Happy Darwin Day

It is probably a mild hyperbole saying that almost any of the several pieces of Darwin’s writings that I came across were radiating with an overwhelming intellectual presence, of the kind that intrudes into the deepest and most private corners of your mind without permission, imposing awe and eliciting recognition of his far-reaching genius, in the highest sense of both words.

This impression stays at first inexplicable. But in taking few steps back from any of these texts, considering it in a wider context, reengaging it and disengaging again, then repeating as needed, the conundrum suddenly gives way. The answer put simply, but aptly conveying the most sobering of its implications, is that a distinguished flair for writing is only second nature to profound thinkers. In a letter to his father, Darwin seems to have been well aware of this talent when he wrote "Whenever I enjoy anything, I always either look forward to writing it down, either in my log-book, or in a letter". Yet he also showed diffidence and harshly practiced self criticism when in his correspondence with others he would occasional write things like "I find it unutterably difficult to write clearly", "I am disgusted with my bad writing", or "How I could have written so badly is quite inconceivable".

Darwin's opinion notwithstanding, two of his books, in particular, stand out together as a most vivid and exhilarating incarnation of the whole spectrum of the higher order mental processes; namely, The Voyage of the Beagle, and his magnus opus, On the Origins of Species.

The Voyage of the Beagle can be thought of as a stereoscopic visualization of Charles’ trenchant faculty for perception. This can be realized by superposing a context in which the book is a travels-journal only and another where it is viewed as a herald of the theory of natural selection. In the former, this faculty expresses itself in a unique ability to efficiently winnow down a drowning range of details that could have certainly stupefied the senses of any other naturalist. But with the eventual emergence of natural selection added to the backdrop, the token of a frightening capacity to intuit becomes the salient feature of this work.

In producing The Origins, Darwin established himself as one of the finest virtuosi of the thought process to have ever existed. Throughout the text you would find him busy not only weaving line after another of cogent arguments, preempting much of the debate spurred by its publication, but you would also find him confidently pointing out where his reasoning might go awry, acknowledging his own wants of knowledge, or describing what might constitute a destructive counter-observation to his theory.

The most telling feature of this book though is its striking consistency. This might sound odd, since a consistent structure is a strict prerequisite that any explanatory effort should satisfy before it can be taken seriously. But it is that the coherence in Darwin’s arguments can’t be a mere happenstance, only the product of a mental construct of the original phenomenon that undergirded his thinking in its regards. And since the conceptual scaffold for Darwin’s original formulation of the theory had passed largely unscathed into the modern evolutionary synthesis, we can easily infer the veracity of this mental model. Therefore, given the crippling lack of knowledge about heredity’s real substance and mechanisms that was characteristic of his time, one is bound to be overwhelmed while she is reading the book!

Put in another way, The Origins, just like its predecessor, can’t be fully appreciated without the advantage of hindsight. Darwin might have known close to nothing about the DNA, but with an unusually keen mind, he captured many of its features, even if in crude terms, and embedded them into the core of his theory. This is clearly the reason why out of all the different accounts of natural selection that were advanced by others in its wake, Darwinism was the only one conducive to the modern synthesis; with the rediscovery of Mendel’s genetic laws, and the successive conciliatory efforts of several bright minds, most notably those of Fisher's, the birth of neo-Darwinism was only a matter of course.

Since this is in a sense a celebration of a person, an extraordinary person, perhaps something about his idiosyncrasies is due. A strong affinity with science and nature ran like a dominating gene in Darwin's family, which spawned 10 fellows of the Royal Society, him included, and beginning with his parental grandfather, Erasmus, who himself was a theorist of evolution. The first expressions of this gene in Charles took the form of reveling in beetles collecting, and a more extreme one of his founding a club at Cambridge University with the sole purpose of consuming birds and animals "unknown to human palate" before. According to Darwin’s autobiography, this was the reason behind his father's utterly failed prediction when he once reproached him saying: "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family".

But judging by this sample of his early life, it might be justifiable to claim that if it was not for the Beagle, this day would have passed unobserved. However, this celebrated expedition was not all bless on Charles. Little after its return to England, he started suffering from a mysterious debilitating illness that haunted him, albeit with frequent respites, until his death. The nature of this affliction was never diagnosed during his life, a thing that gave rise to much speculation about its origin.

