Evolutionary, dear Watson

One can always tell a pseudo-intellectual by their willingness to use "evolution" as a way of explaining everything under the sun.

What "is" must have come about as a result of evolutionary pressures. Since when is the tautological an explanation? Self-interest, sympathy, ..you name it, they favoured survival therefore..as if one could talk only about the structure of 'things' and functionality (carbon is the same as diamond..is it really?, we share 95% of the same make-up as monkeys..does "95" convince you of something?), as if 'substance' itself or the qualitative could be reduced to the structure. In that sense, one might also say that God was "necessary"! I've even heard the absurdity: "God has been (scientifically) tested".

What is thought? A chemical reaction in the brain? The mind is the brain-or wholly determined by its structure. And how could you know that, one wonders, if that was true?

It gets worse. Not only is intelligence supposedly 'explained' by such a view -and here one wonders what to say of freedom which is, as Sen rightly points out, inextricably linked with rationality/reason-but intelligence itself is reduced to some quantifiable measure. Part of this is, perhaps, simply a trend in academic circles, a trend that inclines one to think only in terms of quantities (both in terms of what can be demonstrated in terms of one's research,and in terms of how one evaluates the performance of students). But one can't help think that this is also connected to the processes of commodification and quantification that are vital aspects of capitalism's extension.

'Evolutionary hand waving is an example of the tendency to take a theory which has been successful in one domain and apply it to anything else you can't understand -- not even to apply it, but vaguely to imagine such an application. It is also an example of the pervasive and reductive naturalism of our culture. 'Survival value' is now invoked to account for everything from ethics to language....

Even if randomness is a factor in determining which mutation will appear when (and the extent of the randomness is apparently in dispute), the range of genetic possibilities is not itself a random occurrence but a necessary consequence of the natural order. The possibility of minds capable of forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn't explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them'

T.Nagel, The View From Nowhere

"..Nineteenth century evolutionism..is an apocryphal ancestor of present-day existentialism. The latter's encounter with "nothingness" springs from the denial of "essence" which blocked the recourse to an ideal "nature" of man, once offered in his classical definition of reason (homo animale rationale), or in the Biblical one by creation in the image of God. The "image" , in the absence of creation, had vanished with the original; and reason had been reduced to a means among means, to be judged by the efficiency of its instrumental role in the survival issue...it does not set but serve aims. if there is a "life of reason" for man (as distinct from the mere use of reason), it can be chosen only non-rationally..But use of reason, as a means, is compatible with any end, no matter how irrational. This is the nihilistic implication of man losing a "being" transcending the flux of becoming."
--Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life
(written:13/9/08)

Ur, Un-

I am. We are

That is enough. Now it is up to us to begin. Life is placed into our hands. It has long since become empty. It sways back and forth, but we stand firm.
---Ernst Bloch.

Life, as the great unblocking of hindrances, the great opening-up of possibilities, a clearing for the emergence of the unscripted, the unthinkable, the site of forward-dreaming; life is also the realm of constraint, constriction and delimitation.

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.

---from Mir Dard.

This is the nature of the fabric we wear,that was woven for us, the warp and woof of it; there is no going back to nakedness, to "purity", to some Ur-moment or Ur-place. The song of innocence is over and yet hasn't your whole life been about clinging on to that thread, about keeping things undone, and, mind you, not always in simple ways...wasn't reading, for instance, also a way out, a distancing of yourself from yourself...the letter that does not killeth?

Not this, not that. Not to speak of 'I', or to look for a name, ideology, religion, but the direct, fresh, unmediated experience of bare life itself, a vivid life that opens up to, on to, the unfolding mystery and wonder of the un-nameable, that is startled into awareness? Why do you think of Rothko here, of Jewish aniconism?

A song for Rachel

One of the most incredible human traits: the capacity for new beginnings, the ability to look forward..."if" (G. Steiner). In fact, so amazing that it almost doesn't seem human...a superabundance of will, vision, imagination. But a beginning is also opened up for one...

What once was not, suddenly is; and the other way around, too. This strange intertwining, like that of "black" and "sun". All this is a mystery.

