Geneve

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places

Geneva is an amlgam of the worst features of the old world along with those of the new; crass american commercialism and german insularity.

-----Ali Q

Why are they so unsure of themselves?

---Hagira

There is something pensive, melancholy, almost self-obsessed in their downcast eyes. Everywhere we go we are greeted with the formulaic and wooden "bonjour" but there is never eye contact, never an openness to the other. The nervous sideways glances, the erratic, furtive gestures suggest a form of neurosis; it is as if their bodies have become dissociated from their minds. There is something terrible and strange about the soul of the land-locked Central Europeans. They look out at the world, if at all, with Durer's eyes. Only the sea and a sense of humour has saved their cousins, the English, from such a claustrophobic inwardness. Beneath that placid temperament, the seemingly unruffled exterior, it is easy to imagine the repression of instincts, the fastidious observance of routine, the meticulous attention to detail and exactness (watchmakers), a fanatical, theocratic zeal for order and regimentation, the compelling need to take account of all the intricacies of a life (banking, accounting).

Those implacable faces-thick set, heavy-boned, the square jaws: Polish peasants with fur coats. The city seemed to be petrified into a rigid mould of 80's style and fashion. In every person there co-exists plural selves but here the disjunction between them seemed more acute. Mostly, only one possibility emerges to the fore as personality comes to be clearly delineated against the other, shadowy phantom existence. These other selves, exiles, discarded ancestral forms, are like so many broken lines that never form a pattern. But in this case, the radical alter ego has not been canceled out and lives just under the surface, always likely to re-emerge under certain strains and pressures.

There are 'communities of will' and 'communities of obedience' but in those who are of mixed descent, in whose essential nature is a compond of miscellaneous elements, both temperaments survive as they compete with one another.

The great paradox: the more an individual is uprooted, the more he escapes from 'natural' constraints, the more he craves order, repetition, rituals and the more he becomes entwined in the manacles of his own mind and its products. He veers from one extreme to the other: authority and anarchy, restraint and freedom; Luther, like the German soul, wants to escape legalistic Judaism, 'laws', rules and return to psalmic Judaism...to hear the truth, not see it, to be lost in the One but at the same time be superman. A double life, the tension between being and nothingness. This will culminate in the erasing of the very presence of the people who have made the greatest moves to the truth.

Even the prostitutes look sad here

Never before have I seen such dullness in so many faces; is it from boredom or opulence or something else? The faces of the poor are always expressive, always etched with a story but here my first impressions were of so much hidden suffering, of quiet desperation (Thoreau). The Scream. The woman strains to talk to us, but then realises that she has been too open, too casual and so abruptly brings her sentences to a close. Everywhere is the same: grey upon grey, endless and relentless buildings devoid of any charm or human warmth, of any scale of the human. Bleak beyond belief. The Lebanese immigrants, ghostly and forlorn, shuffle through the city with hunched shoulders, as if marked by the sign of servitude and dejection. They glide by, dreaming of warmer climes.

The divide in Europe is only too evident-the rich, expansive, rounded, unselfconscious, sun-lit Mediterranean world for whom beauty is truth and, on the other hand, the northern spirit whose God is bare, imageless, whose life is always derived from the elemental: tree-spirits, the sea, the bracing wind, the wilderness, the lone voice. The gothic cathedral recreates the forest (Spengler); her music is either profoundly elegaic or a pure, soaring expression of the will-revolutionary, demonic, earth-shattering..a flight of fancy into the realms of imagination perhaps, but always a music that expresses the will, not the intellect.

How to live? What would a city built on the principles of Calvin look like? Geneve, five hundred years of rigorous introspection, of tranquility and peace, a veil of snow and silence, of discipline and sobriety. The birth of psychological man. At Lake Geneve: Rousseau: I feel , therefore I am (not, I think...). The sparse, stark interior of the cathedrals-nothing must be allowed to grow here, no image can be the focus of devotion, around which a whole world might congeal. The cathedral as a cave, a refuge for hollow men in a late civilisation; the exterior world is cut off by these modern-day Manichaeans, life is held in abeyance. One must focus on the one thing needful: to deepen the spiritual life one must narrow it.