To make things more complicated, there is enough evidence in literature to substantiate many different explanations for this illness. For instance, the proponents of a physical cause like to cite Darwin's descriptions of his potentially morbid encounters with disease vectors, such as the "Benchuca", or his granddaughter's memoir, Gwen Raverat, in which she notes that "it was a distinction and a mournful pleasure to be ill [in Charles' home]", possibly indicating an underling genetic disorder. On the other side, advocates of a psychological root have at their disposal an adequate repertoire of accounts on Darwin's antisocial and phobic behavior to draw on. But since this is not a crucial point anymore, there seems to be an emerging general consensus converging on a multifactorial origin of the ailment, a blend of physical and psychiatric etiologies.

I will end this on a somewhat different but related note. Natural selection has become hopelessly embroiled in the polemics of religion and science from its very first days, with the undesired corollary of a negative bias in its priorities as a part of a more general endeavor for progress in thought. This had unfortunately eclipsed much of its unmatched versatility, and sometimes even turned it into a tool for hectoring and suppressing any deviant thoughts or perspectives at either end of the debate. And while I find this to be quite typical of faith oriented establishments, I am surprised by the ubiquity of such practices in renowned intellectual circles.

On the bright side, we are lucky enough that some contemporary great thinkers did not let themselves be trammeled by this less important of a debate, and as an expected consequence, significantly furthered our understanding of how nature might be operating, Noam Chomsky and his contributions to language acquisition by children being the best example in this regard, insofar as I know.

The kernel is that a more appropriate celebration of Darwin would be to carry on with his unique philosophy of inquiry and science, rather than obsessing with how pseudoscientists might interpret, or use to the advantage of their cause, a scientific critique of his theory.

Source: www.darwinday.org (image adapted)

Amman the Morbid City

There is no denying that all modern cities are morbid to one degree or another, but morbidity is of a particularly “fine” and ancient pedigree in the case of Amman.

I had previously came across few non-academic historians who puzzled over the brisk cycle of civilization rise and fall, common to all the communities that once populated this city. Several of them propounded seismic activities as the answer to this question. But in thinking that other enduring cities (Damascus, Beirut or Jericho for instance) were subject to those same disruptive forces, this proposition is weakened if not ruled out.

A more convincing hypothesis alternatively points the finger at the bodies of water that once covered Amman's surfaces. Allured by a varied profile of water sources, from eddying rivulets to crystal clear ponds, many unsuspecting settlers met dreadful ends at contracting lethal waterborne pathogens that those waters were teeming with. This might come as a surprise to most of Amman’s contemporary denizens, but what can be even more surprising is that she was dubbed “The City of Waters” during past epochs. Such a name was equally valid during the early stages of the current cycle, i.e. 40s and 50s of the 20^th Century, echoes of which still reverberate in the modern Ammani vernacular, attesting to this fact.

In current times, despite being a parched stretch of land, Amman still wields the weapon of water against her inhabitants as skilfully as she always did, albeit in different ways. Few days ago I was wandering outside my home when I noticed that the pain I had in my limbs due to a blowing cold wind was not the usual pins and needles type, but had a rather smouldering quality to it. Suspecting this was due to low relative humidity, I checked a weather forecast application expecting a reading of about 20%. But I was taken aback on learning it was a nadir of 12%. It is not the type of pain that bothers me, nor the fact that the skin around my left hand knuckles is more shrivelled than my mother’s octogenarian aunt’s, not that much. It is only the cracked bleeding skin I get if I fail to apply a moisturizing lotion the night before; a problem that I know for sure plagues many other fellow Ammanis.

The city gets even more creative with that favourite weapon of her. She also capitalizes on the fact that no water means no or very little greenery. According to evolutionary psychology, in assessing the hostility or hospitality of a certain environment, humans are most sensitive to its state of vegetation. If that was scant, some mechanism, so to speak, ensues, which in turn induces the secretion of stress hormones in the perceivers. This produces a feeling of angst that serves the purpose of urging them to move away in a bid for survival. However, since the business of survival in the Amman of our times is not related to its colors anymore, this mechanism joins the long list of misplaced, backfiring evolutionary endowments. I think this partly explains the stressful modes of interaction dominating in this city. But there is more to that than having to deal with pissed off people all day, and night, long. Prolonged stress also deprives our bodily repair mechanisms and immunity system of energy essential for their proper functioning, leaving our bodies debilitated and exposed before all kinds of sickening things, animate and inanimate.

