilization” (Phillips 157). Whitechapel was known as London’s “heart of darkness (…) the ultimate threat and the ultimate mystery” (Ackroyd 679). Therefore, the reporters of the London press who visited Whitechapel during and immediately following the murders understandably imbued the suburb with a Gothic atmosphere in their articles. One such newspaper article, An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel, released in November of 1888, demonstrates these characteristics in its description of Whitechapel. The anonymous reporter, writing during the Ripper murders, describes the suburb as a terrible dark ocean in which there are human monsters, where a man might get a sense of what humanity can sink to in areas of poverty. This view was shared by many, including author Margaret Harkness, whose 1889 book In Darkest London described Whitechapel as a monstrous living entity, and as a place of vice and depravity. Gothic literary tropes were also already widely used in print media to describe murders and other crimes that happened in London, such as in the sensationalist newspaper The Illustrated Police News. An example of this is an illustration published in this newspaper after the murder of Mary Kelly, showing the woman letting the Ripper into her lodgings, with the caption ‘Opening the door to admit death’. Jack is depicted as a manifestation of Death itself, with a grinning skull for a head and clutching a doctor’s bag filled with surgical instruments with which to perform his crimes (Johnston n.p.). In the magazine Punch, Jack was depicted as a phantom, the ‘Nemesis of Neglect’, representing the poverty of the East End, floating down an alleyway with his knife looking for more victims. The Ripper murders were explained by London newspapers as “the product of a diseased environment where ‘neglected human refuse’ bred crime” (Walkowitz 194). Whitechapel became a Gothic space upon which civilisation projected their inadequacies and fears, as if “it had become a microcosm of London’s own dark life” (Ackroyd 678). And in the wake of Jack the Ripper, this writing of Whitechapel as a Gothic space would only continue, with the birth of ‘Ripperature’, the body of fictional and non-fiction literature devoted to the murders. The Birth of Ripperature: The Curse upon Mitre Square and Leather Apron John Francis Brewer wrote the first known text about the Ripper murders in October of 1888, a sensational horror monograph entitled The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer made use of well-known Gothic tropes, such as the trans-generational curse, the inclusion of a ghost and the setting of an old church for the murder of an innocent woman. Brewer blended fact and fiction, making the Whitechapel murderer the inheritor, or even perhaps the victim of an ancient curse that hung over Mitre Square, where the second murdered prostitute, Catherine Eddowes, had been found the month before. According to Brewer, the curse originated from the murder of a woman in 1530 by her brother, a ‘mad monk’, on the steps of the high altar of the Holy Trinity Church in Aldgate. The monk, Martin, committed suicide, realising what he had done, and his ghost now appears pointing to the place where the murder occurred, promising that other killings will follow. Whitechapel is written as both a cursed and haunted Gothic space in The Curse upon Mitre Square. Brewer’s description of the area reflected the contemporary public opinion, describing the Whitechapel Road as a “portal to the filth and squalor of the East” (66). However, Mitre Square is the former location of a monastery torn down by a corrupt politician; this place, which should have been holy ground, is cursed. Mitre Square’s atmosphere ensures the continuation of violent acts in the vicinity; indeed, it seems to exude a self-aware and malevolent force that results in the death of Catherine Eddowes centuries later. This idea of Whitechapel as somehow complicit in or even directing the acts of the Ripper will later become a popular trope of Ripperature. Brewer’s work was advertised in London on posters splashed with red, a reminder of the blood spilled by the Ripper’s victims only weeks earlier. It was also widely promoted by the media and reissued in New York in 1889. It is likely that a ‘suggestion effect’ took place during the telegraph-hastened, press-driven coverage of the Jack the Ripper story, including Brewer’s monograph, spreading the image of Gothic Whitechapel as fact to the world (Dimolianis 63). Samuel E. Hudson’s account of the Ripper murders differs in style from Brewer’s because of his attempt to engage critically with issues such as the failure of the police force to find the murderer and the true identity of Jack. His book Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel, London, was published in December of 1888. Hudson described the five murders canonically attributed to Jack, wrote an analysis of the police investigation that followed, and speculated as to the Ripper’s motivations. Despite his intention to examine the case objectively, Hudson writes Jack as a Gothic monster, an atavistic and savage creature prowling Whitechapel to satisfy his bloodlust. Jack is associated with several Gothic tropes in Hudson’s work, and described as different types of