Geneve, a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police...excommunicating drunkards, dancers [the list goes on]. The first attempt at establishing the Panopticon; Genve, an experiment to convert the secular world to one cell-like monastery. But only a theocratic state can make any inroads. By a strange transmutation, the attempt is taken up by the state, by political forces. If the church cannot become a state then the state must become a church. But as it does so, the ideal becomes not a spirtual body but an efficient machine. But all this reveals a fundamental division in the psyche, a division that will manifest itself as the cultural contradiction of capitalism.

For it is will-will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent rapt adoration or straining in violent energy , but always will-which is the essence of Puritanism , and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in the tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.


This corresponds to the conservative, authoritarian phase of capitalism when the state represents total power, solidity, and the idealized image of the individual is that of a grave, stern , conservative spirit, given to punctuality in matters of labour, practicality in public dealings, efficiency, rational clculation, constancy in prayer and deep but simple , reverential piety: ‘sober exaltation’. In this scheme of things, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are diversions, unnecessary and, ultimately, superficial; an ugly excrescence. But within this soul, and opposed to this sober prudence, is a ‘divine recklessness’, the desire to affirm an individual existence, to break free from constraints, tradition, societal norms, anything that is ‘given’: liquid modernity, the endless play of forms (culture), the destruction, devouring, of limits, the melting away of all that is solid. This strand is the root of the secular liberty as well as the Romantic lonely individual faced with a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness ..a wilderness to be subdued beneath solitary stars , the sea behind , the untamed desert ahead.

Fraternity, solidarity must be sacrificed to autonomy. The roots of utilitarianism can be found in puritanism and something of this twin legacy is transferred to america: the conservative, hell-fire nation mixed with the hegemonic ideas of freedom to contract and property.

There is no other way of explaining how a philosophy that is supremely indifferent to the world could end up in this narcotic of gold, how the iron will, the 'practical ascetic', could sanction such garish worldliness.

(quotes from R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)

Evening Land

"Was I the only one who wasn't serious"

------from Wings of Desire

I have spent the whole day lying down, looking at the sky and the great tree out of my window. The desire for escape has not dimmed. The stark morning light, the slow moving winter earth, the northern religion would not exist without them...they are the religion, her inner music. To see the world through the latticework of the tree's branches, the outstretched hands, the thousand-aborted prayers that testify every year to the void in one's heart, to the receding of the sun's light, power, and dominion.

The sky is a rich, deep blue but imageless. Clear, crisp and free. The leaves are frozen into the ground, like so many fossils covered with icicles. Everything is grinding to a halt; the Roding turns self-consciously, darkly, brooding. There is only a murmur of laughter, the faintest of hopes in her movements now. The long grass has congealed into a deathly brown mass and continues to live on only as a memory does.

Winter hollows everything out, reducing us to the elemental, taking us to the time before time. By mid-day the sky has become a fragile, pale blue, devoid of any concern with the proceedings of time. She begins to fill with the whitest clouds, infinitely distant and secretive, already suggesting other worlds. Like delicate porcelain or the notes of a piano, her beauty lies in the thin-ness of her existence, the deep knowledge that between sublime appearances and nothingness there is only a line, the line of a horizon.

The shadows lengthen, become darker. Waves of purple-black clouds descend as the birds follow their pre-ordained paths. Winter lights go on but are not any more artificial than the other spectacles that have passed. They only suggest the existence of other lives, histories that are not ours.

My thoughts turn to friends who have fallen. They have grown sane in their old age. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it not I who thought the world trivial, unworthy of attention?
Those who busy themselves in and with the serious matters of the world are the true ascetics-they care not for the earth or her treasures. And the irony of it all: those who desire nothing but to leave this place of frozen possibilities, a life that never ceases to throw up tragedy, farce, that is always too short, always painful...it is that same life, with all of its limitations, that we love more than ever, clinging onto every moment, hoarding every experience even as they slip away through our outstretched hands.