No-one knows a thing about the distribution of "it". Some are destined to be happy, others: not so. That's the way it is. A stoical or religious inclination don't very much appeal to you. What now of philosophy or theology? A kind of dizziness, nausea, or vertigo in the face of the sheer unknowingness of freedom and destiny. No-one knows what is what, or who is who. The tree of life, the tree of knowledge.

And yet, there is the pragmatic spirit as well: 'do what you can', don't think too deeply.

Vaguely remember former times, times of freedom, spontaneity, and play. But much is blotted out by the structures of dominance, the rigorous institutionalization of discipline and unfreedom.

Floating Bridges

Ry Cooder: music is the last bridge between people.

A bridge says: 'I am here..you are there.A bridge says: 'you can come over here'

Otis Redding: Take your shoes off, get comfortable, you know...

You have to listen to this music late at night; then there is no world, and no need for bridges.

The capacity to think or to say anything coherent has deserted me.
---Hofmannsthal.

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
--T.S.Eliot.

Amidst this cacophony of voices, this hyperinflation of the spoken and written word, there is barely audible, dimly legible, the potentialities of the past. All that remains, perhaps, are the human gestures that remain relatively constant over time.

The seismic shocks and fractures in language, the breaking of the primordial contract between word and world..Are we entering a phase of logo-nihilism: the negation of the semantic?

Have we reached an impasse, a blank future on which we scrawl incomprehensible signs? Our suspicion of words, our desire to get behind language, get to the real person behind the forked tongue: silent authenticity....words whirl and it makes me dizzy to look into their incessant spinning, beyond which one only enters on emptiness.

I give you my word.
A meaningless phrase today.

Karl Krauss on the Great War:
[it] marked the irreparable termination of what was humane in Western civilisation.

Speech acts and instruments trivialized by mass consumption and publicity, falsified by the jargons of the bourse, of the educators, of the bureaucrats, ..had become incapable of telling the truth...the hypocrisies of language, the embezzlement of diction, the infantilism of the mass media, saturating awareness, routinizing our responses, has made truth speechless.

Krauss' is a world gone mad with vacant but virulently contagious chatter.
(see Q: ? )

Logical Positivists:

Authentic meaning only possible of statements that can be verified or falsified: all else is meaningless, nonsense-even if they have emotional or subjective importance. The propositions of the theological or metaphysical order belong with fictive narratives or poetry...the imaginary, the irrational. Never has the word seemed so light.

What science cannot say must remain silent. Sprachkritik engenders a 'mystique of silence'. The long-standing pre-1914 claims to spiritual sense and communicability have been lost.

The God of Moses is defined by his absolute inaccessibility to verbalised thought, to conceptual articulation or any imagining ..the rigorously unconceivable, unimaginable, unsayable presence...

For Freud, language has lost its classical luminosity, its ready correspondence with intent and truth-saying. Speech has been fractured. Kritik always breaks down. Language is powerless to express any fundamental, deep-lying truths.

The pressure, the weight of the word..of textual precedent in law, in education, in literature, in political discourse was mountainous. And now, the avalanche of print. Life in the west was organized around around spoken and written power relations.

But is the fundamental subversion a religious one or a technological one?

With the decay of a theological, canonic world order throughout ever-widening areas of western experience, the informing source, the normative claims of the primacy of language, of its sovereign at-homeness in creation..

This decline goes hand in hand with the rise of a technological civilisation. From now on we, like Nature, can only speak the language of mathematics.The letter and the spirit: the letter does not killeth. The death of authority, of 'textual fathers'. Deconstruction.

Radical changes in reading remembrance, and representation of our lives, both inward and social, both imaginative and empirical.

Dying of thirst an inmate watched his torturer slowly spill to the floor a glass of fresh water. "Why are you doing this?" The butcher replied: "there is no 'why' here". Signifying, with a concision and lucidity out of hell, the divorce between humanity and language, between dialogue and hope.Speaking and writing had become, at the nadir of history, an expression of absurdity and disaster. There was, stricto sensu, nothing left to say.

bewildered

don't know again,
don't care again.

why does your heart sigh so?
surely not...
surely not.
via negativa.

the story unfolds once more
comes to its natural end
just as each image finds its true Form.

the dragon lies slain yonder
in lush field
the green shade, the green slumber.
gentle stars and persuasion
were like the faint blue of the moon in the morning sky
and all was like his ebbing life: a true wonder, yet unseen.

