The wisdom of the square, balance and weight

"The principle of tranquility does not lie merely in architectural balance. It is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created an ontological indestructibility."

---Herbert, Collected Prose.

~~~

So nice to hear John Broome speak (over skype) from Oxford. Great clarity of thought is the ability to speak little and still get to the heart of things. But, but..ways of approaching the heart! Do philosophers tend to have a 'harder' vision, one that by abstracting misses out on the details, excludes the messiness and mystery that is life? Fiction, poetry, music, art...can never just be about the timeless. Not now, anyway!  When does the point become a circle, the square a cube?

Broome's 'most important thing about climate change': no-one needs to make any sacrifices. If we consume more and invest less for the future then future generations are in effect 'paying' us for reducing emissions. All very prosaic stuff. Pareto and all that. Only towards the end, when time was running out, did he relent and give up on his (broadly) utilitarian picture: we value continuity as well. We would be quite willing to sacrifice so that there's a chance that there will be people around like us in the future, people who will have the same opportunities as us to flourish, come up with their own projects, and enjoy Bach, Rembrandt, just as we did. If we care about the ordinary things in life then we also surely care that the possibilities of ordinariness are shared and not exhausted by our self-centredness. Volo ut sis. 

I come back to these lines again and again because I find them so beautiful:

'Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.' An intense stillness..the smallest sound is easily heard.'
---J.B.  

I-We

Inter-relational normativity.

I know an economist who is almost autistic in his inability -and one assumes it is a lack of ability rather than a failure of the will-to break out of his own narrow world. At first it was merely irritating, but trying to distance myself from it (perhaps with too cold a heart) I''ve begun to think about this person quite a lot.

One reason for doing so is, of course, to reflect on my own inability to be open. I hear some awful bores talk and I just can't bring myself to laugh at their silly jokes, nod at the appropriate time or even feign interest. This may just be a seasonal thing, or maybe it's middle age wrapping itself up in a nostalgia for the past and what is deeply familiar?  In any case, it is not quite as bad as "hell is other people" but it is getting there. I think part of the problem is the lack of attractive/charming women in the workplace...

Then I wonder: is this a more general phenomenon? Is there something irreducibly private, atomistic about the human condition so that someone will always find themselves-at least to some extent- opposed or confronted by the world and other people? But even if this is a universal tendency, does it become more accentuated under certain historical conditions? Do late capitalism, modern technology, and mobility preclude the possibility of us being grounded in a shared sense of place? Does the sheer scale of the information overload mean we are always looking for ways of blocking out "noise"?  Or does this irritability stem primarily from boredom?

----

By the way, Roxana, where are my pictures?

---

Back to the robot, though, for when all is said and done I am fascinated- in a rather unhealthy way, admittedly- by this freak. 'I' before the world; 'I' at the centre of the world. In his emails if one were to take out a few worlds what one would be left with would go something like this...'I...I...because..I...and ..I...but ...I...'

The Green Knight

I don't know what it is about this book but it has always struck me as wonderful and slightly mysterious. I suppose half the charm rests in the fact that it predates the novel and any 'psychological' depth. This idea that something can work in a different gear, a different plane to the one we're accustomed to. Like a dream, it is two-dimensional, a story surrounded by a vague and indistinct fog of memories and half-buried truths. A story, then, that touches on the mythical and symbolic. The pentangle, for example. The Green Knight does sound like a figure deep out of folklore. Khidr in the incredible Surah 19 or Khwaja Khizr in the Indian tradition.

Benjamin's Storyteller...What counts as experience, tellable experience?Can the storyteller exist without listeners? The novel, on the other hand, requires 'readers'-and it's not clear that these are always the same thing. Transmission vs novelty. the circle-and breaking out of the circle. Our old themes, right from Day One.

The Grand Old Duke of York. I don't know why, but I suddenly felt very sad when making up a story about  the Grand Old Duke for little r. And tears welled up in little r's eyes as well. Yes, he defeated the wicked old man. And yes, he was invited for chocolate eclairs and cinnamon rolls and piping hot tea to the King's castle. "As much as he could eat". But he was wounded in the battle and never quite the same again. Why this subservience to the King or to the Queen? Is there not something futile about it all? Would not a tragic death have been a more befitting end?

Adam Smith's parable of 'the Poor Man's Son'...

So, there's this kid who is born into a very poor family. He sees lots of rich people around him and they seem happy. He resolves that he too will find this happiness. And so it comes to pass, after many years of hardship, that he makes lots of money. And yet, and yet...he is not happy. What's gone wrong in this story? Was he wrong to aim for happiness or was it that the means he chose were the wrong ones, that he made  a mistake in his selection? since economics is forward looking it is hard to imagine that the boy made an error. systemic mistakes aren't allowed for. We see the world all panned out in front of us, time flat like a map.

To tie the threads together: time (t) is abstract time, not lived experience.

What we seem to have is a 'preference reversal' (though preference is probably the wrong word). What the poor boy (now man) realizes is that the attainment of happiness (or that type of happiness) isn't really what he was after. I don't think it's just a matter of regret (which, again, is not permissible from the economist's point of view). The point is that values can and do change. We seek a conclusion to our deliberations, but have to keep ourselves open to the possibility of them changing. These "provisionally fixed points" would suggest that thought is a broken circle.

How ought I to live, to live well? Who could know this but a dead man-and he won't tell.

Iris's Green Knight...Peter Mir!...