Still, no matter how ruthless the rendition has been so far, outdoor Amman is a merciful mother when compared to its indoor manifestation. This conviction I formed during a couple of courses I took on the subject of built environment, and a subsequent short lived career in the same field. Under the rubric “Sick Building Syndrome” among some others, I learned about the havoc an ill-designed enclosed space can inflict on the well being of those who occupy it over lengthy periods. And through practicing I was introduced to the “standards” of Jordan’s construction contractors and designers.

I remember the troubles I used to get into for pointing out the necessity of sticking to the ASHRAE standards in designing indoor environments. Almost all of the seniors scoffed at the idea, and the few who did not take it as an insult to their “long careers that began before I was even born”, bantered that those standards were only for “the pansy people of the first world”, which I think was their rather churlish way of referring to the relatively pristine health states that citizens of the developed countries usually enjoy. Ironically enough though, if the ASHRAE standards were to be modified accordingly, then they should be made tighter and stricter for people living in developing countries, since they are more prone to illness and are of less robust constitutions, as research on socioeconomic pressures is already showing.

I also remember laying my hands on the HVAC schematics – pronounced “h vak” and is shorthand for heating ventilation and air conditioning – of a major mall in Amman. What I saw was so horrible that I immediately took a decision to never go there again. Since I can’t name it, due to some ethical obligations, I will only hint that it is probably the largest one in Amman, and few minutes into entering it you are likely to feel giddy and start yawning, both because of hypoxia. A caveat is due here. The presence or absences of these signs alone is not adequate to judge if the place was ill or well designed. If air filters were not replaced per the right recommendations, for an example, they become a major source of contamination, and the first sign will most likely be a sore throat the day following exposure.

To be fair though, malls are not to be worried about as much as homes, since it seems to me that the concept of a comfortable house environment in Jordan never evolved from a rudimentary one of warm during winters, and cool in summers. There is no reckoning of humidity regulation and ventilation, despite the fact that a built space without proper air renewal and circulation can be 1000 times more polluted than the outdoors. Almost everything inside a typical compartment, including walls, generates unwholesome volatile grains that are likely to precipitate in your lungs for good, and this is probably responsible for the varied assortment of pulmonary disorders rife in Jordan.

It would be interesting to calculate the economic burden of Amman’s inappropriately designed spaces. Naturally this should include both the energy and health bills. But since this post is about morbidity, I find it more appropriate to focus on the later. However the dearth of data on the subject makes it impossible to even draw a sound conjecture, but by thinking in terms of a well defined phenomenon, such as seasonal allergies, we might come close to appreciating the fiscal strains that Jordan faces as a consequence.

From personal experience I know that a reasonable treatment for pollen allergy costs around 35 JOD per person (actually a bottle of efficient nasal spray costs around 48 JOD). Assuming 3% of the total population is afflicted with this ailment and seeks treatment, the annual cost stands at 6.3 million JOD. This type of allergy probably comprises no more than a fraction of the total aggregate of diseases, respiratory and others, caused by contaminated air. But it at least helps us imagine the total taxation on Jordan’s GDP due to our local engineers unprofessionalism.

For all of what preceded, I sometimes think that since Beirut is a variant of Aphrodite's & Adonis' daughter's name, Amman should have been the name of Eris' and Apollo's daughter, never born since they never copulated in the first place, and Amman never fall under a pure Greek hegemony for that matter. Still, I find this dark and malevolent image more appealing than that of a bride in a white wedding dress.

As We Wade Through a Morass of Modernity

As is his wont, a friend surprised me with a most mundane remark and not before long deduced from it an intuitive and practical generalization, which he put forward in a reasonably eloquent manner.

Some of his work colleagues, he recently discovered, read books! Ergo, he continued, each human being has limited mental resources that are either squandered on frivolous acts, such as gossiping and the likes, or harnessed effectively to climb the career ladder at rapid rates. Regardless of the narrow and compartmentalizing context in which he decided to express his generalization, which I still find to be interesting in its own right, it is hard to fully disagree.