monsters. He is called: a “fiend bearing a charmed and supernatural existence,” a “human vampire”, an “incarnate monster” and even, like Brewer, the perpetrator of “ghoulish butchery” (Hudson 40). Hudson describes Whitechapel as “the worst place in London (...) with innumerable foul and pest-ridden alleys” (9). Whitechapel becomes implicated in the Ripper murders because of its previously established reputation as a crime-ridden slum. Poverty forced women into prostitution, meaning they were often out alone late at night, and its many courts and alleyways allowed the Ripper an easy escape from his pursuers after each murder (Warwick 560). The aspect of Whitechapel that Hudson emphasises the most is its darkness; “off the boulevard, away from the streaming gas-jets (...) the knave ran but slight chance of interruption” (40). Whitechapel is a place of shadows, its darkest places negotiated only by ‘fallen women’ and their clients, and Jack himself. Hudson’s casting of Jack as a vampire makes his preference for the night, and his ability to skilfully disembowel prostitutes and disappear without a trace, intelligible to his readers as the attributes of a Gothic monster. Significantly, Hudson’s London is personified as female, the same sex as the Ripper victims, evoking a sense of passive vulnerability against the acts of the masculine and predatory Jack, Hudson writing that “it was not until four Whitechapel women had perished (...) that London awoke to the startling fact that a monster was at work upon her streets” (8). The Complicity of Gothic Whitechapel in the Ripper Murders This seeming complicity of Whitechapel as a Gothic space in the Ripper murders, which Brewer and Hudson suggest in their work, can be seen to have influenced subsequent representations of Whitechapel in Ripperature. Whitechapel is no longer simply the location in which these terrible events take place; they happen because of Whitechapel itself, the space exerting a self-conscious malevolence and kinship with Jack. Historically, the murders forced Queen Victoria to call for redevelopment in Spitalfields, the improvement of living conditions for the working class, and for a better police force to patrol the East End to prevent similar crimes (Sugden 2). The fact that Jack was never captured “seemed only to confirm the impression that the bloodshed was created by the foul streets themselves: that the East End was the true Ripper,” (Ackroyd 678) using the murderer as a way to emerge into the public consciousness. In Ripperature, this idea was further developed by the now popular image of Jack “stalking the black alleyways [in] thick swirling fog” (Jones 15). This otherworldly fog seems to imply a mystical relationship between Jack and Whitechapel, shielding him from view and disorientating his victims. Whitechapel shares the guilt of the murders as a malevolent and essentially pagan space. The notion of Whitechapel as being inscribed with paganism and magic has become an enduring and popular trope of Ripperature. It relates to an obscure theory that drawing lines between the locations of the first four Ripper murders created Satanic and profane religious symbols, suggesting that they were predetermined locations for a black magic ritual (Odell 217). This theory was expanded upon most extensively in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, published in 1999. In From Hell, Jack connects several important historical and religious sites around London by drawing a pentacle on a map of the city. He explains the murders as a reinforcement of the pentacle’s “lines of power and meaning (...) this pentacle of sun gods, obelisks and rational male fire, within unconsciousness, the moon and womanhood are chained” (Moore 4.37). London becomes a ‘textbook’, a “literature of stone, of place-names and associations,” stretching back to the Romans and their pagan gods (Moore 4.9). Buck’s Row, the real location of the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, is pagan in origin; named for the deer that were sacrificed on the goddess Diana’s altars. However, Moore’s Whitechapel is also Hell itself, the result of Jack slipping further into insanity as the murders continue. From Hell is illustrated in black and white, which emphasises the shadows and darkness of Whitechapel. The buildings are indistinct scrawls of shadow, Jack often nothing more than a silhouette, forcing the reader to occupy the same “murky moral and spiritual darkness” that the Ripper does (Ferguson 58). Artist Eddie Campbell’s use of shade and shadow in his illustrations also contribute to the image of Whitechapel-as-Hell as a subterranean place. Therefore, in tracing the representations of Whitechapel in the London press and in Ripperature from 1888 onwards, the development of Whitechapel as a Gothic location becomes clear. From the geographical setting of the Ripper murders, Whitechapel has become a Gothic space, complicit in Jack’s work if not actively inspiring the murders. Whitechapel, although known to the public before the Ripper as a crime-ridden slum, developed into a Gothic space because of the murders, and continues to be associated with the Gothic in contemporary Ripperature as an uncanny and malevolent space “which seems to compel recognition as not of this earth" (Ackroyd 581). References Anonymous. “An Autumn Evening in Whitechapel.” Littell’s Living Age, 3 Nov. 1888. Anonymous. “The Nemesis of Neglect.” Punch, or the London Charivari, 29 Sep. 1888. Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. Great Britain: Vintage, 2001. Brewer, John Francis. The Curse upon Mitre Square. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co, 1888. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850. Dimolianis, Spiro. Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. North Carolina: McFarland and Co, 2011. Ferguson, Christine. “Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 20.1-2 (2009): 58. Harkness, Mary, In Darkest London. London: Hodder and Staughton, 1889. Hudson, Samuel E. Leather Apron; or, the Horrors of Whitechapel. London, Philadelphia, 1888. Johnstone, Lisa. “Rippercussions: Public Reactions to the Ripper Murders in the Victorian Press.” Casebook 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/rippercussions.html›. London, Jack. The People of the Abyss. New York: Lawrence Hill, 1905. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, Volume 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Co, 1861. Moore, Alan, Campbell, Eddie. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. London: Knockabout Limited, 1999. Morrison, Arthur G. “Whitechapel.” The Palace Journal. 24 Apr. 1889. Odell, Robin. Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon. Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2006. Paulden, Arthur. “Sensationalism and the City: An Explanation of the Ways in Which Locality Is Defined and Represented through Sensationalist Techniques in the Gothic Novels The Beetle and Dracula.” Innervate: Leading Undergraduate Work in English Studies 1 (2008-2009): 245. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. London: Continuum International, 2010. Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Man of the Crowd.” The Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Vol. 5. Raven ed. 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2151/2151-h/2151-h.htm›. Punter, David. A New Companion to the Gothic. Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2012. Stead, William Thomas. “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885. Sugden, Peter. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. London: Robinson Publishing, 2002. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London: Virago, 1998. Woodford, Elizabeth. “Gothic City.” 15 July 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.nus.edu.au/sg/ellgohbh/gothickeywords.html›.

We are living in uncertain times. Recent and ongoing crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and natural disasters, and increasing geopolitical and economic instability, have arguably led to a growing awareness of our existential precarity. Recent studies suggest that mental health is poor: among the general population, 24.4% experience anxiety and 22.9% suffer from symptoms of depression. These figures rise to an alarming 41.1% and 32.5% respectively in vulnerable populations (Bower et al.). As Maree Teesson, Director of the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, points out, “what worries me is that rather than having an intense recovery phase [after the pandemic] in Australia we’ve had further crises, including marked increases in costs of living and natural disasters, all of which we know exacerbate mental health problems” (anon.). How do we not only survive but flourish in such times? As we are coming up against the financial as well as conceptual limitations of biomedically informed approaches to mental health (McDonald and Hollenbach 5), the therapeutic potential of the arts is receiving renewed attention. While art, music, and writing therapy are widely recognised, bibliotherapy, although practiced in clinical as well as many informal settings, is less prominent in our cultural imagination – perhaps because the creativity in the act of reading is less obvious, perhaps because our reading practices tend to bleed into each other: we read for pleasure, distraction, information, guidance, etc., often all at the same time. And yet, research shows that bibliotherapy can make significant contributions to mental health (Monroy-Fraustro et al.). In our article, we explore how the practice of Shared Reading, a form of creative bibliotherapy, can nurture the wellbeing of individuals and communities in our uncertain times. Neither a book club nor a self-help group, Shared Reading brings a small group of people together to listen to a story and a poem, which are read out by a trained facilitator, who gently guides the conversation to tease out the emotional undercurrents of the text, to reflect on literary characters and their predicaments, and generally use literature as a springboard for broader reflections on life and personal experience. The format combines the benefits of reading with those of being part of a community. The positive effects have been documented in a range of studies: Shared Reading has the capacity to reduce anxiety, alleviate symptoms of depression, increase confidence, and, importantly, create a sense of connectedness and social inclusion in a non-medicalised setting (see Billington Reading; Davis Literature; Dowrick et