Durer's Eyes

The way in which we draw boundaries around things, how we define the limits, the periphery, tells us what we are, what is.

We need to set up and maintain all that is not-I, all that is of lesser value and reality. How we need those barbarians!

The depth of reason is only realised in the play against what it is not-unreason, madness, precisely. And the supra-rational?

Madness: A new rite of exclusion, an expression of the desire to set apart the impure, the corrupted-whether in body or mind...

Leonardo: he was interested in everything because he was interested in nothing..

Durer: Restless, nervous energy. Lacking all self-repose. A life on the edge of a precipice, and one that understands just how precarious this is; far too aware of itself, in fact, to be at peace.

It's comforting talking about madness-especially if one isn't mad oneself. The genius of the Romantics against the philistines; mountain people vs the plains.

.

The problem with mad people is that they look at the world too intensely. Searching for a pattern when they need to let go. How many of Europe's leading lights ended up crazy: Cantor, Nietzsche, Van Gogh...

To be small and stay small

"Assuredly there exists ..work of the kind one can do in a dream? I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese, that is to say, a person who dreams everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid."

From a Boat Trip:

"Odd similarity between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in and would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there..here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is this why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths?...

A girl sitting with us on the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end."

Walser remains for the last 27 years of his life in an asylum; there is a black and white photograph..'footprints in the snow lead to tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away.'

Smallness, as a way of resisting power, transcending it; but something more: the understanding that a life may always be destined to be small in many ways. A refuge, yes, a way of going unnoticed, yes, but one also wants to be recognized, seek out a witness to the words we scrawl between the lines. Our own personal lives will always be small in the vastness of time. It may be comforting to think that nothing matters, but it may also be a thought full of sadness.

~~~

A common thread: hats, of course! 

Freud's father...anti-semitism

the uni

'A spokesperson for Strathclyde says the university is "committed to world-leading research, education and knowledge exchange'


No disrespect to Strathclyde, but this is material for a Monty Python sketch!

The amount of bullshit-to use Harry Frankfurt's technical term-that management comes out with is hilarious. What is "world-leading" research and what is "knowledge exchange"? Committed to education? So glad to hear that, Stratchclyde!

~~~

This is important: the takeover by managers, accountants, pen-pushers, publicists, self-promoters, consultants and whores is, you think, probably a feature of a number of areas of social and cultural life. What that entails is an exclusive focus on research, league tables, rankings and the number of foreign students you can pull in. Quantification and 'commodification' go hand in hand and so the poor hapless teacher, that grim survivor from the old world, is left clutching at values and approaches to education that stand out like a sore thumb. 

The 'marketplace of ideas', students who are now 'customers' and research projects that can bring in the dosh. Universities now have to be centres of "excellence" (but of course, who is going to say: "We aim to be a fairly good university"?)

Use the technology, ride the tiger. Can't you teach Shakespeare using only 140 characters? Wikipedia says Shakespeare never existed. Click the 'like' button if you think Descartes is cool. Isn't there a film-version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations? How to teach African farmers basic English using txt mssgs 4 ex so them :-) 

The knowledge economy. The communications revolution (better than that stuffy old Marx's). 

we are not amused

Now, steady on. Avert your gaze, ladies.

Two Greek statues have been pulled from a current exhibition in Qatar because they might scandalize Qatari women. (A bare-breasted Nike remains on exhibition, though..what's sauce for the goose...). One wonders if the real reason isn't that the Qatari men are a bit worried about their 'womenfolk' realizing that they're missing out in life, hooked up with those miserable and ugly bastards. 

Some intriguing reporting by the Guardian:

"In another hopeful sign, the emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, recently bought six isles in the Ionian sea with a view to building palaces on them for his three wives and 24 children."

How the f*** is that "hopeful"?

~~~

A friend's mother who used to teach art history here used to mock the students by saying: "Okay, we're doing the Renaissance today, so time to put a cloth in front of your eyes so as to preserve the modesty of your gaze!"

But I do want to say something serious here. The other day little r wanted to play a game on the computer (Dora or Jungle Book). All very well, but the advertising on the sidebars has lots of lusty women in bras. I kid thee not. 