But not a one to miss out on any chance to conduct an irony, life, as if sentient, led both of us later, through a chain of germane antecedents to contend over the value of a certain TED video. At one end, the talk was highly applauded, while on the other it was dismissed as a derivative oratory, based on unfounded claims and propped by weak arguments of the much more profound work of Jim Collins et al. When the latter position was adequately substantiated, my friend, trying to secure a draw, retorted that I still can't deny the educative value of TED Talks as a whole. To his dismay, I disagreed, but not in the categorical sense of the word.

TED’s philosophy of unfolding the principles underling a given technology in a simple and endearing way is entertaining at its climax, benign at worst. But substitute abstract ideas and success stories for technologies, and the platform starts pandering, more often than not, to the educative morality of oversimplification and entertaining. Alas, ubiquitous in our days, when it should be loathed for the mental obtuseness it encourages. - I find this moment most appropriate to point out that the matter at hand is much more deeper and trickery than it might have sounded this far, or at least this is how I feel. At any rate, I find it only behooving to approach the crux deviously, while keeping my fingers crossed that the path I chose will depict a sufficiently alarming portion of the real problem.

Historically, the notion of educating the masses can be traced back to the Enlightenment period, as intellectuals back then had unwavering faith in the emancipating capacities of logic and, by extension, thinking. But perhaps they simultaneously held that issuing from the arms of serfdom must be the concerned individual’s effort only. As such, access to all sorts of knowledge was made as easy as it could be, but it was regarded as solely the less privileged job to come to grips with tomes of inscrutable nature, on the premise that liberty is most appreciated when it is hard-earned. Alternatively, it could be that scholars of the time were still too overawed by their perceived sanctity of knowledge to have had "peddled it". Either way, the ideals were too quixotic to have yielded any fruits or any immediate general ones at least.

Humanity would have to wait until the first twenty years of the previous century had passed for the first successful movement of knowledge humanization to take place, starting in the Anglo-American world. – There might be similar successful movements anterior to this one, but the purpose here is not writing history proper, or drawing on its authority, rather the historical context is meant to serve the function of a scaffold to the argument. – Professors would finally deign, or knuckle under the economic pressures of the period, to write in intelligible manner. Yet the readers were still expected to exert some mental effort and meet the writer somewhere along the way, though it was the writer who covered the longest distance to this meeting point.

Thus a profusion of books that try to recapitulate vast branches of knowledge or systems of thought, poured (e.g. the now classic H. G. Wells' "The Outline of History"). Professors were only too aware of the inevitability of errors in any account written in a synoptic vein, which led many of them to criticize the project from early on. But some maintained the arguably tenable argument that dividends were being repaid in whetting the average intellect of the public and in nurturing their faculty for criticism and discerning, viz., far from reinforcing parochial penchants with scholasticism, the purpose of education is to liberate people from such tendencies; hence the term "Liberal Education".

However, this form began falling out of fashion toward the end of the thirties, which might be a corollary of its very success, for after all a secular project’s ultimate achievement is attained in rendering itself obsolete. The respective trends from this point onward are harder to demarcate with precision, for any number of reasons, but generally speaking, knowledge was no longer the rarefied domain of experts, in more than just one way.

One aspect of this was most clearly exemplified in the counterculture of the 60s and the subsequent cultural wars, which at the educational level yielded a long list of concessions from the side of universities, the most triumphal of which was introducing studies that had been scandalously suppressed until those times (studies of gender, equity, environment, cultures... et cetera). That makes this period's enduring contribution to humanity, aside from evincing what kind of effects a liberal education can have on the masses, a new realization of the term humanization of knowledge.

In juxtaposition with this cursory historical tour, our time seems to be extremely dichotomous. Radical scrutinized educative initiatives and open access high quality knowledge dissemination projects are proliferating ceaselessly (e.g. the OpenCourseWare concept, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cornell's CyberTower and if I am allowed to add something from outside the cyber realm, the extremely affordable Very Short Introduction series by Oxford, to name only a few), carrying through the trend of bridging the chasm between the academic and the public spheres. 