Had we the choice again we would take the privilege of seeing the coming and passing of a single day (even if it is empty of meaning) ; we would, like the trees, not decline the terrible responsibility of bearing witness- to both God's presence and His absence; far better that than to settle for the endless affirmation of reality. ..to be free and bound, earth and sky.

Repetition and Ritual

"There is no delusion of total command over Nature, just constant ecological adaptation. The city is an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic Mediterranean environment. ‘Things are allowed to remain in a halfway real condition, and delight is taken in the way things come to their own equilibrium and completion.’... In the ‘Americanized big city’, by contrast, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity ( Unheimlich). Indeed ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately.’ "

The bourgeois’ hat flies off his pointed head /Trains fall off bridges

--------Mike Davis, The Flames of New York

Are we destined to repeat the words and thoughts of others? Is thought itself just an articulation of our animal instincts, of biology? There is no such thing as 'inner experience' nor an understanding that isn't incarnate, mediated by the body as well as by bodies (the community).
Is the self generated by the body, a mirror image that resists contingency and the dissolution of time? The Double, our true self, exists on the other side of this mirror. But if the mind is essentially related to the organic how can it ever know this, how can it ever stand outside the stream (of consciousness)?

"An animal legacy that the coldness of the mind would like to dissolve"
But if all truth is immanent then why the dream to get outside of ourselves, for abstraction and objectivity? Does life generate its own transcendence? If we want to learn things 'off by heart' we also want to know them with a thought that isn't encumbered by memory or cluttered by the body's sensations and impressions. A perfect thinking machine. An eye that doesn't blink.

What is the demon that compels us to repeat, to return to the familiar, to 'home'? Psychologically, perhaps it is the desire to re-create in the shadow of an original absence. Political and social utopias in this sense are nothing but the infantile dreams of a perfect state, of authority. But before this and without necessarily making the claim for biological continuity: " In their migrations over thousands of kilometers, birds and fish are thought to be seeking the land of their origin, which is the inertia of matter, the state prior to life".

Is this a difference in degree or kind? In all of nature there is the great flux between movement and settlement; 'freedom' and 'security' are a philosophical prolongation of a fundamental tendency that runs throughout nature. The organic foreshadows the human possibility.
Nomadic and sedentary cultures are but late additions, dim reflections of the originary categories, Space and Time. The world is an instant and a series of events, Being and Becoming. But does this imply a closed universe that repeats itself or is there a Real frontier that leads onto the open, the unrepeatable?

But why do we return to that first place? Why are we so enchanted by origins, the untainted beginning? Not just for security, food, or economic reasons-but that too. We return to the city of the dead to commune with the spirits. Pilgrimages to holy places, to shrines, to springs, are deeply embedded in our consciousness. The fixed markers in a shape-shifting world that inspire reverence and awe, a place where the spirit 'dwells'. There is always a sacred space and a profane space. Repetition fixes boundaries. If Time is the Space between me and You then it must be annulled, spatialized as eternal return.

Before the first civilisations we are inclined to return to the cave, to the ritual centre, because we are mesmerized by the cave drawings, the representations of the other world and our ability to re-produce a depiction of the gateway. Art as power, a magical, hypnotic, transforming power.

We return again and again to that clearing in search of the loved one. We retrace our steps, like the hunter, only to realise that it is we who are being hunted. But 'to search', love must first be lost. Only the broken-hearted can yearn, can mourn. All our games of lost and found, hide and seek are but variations of this theme.

Death; art; religion; love. These, our oldest stories, we fondly repeat to ourselves.