~~~

Bob has an interesting post on the shortness of Ted talks. I was asked to speak, believe it or not, for a Pakistan Ted Talk but refused. In 18 minutes you're supposed to condense your ideas. Okay, you might say, we live an age when everything has to be abbreviated, dumbed down..get with it. But-and this is the connection to the points made above-it's really all essentially about showmanship and catching people's attention with some glib comments or jokes. 

The idea of restraint today simply implies prudishness, a kind of throwback to the Victorian era or universal repression. "Just do it!," says the Nike advert. 

Iris M:

when was modernity?

From 1715 onward, apparently.

It is hard to imagine anyone not feeling a kind of thrill on hearing this word; after all, if identity means anything today-and it probably doesn't-then the one thing we like to think of ourselves as, the one picture we have of who we are, is an image of  someone who is somehow radically different from previous ages. We've got a vague idea of what it is to be modern and we wouldn't swap it for the world.

But what is it? Partly, I guess, it's an acceptance, slightly tinged with sadness, of uncertainty and finitude; we no longer have any 'models' (or transcendent models) of 'the good'. The Cosmos, Nature, Reason, God. If you're modern then you aren't too worried about the lack of foundations, the inability to ground your views in 'the Real'. A self-consciousness of the fact that you've got to make sense of things on your own and/or that things will not always make sense or fit into a pattern. Fragments, partial insights, small acts of kindness, quotes, reviews, summaries, takings from previous ages or different cultures without any knowledge of contextual background. Of course that can lead to a lot of confusion and superficiality (Coelho, etc.) More: a distrust of all systems-be they economic, political, religious. A sense of wonder at theoretical advances in physics, maths, science, but also a big fistful of salt when it comes to theory and theorizing. Particularity, singularity, the awareness of the paradox that this 'atomisation' is precisely what allows for the growth of state power and, even more worryingly, of totalitarianism ("uprootedness").

A sense of having lived through a lot of time and not much the wiser for it. The notion that it is only through experience, living in the time you do, that you can get any orientation in your life.Which isn't to say that you don't value things from the past but that a medieval mindset and living conditions are not something that much appeal to you. You can recognize that they probably produced better art, had greater religious insights, and possibly warmer relations with other people. To be modern is to live a bit like a mysterious stranger, even though at the same time this world, this place, is deeply familiar and you don't long for some other kind of reality. This place, this place now, is where I am and what I am...

The old virtues sound, well, a bit silly now. Are they universal or do they only make sense in a particular society? Can there be bourgeois virtues, then? If one is sceptical of the old Republican virtues and their narrow base then, equally, one isn't wholly convinced that a commercial society can avoid being shallow and trivial.

~~~

Re-reading The City of Man (mainly for the chapter on Smith). Difficult book. First time round the conservative tenor caught your attention and chimed with some of your views but now it seems fundamentally wrong in many places.

In a similar vein, whenever I turn back to the perennialists, whose books I once loved, I can't but help feel uneasy with their anti-modern sensibilities.

[clarify later]

~~~

My unease is this: distinctions aren't distinctions. Now and then some people realize, for instance, that Muslims are still human beings, much like the rest of humanity, warts and all. From another perspective, how is it that we can be moved by music, art, literature and images that are so very old? It is not the case that modern men and women are so different from any other person. The fundamentals still apply, as time goes by. Play it again. 

After all has been said and done, modern Man is still Man, for all that. Aye.  There is still much heartache, much longing and regret, tragedy, farce. 

Here's a line from TMS:

'A well-fancied coat is done in a twelve-month, and cannot continue longer to propagate, as the fashion, that form according to which it was made. The modes of furniture change less rapidly than those of dress; because furniture is commonly more durable. In five or six years, however, it generally undergoes an entire revolution, and every man in his own time sees the fashion in this respect change many different ways. The productions of the other arts are much more lasting, and, when happily imagined, may continue to propagate the fashion of their make for a much longer time. A well-contrived building may endure many centuries: a beautiful air may be delivered down by a sort of tradition, through many successive generations: a well-written poem may last as long as the world'.