In parallel, education seems to be constantly degenerating in the minds of the public to nothing more than a set of trivially simplified formulas for success, which is reflected in how enamored they are becoming with quotes, and which is, the success that is, being narrowly associated with the amelioration of economic status. If we suppose that “something” used to prick the conscience of people from time to time in the past, prodding them to grab a worthy book and read it, halting the degeneration as result. Could it be that the contemporary unprecedented flow of information we are exposed to is masquerading as education, and in the process neutralizing this “something”?

If so, a litmus test might be needed then. Could this be that true education is never a thing done in passing, or as an activity of primary entertaining value, but is rather hard and time consuming, albeit rewarding and elating in the end? Fogyish, if you'd like, but definitely on the right track.

Relativity is Intact, Our Pride is in Jeopardy

Few Fridays ago, early in the morning, I received an SMS from my science apotheosizing dear friend, conveying news to the effect that the light speed barrier was shattered at the CERN. That was very interesting, but insufficient; was it, at a more precise level, the discovery of a superluminal particle, or accelerating a particle across the infamous "c" threshold? A little bit later I learned it was a possibility of the former and not the latter.

That does not defy Relativity. Yet most of the articles I read, written on popular news sites, in a most critical time to the understanding of the public, were claiming the nullifying of Einstein's theory in case the reported results were corroborated. So much for science journalism due diligence and responsibility.

The theory of Relativity does not strictly impose an upper speed limit on motion. It sets, however, a speed barrier that is not allowed to be crossed by particles with velocities on either of its sides. This means that a particle found to be always traveling at speeds higher than that of light is not, according to the theory, allowed to slow down to speeds lower than the speed of light, and vice versa.

Actually the tachyon was conceptually born as soon as Special Relativity's foundations were laid, as a theoretically predicted class of particles that might be found to exhibit superluminal velocities. But it was quickly and deliberately pushed under the table of scientific discourse because of the dilemma such particles pose for the very foundations of human consciousness, for they break away with causality. Such tenuous grounds for dismissal. But things, it seems, can get political even in physics.

To eschew the abstruse nature of proper technical language, and to express this in a more intelligible and exciting manner, superluminal particles open the possibility, at least in theory, for communications across time. An example that gets the point across effectively, even though it might not be fully sound in concept, would be downloading a file from the internet using faster than light signals. You hit "download" at this precise moment, and you got the file downloaded few hours ago. Reading this, any human being should hit a mental impasse.

What temporal standpoint should we adopt as our departure point in internalizing what happened? The second when we clicked on "download"? Or the past, when the file was already downloaded? Either way we will never comprehend such a reality. Why should I download a file when all out of a sudden I had it on my computer, brushing aside the concomitant astonishment? Yet according to the theory of concern here, you will do just that, like it or not, as under its laws the totality of reality is absolutely invariant, regardless of how you observe it. This gives you a hint about the basic motivation behind Physic's, may be partial, relinquishment of its child tachyon little after it was born.

Even though this denial of conclusions belies the spirit of discovery, that which fuels the endeavor of natural sciences, it is, by and large, expected. Modern science wise, we are only coming of age. Still dumbfounded by how it had radicalized our understanding of the universe in such a short period of time, and made too clumsy by our lack of wisdom and humility to handle with sufficient care the precarious hope it promises of furthering this comprehension. Fortunately though, the much older and wiser philosophy is there for our counsel and guidance.

A very satisfactory explanation of the aforementioned impasse was discussed some 250 years ago. A philosopher called Kant - personally, he is one intellectual I grit my teeth on the thought that I can't read any of his treatise in their original language of German - proposing to transcend the irreconcilability of two ajar schools of thought, stated reality as completely independent from the human consciousness. From that point, he proceeds to describe a set of what is known in philosophy's own parlance as a prior concepts of knowledge, which, according to Kant, are inescapably inherent in the structure of the human mind.

These a prior concepts are to our cerebration, more or less, what breathing is to our existence; both are subliminal, but essential to their relative processes. It is less than often that their existence crosses the threshold of our consciousness yet we can't conceive of a meaningful sentence that does not imply a sense of time and place, or the space and time a prior. Just as much, we can't construct even the most simple of construable statements without embedding into them some form of cause and effect, generally expressed through a subject and an object. This we call the causality a prior, and it is what pertains the most of these a prior concepts to the scope of this article.

