song of the summer

This was the best version i could find. If anyone has S. Isbin's wonderful, wonderful rendition, please pass it on. Danke.

song of the summer

Hard to decide. Guess it's got to be something French. So far:

Andecy, Isbin; Miroirs, Ravel; Easy living, Stan Tracey; Ikon of Joy/Sorrow, Tavener; Something in the air, Ziggy.

Any recommendations, people?

~~~~

Transcending oneself without transcendence.

--E. Bloch.

Not to get out of oneself; not to withdraw into oneself. Not this, not that (the Hindus would say).

Never trust a god who doesn't dance (sorry, m, still can't stop laughing when I think of God on a tractor).

Does one have to be an atheist to be a modern muslim? Some will flinch at having any pre-fix to the word muslim. Fundamentalist muslims will say: there is only one Islam. Yeah, okay, er...so try telling that to the Shias!

~~~

Coming to the end of Herzog. Disappointing, to be honest. Too fragmentary. Some dazzling flashes, though. In particular, this:

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage ... Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.

douceur de vivre

Do you forgive me these November days?

---Anna.

~

Be mysterious, be in love, and you shall be happy.

---Gaugin?

~

Can you be French without speaking French?

~

Non.

~

But if you're heart speaks so?

~

C'est possible!

~

There is a place in the heart where all is stillness, like a shelter in a storm, and to there I withdraw and speak my silent words to the beloved. At night she enters my tent, looks at me out of the soft brightness of her eyes. Then we are both lost; I am in her, and she is in me. And who, then, can say who is who, or whether I am a believer or an infidel? Why do you stay in the world of distinctions, gentle one?

~

...[a] world in which serious things were done with a sense of play-where even war and theology could become a sort of game.

~

...a joust, jester?

A Place Between

She's gone forever
I know when one is dead, and when one lives...
Thou'lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never!
----King Lear

meet me, child, in a place between.

There was a time when time wasn't time; when the point was not yet a circle, the line not yet a square. There was time. There was a time when time was not the space between the thing and the thing said, when it didn't spiral, curve, fall.

and now? and now it is empty, like a sunday, or bare unadorned hands that relinquish desire despite themselves. Old man's hands. greying. the self-revealing gestures of the soul. When time is everything then man is nothing, said Marx. when man is nothing then he is full of memories. was that augustine, your more learned reader(s) asks, or was it from a fortune cookie (says Roxana).

close the books, now. when all is said and done, not much has been said or done. haven't we dazed ourselves with fragments for long enough yet?

From Thomas Merton:

inner identity is not "found" as an object, but is the very self that finds...

we are so close to ourselves that there is no relation. be.

..we are obsessed with what is repeatable. Reality does not surrender itself all at once. security is the ability to strike a deal again. always "getting" the best deal...

life consists in learning to live one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling life..to do this one must recognize what is one's own...

true freedom is openness, availability, the capacity for gift.

'sell' knowledge, 'buy' wonder. This is precisely the opposite of what a university aspires to. Not to be taught, but pointed to the places between. Experience without thought may be empty, but is at least more real than thought without experience.


'Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it. We've done the globe and the globe is done.

The same is true of land travel. We skim along, we get there, we see it all, we've done it all. And as a rule, we never once go through the curious film which railroads, ships, motor-cars and hotels stretch over the surface of the whole earth. Peking is just the same as New York, with a few different things to look at: rather more Chinese about, etc. Poor creatures that we are, we crave for experience, yet we are like flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it.

Our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything. When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room. We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: "It's very much what you'd expect." We really know it all.

We are mistaken. The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilisation. Underneath is everything we don't know and are afraid of knowing.'
---D.H.Lawrence

July 21, 1969

..[t]he fatal disorder of worldliness which rejects worldly happiness.

Innumerable millions of passengers had polished the wood of the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion-brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms.

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

Once again, once again walking yet always on the spot, another country, other towns, the same country...Gagarin did not "find God in Heaven"...the new condition of existence in the weightlessness of a space 'without place' is still experienced by the first man sent there as a here, as the same, without genuine otherness.