There is much overlapping. There are text, words, memories we carry with us. Some, always. Some things remain. Like the words we don't speak. 

the future...

Now, I thought flax seeds (linseed?) were the real McCoy, but stop the press...

Granola with cinnamon...

(hey, California/anon, where've you been?...you never did reveal the secret recipe for French onion soup)

~~~

No luck with the chia and the granola needs more roasting and more honey. But this is what I put in it: figs, raisins, cinnamon, walnuts, almonds, pecans, sunflower seeds, melon seeds, sesame seeds, basil seeds (mistaken for chia), local wild bee honey, roasted oats, 1 teaspoon of olive oil. 

war citizenship

The first thing you think of when you see bombings like the terrible one in Boston is: Jesus!

I suppose it might be considered good taste to leave it at that and I'm certainly tempted to do so. But having seen so much bloodshed here, bloodshed that probably would not have taken place had the ISI not supported the religious crazies in the first place, and had America not waged this ridiculous 'war on terror', I have to mention my second thoughts...

Really, it's media whores I can't stand. The need to put every image out there, to relentlessly pry into other people's privacy, to bring you "live coverage" of every moving detail of an "event". The situation is fluid, they say, mimicking army gibberish. And all in the name of freedom! Of course, many recognize it for what it is: cheap sensationalism because that is, ultimately, what holds our attention in an age saturated by images and full to the brim with pomposity and verbal hyperinflation. Gawk dumbfounded at the "situation" as it unfolds, quietly sip your latte.

Gawk, awkward, ga, ga-ga. 

"As always in America, what actually happened today near Boston braided entirely into what was being shown and said, so that the two became inseparable...We are now a nation of experts, with millions of people who know the meaning of everything that they haven’t actually experienced...And it was an American story, too, in what could only be called a hysterical and insular overreaction that allowed it to become the sole national narrative."

---Adam Gopnik, sensible as ever.

Smith, it seems, saw wars as "expensive and unnecessary".  Yes, but what that misses out on is the psychological impact it has. The Pakistani army in 'East Pakistan', or Israel in Gaza or the Indians in Kashmir: the brutality is first and foremost against other people-and that is where our sympathies must lie; but the perpetrators themselves sink in their own brutality as well.

distance is the soul of beauty

Lana Del Rey - Chelsea Hotel No 2 (2013)

Finding a new way to say what you do not say.

~~~

A friend asked: "Is it too late?"

Yes, it is. It always is.

"No, I mean, is it too late for us to turn our lives around, get a second chance, put ourselves in with a shout, a sniff of the game?"

Dude, it's over.

Finally convinced, he asks, "Okay, but where did it all go wrong?"

Where, when, how? The old questions. The cards we're dealt. Anyone who accepts that isn't fully human, I guess.

~~~

Rooted to the square, the place we were. Before the bell sounded and we followed our own paths, or paths that we had to follow, or paths that we stumbled upon and that were not really paths at all. To say the obvious is only to continue the fall. There is no new wound, except it seems that way to each person, and that is enough.

~~~

When do the colours change, the precise moment? From blue to grey, say? Blessed is the man who sees the colours of the sky and doesn't think of his own soul...

