ars poetica

john thinks journaling must be an addiction.  he will tell you a story about a woman who beat her drug addiction by journaling and now promotes her book that will teach one how to journal.  whether john actually saw this story on oprah or cooked this one up himself, i'll never know.

i have stacks of journals.  piles.  i talked to my mother the other day as she has been going through the library of books i left in alabama when i moved to oregon.  she found a cache of journals among all the other volumes; she told me she'd save them for me.

these journals contain a lot of entries about the purpose of maintaining a journal.  how do i justify this habit?

a part of me believes (perhaps falsely) that in writing this daily monologue, in noting these quotidian details, in indulging this compulsion to record i can glean some meaning from the culmination of events, that i can sort out my thoughts and experiences and emotions and all the rest of this meaningless bullshit and be left with a revelatory web, a pattern i can apply to the future.  i believe in this mathematics of memory.  my memory impacts and affects my experience now which compounds to affect a future present.  memory snowballs and collects like interest.

psychoanalysis breaks apart memory to find the missing mental component or malfunction buried underneath strata of memory and habit.  i think i journal for the same reason: i want to be able to pick apart of the calculus of experience, to understand subsets of memory, trajectories of effect.  that i should think of that man then when i love this man now and how then will i love another?  that china considered itself as center of the world, then a non-aligned, third world, and now again an economic superpower - how then will it be?

honestly, john may be right.  journaling may be just a compulsion.  it doesn't help me predict the future.  it is not a crystal ball.  it's not even an effective psychoanalytic tool considering i continue to fall into the same mental traps year after year.  i've been keeping a journal since the age of fifteen.  what would i do with all that time if i stopped now?

the middle kingdom and the three worlds

"third world" probably doesn't mean what you think it means.  the term originated during the cold war to refer to nations non-aligned with either the capitalist west (nato) or the communist bloc (the ussr.)  many of these third world countries had been former colonies, having found independence and needing to develop economically in the '60s and '70s.  hence popularly "third world" came to describe poor or developing nations.

the west did not consider china a third world country.  rule by the chinese communist party signified soviet alignment to the west.  mao zedong had a different idea: he wanted to lead china was a non-aligned power between the u.s. and the u.s.s.r., despite his communist ideology, calling this his "three worlds theory."

i don't really remember the collapse of the u.s.s.r. - it didn't hold much significance for me at six.  neither did china form an axis of evil with the soviet giant.  i missed the hysterics of reagan.  young children in nineties must have dreamed of china as an alien place of red palaces and toy factories.  we saw the "made in china" sticker everywhere.

china came of age economically at the same time my generation did.  it now has the second largest economic in the world.  furthermore, in the new york times yesterday, an article reviewed the rising military might of china in the pacific, narrowing the capabilities between the u.s. and china.  obama and the joint chiefs of staff have in response this year declared a shift to greater attention militarily to the pacific, particularly as traditional american allies such as japan, south korea, and india continue to find themselves locked in disputes with china over territory.

this military focus only inflames china.  as henry kissinger points out in his book "on china," the middle kingdom has historically considered itself the center of the world, insisting upon tribute from bordering kingdoms, but the ancient imperial mandarins of china dealt with their neighbors diplomatically.  contemporarily china may seem aggressive, but in a constantly changing southeast asia populated by many different peoples and cultures, china attempts to maintain internal stability and beneficial relations with its neighbors in the face of a growing american military presence in the area.

instead of providing constant worry to the chinese government, instead of viewing china in the united states (replacing the u.s.s.r. as the second world,) the u.s. government needs to start supporting chinese diplomacy.  overt u.s. support could temper china's aggressive stance and put china in a place to effectively stabilize the region, including aiding democracy and normalcy in north korea and myanmar.  china needs to become a regional leader and an international leader and can only do so with the support of the united states.

we need to erase the distinction between a capitalist first world and a communist second and acknowledge that whether as a developing nation or non-aligned, china is not a third world country.