al.; Pettersson). While Shared Reading has been extensively researched from the perspective of specific mental health issues, less attention has been paid to how it contributes to an overall sense of flourishing in which a person feels good about their life (emotional wellbeing) and functions well within it (psychological and social wellbeing) – as opposed to subsisting in a state of languishing characterised by feelings of “emptiness”, “stagnation”, and “quiet despair” (Keyes 210), without amounting to actual mental illness (Keyes et al. 2367). The distinction between languishing and mental illness is crucial to avoid conflation of “normal human sadness” (Haslam and DeDeyne n.p.) and “common human sorrows – normality under severe strain” (Billington, Literature 2) – with the pathological psychological states of mental illness. Understanding what makes us flourish is important, not least because Keyes’s findings suggest that flourishing in life may foster resilience and provide a “stress buffer” against challenging life events and transitions (218), while languishing individuals may be more susceptible to mental illness (213). The flourishing individual, it seems, is better placed to make the best of ‘the mingled yarn’ of their life (All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3). The workings and effects of Shared Reading can best be captured with current concepts of eudaimonic wellbeing, which expand Aristotle’s notion of human flourishing by integrating the fulfilment of psychological needs (see Huta; Besser-Jones). Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia is characterised by reason and moderation in aiming for an embodiment of particular virtues or excellences. Ryan, Huta, and Deci update Aristotle’s normative concept of the good life into the mindful, freely chosen pursuit of intrinsic goals, such as personal growth, relationships, and community. A eudaimonic life, they argue, will satisfy basic psychological needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Like Aristotle, they consider pleasure and positive affect as welcome by-products rather than goals in themselves. Besser-Jones concurs: we have needs to experience competency over our environments and as such to engage in experiences that allow us to exercise our skills; to experience belongingness with others, to both care for others and be cared for by others; to experience autonomy through selecting and pursuing goals with which we identify. When we engage in these activities in an ongoing fashion, we experience eudaimonic well-being. (Besser-Jones 190) Significantly, the eudaimonic life is one of active reflection and conscious volition (Besser-Jones 187), rather than passive acquiescence to either outside forces or inner drives. Mindfulness is a crucial ingredient, enabling a person to see “what is true” in their inner and outer experience (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 158). Research suggests that the fruits of such a life may include a sense of meaning, enhanced vitality, inner peace, and even physical health (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 161–2). Shared Reading contributes to eudaimonic wellbeing in several ways. Rather than fostering wellbeing through a cumulation of moments of hedonic pleasure (see Diener), Shared Reading does not provide exclusively pleasurable experiences; instead it creates “a little community ... whose first concern is the serious business of living” (Billington, Literature 132). While this undoubtedly affords moments of heightened positive affect, participants may also experience heightened negative affect. However, engagement with the negative through literature can, in fact, positively contribute to a deepened sense of purpose, meaning, and connection with others (Ryff & Singer 10), and thereby contribute to an improved sense of psychological wellbeing (Billington et al. 267-8; see also Davis et al., Literature 19) as tensions, uncertainties, and memories can be articulated, contextualised and, ultimately, integrated (McNicol 23–40). In that respect Shared Reading resonates with Vittersø’s reflection that “eudaimonic well-being is strange. It contains a kind of complex goodness that is not necessarily associated with pleasure – and it may be valued only after a bit of reflection” (Vittersø 254). As a practice, Shared Reading unfolds its full potential over time in accordance with eudaimonism, which defines wellbeing as “an active state ... that, while experiential, requires agency and ongoing activity” (Besser-Jones 187). Given the limited scope of this article, we want to focus on just some of the ways in which Shared Reading contributes to eudaimonic wellbeing by offering opportunities for self-growth and greater autonomy through a sense of connectedness, which may lead to a greater sense of overall liveness and a fuller experience of the amplitude of human life. Corcoran and Oatley note that “the interpersonal context in which to think about human challenges and complex, day-to-day human situations” in reading groups is “a luxury that is not typically afforded by pressured, busy and demanding lives, but which is invaluable as an underpinning life resource to enhance sustainable psychological wellbeing” (338). Throughout our exploration, we will draw