Facing a reality where an effect precedes a cause, and Kant would nod on this, humans are somewhat like a cat in front of a highly sophisticated contraption. The cat gazes hard at the weird device trying to tease out a mate, a shelter, a predator, a prey, or a rolling ball of threads. Other higher aspects or functions of the mechanism are of no interest to the cat, simply because for it they don't exist.

But that is more indicative of the cat's inferiority than being a derogation to the splendors of reality, das ding an sich.

The Type of Honor Crimes That Goes Unreported

There is a subtler aspect of our Jordanian notion of honor, through which it proves yet another time how distorted it is, and through which also, and most importantly, it seems to be seeking an extension in its operating brief to include fraying the very fabric of the society itself beyond that which it is most notorious for; wrecking havoc on personal and familial spheres.

It seems that gender based susceptibility to "desecrating one's own family's honor" is not the only bias. Faith, apparently, is also a major deciding factor in how prone a person is to committing such "desecrating conducts" as well as being "insensitive to them". This aspect revealed itself clearly, and in its most abhorrent form, when I heard some saying things like "she is feigning chastity when she is a [Christian surname]? She is Christian!". In other cases I heard some recasting this, which seems to stand as an invariable fact in these ignorant heads, in the less pungent terms of personal liberty, terms, nevertheless, that are still to my knowledge suffused with negative connotations for the vast majority of Jordanians.

I perceive this to be an undercurrent flowing in the society, and not merely a few isolated cases. From hearing women correlating bare shoulders with an increased probability in the girl "flaunting" them being a Christine, to a school teacher whom I vividly recall describing the mixed sex Church organized Christian youth excursions as orgy parties, never mind the fact that he was lecturing a coed class, to some other related incidents the frequency of which precludes anomaly as an explanation, I think calling this an undercurrent is justified.

This does not imply an impending religious strife in Jordan, for none exists, or looms in the horizon for that matter, nor does it negate the state of our society as an epitome of coexistence. But this is to spotlight an unfavorable tendency that might amount from its current latent state to become a generator of some sort of unrest when social structures shift in favor of a malignant fissiparousness. There is much to learn from the contemporary history of Mount Lebanon in this regard.

Numerous sects and faiths had harmoniously abutted on the slopes of this mountain for many centuries, but all of this was set asunder overnight and a ferocious civil war ensued. A chance, it is likely, had presented itself for some pernicious undercurrents to surface and intensify, and history took a violent course, regardless of how peaceful it was hitherto. This is not limited to Lebanon. Such patterns can be discerned to varying degrees wherever you look at in history, with a rate of recurrence that tempts one to view peaceful periods as nothing more than times when conflicts are not feasible. But despite the stench of nihilism that this view reeks of, I believe it goads us to work as hard as we can on quenching such undercurrents and tendencies when we are allotted the time and chance to.

On another level I also reckon that the tendency to debase the different other, who shares the same space in a given context, using the most circulated social currency of value, this being honor in Jordan, is a universal phenomenon. It might be a consequence of a default reflection that we are born with as humans, acquiring its content as we grow, and it seems that our society constantly fails at educating or eliminating it. On a second thought, it is nurtured and heavily drawn upon in conceiving of other biases. In times of growing hostility against Iran in Jordan, for instance, you are likely to come across someone falsely, yet boldly claiming that for a Shi'ite it is of a great honor to give any of his female relatives as a concubine for a visiting Mullah.

There is also another rich and telling fold in all of this. In a conservative society where any form of sexual expression is heavily repressed, save for inadequate few, people will still find ways to go around such circumscriptions, and do so by means that are detrimental to the well being of the society. Contempt of the different becomes prurient, and the hatred and violence it begets will be all the more so, if allowed the needed space to grow. The aforementioned teacher description is obviously an interplay of hidden desires and a rooted false sense of the inferiority of a certain other. If not rooted, then at least it came in handy for a convoluted and mischievous expression or venting of fantasies. Ironically, this repression purports, brazenly, protecting us from the decadence it induces in the first place.