his head still tapping on the ground
his thick blood darkly throbbing unbeknown
as time might go on in a mirror.
and still no-one knows why the princess smiles,
or why the prince sighs.

bright stars

You must know yourself before you know others. But knowing isn't everything. And do we ever really know ourselves? Sometimes there is a spontaneous understanding and then knowing or not knowing doesn't become a consideration: faithfulness to what is not known, to the hidden...to silence, the memory of you. Radical hope, tawakkul

The ability, the desire, to keep these things safe. Not a momentary 'awareness' that breaks out of the mundane but, rather, an acknowledgement, a witnessing of, and a deep sense of gratitude for the life and time that is given us. The ordinary is already extraordinary: all that is, is holy (even though not the Holy..the height that is not height). Wondering, wandering, never cease; the past is never over.

What remains undone will be done. The loose strands will be gathered. But, for now, they flutter. We must be careful of (for)what we let go, what we tie together.

What bright stars there are! Who knows whether they burn for me, or for you. Khair..there were more within, other fires, and, as the poet said, nothing compares to the lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face.

The Victory of Orthodoxy

the victory of orthodoxy

yes and no in your eyes

there are many small and great losses. a moment in the sun, under the sun. like salt before the immense rock-time. stars move on their way in smooth curves. asymptotically to their place. a shadowed land. much has passed. much yet will. by the side of the road, in a field, burnt -out cars rest. crumbling brown-ochre the colour of abandonment. joy and merriment, a thousand journeys..all is fallen now. pile image upon image-if you will. the dark mirror will still collect, darkly. the old descend before you. you, too, for some reason drift. so that they don't know? may the Lord have mercy.

now lights glow so dimly. brighter, later. you'll never know. to my house, and there withdraw myself. stand by the river. the stone bridge floats. to wait by water's edge, like many before. life's become a winter scene painting that looks at life. gaze inwardly, silently for myself. did you see me today, god? in time lilac flowers will come to grow by my grave. side by side, shadowing eachother, we shall lie. both of us, strangely, without name.

in the mirror is Sunday

always will be a summer day

the day with no night

or a number on skin

fate chanced upon by a 'yes' or a 'no'

not long, but it isn't anyway

determined by the interval: we mourn,

maybe, the brevities, as much as to say

form were the enemy-the length of form-

to hide from ourselves

that emptiness of content length couldn't fill

no matter how long it might be-forever if it were.

---eccliasticus, bronk-and a line from celan.

the way it might have been

the way it might have been, what might have been. what remains of the past that never was?

was listening to some jazz last night and thought: starts off loyal to the original, down to each note, every key. fidelity to the score, the way it is. a few random notes are then thrown in, appear all of a sudden. a change of pace, rhythm. picks up where it left off. a new current, change of direction. the introduction of dissonance into the scheme of things. playfulness that spins out, like a greek god parceling out destinies. the first stirrings of something different. the music opens up slightly, like a spring day, the sky becoming lighter. unlocked, unwound. becomes expansive, loose, but retains the dominant theme at its heart. curves out in ever greater sweeping movements, further and further from the centre. vectors of hope.freer, less burdened by fidelity to repetition and ritual. freedom breaking out of structure. the dizzying thrill of the unchartered, of foreign lands. into the blue, open space. how to keep what is fundamental, essential? flight of the imagination. this is how things might be or, more darkly, how things might have been, had there been other lives, other times. but this song away from the song is also a tribute, an act of love. even as it becomes tangential, moves "out there', it retains a loving memory of the shards of the original...they're interwoven into what is new-as if a streaming blue ribbon is sewn onto a different garment...something borrowed, something new. a different kind of truth, of mirroring, reflecting.

like a river, a river man. comes home. leaps across the gaps. never lost the sense of it. carried it with you all the time. like a person who speaks quickly but the eyes, the eyes still sad.

the circle is broken. forgive me, father. the years we had together fade. but i hold them close. the circle is broken. it always was. from the beginning.