on surveys and interviews with Shared Reading participants from a pilot study at La Trobe University, in which, together with Senior Lecturer Sara James, we ran five groups for eight weeks in a range of community settings in greater Melbourne. Three of these groups, at Yarra Libraries and the La Trobe University Library as well as the Warrandyte Neighbourhood House, were conducted face-to-face. Two more groups, one with outpatient cancer survivors at Ringwood Hospital and one with La Trobe University alumni, were held on Zoom. The study consisted of 27 participants – 20 female, 6 male, and one non-binary – ranging from young adulthood to elderly. All participants self-selected to join after advertising campaigns in conjunction with our partner institutions; participation in the research component of the project was entirely voluntary. All participants, whose statements we quote, have been de-identified. The positive effects on both a sense of personal autonomy and social connection are reflected in our research findings: 92.5% of the participants found they had grown more confident since joining the group. 92.6% of the participants reported that the groups helped them understand themselves better, while 77.7% found the sessions helped them relate to others in a deeper way. In Shared Reading the connection between reader and text expands into connections formed within the group. Recognising aspects of one’s own life in a story is powerful in “confirming that I am not entirely alone, that there are others who think or feel like me. Through this experience of affiliation, I feel myself acknowledged; I am rescued from the fear of invisibility, from the terror of not being seen” (Felski 54). In this way, even solitary reading has the capacity to normalise a broad range of individual experiences and to stave off loneliness. We find friends in books. In Shared Reading this moment of connection is intensified and multiplied by also offering recognition from others – groups bond quickly. Beth, a shy participant who struggles with anxiety, found “it was really, really special to find a way to really honestly understand someone else without judgement, which is hard to do”. She reported that the sessions had increased her confidence because she “felt seen” within the group. A number of participants commented on the depth and quality of the conversations and found the groups “nourishing” or “nurturing”. By focussing on the text, meaningful and even personal conversations spring up that are not easily had in other contexts. Such rich and intimate encounters with the text and others are predicated on the practice of joint “close” or “deep” reading. By immersing oneself in the text, the borders between self and text become porous. In “bringing the work into existence as an imaginary space within oneself” (Miller 38), we allow the text to “get under our skin” in an act of “compenetration” (Rosenblatt 12). This process holds significant transformative potential, as Radway notes: when reading, “‘I’ become something other than what I have been and inhabit thoughts other than those I have been able to conceive before” (13). Billington credits reading as a unique form of thinking in its own right (Literature 115–37). Thinking with the text collaboratively can deepen into self-reflection through our internal and external conversations with the voices of others (Archer 458–472). Self-reflexivity becomes a relational process in which individuals experiment with new modes of selfhood and ways of relating to others (Holmes 139–41). This resonates with research into Shared Reading, which suggests an “impact upon psychological wellbeing by improving a sense of personal growth through increased self-development” (Davis et al., Values 7). In fact, one of the strongest themes to emerge from the post-program interviews was how strongly participants appreciated the broadening of inner horizons through the group conversations. Reading itself offers “a literary rendering of how worlds create selves, but also of how selves perceive and react to worlds made up of other selves” (Felski 132). It involves exercising the imagination; it is the practice of “going out from one’s self toward other lives” and stimulates “sympathy, fellowship, spirituality and [the] morality of being human” (Donoghue 73; see also Charon). Shared Reading fosters self-growth as a relational activity, as group participant Ian describes: [Shared Reading] will open up a world to your own feelings and views ... and expand that beyond your expectations ... . As a group you have that cross-fertilisation of emotions, feelings, experiences. ... It is amazing what it will do for your own mental wellbeing, your own intellectual stimulation, and your sense of engagement with your fellow human being. Ian’s statement captures something integral to Shared Reading and to eudaimonic flourishing: a sense of “liveness” and vibrancy. Participants experience the literature freshly during the session, without preparation – indeed without warning – as to what will be encountered (Davis, Reading 4). Participant Anna notes: “you really have to be in the moment, present to the text”. Nina likens this quality of attention to that of “meditating and connecting at the same time”, which resonates with the mindfulness