Personally, I think that any effective way to obviate the unfriendly consequences that this social phenomenon might surprise Jordan with in the future, should incorporate putting an end to many of the social sensibilities, which are besetting any action aiming at social change. Just like a field of mines, each waiting to be stepped on, no matter how lightly, to explode and cripple the efforts. In this particular case, this may translate to discussing such aspects of our society openly, and introducing courses and classes that provide a neutral point of view on the different cultural constituents of it, away from the ones threatening, with a god's raging fire, those who don't abide by their notions. This is directed to Jordanians from all stripes without discriminating.

On The Fringes of "Amman" (II)

Five days following that Fuheis-mania incident, I was spotted and subsequently accosted by two of my friends in Rabieh. At first, I expended no effort to hide my irritation by that, which I could tell made them feel kind of awkward, but I noticed soon that this was not so courteous of me, especially given the fact that I haven't seen one of them in ages, during which, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, I ignored many of her school-days-nostalgic and reunion-suggestive hints implied in brief sporadic periods of communication.

Trying to compensate for my early rude behavior I decided to drive each of them home after an indirect introduction to my newly found urban sanctuary, somewhere onlooking a beautiful part of Wadi Saqra street, where we chitchatted about our pasts and presents until the time for a drive to Al-Ashrafieh, where the girl lives, was due. I dusted off the mental map I have of east Amman's streets, a fairly functional one, but now that I haven't been there for many years, since the last of my relatives had "evacuated" that side of the city, it was segmented and less efficient, so I ended up taking a really long route through Jabal Al-Jofeh toward Abu Darwish mosque, or the checkerboard mosque as I call it.

That proved unpleasant at first, especially the narrow steep mountainous terrain I am not used to maneuvering on, but it was not until I came by a stunning nightly extensive panoramic view of Amman that I forgot all about that and caught myself in the process of envying the whole of Al-Ashrafieh dwellers for being able to behold such beauty every night. But what made it of extra charm to my eyes was that it shattered and supplanted another view which I had two years earlier on top of an elevated platform in Amman, which lurked in my mind undefined until it took the expressive form of "a sprawling graveyard" months later when I came across a description of Amman as a beautiful graveyard by Mahmoud Darwish.

Soon, my knowledge of the social subtleties of the area was reawakened from its dormant state, but added to it was the first time musing over the origins of the Armenian neighborhood, which as its name suggests, is the place where the majority of the Armenians in Amman came to settle in the past. But besides being fond of sewing, a thing you can easily infer from the numerous tailor shops paving the neighborhood's main street as you stroll it down, I never came to know a single thing about them. The mental stagnation induced by this humbling "confrontation" with one of the oldest neighborhoods in Amman and the fact that I knew very little about its origins was not comfortable, if not unsettling, but my namesake friend had already unwittingly paved a way out early on when he picked up and started going through an issue of Review:Amman I had.

The magazine is a nascent self proclaimed one stop point for all your needs to know about the past, present and future of Amman and its identity, a thing it has proved to be successful to some degree at thus far with its sundry articles, despite some jarring historical errors, but the catch is the narrow definition of a city identity that it embraces. Had it been a single mind effort, the narrowness would have been condonable, but, and if I am to relent from my position in this regard, in which I maintain the Sisyphean nature of such a task, for the sake of reaching some middle grounds here, then that there are eight contributors makes it culpable. It is indicative of either an editor in chief's micromanaging attitude, or the common grounds based on which the team was assembled, consciously or not.

A third and a more interesting scenario, in which R:A's conception of Amman's identity is but a byproduct, can be constructed around Municipality of Amman's attitude in the past few years. The squabble with Amman Facebook page owners about a year ago, taken at face value, might sound like a one over the proprietary rights to Amman's new logo. But below the surface lie the real intentions of the municipality to establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the city, and the only authority to pass judgments on what constitute its identity and what not. Instead of identities rooted in the natural historic, political, cultural and economic environment of Amman, the municipality is actively promoting and supporting any identity viewed within a synthetic context framed by lifeless architectural and urban studies terminologies, which, needless to say, are wholly inadequate and will eventually yield a gamut of inchoate identities.

I perceive this to be a late phase of the grander scheme that the state has been carrying out to cull intellect from the fabric of the Jordanian society since little after the time I was born, the very same scheme that among the most notable of its causalities lies ruined the edifice of intellect that the University of Jordan once was. The municipality, it is evident, has enabling resources, the equivalents of which are untapped by any other potential rivals, save for one which I will get to in a bit, and has succeeded thus far in providing the impetus and the catalyst to the crystallization and prevalence of an identity that satisfies the state's predefined terms.

