the oasis

Lawyers are a strange breed. But then again, so are academics. In fact, everyone not like you is simply weird or messed up in the head.

One step forward, a thousand steps back; read one article or book and realize you have so many more to read (you blame the kuffar technology for this). Of course, it's all a strategy to avoid reality or doing any real work (like collecting one's thoughts and actually putting them down into a coherent form instead of this spluttering nonsense).

So, busy yourself in a bit of gossip: a faculty member was off campus and contacted (via one of his student spies on campus). He was told that two students were at it in the bushes. So, Saturday night, he drives for one hour back to campus, because he feels he has to uphold the "core values" of the university. He searches for them with a torch and stops a couple that just happened to be walking hand in hand around that area. As it turns out, they were the wrong couple. As usual, this descends into an 'us and them' type of shoddy discussion: the self-styled religious vs the self-styled liberals.  And you thought university would be a refuge from the crazies!

~~~

A few lines from 'The Poverty of Clio':

'Changes in the form of religion take place as rational decisions determined by comparisons of benefits and costs...In societies that allow plural religions to compete with each other, religious entrepreneurs adjust product characteristics to match different sets of demands and, in the process, sometimes create alternative forms of religion.'

You have to wonder at the sheer stupidity of some academics (one hesitates to use the word 'intellectuals' in the same sentence).

You send the book to your colleagues. Of course, it's naive of you to expect it to generate any discussion. A book?! What's that, for Christ's sake! 