of a eudaimonic life (Ryan, Huta, & Deci 158). Literature can enliven us by disrupting habitual patterns of response, defences, pat attitudes and opinions; it nudges us, so to speak, out of the “insidiously lazy default language” (Davis, Reader 3) of familiar, well-worn conceptual and linguistic paths into unexplored territory. The reader may be caught off guard when a story abruptly triggers an emotion, a memory, or some other element of inner experience (Billington, Literature 91–93), which then emerges, often haltingly, into the light of conscious thought. Such ambushing is recognised by both facilitators and researchers when a participant’s normal fluency falters or breaks down into a “creative inarticulacy” (Davis et al. 11–14) as they actively, arduously attempt to express what the literature has summoned (Billington, Literature 91–2). Such linguistic groping signals the emergence of fresh insight; it is personal growth in action. Anna relates how Sharma Shields’s story “The Mcgugle Account” exhumed a long-buried memory: “it really disturbed me a lot. And it was not until a week or so later that I recognised what it was … that it summoned up in me, a memory of something that had happened … [that] I’d always felt a lot of shame about. And I’ve never, I’ve never really shared it with anybody”. She continues, “and it was so good to talk about it and process something I’ve not been able to [indistinct] for 30 years”. Anna experiences a moment of “recovery” or “awakening” (Billington, Literature 88) as a “second chance” (Davis, Reading 14) to return to an experience and reframe, maybe even redeem it. Davis notes that literature widens and enriches the human norm [by] accepting and allowing for trauma, troubles, inadequacies, and other experiences usually classed as negative or even pathological. It is a process of recovery – in the deeper sense of spontaneously retrieving for use experiences and qualities that were lost, regretted or made redundant. (Davis et al. Values, 33) Similarly, Beth describes what happened when another participant recalled an argument with his ex-wife: we all laughed, really, which is quite a tender moment and it’s really a vulnerable expression of something that was potentially really painful in someone’s past. But for some reason we all laughed, and it was fine. He was happy with us laughing too …. . I can’t remember many, many moments like that where we just – yeah , collectively kind of laughed about this. This life. Yeah. The laughter shared during such moments expresses relief, reassurance that we are not alone in the painful experiences of “this life”. These are moments of connection and of re-storying or recuperating a painful past. The sense of vitality is often palpable, manifesting sometimes as an alert stillness – a taut “leaning in” (Davis et al., Value 9) to what’s being read –, at others as an eruption into laughter as we have seen. In its embrace of the full spectrum of human experience it is “as though literature itself said implicitly ‘Nothing human is alien to me’” (Billington, Literature 3). Within this capacious, generous space, participants can grow into a more expansive self-awareness. Beth explains: I find it hard to understand what I’m feeling sometimes and articulate that, and through the stories and through the group and through the process, I found that easier. Which was such a surprise to me. Because that wasn’t what I thought would happen. … I can’t quite place what it is about the experience that had that catalyst for me … . And there was something in each of the stories that was really relatable, and I found that it just drew something out of me that I wasn’t expecting then. “Alive”, “enriched”, and “stimulated” are some of the participants’ descriptors for how they feel in Shared Reading sessions. As with any practice, these feelings deepen and spread into other areas of life over time. Tom, who describes “reading as a way of life”, explains its power: “to be an appreciator of the text is a practice in itself without being a writer of text or a critic. … And the more I appreciate, the better my life becomes”. After the program, Beth reported that she started exploring the library in more detail, and one of the groups started meeting at the pub to share reading tips, discuss “ideas”, and catch up. As has perhaps become clear, in Shared Reading the individual aspects of a eudaimonic life work together synergistically to promote a sense of eudaimonic wellbeing. The attentive and sincere engagement with literature and its representations of human complexity facilitates connection and reflection that may inspire self-growth and an overall sense of vitality. In the practice of reading together these aspects remain entangled and interdependent, reinforcing each other over time into a sense of eudaimonic wellbeing that can accommodate pain or negative affect and potentially transform them into something meaningful. The process of restoration, of unfolding, articulating, and reintegrating what was submerged, considered lost, or pushed aside is never linear, often surprising, and never complete, just as expressions of eudaimonic flourishing are unique to each individual and bear all the complexity of human experience. 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