Where's, uh, Christopher?

So, I think I’ve set a personal record for the number of continents upon which my body has alighted in a given 3 week period… 4… four continents. Can any of you guess where I am? Could any of you tell me where I ought to go, or better yet, what I ought to “do” next… I’m done with Congo, I have a funny feeling that I’m done with Vancouver, and I’m more than a little uncertain about pretty much everything else.

Nevertheless, angst and disorientation notwithstanding, I’m alive and well, typing away from the bottom of new Zealand—a lovely country. I’m cold, absolutely freezing in fact, and doggedly trying to sort out my plans for grad school (why, when where, etc) before taking another step forward… I’m so determined to sort this out that I’ve even turned down 3 (what was I thinking!) super positions based in rotten, terrible, absolutely dreadful places like tchad and jafna. At any rate, I’ve come out of congo, full of perspective, full of concern, and in full view of the immensity of the next couple steps in my life, steps that I think ought to be taken deliberately, given the gravity of the implications… say, if I were to do a post-grad degree in disaster management, I would be very very well qualified (given my humanitarian experience) to live/work the rest of my life in disaster zones—and frankly, I’m not sure I can do it!
But an example, but it ought to cast a bit of light on some of the things I’m presently trying to work out.

Right, there you have it, I’m in new Zealand, not a little disoriented, but moving in a/the right direction. The ever-elusive “top 10” list of all the things I love about the congo, my job, etc, is forthcoming,… actually, I’ve lost it somewhere in my hardrive, but it’ll be fabulous! In fact, the list is larger than 10 items, but when did the heart of darkness ever resign itself, in all its breadth and depth of absurdity and paradox, to be contained in a single list of 10 peculiarities?

Also, there are a number of quotes from Vaclav Havel’s recently published memoirs (to the castle and back)…quotes I thought to be particularly interesting… so be sure to scroll down a bit, check out the pics, and read some of havel’s reflections.

Peace
C

pics? New Zealand?

is there something wrong with blogspot photo upload mechanism again, or is it really just me?

picnicking with the varners and vaclav?

The beauty of language is that it can never capture precisely what it wants. Language is disconnected, hard, digital as it were, and for that reason , but not only for that reason, it can never completely capture something as connected as reality, experience, or our souls. This opens the door to the magnificient battle for expression and self-expression that has accompanied man down through history. It is a battle without end, and thanks o it, everything that is human is continually being elucidated, each time somewhat differently. Moreover, t is in this battle that man in fact becomes himself. As an individual, as a species. He simply tries to capture the world and humself more and more exactly through words, images, or actinos, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself, nor any part of the world. But that drives him to keep trying, again and again, and thus he continues to define himself more and more exactly. It’s a sysphaen fate. But it can’t be helped: man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave, though someone, in the end, will know that truth ater all: if no the Lord God, then at least the great memory of being.



Pics--melissa and her mighty muscles--elliot, the cutest kid east of the drive--neil and me, amanda and me...collectively the varner family

peace
C

vaclav and parties?

I’m convinced that my existence—like everything that has ever happened—has ruffled the surface of Being, and that after my little ripple, however marginal, insignificant, and ephermeral it may have been, Being is and always will be different from what it was before. All my life I have simply believed that what is once done can never be undone and that, in fact, everything remains forever. In short, Being has a memory. And thus even my insignificance—as a bourgeois child, a laboratory assistant, a soldier, a stagehand, a playwright, a dissident, a prisoner, a president, a pensioner, a public phenomenon, and a hermit, an alleged hero but sercretly a bundle of nerves—will remain here forever, or rather not here, but somewhere. But not, however, elsewhere. Somewhere here.