'The water in the harbour had the usual harbour litter, orange peel, a fine web of seemingly dusty, semi-iridescent scum hung with small leaves and bits of twig. It made me think of classical lands and of people making journeys in ancient times to famous cities, to study rhetoric or philosophy or to put a question to the local oracle. The harbour water would always have been like this, ordinary, unremarkable, until it had been left behind on the journey out'
---V.S.N.

the drift

wordless. less is more, you say. more or less. threadbare: a nimble intelligence. or so you would like to believe. dances around the point. around, mind you. that's about right. misses the mark, marks the misses. like time waiting to be crossed out. a life time. a lifetime waiting is a life full of time.cancellations. noughts and crosses. or delays. due to poor visibility.

i see what you're saying. it's your silences that have undone me. done me in. an asylum or a refuge. it's there. falls all around us. drifts our way unbidden. do you get the drift? one or two? the meaningless of measurement. we know what distance is. there are distances.when all's said and done. the words not said were not difficult, if truth be told. would be known. but we cannot know. simple, fundamental words across the centuries that have held us together, like 'elementary', dear watson.

I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no; there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

---William Bronk

the wild blue yonder

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances..
---R.Hass.

Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.
--Simone Weil.

For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even if for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.

There was a mole on your face, a full stop on the blank page..that took me to you. You looked for the place: a hole, a well in the sky, an opening so you could fall upwards...it took time, it took light, it took time to find my human form. And it was not so different from yours.

This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.

Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then placed her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.

I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.

Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.

I am not the space where I am.
I am not what I am.

All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them.
---Raban on Lowell.

The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them.
(originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)

~~~~~~~~~~

Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')

Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...

~~~

crow finds a home

'There is a certain kind of magpie that can learn words; they become fond of some words, and not only repeat them but can be seen to ponder them. To learn a word they must hear it said often, and if a word is too difficult for them to learn they may die. When they forget a word they cheer up greatly when they hear it spoken'
---Pliny the Elder?

Only the magpie recognizes itself in the mirror. Recognizes only itself. Why this particular creature, no-one knows. Turns its face from the drowning world, delights in scattered flesh, is oblivious of judgement. Ancient affinities between crow and man? And why not woman?The dark half-opened eye,the piercing gaze, the raven of my heart searches for scraps of being, settles at last, makes her home. And in this way she, full of herself and speechless, without equal, makes me stumble, fall, crawl.
~~~

I was walking towards her, carrying a half-opened rose..

She was reclining on a carpet, receiving guests
Her neck a lily of immaculate whiteness
Please kneel here, she said, next to me...
This happened in another country, a lost century..

No doubt she married, had three children
Who can track down the details?

Why her precisely, I don't understand.
I'm not sure I'd recognize her on a busy street

And I ask myself why it is constructed so perversely;
so that life is vague and only death is real.
---C. Milosz.

The Lost Horizon

question me an answer

the certain light
a certain light
over the same place at a different time in the day
means it isn't the same place.
and in the real world?
is it any different?
---after William Bronk.

Must everything be a question?

In a certain light we are neither image or word. but are.

listening to a clip (yeah, reading, what's that?) of a 'world sage' and was immediately struck (roxana will no doubt say that that's precisely the problem) by how much I disagreed with his words. But that's not true (I think)...pluralism is not relativism, after all. But yes, of course, one must not try and circumscribe the realm of what is possible or meaningful too tightly or rashly-unless one is a talib. On the other hand, is it merely a modern prejudice to think that a narrow perspective, one that ignores lost horizons, necessarily precludes profundity?

Khair..what got me was this:

Firstly, this idea of no conflict as either a realized state or an ideal. Just can't get my head around that. Then: the 'timeless east' and the 'restless west'. Old hat, my dear.

But the most remarkable thing was him saying that Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism are based on thought. Repeat the words slowly. Rituals, revelation, and texts are distortions, not the real thing, not a direct perception or awareness of Reality (as if one could achieve this on one's own, without grace). So, the testimony of the prophets and the saints is to be replaced by what, exactly? Psychology? The problem is, perhaps, not the world but the wrong approach to the world that makes it, precisely, worldliness; a proper 'love of the world' is always possible and, as Denise Levertov says: the world is not with us enough.

Of course, this is unfair. Always subject to re-vision. But here's the question: why shouldn't all sorts of things and relations be reflections and instances of the spiritual: words, images, music, friendship, love? Beauty is the splendour of the true. Aren't these refuges (Iris M) for the refugees?

Art does not mean dispersion, it means concentration, a way back to God.
--Frithjof Schuon.