Is there a door he hasn't noticed? Is there a bare wall where two windows open?

---Bellow, Frost, Blanchot (via Levinas)

July 21, 1969: something in the air

And now: Z

scintilla animae

The last note was contained in the first.

She said "no" and really meant "yes"
she said "i hate you" but spoke so softly..

You looked for a song,andecy, by sharon isbin-but as fate would have it, it cannot be heard. You looked for a word, because your eyes didn't meet. Spellbound by silence, you wait to melt, to burn...

If we were constant beings by nature, like angels, it would be easier. But we are flux, mere flux. No, not 'mere' flux-necessary, right & proper flux.
---Muriel Spark

He says Yes
to No; and in saying yes he says farewell.
---Wallace Stevens

How to win friends and influence people

I remember Thanksgiving with my wonderfully generous hosts in Boston, a Jewish family with two really smart kids. During the meal the eldest (eight years old) was quizzed :

"And what's the capital of K's country, India(no matter that we were from Pakistan) ? One out of one. Good.

"And who was the first Sultan of Delhi?"

Don't look at me kid. But he did, from the corner of his eyes. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders, deflated. But now they were looking at me. I'm buggered.

And so the whole meal passed in this pathetic game of approval and rejection. I felt myself gradually slouching into my chair. I was going to ask the kid to pass the oranges but thought better not, they might ask him when oranges were first introduced into Europe!

I came across these lines from Gaddis:

On the one hand the parent looks for signs of potential failure-this search arises in part from guilt and anxious preoccupation about himself. On the other hand he looks for signs of talent-this must not be wasted.

I couldn't but help think of all those false smiles, the picket-fence perfect lives, the beauty pageants and the strong desire to be a celebrity, to be someone , to be liked. (Roth's portrayal of 'the Swede' is brilliant on this).

The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.
---Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

First best. Kick ass. We gonna show those towel-heads in I-raq..

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.

Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports...
---Norman Mailer , New York Review of Books

But what of those who don't make it to first place, all those scroungers on welfare? What of those who do not answer to the 'calling'?

Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss.

Step up to the rush for second place. One has to wonder if what Solzhenitsyn saw as the constant desire to have still more things, and a still better life (the American Dream) ..imprints many western faces with worry and even depression doesn't go to the heart of the matter. With so much pressure to be the best, to always have the perfect life, have all the answers to the questions, is it any wonder that in order to keep the quiet desperation at bay life should be lived on the surface only? (Roth, again)....

and the day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You....mortifying confessions, group therapy, primal screams and "making it"..Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self esteem....books on how to be happy, how to obtain peace of mind, how to win friends and influence people (sold 15 million copies), how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.
--Gaddis.

I don't know. Perhaps some think this war on Iraq is another game (play station for the troops, something else for the politicians). The death of other people's children is insignificant: no mournful flutes for them, no playing of Barber's Adagio, just the grim reality of dust returning to dust. There is some talk now of "lowering of expectations", of hoping for the second best. Maybe one day people will start to ask, as in Lord of the Flies, if the beast wasn't within, if there wasn't something terribly flawed, right from the beginning , with the first best.

Somehow I doubt it. Talking of Vietnam, Gerald Ford would say:

It seems a shame that at the last minute of the last quarter we don't make that special effort,..It just makes me sick.

