"The world may be known without leaving the house."
- Lao-Tzu. The Way of Life, 47.
Ten months since my latest post. My readers, if any, poor creatures, will do well to subscribe to RSS feed! I shall not endeavour to fill the lacunae. It would justify ‘a bore of bloggers’ as a collective noun entry into the OED. No, this post will be dedicated to decontextualisation (I beg your pardon?). This post will be entirely devoted to the competition, also cradle snatcher par excellence, Facebook, affectionately shortened to FB by its cognoscenti. If it weren’t for FB’s crucial lack of lengthy entry space, this blog would not even have been posted. Ah, but it will be shared on the wall!
If blogs are the solipsist’s variant of a particular form of exhibitionism (one’s own mind is all that exists – the external world and other minds cannot be known), Facebook is its social counterpart. If blogs compare to the internal world armchair by the fireplace with the solitary single malt, FB is the densely crowded counter at the pub, with both feet firmly planted in the external world and highly frequented by other minds. A lot of pint trafficking takes place there.
I am a convert. A recent one. Like with all converts, conviction and enthusiasm is ardent. Writers, and those who might wish they were or aspire to be one, those with a big ego and a compelling need to share their world with an audience, will instinctively see the multifarious benefits this adorable medium offers. For one, it is an interactive exercise in discipline, the haiku of the modern communication channels. I am aware that Twitter would rank shortest and thereby fit the description better. Twitter though is above my station. It requires such discipline to be condensed and brief that it cannot possibly satiate my greed. An art too far still.
FB lately is the place to be. If the avant-garde turns to it, you know you have to join in. It has become the virtual place m’as-tu vu, as one says in my country of Knokke, the fashionable sea resort. Strolling down the boulevard watching people and the wide horizon however cannot compare to the vistas FB yields on its walls.
FB is a strange creature. It offers windows on the world. The world of one’s friends, of the friends of one’s friends, of the friends of the friends of one’s friends, the groups they adhere to, the web pages they favour, their quirks, likes, dislikes. A world which, like the universe, is ever expanding. The Six Degrees of Separation theory states that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. I would argue that the reverse also goes. Everybody is six clicks removed from a totally unknown, foreign life, a hic sunt leones that one can only marvel at and that makes one feel like a Livingstone having accidentally stumbled upon the source of the Nile. FB appeals to an innate shameless voyeurism, publicly condoned at that. It appeals to an innate shameless exhibitionism too. The perfect medium for the social herd animal that man is and the recluse alike. One can open one’s window as much or as little as one wants. One can close it off and watch the outside world unseen.
FB offers the scopic pleasure that is the prerogative of the inmates of an Ottoman harem empowered to look outside. Window shutters, placed at one’s own will in the security settings, protect from the scrutiny of unwanted gazes like Moushrabiya panels. Like in the strictest Islamic tradition these screens are placed on the windows so that one may look outside at the walls and profiles without being seen and observe what your friends and their friends have been at. One catches a glance of the outside world from behind the wooden grating, much like the prospective Muslim bride might use the reinforced window to scout out a handsome husband, as Jean DelPlato writes in ‘Multiple wives, multiples pleasures: representing the harem, 1800-1875’. Moushrabiya panels are made of turned wooden knobs glued or nailed in a pattern into a frame. They keep the interior cool. The carved star or octagonal openings and repeating patterns transform light into ornament, gently filtering natural light into the room. (source: Alexandra Bonfanta Warren, Moroccan style, Chapter II – Inner Paradises).
It makes FB a seductive blend of simplicity and elegant profusion.
As Lady Mary Montagu wrote in one of her Turkish Embassy letters, to the Abbé Conti, Pera, Constantinople, 19 May 1718: “The walls are in the nature of lattices and on the outside of them vines and woodbines planted that form a sort of green tapestry and give an agreeable obscurity to these delightful chambers. I should go and let you into some of the other apartments, all worthy your curiosity, but ‘tis yet harder to describe a Turkish palace than any other, being built entirely irregular. There is nothing can be properly called front or wings, although such a confusion is, I think, pleasing to the sight, yet it would be very unintelligible in a letter”.
Naturally, there is much scope for mightily perpetuating the Orientalist stereotype here and I shall with delight play further on harem iconography.
So let’s turn the gaze to FB’s exhibitionism and open the window. The open window suggests pride in ownership by revealing both interior and exterior commodities, Del Plato writes.
The visitor of the harem was offered a water-pipe and coffee, which function as signs of membership. The pipe, in good orientalist tradition, promises lower inhibitions and ‘unbridled release’, observes Harriet Martineau. What you see is what you get: displays of nudity, heightened emotion, exaggeration and imagination.
The Chambers Edinburgh Journal 1878 acknowledges that the window covers reputation and implies that suspicious activities are taking place behind these grated windows.
One can indeed seek out the private company of a friend, indulge in bilateral chats and retire to a private chamber that can be closed off hermetically. The shuttered window becomes fetishized (the years of enacting fantasies has finally corrupted my dreams, so that even in my heart of hearts I turn FB into the oldest male fantasy of all).
Lady Mary Montagu remarks in her letter to the Countess of -------, May 1718: “I am more inclined, out of a true female spirit of contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors, for example, the admirable Mr Hill. […] ‘Tis also very pleasant to observe how he and his brethren voyage-writers lament on the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies, who are, perhaps, freer than any ladies in the universe, and are the only women in the world that lead a life of uninterrupted pleasure, exempt from cares, their whole time being spent in visiting, bathing or the agreeable amusement of spending money and inventing new fashions”.
Here enters the notion of status. The harem confinement coincides with the mid 19th century privilege for the Victorian housewife to stay at home and avoid outside paid labour. Much like the harem, FB also is about status. One even has a status on FB, which one can update continuously and interactively react to. It is here, in these public four-walled courts, that squash doubles find a new definition and are played to perfection by some before a cheering or booing audience that is watching closely.
Reina Lewis states in ‘Gendering Orientalism: race, femininity and representation’ that the harem, as depicted by Henriette Browne, was “a social place, a social realm, its walls regularly penetrated by visitors, friends and musicians – power, kinship and society. No-one entered the haremlik without permission. The harem is depicted in terms of an active and recognized part in political life, and rather than secluding women from the outside world, actively creates a central role for them in the dissemination of information.”
That is, disregarding gender, exactly what I think Facebook is.
How many friends can you handle? "People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle." Paul Auster. From the film Smoke, spoken by Harvey Keitel as Auggie Wren.
Sources:
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Turkish Embassy Letters
Jean DelPlato, Multiple wives, multiples pleasures: representing the harem, 1800-1875
Alexandra Bonfante-Warren, Morrocan style
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: race, femininity and representation
Should we do away with the Islay single malt ruggedly man, the leather buttons, the lairds, the rubber boots? No, we should not. Neither with the lovely handcraft of the islanders on Harris, Lewis, Uist and Barra. Think of the sheep on those Outer Hebrides, the salty Atlantic tang in their pelt, the virgin wool spun by the ravishing miller’s daughter in her cottage who can keep Rumpelstiltskin reform managers at bay. Delight your senses. Think of these fingers that have woven your jacket. 