The ancient world was held spellbound to the 'origin' and the 'centre'; the ontological thirst meant that we must always re-enact those primal gestures, walk in the footsteps of the First Man, circle and dance around the timeless space. In the sea of time we must return again and again to the stable world of forms, to the rituals that are handed down in the illud tempus. We map the stars and imagine a perfect order; the theatre and the observatory predate the city.

" A faded scrap of Oriental fabric: in it survives the mythic heritage, the ability to see a certain gesture as an exemplar, the sense of a destiny linked to a form."

The first man looks to the heavens and tries to imitate its perfectly ordered symmetry here on earth (Egypt, the sublime example)..." as it is in heaven so shall it be on earth." Order, regularity, cleanliness, musicality and harmony are all intimately connected to the compulsion to repeat. Tyranny has ancient roots.

Must I say it again: since Darwin the old dualism of mind and matter has broken down but we cannot go back to the mythical world, the muddy centre either. Nature must be isolated as pure extension, so much dead matter. But the nihilistic conclusion of this is that we too are dead matter: thanatos and modern pessimism.

How does culture begin? With our ability to name the world, to repeat a thing, conjure it up with a word. An act of substitution. But the world of signs and omens must remain opaque for us to establish our independent of world of meanings, to free the psyche of mysterious significances and correspondences. Nature throws up the human possibility. Are we just a word in its language? We must have the first and the last word. The great edifice of the medieval construction collapses under the weight of its excess of meaning. From now on the mind wants to be alone.

Everything moves in a circle, the most perfect form. At first there can be no real history; the model for history is nature, the ideal for the traditional civilisation is the unchanging rhythms, harmonics of the heavens. Forms of government must change according to some sort of cyclical law (monarchy, aristocracy, then democracy) or society must fluctuate between city and desert (Ibn Khaldun), virtue and decadence; or, in another version: poverty, labour, wealth, luxury. The great question for all civilisations is how to negotiate the conflicting aims of a slow moving traditional society with the need for new expressions of its essence: how to reconcile continuity with the forward dreaming impulses? All political tradition must be , essentially, conservative. Rome depends on the inaugural moment, the founding fathers, so that even if one cannot repeat history one should always be able to refer back to some sort of pole star, polis.

At the individual level the constant strain of etiquette, the high end of ritual; to say words in the right order (if not, death , in the Aboriginal system of things), to repeat the same gestures at the appropriate moment, the set phrase. Courtesy, the matching of inward attention to outward actions seems , to our modern ears, as entirely superficial. We must avoid cliches at all costs if we are to live up to the ideal of authenticity.

To recognize difference as an aspect of ourselves. Repetition is a way of recognizing something, someone: a pattern. Our survival depended on it. But what do we seek: identity or difference? Do we aim to recreate that first pattern that bewitched us, or find it in a different mode, tenor- a new configuration of the old? The familiar is distinguished from the strange, the dangerous, the uncanny and we clutch onto it, like a rosary bead, chanting words for protection. A ritual is a way of remembering as well as forgetting , for managing our fears; it is a mechanism for pre-empting anarchy, chaos, pollution.

"Why are you throwing this corn around?
To keep the tigers away.
But there are no tigers here
It must be working then! "

This 'throwing' becomes a comforting ritual in itself, devoid of any intrinsic connection to the problem. It averts our attention from it but at the same time reminds us that we are scared. The ritual is a middle path between an overcoming, raw sensation-pure chance- and complete amnesia.

" Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated and becomes part of the ceremony."

Our taste for ritual has not dissipated but merely been transformed, repeated in other forms. The experiment in the temple of science cannot allow for miracles, or for outcomes that are not the result of causal laws lest the irrational irrupts into our ordered lives. We live under the sign of the Same. The Japanese tea ceremony, ritual prayer: highly stylized actions, formulaic offerings are now but empty showings. But ritual has not died, it is merely reborn in the strangest of places. We only differ from our ancestors in that we disavow any possibility of being subject to the bounds of ritual: our rituals have only become more opaque, not less ubiquitous. Can there be understanding without memory? Can there be a shared common world without the repeating of the same meaningful gestures? Is truth, as Hume suggested, but the association of ideas? (the mind recoils at the notion that it is based on such shallow foundations). Each individual now lives in the illusion that he is free from ceremony, habits of mind, and he repeats this like a secret mantra; it is institutionalized, organized, repeated until we have internalized it: love is hate, war is peace, and we're all free.