More troops to Iraq anyone?I can see next year's bestseller, having won Muslim hearts and minds : How to Win Friends and Influence People.

~~~~~

Wrote that just before the 'surge'. But the same thing applies to Afghanistan: 'We' cannot, simply cannot, fail or be seen to fail.

At the level of the individual, is this frenzy to 'succeed' leading to fatigue, exhaustion, nervous disorders? As the pointy heads keep on telling us, happiness depends on comparisons (with other people and other times in one's life). Not only does the pursuit, then, warp our sense of our self, but it could ultimately be futile-even according to its own narrow standards.

Look back on your life. What have you achieved? Look at the people around you, the high-flyers (who are easy, too easy, to mock) and those who have settled in to stable patterns of bourgeois mediocrity and quiet plodding success. They've done it, managed to grow up, make their peace with the world, religion, God. No-one your age is still a liberal. Conserve. Build. Forget. Learn to count: 1st best, 2nd best...

It happens agreeably enough to this maxim,the Whigs are
friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.

---from Hazlitt

It seems (or I find) the most useful definition of Man is that he is without definition.
---after Hazlitt

Well, yes, there's something a bit fishy about people who want to talk about "the soul" and all things deep and profound, or who always complain about the prosaic nature of the world and its duplicity, her masks; they are, instead, greatly animated and at the drop of a hat ready to swoon like lovers in a tryst of mutual self-negation or like teary-eyed patriots before the flag.

Like Americans who want to reestablish America's 'moral authority' or Christians and Muslims who see life as one steady but uneasy falling away from some intitial pure state, every change speaks only of decadence, and time itself is the great carrier of this disease.

The changeless as an ideal; religion and tradition as a closing of the circle of possibilities.

companions

One of the best things about blogging has been the sharing of books/films/music by my readers and the always insightful comments that have made me think twice about my views. Danke.

Economics and friendship (fellow-feeling):

One of the reasons that economics is a spectacularly narrow approach to understanding reality is that it posits that the sole principle underlying human motivation is self-interest (Edgeworth). Well, actually, that isn't true,strictly speaking,since economic (utility) theory doesn't actually say anything about the substance of one's preferences and instead focuses on their structure. So, for example, to say that one's preferences are rational is not a comment on the ends of one's actions/desires but, simply, that they-as a set- meet some sort of conditions of rationality (such as consistency).

However, for practical purposes most economists actually do take the self-interest idea as a working proposition or as the principle of motivation. It says something about "human nature": what it is, or what it ought to be.

And of course, the picture we set for ourselves-in our institutions, culture, and ideals- is often the one we grow into. The market, the "selfish gene", conflict, the survival of the fittest etc go up to make a constellation of ideas that views things like kindness, commitment, altruism, reciprocity, a sense of fairness and duty etc as fundamentally suspect. They are either veiled forms of self-interest or they are signs of weakness: if we were strong enough we wouldn't need to depend on others. Self-sufficiency is the deal. We are, it is said, at odds with one another. A warre against all.

We've been talked out of kindness, duped by a shallow form of intelligence (academia plays its part here). It would be mistaken to deny the great appeal of the notion of autonomy, but equally so to lose a sense of a 'we' (J.Luc Nancy)

Alan Ryan: "we mutually belong to one another" and this is necessary for the good life. Happiness: I-We.

Kindness-kinship (sameness). Philanthropia: the love of mankind. Caritas and open-heartedness. The desire to connect, to break out of the self, to live with others. Or man as a selfish beast, defined by his biological inheritance?

To be sympathetic to the vulnerability of others is to be so to our own-but not because it is so. Pleasure may accompany friendship but it is not the reason for it. Or, to put it another way, it is a qualitatively 'higher' form of pleasure.

What do we hold in common? Our needs? Our finitude? Is self-sufficiency and narcissism a turning away from the trauma of that acknowledgement? Kindness opens us to others but also to the dread of our own vulnerability and fragility.

Self-interest...assumes that we know what the self is, and what its interests are (next post)

Seneca: No-one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purpose. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.

'We' as a way of fulfilling one's humanity, our common humanity, without filling it.

Oikeiosis: the attachment of self to the other

R.I.P. Michael

white and light

the mystery of the veil

Two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason.

Well, it appears that the French are getting their knickers in a twist (again!) over the Very Important issue of the niqab.

The first question: why is this the first question?

Surely anyone who was really concerned about the inequalities between men and women, about oppression in France -and the starker ones in the so-called muslim world- would talk about education, work, political participation, patriarchal, tribal and feudal attitudes and practices, access to water, shelter, safety...

Of course, very often religious practices are inextricably connected to some of these issues, but the desire to reduce all questions of identity and all problems to religion (rather than class or justice, say)is, perhaps, symptomatic of a rather fanatical mindset.

Why is this issue, for example, more important than education, poverty or access to good housing when it comes to Culture (note the "C") and citizenship?