Still Eyeing Iyer

The Global Soul is still hanging around in my thoughts. The other day, I was looking again at the wonderful final chapter ("The Alien Home"), which you didn't get to read, and thinking about Iyer's engaging way of moving from the travel writer to the essayist to the autobiographer. Somewhere in an interview I chanced upon, he described the more frenetic parts of this book as creating a sense of "jet lag" (apparently it was an intentional part of his aesthetic), but in this last chapter everything seems to settle (both for Iyer in Japan and for we as readers), sometimes to exquisite effect. Some extractions:

OF STAIRS:
"The Global Age reminds us of how little we really know about the people we pass on the stairs every day; identity will have to be deepened without much help from outside" (282). Compare this with Bhabha's take on stairs: "The stairwell as liminal space, in-between the designations of identity, becomes the process of symbolic interaction, the connective tissue that constructs the difference between upper and lower, black and white. The hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities" (The Location of Culture 5).

OF ENFORCED SIMPLICITIES:
"Yet being in so alien an environment is the first step towards living more slowly, and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, it's an equivalent to living in the wilderness" (288). Thinking of all the things that are overstacked, overflowing, and overwhelming in my own life (e.g., piles of relentlessly arriving New Yorker magazines, an impossibly rotund email inbox, books bought but never read, household chores in a static queue, etc.), it's of course most appealing to read Iyer describing himself being brought back "to some of the defining principles of the society all around me, which more or less patented the notion that if you decorate a simple room with single chrysanthemum, it will concentrate the mind and consecrate the flower" (289).

OF NEW PARADIGMS:
We've been discussing the various locations and spaces of possibility offered to us by our writers this semester -- the West Indian dance hall in The Lonely Londoners, the jazz clubs in Trumpet, the multicultural outdoor markets in Dirty Pretty Things (still to come), the Cafe Shaandaar in The Satanic Verses. Here's Iyer take on how newness can enter the world: "Such minglings are more and more the fabric of our mongrel worlds, as more and more of us cross borders in our private lives, or choose to live with foreign cultures in our arms. In Toronto, in Hong Kong, even in the Olympic Village nowadays, I seem to see as many couples dissolving nationalities as other kinds of distinctions, and so bringing to light unimaginable new cultures in which the annihilation of traditional identity is turned to something higher" (292).

OF SUNDAYS:
"I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings," writes Iyer,"as Baptist hymns float over from across the way, and think that in our mongrel, mixed-up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find" (296). This modest little sentence asks us what ingredients help us find the time zone of wonder in our harried daily lives. It also makes me think of that beautiful chapter in Trumpet when Millie tenderly explains why Sundays were so special to her and Joss, the day of the week when "our faces have the lines of dreams on them" (196).

Anyway, I didn't mean to go on so long with this echo from of our past (then again, we mustn't follow a linear teleology even in this class, right?!), but there are so many nice moments to tease out of this chapter. Hopefully you found your own.