Each town is the same as the other. Subtopia. We are caught between either a lonely , incommunicable freedom or a deadening, horizontal sameness and totality...the flatlands of the spirit wear us down. Life has become mechanical: been there, done that.

Re-ligion, re-demption, re-surrection: all of these are a 'second coming', a homecoming, when what we seek is an exodus; a gathering, a re-binding, a re-membering, when what we want is forgetfulness, a new world at every instant.

I run on

ruffling the periphery,

the treadmill's outer wheel,

declining centre

or any loss of it

Or, as the Allama once pointed out: finitude isn't a misfortune. Sometimes (but only sometimes) want to die but once.

(citations: Roberto Calasso, Mumford, Kafka, Ammons)

The Happy Pessimist

I'm H.A.P.P.Y., I know I am, I'm sure I am.
Surely it is a mistake to suppose that happiness is the central and not just a central aspect of human nature? In fact, might it not be suggested that the concept is introduced at a particular historical juncture and with specific political motives and that it has, therefore, less to do with our nature than one at first might suspect? The insertion of life into the political realm is a decisive move; the concern for life, pleasure and pain and its calculus, the efficient management of growth, the 'standard of living', the discipline of the body, the normalizing of the population and the setting up of pleasure industries, utopian fantasy islands: all follow the rubric of biopolitics. But this, it might be suggested, is but the late flourish of a clever animal. Only we recognize that we are needy animals and are defined by what we lack.


Nietzsche’s wry comment: "happiness: only the Englishman seeks that" would indicate that happiness is not the universal, over-arching principle that it is made out to be. Furthermore, to believe that the motivation for pursuing 'meaning', art, beauty, or knowledge is our happiness is fundamentally wrong- even though these things may lead to it or accompany it. Are we really governed by this single motivating factor or might there be other things like duty, love, and compassion that move us to act? I think that one has to admit the obvious charm and benefits of reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut principle or common currency that apparently does away with conflict (as well as tragedy)-but one does so at significant detriment to our perception of ourselves. This one-dimensional, hollow man is travesty of all the best that we can imagine and even though the mind loves being absorbed by one thing it also needs to know the world in depth . A concept may lead to easier calculations or it may allow things to be more readily objectified in monetary terms, but that does not in-itself mean that it offers a surer method of evaluation.

It seems quite strange to make an argument for happiness from nature or evolution(as if our natures are such that we seek happiness because of its survival value) when others have thought of our natural purpose in quite different terms: namely, the good life that depends on the virtues or the perfection of the soul: indeed, happiness is only one such notion of the common good and to say, therefore, that we must start from man's nature "as it is" means starting with the assumption-and it is only an assumption-that the bourgeois, non-metaphysical individual is the best model we have and that he represents the true version of human nature. That this is a self-evident truth is surely contestable, to say the least. Can we now envisage a politics that stands outside the web of life, can we move back from the language of the markets to the language of justice, virtue, and does that depend on possessing a transcendental perspective?

Even within the utilitarian framework there are still some awkward questions: what about entrenched preferences (a happy slave or an extremely poor person may convince himself that he is happy with the help of religious consolations and notions of kismet and how many desperate housewives are there that adapt to a life of low expectations?) And what about the happiness that results from the fulfilment of frivolous desires (incidentally, weren’t such vain desires and the concern for status the motor of economic growth according to Adam Smith?) With regards the latter set of issues, it might be argued that we should distinguish between temporary and permanent happiness but most economists would suggest that temporary happiness, a quick fix, is merely a case of informational problems (in the sense that we do not realise that that happiness turns sour in the long run) or an irrational pursuit, the failure of the rational calculator to see and latch on to a happiness that doesn't fade. But does the recognition of this imply a move to human nature, not “as it is” but as it should be, an ideal self? If so, then happiness, on its own, is an inadequate guiding principle.

