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)