Boddhisattva

In my last post, I mentioned a love of irony but I'm also quite fond of surrealism. Its in that vein that I'm going to tell you about Jean Paul Sartre wind my way through an article about the African brain and possibly end with an anecdote from England's amateur football leagues. If I take a detour on the way...well so be it.
Anyway Sartre was a French philosopher whose chief preoccupation was explaining just how devoid of meaning our world was. He was an existentialist and pretty proud of it. However this is France we are talking about so despite the fact that he was short, ugly and a very unpleasant man he was treated as a bit of a rock star and got laid quite a lot. Women used to faint midway through his lectures which had tantalising names like "Is existentialism humanism?".
Anyway Satre once decided to experiment with drugs and did some mescaline which is supposedly some pretty nasty stuff. As a result of it-presumably he did not enjoy the experience- he spent the rest of his life terrorized by the fear that he was being stalked by a giant crab. One might say it was a fitting fate for a man who after all believed the world made no sense and even a Boddhisattva would have had trouble untangling that mess. I love that story for many reasons but primarily because of the sheer surreal nature of it. As he famously said, man is condemned to be free but evidently that freedom comes with the ever-present danger of giant crabs.
For a slightly less funny dose of the surreal I direct you to-of all places- The New African magazine. Their mission statement appears to be "Of all the magazines in Africa..wer'e one of them" More specifically i urge you to read an article called 'I think like an African' by a young lady called Stella Orakwue. Among the opening lines is the phrase 'The African brain is a brain that Europeans are jealous of" why? I quote "because it has multiple capacities, it is infinitely flexible and it works and works and works. On and on and on, like a computer with infinite versions of the finest, highest quality software" She goes on to show just how much more superior we are to Europeans- another example being because we dont need rehab or psychoanalysis. All we have is laughter and thats all we need. There is a silly picture of Robbie Williams on the page which urges us to point and laugh- those stupid white people! Why cant they be as clever as us?
I have major problems with this article. For starters a good part of it is spent trying to show how Europeans tried to set themselves up as more superior to us. She rightly points out that this was obviously racism. Her solution? To show that WE are superior to THEM. As long as its a black person saying they are superior then its not racism! Like magic. As for our brains being so much more superior, there is zero evidence presented here except to note that we smile a lot more and we dont do rehab. If we are so dammned smart why is the continent still heading up shit creek minus a paddle? In trying to tackle racist thinking, our journalist friend makes the same mistake the racist Europeans did. We are not inherently superior and neither are they. And of course there is no such thing as an 'African brain.' The whole thing is an unintentional piece of surreal journalism which also has the laughable notion that Sigmund Freud basically saved Western civilization from descending into madness. There is also a letter to the editor in the same magazine in which Oprah Winfrey's new school in South Africa is described as a front for neo-liberalism. Ye gods what is going on?
Yes its not quite Haruki Murakami, but its still pretty much adrift of reality. And yes this gives me an excuse to recommend Murakami's magnificent-but very weird- book Kafka on the shore. Murakami is probably the foremost surrealist author working today.
And I end with another strange but true story that in many ways shows what a delightful world we live in. It concerns our 'inferior' European friends- more specifically England's amateur football leagues. This happened back in the seventies when I wasnt even a twinkle in my father's eye. It's a simple story but I love it anyway. The hero of the tale is a tricky winger called Albert. His team used to play in a park which was lined with outdoor toilets so as Albert bombed down the wing, he would beat defenders by flicking the ball against the toilets and pick it again on the other side. He did the same trick over and over again but the defenders just couldn't stop him mainly because he was fast but because his team was being ably aided by the nearby toilets. Sometimes someone would come out of the toilet just as Albert flicked the ball against the door in which case the ball would have to be retrieved in a place that made applicants for this task quite uneasy about volunteering to help.
Anyway one day a team came down to town and they were all hard-men. They had heard about Albert and they were determined to stop him. Come matchday, Albert went charging down the wing banging the ball against the toilet doors and getting past players but there was someone waiting patiently on the wing for him. As soon as Albert was within distance he charged him- he barely glanced at the ball- and just knocked him straight into the loo breaking the door. The sight of the two dazed men sitting on the floor of an outdoor toilet with a football next to them must have been a sight to record for posterity. The balletic cheeky grace of Albert came face-to-face with the no-nonsense brutal realism of his opponents.
For these sins- and possibly for being crap- the teams were banned from playing on the park in the future and Albert presumably never flicked a ball against a toilet again. I've always thought that's a wonderful story but that's probably just me. I suspect Andre Breton would also have approved though...