Driving back on the empty road, alone and with the windows down, a light breeze keeping things clear; the moon radiant and high in the eastern sky, but chipped and ultimately flawed. The last dregs of light in the sky as it just holds the line, and then the grey invades and silence falls. Lights in the nearby houses are switched on. Preparations are made. Introductions, the rattling of silverware, the exact placing of things, keys disengaged from the word again, the folding of napkins, the comforting sound of car tyres on gravel. A timeless scene of homecoming, forgetfulness. In front of you, on the road, a man on a motorbike engulfed in the darkness, except for his headlights which produce a warm and shallow pool of light around the patch of road he travels on. That's it. The small lights in evening, the brief moments of illumination. One man and a road.  

~~~

Distances, irreducible, are what make us what we are. This distance: from God, nature, other human beings, ourselves is also called longing. 

I need you. I don't need you.

'We are at the point where love is just possible.'

---simone.

ghost stories

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

Kant, on The Critique:

"It rests on a fully secured foundation,established forever, it will prove to be indispensable too for the noblest ends of mankind in all future ages."

Sidgwick on The Method: 

"It solves nothing, but may clear up the ideas of one or two people a little."

~~~

There was a lovely piece on Derek Parfit; what interested you, you have to admit, was the person more than the ideas. Quite revealing, really. You're always hovering around in the antechamber of understanding,as it were, never able to quite get to the heart of the issue, skirting around the centre. Probably because you lack the mental capacities and temperament for sustained reflection. Instead, it is always the idea of the idea-a fact not unrelated, perhaps, to the preponderance of quotes on this blog. Not that a bit of directness wouldn't be welcome; it's just that what little you do understand (of life-that is what we're talking about, isn't it?) could be written down on a small piece of paper.  

It's a bit like reading Berlin on the history of ideas. Exciting at first, then you think you've been short-changed because all you really have at the end of the day in your hands is derivative, a fuzzy kind of precis of ideas that another person has lived and struggled with over a long period of gestation.

After a series of short-cuts you realize you really don't get anywhere. Of course, you'd love to say that at least part of this hesitancy before 'knowledge' and this disdain for academia stems from some deeply buried religious sensibility, a prizing of wisdom over merely superficial intelligence. But that, too, only highlights the same phenomenon: an idea of religion is all you really have.


~~~

Is it the same with people, you wonder? A sort of irreducible distance. Of course, there's the horrid thought of being 'at one' with the universe but no, that's not quite it. Is it really the case, as the swami more or less said, that we're like shadows of our real selves, a ghostly presence to others?

~~~

There's something comforting reading about old Sidg. I think it's partly the fact that stands at the cusp of modernity. So, here is someone living around a century before you. When you read 1870 it is easy for the mind to jump to 1970 and imagine some sort of parallel, some current of thought from then still very much in our conversation. But it's more than that. It's also the ordinary, day-to-day routines that attract you...the fact that he turns to Aristotle again .."Perhaps this was made necessary by the task of selecting books for the Tripos, perhaps by general preparation for teaching ethics in the autumn of 1867..." It's like looking through a window and seeing parts of a person's life and it seems more real than any fiction you've read. 

His views on religion sound quite progressive as well, without the pompous notions of Progress or Humanity. And then there are his "ghost-seeking tendencies". J. Gray has an intriguing and fascinating chapter on this [link].

~~~

I am almost never there, in these
old photographs: a hand
or shoulder, out of focus; a figure
in the background,
stepping from the frame.
I see myself, sometimes, in the restless
blur of a child, that flinch
in the eye, or the way
sun leaks its gold into the print;
or there, in that long white gash
across the face of the glass
on the wall behind. That
smear of light
the sign of me, leaving.

--Robin Robertson.

Still, life.

'Here, they, men, inscribe themselves upon space, immediately covering it with familiar gestures, memories, customs and intentions. They establish themselves by means of a path, a mill, a frozen canal..everything in them tends toward the habitat pure and simple.'
--Barthes. 

A house: 'the triumph of an entirely self-sufficient nominalism.' To live amongst and move through "easy surfaces". 

Vermeer: Searching for that ideal moment when all else falls away; the need to find it, to prolong it. The singular, contained moment.

~~~

In the light of experience. 

From an interview with P.D. James...

Why do your stories start in autumn?

The dying light...people can be concealed by darkness and there is a melancholy in the dying of the year. [At 90] one has learnt what is important and what is unimportant...the most important thing in life is the "holiness of the heart's affections" (Keats).

A.B.