However, there is a potentially strong and competing alternative identity looming amorphous and unnoticed in the subconsciousness of the erudite and well versed in modern Arabic literature, the Levantine branch in specific, which is full of fragments of all sorts that can be gleaned and assembled into a solid base for an identity that captures a more vivid and truer reality of Amman, a one which already promises us a chance to get over the inferiority complex we felt for so long as Ammanies toward Beirut, for it might be shown at the end that most of the great manuscripts published there during the past five or six decades had at some point during their production passed through Amman, at least once, before being published in Beirut.

The fact that the memoir of the most profound literary Arab figure during the past century, Abdulrahman Munif, is titled Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman (سيرة مدينة - عمّان في الأربعينات) stands as an initial revelation of an identity, the identifying of which might be the starting point for a new batch of great Jordanian literary authors.

On The Fringes of Amman (I)

Life is getting pretty much hectic and fun is becoming an elusive quarry. That would be a sufficient description of how I have been feeling lately. It is, almost, my first year working from 9 am to 5 pm, and the first without a lengthy reinvigorating university summer vacation.

With the monotony about to cross my tolerance threshold, and I almost exhausting all the recreational options offered by Amman that cater to my taste, I sat down with two of my friends in a car somewhere around the 8th circle. "What shall we do?", the most vexing of the questions seemed like the only thing they could utter that night, and, oddly enough, "Fuheis" was the only word echoing back an forth within the confines of my skull.

I frequent that town on regular basis to dine at a restaurant somewhere at the bottom of a hill on its outskirts, but I never thought about going there aimlessly, even though I walked through it once with the fast walking group last December. But that night "Fuheis" was, without prior notice, phenomenal in its persistence, yet meaningful. I swear that the word repeated 6 times meant "All the relaxation you need tonight", twice "screw Amman", and thrice "reclaim your sanity".

Trying to break what felt like an unholy spell, I turned to my friends as I was starting the engine and said "Fuheis, we are going to Fuheis". Silence fall all over the car until one of them sarcastically asked "do you know how to get there?" alluding to an almost disastrous venture into Na'ur the Friday before. This trip to Na'ur was, in retrospect, the first subtle manifestation of an urge that intensified in that mental "Fuheis" flurry. What kind of a maddening urge was that, I can't conclusively tell yet, but I can confidently link it to the uncomfortably parched Ammani nature which begets the stressful lack of greenery, besides the lack of widespread empty spaces.

Less than 15 minutes later, we were getting out of the car as I parked it at the central circle of Fuheis, though replacing "circle" with "eclipse" in the preceding statement would make for a more accurate description. There, the two main streets constituting the town meet. The city in any other day of mine, could have been an epitome of boredom, for it has nothing to offer other than restaurants and wine shops. Yet, in what seemed like an ordinary Fuheis weekend evening, a host of separate mundane backdrops to our aimless trip there fused into a mural, a benchmark, against which I found myself involuntarily comparing my life at Amman.

The cool breeze was reviving and freshening, a thing we are largely deprived of in Amman thanks to the wind shielding, air trapping, and heat storing concrete blocks that it is crammed with. The ladies walking around with bare shoulders and revealing clothes was a stunning view. Don't get me wrong, not the ladies themselves, but the fact that they were at ease and paying full attention to nothing other than their conversation while walking at a slow pace at the main and only, busy square in town is a clear sign that they are rarely stalked there. In contrast to Amman, where the widespread acts of stalking women with prying eyes and impudent tongues are being progressively joined by groping, the scene was understandably a soothing one.

Not only that, but every mediocre feature of that city that night from the kitsch public statues, to the moderately drunk market owners, who, as one of my friends puts it, on their priority list socializing with customers is anterior to doing business, to the semi-blinding darkness that besets it in almost every direction, infiltrated by few rays of light coming from Salt to the west, and disturbed by the glare to the south, emanating from somewhere in Amman, every trivial feature of that town that night had the ballast of an identity element.

But that was only part of the story of my recent dalliance with Amman...