~~~

The lawyer. Far too jovial for my liking. A plush velvet lampshade, tilted at an angle; the door constructed at an angle so he could see people outside his office. "This is a very weak case". Our hearts soar. "It won't be solved even in fifty years." All round general relief. Then he adds: "InshAllah". Hmm. It's a strange fact, but in the land of the pure when someone utters those words you automatically suspect something isn't quite right.

~~~

Anyway, must somehow find an oasis in this desert. Books are not the thing, or only a temporary ladder of escape at best. Perhaps a picture, an image, to distract one. A quick fix, a 'high' to blot it all out. The sudden demise of the black sun, totally unscripted...  
 

  

black sun

But how did it begin?

With fragments of sentences, books half read, people half imagined, which is to say: with reflections and traces, and memories and a chaste heart. To travel, and leave everything behind, to grow in lightness (Calvino), only to realize that you haven't moved an inch, as in all the best traveling. 

At Penarth pier, as a young boy, you look down through the planks to the sea; the movement of the world, the slow rocking against the fragile creation of human hands. Old people shuffle past you, from another world, death on their purple lips. It seems like this moment is forever: memory is the stillness of the soul in the world. Snow clears, the frost bites back from the windowpanes, seasons turn and wisdom escapes you. This series of attachments hidden, like an underground stream, the fabric of our lives woven from far too many various threads to have any coherence.

'In the evenings especially, when the candles have been lit, a hypochondriac sadness, without object, like a blood-red tone over everything.'

"Have you had your mid-life crisis yet," a friend asked.

No, not yet. Why, what does it look like, and what colour is it? 

A crisis requires too much energy, but if it comes then it will come. May the Lord give us strength [he says, quickly looking for his religious hat]. 

Yesterday at __'s birthday party. A room of poets and writers and artists. Suicide contemplated to end the boredom. Except quiche and cinnamon rolls served by old Emmanuel kept these thoughts at bay. Even little r was quiet, saw through the fakery, and busied herself by stuffing her mouth with potato chips with great sense of purpose, a renewed sense of life's charms.    

so to speak

 'The result of my life was, so to speak, nothing.'

The storm in your eyes, the white lightning behind them that flashes out, burning, reducing all to red; the heart that is opened, brought to speak of/on its own; the recollection of bright days as the rain falls obliquely on cold windowpanes. Memories held closely to oneself, the fist clenched. The rain falling, the loosening of your hair, the glare of lights in the darkening, the rain, full of longing, dissolving what was left of you. 

Typhoon. Such a strange history. A word well-traveled. Mixed ancestry. How nature loves to cross boundaries whilst humans erect barriers, create distinctions. The great clearing, the open ground, breaking newly, your brow fresh, radiant; the miscellaneous bastardization of our lives, the mingling of thoughts and blood, when the time is right, when time, finding itself, slots into place, and the rain falls darkly no more. Then, with flowers on your lips and winter in your heart we will, so to speak, kiss.

why are some countries poor and others rich?

An interesting review/summary of the new book by

Acemoglu

Meanwhile, for my money, probably the best journalist writing today:

"Just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence."
---Zoe Williams.

Two questions: what is the appropriate distributive principle (priority to the least well-off, Utilitarianism, etc., etc) and what is the relevant 'evaluative space' (what, exactly, is meant by 'well-off' and how does this relate to other things we value, such a freedom, efficiency, fairness...)?

Acemoglu et al produce some interesting work but ultimately you have to ask yourself if there isn't something odd about explaining history through "origins" (or initial conditions: path dependence). Furthermore, one has to wonder if a great distortion to our understanding doesn't follow from the manner in which economists both try to fit historical events into their framework of rational choice theory and from their desire to reduce the set of human motivations down to the bare minimum, as if to say: the springs of action can be narrowed down to one fundamental, tightly wound coil. 
 

the devil was in the details

the changing year, the animal longing still on us; 

the changing year, and the animal longing.

This day, of all days, makes you hark for the Bright Feast; as the years collect the moments of our lost lives, the desert of the heart in a pagan year remains unbroken. 

The grain of wood in the woods is unknown; so, too, your heart. This strangeness, deeply familiar. The accumulation of details, of intuitions and imaginings, even as understanding escapes you, lacks Form. the world, the bright face, the resplendent image, the idols of your heart, brought to the surface, only to die. Lord, what is this longing but a type of blindness?

God knows, it's just the devil...

'It was the time of summer when wounds heal slowly,

Beautiful the world, and beautiful my desires.'

Summer, Spring, Autumn,

the times of our lives, full, and full of longing.

Summer, Spring and Autumn, the seasons of hell.

Winter, when time stood still for us. & north was a star high above the world, the high desire, the darkness of the soul gathering the moments of love that were apportioned to it. and in the night, these words were true. Second-order desires are not a forgetting, but a deepening.Our circles, broken by the hand of fate. hold on, b fades, soars...  

21st.

'Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.'
---G. Monbiot.

The disturbing thing is just how many people sincerely want to believe there's depravity, moral decadence, a falling away from some prime, pristine point in time; the origins, free from the plurality and complexity of the world, a time when everything was in it's place, neatly ordered, recognized. Maybe it's deep rooted, that kind of nostalgia? But you can't help wondering if it finds more fertile ground at particular junctures in history, or-at the personal level-when one is of a certain age? If there's one thing worse than an old fogey it's a young fogey! 

Atomisation, angst, anxiety, and alienation. You don't really buy any of that (except in small doses) and those who pedal it, shovel it out to the students, are an odd breed indeed. Over here it's very much: Tradition, the 'golden age of Islam',our culture of honour and respect (for women, the environment, elders etc., etc) Except, of course, no-one's ever actually, you know, seen it.

So, today, the unfashionable thought that, you know what, things are actually a lot better than they've been; the untimely thought that the Enlightenment (without the fanaticism bit) is actually not half bad (Calvino's baron). The shocking news that market societies have their virtues (and not just their vices). When all is said and done, who would like to go back (assuming such a thing were possible)? Minorities, women, gays and lesbians, peasants? I somehow doubt it. The old (Republican) virtues, the old religious moralities were, it seems to me, reserved for the few-and sod the rest!

21 st century enlightenment:

...  

How red left me speechless

There was this line from Miro...

There was this line from Miro, that went something like...I choose a direction, and when I'm done with it, I go in a completely different direction. I love that.

A particularly acute reader pointed out, with regard to my last rambling post, that it was quite ironic for me, of all people, to be writing about pluralism when I am, in reality, actually unaccepting of differences.

You wonder about this blog and your writing here over the years. Your varied musical tastes (from post-punk to Jordi Savall), the change in your reading habits towards more poetry and fiction, the move to ethics & economics, your fascination with crows, the 'Red Man', the sublime art you've got to see over the years and commented upon, your mistrust of, and indifference to, politics as well as your hatred for fundamentalism...all that, despite the odd rant here and there, and...

Well, of course it could be that all those things are only in one's mind and what really counts is how you live, how you interact with other people: experience is not a set of fleeting impressions or a few stray words; isn't there a fundamental narrowness here? Here, I think the reader is on safer ground. But even then, is that really true?

... 

second thoughts, 'second spaces': 

But what is so surprising? After all, some of the most brutal men to have ever lived on this planet undoubtedly had "fine feelings" when it came to art, music, etc. (i.e the Nazis); and haven't there been poets, writers, and artists who have espoused anti-semitic or racist or fascist views (Ezra Pound)? Closer to home, you see academics who are, supposedly, fantastically well-read and yet, at the end of the day, they're still major league assholes; and what of the self-styled 'religious' who have often, far too often, promoted or supported bigotry, hatred, repression and violence? 

What (or who), then, is a liberal? Perhaps we should put our deep passions to one side after all. The disturbing possibility that poetry or philosophy may not, in the final analysis, be intimately related to goodness. Are there particular features or characteristics of a person, then? If pushed, I'd be inclined to think: maybe. Maybe the ability to find second spaces, to give others (and yourself) second chances, cut them some slack (everyone's got some crookedness somewhere); one should not think everyone else is illiberal. 

One of the great things about this place-despite, or maybe because of, its barbarity-is the desire to get on, to forget. In may ways, at the day-to-day level, there's a certain ease about 'the east', a reluctance to be too confrontational or antagonistic (is this related to a lack of individualism?) For all my love of West, North, there's still something to be said for East; the South, however, continues to piss me off!