'In England age wipes the slate clean..If you live to be 90 and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel prize.'

...

One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others,
know how to keep it safe.

---Jules S.

Menashe...

Sun splinters
In winter's skin
Quivers hundred
Of lines to rim
One radiance
You within

~

The hollow of morning
Holds my soul still
As water in a jar

~

And daydreams dapple
His blue eyes.

~~

To stand together, and watch the passing of ordinary time; that is a difficult thing to imagine.

In the land of purity (of thought)

The time, my friends, has come to speak in plain French...

'The French are the most abstract and religious people in the world; the fanaticism with them goes hand in hand with lack of respect for persons..the French turn everything into an idol, and then woe to him who does not bow the knee to the idol of the day. Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom and without a thought drag you to jail if you don't agree with their opinions...everywhere dualism, abstraction, abstract duty, enforced virtues and official and rhetorical morality without any relation to life.'

~~~

The thing with reading Berlin is that it is easy to get swayed by the breathless prose so that your mind soon relaxes its guard. But, having said that, there isn't half a lot of convoluted nonsense churned out by academics and theorists...

'This is not just its situation ‘in principle’ (the one it occupies in the hierarchy of instances in relation to the determinant instance: in society, the economy) nor just its situation ‘in fact’(whether, in the phase under consideration, it is dominant or subordinate) but the relation of this situation in fact to this situation in principle, that is, the very relation which makes of this situation in fact a ‘variation’ of the — ‘invariant’ — structure, in dominance, of the totality.

(Althusser, cited by Scruton).

~~~

The attempt to appear clever with fancy language or sophisticated mathematics is one of the oldest tricks in town. Religious folks had their own version of what constituted the esoteric and, surprise, surprise, it turned out that only they had privileged access to 'the real', the inner sanctuary of truth, whilst the rest of the poor sods had to make do with rituals, superstitions, and a hotch-potch of inherited sayings, opinions and proverbs. 

The display of intelligence. Really is awfully boring...

~~~

Back in the land of the Pure, politicians left right and centre are being banned from participating in the upcoming elections because they are not deemed to be truthful and of good moral character. You have to laugh. This would make great material for a comic novel. Some of the questions asked of candidates:

What do you think of honeymoon? If your wife, child and a scholar of Islam are drowning, whom would you save? Please recite the third kalima.

[ ]

She said,

]
] right here
]
] (now again)
]
] for
]

I closed my book, folded a piece of paper. I want to say something but shame prevents me. 

Of all the stars the most beautiful was the one...

If this is not winter, then what is?

Write down the words in Indian ink, or speak them to a mirror. It makes no difference. Nothing will 

][ hold

When we could
stand
[]
face to face...
[I]
and then [ ]

In our place
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
Time

~~~

Many seasons will pass, Winter and Spring, the senses slowing, the eyes less keen; hands that would know will be less sure; my hair will thin, yours will grey, our hearts free from straying and you will no doubt, if you remember at all, say these were but words, like snowflakes that immediately lost all form on contact with your window, disappearing in the night of your starred heart.
  

out of the blue

...someone sent me this:

the letter "Waw", which in Arabic means "and." The Sufis call it the letter of Love, because without it, nothing can come together. We say "the sea and the sky," "Man andWoman." The "Waw" is the meeting place, thus it is the place of Love. It is also the letter of the traveler, because it gathers together things and beings.

&

There is too much sun here, by far; isn't one ray enough to get the picture? 

The sun is naked
in autumn, nothing except a thread of cloud around her waist
This is how love arrives.
---Adonis.

There is too much light in this place so that you shield yourself from it with notebooks held at an angle; every corner of shade you seek out, a veritable oasis in a square inch, Mr. Blake, the world in miniature. 

Yesterday you saw a man, face blackened with coal dust, his clothes worn thin with age and sweat, lifting a large wooden and crude wheelbarrow, as if it had been made for someone eight feet tall. Years of working with bare hands under the sun, in open fields or amidst the noise of the city. All that stuff about the dignity of labour is very appealing when you sip a cool mint and apple drink. You thought of Van Gogh's potato eaters. 