The problem is that we want a moral principle that can deal with such questions but that at the same time is sensitive to the charge of paternalism (who, for example, has the authority to oppose our democratic choices or, in another expression of this, what the market determines; indeed, why not ditch the classics or education altogether if in doing so one makes the greatest number happy?) The over-arching idea of happiness is really just a problematic version of universalism: as if to say that the existence of other values, other ‘forms of life,’ only indicate a deficiency with respect to the new (and universal) standard of happiness. Those in the developing countries must, according to this logic, be first made aware of how unhappy they are before they can enjoy the right to pursue a life of happiness.

There are equally troubling questions with the approach: its neglect of freedom. For example, would an educated person who'chooses' not to read have the same level of happiness as a person who is illiterate? Many would think that the former, with its greater range of opportunities, offers a better way of living. So, we either accept freedom as another source of value or we reduce it to a means to our utilitarian end. Of course, we are warned of the dangers of thinking of everything simply in terms of as a means to an end but if this is so the question remains: why then persist with happiness as the only end to which evolution moves? Might not freedom be explained in this way as well, so that nature evolves along degrees of freedom?

On what grounds, for example, should society prevent a change or, say, a fair process of exchange that leads to a small minority becoming significantly better off at the expense of a lot of people becoming only slightly worse off or, in a variant of this, on what basis would society rule out an increase in utility of large sections of society at the expense of seeing a few members having their fundamental rights infringed upon or their utility dropping to extremely low levels? If on a theory of rights are we, then, to move away from the utilitarian framework? To put it more starkly: can we invoke a moral theory that doesn't talk about intentions or sacrifice or restraint or any actions that go beyond our own happiness. One can only talk about these things tautologically: we accept limitations because we choose to do so, because doing so makes us happier. It is the point at which explanation can go no further.

The central problem with this analysis is that it just doesn't take on board the whole gamut of human motivations and ends (this being, of course, the familiar complaint that homo economicus is a very 'thin'concept) ; for example, religion, civic virtues or the pursuit of knowledge are not simply or exclusively about enhancing one's happiness or forwarding our self-interest. Perhaps the pessimistic Romantics would have had a thing or two to say about happiness and its embodiment of a 'sun-and-wheat-consciousness' (Lawrence) and wouldn’t the Freudians say that this constant search for perfect happiness is a form of neurosis? Deep down we have the sneaking suspicion that a life singularly devoted to happiness is a shallow and trivial one.

But is it perfection, bliss, stillness that we really seek? Would we be happy by having attained our heart's desire? There is the bonum honestum, accompanied by an interior joy, and the bonum delectabile, which is a pleasure that becomes an end in itself. Happiness, in this sense, is a shadow of desire for the garden, a utopian longing for the end of longing, the desire for a land of plenty where we are not defined by what we lack.

If we accept that there are certain things that are of intrinsic importance-and this is a concept that economics has banished a long time ago-then we are already well on the way of thinking about human motivations and ends in a more pluralistic (and more complicated) way. This would be a radical departure for economics because for centuries we’ve been brought up with the idea that something is valued because it is desired, that desires can make pushpin as good as poetry (Bentham), and that our subjective experiences are not to be snuffed at. Is the content, soothed animal the best picture, the truest depiction, we have of ourselves?