PICS--fun times, captured by digital imaging technology... me and daniel, me and alain, me and caroline/rebecca--

post-democracy and non-sequitous pictures

By “post-democracy” I meant nothing more, and nothing other than a democracy that has once again been given human content, which is to say that it is not just formal, not just institutional, not just an elegant mechanism to ensure that although the same overn, it appears as though the citizens are themselves choosing them again. I may have been naïve, but I was merely explaining then what I still think to this day, and more urgently than ever: that if everything is not to turn out badly for us, we will need a revolution of “heads and hearts” as Maaryk called it, a kind of general awakening, an emphasis on seeking an alternative to the established and already shopworn and very technocratic political parties, or at least a crying out for the inner renewal; an effort to rid them of their hidden, subtle, and omnipresent power, which itself is a denial of the principles of representative democracy, an emphasis on the development of an open civil society and on the reconstruction of transparent human communities as an instrument of human solidarity and self-regulationl an emphasis on long-term interests and on the spiritual and morla dimensions of politics—all of those are simply aspects or consequences of the same fundamental ideal, which of course is not complicated in the least. It is simply the extrication of the human race from self-destructive and automoatic collapse of civilization.



Pics--Jana the german (unlike Vaclav, the czech)--Jeremy the office's barista--and ben, my syphilitic, self-absorbed dog

vaclav and my neighbors kids!

Yesterday I saw my friend Joan Baez on television; she was marvelous and I remembered the ampitheater at Stanford university where I gave a big speech and she sang and then I carried her guitar off the stage just as I had done in the communist era when I was at her concert in Bratislava. The state police had tried to prevent me from taking part, and I escaped their clutches by carrying joan’s guitar for her: they were reluctant to arrest me in her presence because they were afraid that she would speak about it at the concert. Even so, she dedicated a song to me and charter 77 and they punished her by cutting off the power. A funereal silence fell over the stadium, and then she sang without a microphone. She was clearly audible. It was very moving and, naturally, it was a far more momentous event than it woul have been if they’d left her microphone left on.


Photos--my neighbors kids, getting crazy for the camera!

vaclav Havel, surely....

In principal, however, I believe that there are cases when it is possible and proper to go to the aid of innocent people, even at the cost of violating state sovereignty. In one of my speeches I said: a state is the work of humans, a human being is the work of God. What I meant was that defending human beings is a higher responsibility than respecting the inviolability of a state. One must, however, constantly and carefully scrutinize such humanistic arguments to determine that it is not just a pretty façade concealing far less respectable interests, be they strategic, economic, or other. The world should never automatically approve the intervention of one state against another state that is justified by a defense of humanity.

(the guys, again, there're just so great!)

Vaclav Havel, who else?

To tell you the truth, its not just the Americans and other foreigners who think of me as a kind of fairy-tale prince or at least as the main character in a fairy tale; I to am often aware of something utterl unbelievable in my own destiny. And I’m less and less able to understand that destiny; at times I even see myself as a minor freak of history. How could this ever have happened to me—and to me in particular—to be in the very centre of events so momentous that they determined the fate of many nations and millions of people? Why did I, the author of absurd plays, experience hundreds of absurd situations…Sometimes I think my is just a dream and that one day, very soon, I will wake up in 1958 as a soldier in the barracks in Ceske Budejovice; the alarm will have sounded, and I –someone with no sense balance—will haveto go down a busy street in the morning rush hour on a bicycle with no rubber tires wearing a helmet and full battle gear, carryng a machine gun, a gas mask, and a cardboard box full of live ammunition, in order to wake up an officer in his flat so that he can lead our entire sapper regiment to the westen borders on an exercise to defend the communist world against NATO trops ( the same organization whose summit I will inaugaurate in Prague forty-four years later). But in fact, even my two years in the army, and even more so my five years in prison, seem to me an unreal and indescribable dream, albeit in this case a very dark one. And so I must ultimately pose the question as to whether all of this—the fact that such a peaceable man ended up living such an adventurous life—isn’t a result of the fact that life itself, even the most ordinary and the most inconspicuous life, is an unbelievable miracle. A fairy tale at times beautiful, at times suspenseful, at times terrifying.

Photo... my boys: Mr enthusiasmo and Wall-eye the hat, my favorite and most hard working day labourers. And, these guys would call after me on my walk home, just to check in, see how I was getting on... These are the guys I fought for.