~~~

To lose touch.

~~~

The Ethics of Climate Change

"Consequentalism, it now appears, is not something to be defended under the aspect of a mere grammatical transformation..or truism of moral mathematics. It is a striking and controversial proposal-the proposal, in the name of the ethical rationality of value maximization to find a single rule for the overall rightness that will replace the multiplicity of ways that are sanctioned by practices..by notions of morality that take it for granted that morality itself fills out our idea of reasonableness..."
---David Wiggins.

One can't but help feel that our inheritance of the consequentalist structure of Utilitarianism (as opposed to its content) makes it difficult for economists to get beyond the self in self-interest. I think that goes some way in explaining why economics is so anal and autistic.

Dear Life,

A short story is more perfect because no image is allowed to grow.

Dear Life: the momentum in the moment. Turn the page, hold the thought, return to life saddened, mystified.

The old, posh part of town, where the houses are three story high large white buildings. The curved outer walls of the house interrupting the natural growth of ancient trees, the crumbling facade, the doors and windows flung open as if to mock time, the huge silences in the courtyard, the narrow and dark winding steps to rooms with cold floors. The isolated room where the sudden light filters through the blinds with a brilliance that makes you smile..the original white room, before distinctions...

You greet an old man who is still wearing a thick and patterned brown housecoat at 11 o'clock in the morning. His face is so interesting that you fail to notice his lack of hair. He ambles out towards you. At first I think he's one of the servants or a retired bank clerk. It transpires that he's a multi-millionaire who has lived in this house since pre-partition days. He looks at me out of the corner of his eyes. There's always something unhinged about lonely people, or those who live close to darkness. He asks me about money, interest rates, cars but looks up into the sun like a blind man. The rituals, the cheapness, the days that will not pass...

"There's something much kinder about a house which has been lived in for generations than a brand new one...old glass still diffuses the daylight on the latest hats as softly as it did on the rugs of the 18th century."
---J.B.

Nothing must be allowed to grow, only to age and disappear. The souls of your favourite shoes are wearing so thin you can almost feel the ground in them. The last streak of being between my breathing body and earth....

Dear Life,

...near your own house, 110-A, your best friend's father is losing his mind. There are arrows on the wall pointing him this way or that. It is painful to write this. Hold on for dear life. What else? The graveyard. They have built a graveyard in the heart of the Society. The Co-operative Housing Society, run by crooks and fascists...On a white wall I saw a girl's name drawn in beautiful black paint, the large letters flowery, tripping over themselves. I thought of her eyelashes.

At best: It doesn't go wrong, Just goes different. And that's absolute aliveness. (De Waal)

The mystical east, the high windows, the low seriousness, the comical faltering of your life..no image is allowed to grow, to take shape.

Northern Light

The swami said that she was saddened that I'd closed down the blog, because at least that way she had some contact with me; and fff and R wrote so touchingly that I couldn't resist (you'll all regret this!)....

There is nothing more wonderful than the light after the rains. Saturday was a uniformly grey and rainy day; the flags on the long poles outside the expo. centre fluttered as if they'd taken up a renewed sense of possibility. Inside, it was if old Lahore was trying to remember itself, reassemble what has been lost, as old bookseller after another poured in, setting up shop. Booksellers from old Anarkali and Regal chowk, the British Pakistani owner who asked me if I'd read Hugh's Didascalion...all so encouraging after it had appeared we'd be swamped by books offering religious commentaries  pamphlets discussing important issues such as whether it was Islamic to eat with one's left hand or piss standing up. And then the young girls, lapping up the latest fiction, the aunties furtively buying 50 shades of...

The day had begun well. Still half asleep I'd heard a small number of black birds (perhaps no more than seven or eight) swoop down just outside my window and it was like a breath of fresh air or a burst of Spring rain, a sudden gulp of excitement. Coffee and sticky cinnamon roll (er..rolls) followed; then the books. Picked up Chekhov, some Ivan Illich, Bernard Williams's Moral Luck, Roth's Humbling, Dora the Explorer, Kingsley Amis's King's Speech (which I nearly missed and only picked up because I scanned the bookshelf from a different angle, left to right instead of right to left) and DeLillo's Body Artist, from which the following quote comes:

'Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely and streaks of running luster on the bay. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness. The wind makes a sound in the pines and the world comes into being, irreversibly, and the spider rides the wind-swayed web.'

The next morning. The light broke through, opening up the sky, lifting it up so that its greater clarity was equivalent to its more generous spaciousness. Scrambled eggs and weak cappuccino. On to the old zoo and a ride on a particularly grumpy camel with little r who was very amused by the strange beast. "Thank you for sharing your time with us," she said. 

We called out to the hippos who merely blinked their lazy eyes, trying to muster a few thoughts, collect themselves after a deep slumber. There is something opaque and dull about the mind of a hippo. Apart from the pink and grey leathery body the hippo would actually be a very small animal: he has minute bat-like ears, an abbreviated tail, and short stumpy legs. 

It was also strange to notice just how beautiful the elephant's eyelashes were, how exaggeratedly long they were. Gentle souls, one thinks. The one we saw has been trained to accept money with its trunk. The cheeky bugger!

Hippo was little r's first word. Hippo or hap-py. 

The word "hippo" is still funny even though "hippopotamus" is too frivolous a word in English to be in any way helpful.

---Gunter Eich.