In the end, might it not be the case that our fixation with the idea of man as a 'constantly moving happiness machine' has in part-and quite tragically-led us to being so unhappy? Coming on the back of a century devoted to the happiness of the self, the American dream, the American pastoral, perhaps we could do worse than turn to Philip Roth for his descriptions of how perfect, happy lives unravel. We are left wondering how much loneliness, depression and indifference lies behind the shiny surfaces of the happy life. And the disturbing possibility that, as one of Roth’s characters says, “it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self…”

Perhaps there is more.
" Psychoanalytically, any form of life will tend to generate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life". In that sense, true happiness is achieved by not achieving it, by being a happy pessimist. "Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days". Capitalism and consumerism would never have such a hold on us unless it held up the possibility of endless expansion, of unlimitedness itself (Marx would say that the growth of productive forces allows for a breaking out of the ghetto, the limited but narrow perfection of the ancients for the unlimited, multi-faceted, alienated individual); insofar as we are modern we must reject the Greeks and the closed medieval world; infinity can no longer be located along a vertical axis, as it were.

And so, the best thing about being human is that have the ability not to be human, to step outside te natural necessities from which the animals derive satisfaction, happiness. This is what Hannah called the unnatural growth of the natural. Ours is a troubled happiness, something that we want to and do not want to name, to find and to lose. "Only mortals pursue ends that come to an end, we dream of a deathless activity."

Modern happiness is, therefore, a discourse on how to escape the ordinary, finitude. It is not an attempt, contrary to first appearances, to weigh ourselves down with so many goods and trinkets but, rather, a desire for lightness. But there is a lightness that comes from profundity, and a lightness of being that is unbearable. By detaching our pleasures from 'the good' , from the world, we have thought that we could be free to find our own infinites. The moderns, in their inwardness, are the true ascetics! One only needs to reflect on how many of our freedoms have turned to obsessions, compulsive behaviours, to realise that maybe, just maybe, we are not as sure as to whether we really know what happiness is any more.

(citations from J. Lear and Goethe)

Suburban Blues

I only have to look up and the world 'is'.
I look up and I am.

-----from Wings of Desire

I have only to formulate a 'clear and distinct' idea of something and it is; this is the immanence of the world, there are no gaps between thought and world and, therefore, between time and space. Everything is a sign of something else and nothing I say has not been thought before. The world is a moment and a series of events.

Suburbia is the perfectly enclosed world that was once a dream. Like a multi-faceted crystal it is always one with itself. All the lives that are lived there are interchangeable..there are only a number of basic storylines which a mysterious card shifter shuffles with. It is a world of finite possibilities that are played out again and again, ad nauseam, a home in which one can finally lose oneself, submerge oneself into indistinctness and live a life entirely on the surface: home is where the heart is, but where is the heart?

We thought of a heaven of equality and have arrived there. Through infinite repetition and sameness we have canceled out chance, sheltered ourselves from the horror of contingency. Matisse painted the same picture fifteen times, searching for some subtle gradation of meaning, and a ritual is repeated for a thousand years-is there any difference?; the warm glow of the crowd, creature comforts, the ceremonial animal re-affirms that he lives in the same endless circles as the rest of nature. Except that we are condemned to be aware of this fact, to have imagined otherwise. But even then, we remain unconvinced that this might not just be another case of deja vu.

The sudden blotting out of a life can be imagined, pictured..war would be unthinkable if this were not true. But whereas the meaning of the void can be a subject of 'art', the quiet desperation that is the lack of meaning cannot; the slow fading away into insignificance, the running down of a life, the closing of the doors of potentiality and possibilities can only be conceived of as a happy, bourgeois suburban life.

The prisoners of chance
have built their home
In a field below the wood
And are at peace

Somewhere there is an afterlife
of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing

Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfillment.

But to "look up" at the world is not to think it in a geometric spirit; to see the world is to be distanced from it, at the very same time as one feels its presence, as on the very first day; to see is the very affirmation of our freedom to imagine a past and an open future, to be aware of transcendence and immanence. "To look" is neither an action nor a timeless thought. And reality is neither objectively given nor a world created by subjective desires.

One must sing with Goethe:

Now one may hear it still
even from afar
Words reach their goal
though sound and music fade
Is it still not the tent of scattered stars
the light transfigured world,
that love has made?

(quotes from the East-West Diwan and Derek Mahon)