The man carried grey slabs of the road, as if he was stitching it back together, or assembling a jigsaw puzzle. When the job was done dust was poured over the fixed bits, to give it a deathly powdered look. 

For those who work day by day what gathering can there be? 

~~~

You saw a man in a navy blue security uniform, stuck in the middle of the road. Probably finishing a night shift, or starting the morning one. But there he was, bewildered, frozen to the spot, his dark radiant head full of mystery, his thick glasses awash with images, his hands steadily holding his old basic bicycle in the midst of the traffic that passed him by on all sides. The huge frustration of the drivers meaningless to him, for nothing could catch his attention now...What had this man seen, what did he know?

Inescapable Frameworks

The person who knows where she is, even after much traveling. Because she knows, as a person, that she cannot know everything...

The swami said, no matter how much you reflect on it, you cannot really know anyone else-all you have are the bare details of another individual's life, a faded picture that you keep in your top pocket, as it were. And you can never see clearly because, ultimately, you can never see your own life with any clarity. We are strangers to ourselves, me & you, but the '&' is sweet...


Yesterday, I tried to convince little r that it was a good thing to be a liberal. So, tell me, little r, are you the Taleban or a liberal? 

What is the Taleban? 

Well, they're people who say you can't have your beloved chicken and rice; no Barney or Dora either! 

Not convinced, I'm afraid. She just marched off, singing her song, 'I am the Taleban, my friend'.

Jesus!

~~~

Now, you might say that a liberal society must make some place for non-liberal attitudes, practices. But on what basis? Diversity and pluralism? If so, what is being stated is that associations which are not autonomous (or, to beg the question, fully autonomous) have some kind of legitimacy because people choose to enter them, even if they're not 'the best' according to our version of the good (who is 'our'?). Underlying this line of reasoning is the notion that autonomy/individuality can be sacrificed if it favours diversity. Again, there's a difficult question of: to what extent? Certainly voluntarily entering into a contract that restricts one's future autonomy is highly problematic. A more tangible example: a woman who chooses to follow what she deems to be a religious life, one that entails submission to the authority of her husband, hardly seems like a very satisfactory situation.

A bit of untangling/tangling:

This isn't always a clear-cut distinction. People in liberal societies acknowledge all kinds of constraints or obligations (from marriage, to decent behaviour, and from promises to work norms). Also, this ignores the fact that through industrialization and the creation of a mass society, the huge conformities produced by the education system, and the culture, marketing and fashion industries, individuals' ability to determine their own goals in life may not be as free as we think it is. 

On the other side, should we say that artists who follow a pattern of living and learning, a tradition for lack of a better word, are in some sense "constrained" or that they lack autonomy? And what of someone reflectively chooses to follow a religious life? Is 'choose' the right word here, or is it respond to what one thinks one's capacities and true inclinations are? For to say 'choose' already presumes a 'chooser'-and that is, precisely, what is so contentious here.

Merton, for example. Someone who writes:

'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.'

hardly seems to be an automaton. 

Of course, this is a rather extreme example, but if one takes the more prosaic ones then it seems that there are indeed lots of fairly decent religious people who pick and choose various practices, paths, and aspects of religion that suit them. Fundamentalists (and perhaps liberals as well) would like to condemn them for not being 'truly' religious, but I don't think that's right. Reality is always more syncretic, varied, flexible and messy than theorists would allow for.

What's wrong with this picture, then? I think it's the view that autonomy can only really exist in an unencumbered self. To talk of anything that is 'given' already strikes some ears as suggesting dependence. So, the usual dichotomies are set up: liberal vs communitarian, atomism vs holism, the individual vs society...

One influential version of this is economic man who is, by all accounts, a Robinson Crusoe interacting, freely and voluntarily, with other Robinson Crusoes. What relation there is with anyone else is a matter of a contract. The social, to the extent that it exists, is a product of individuals' transactions and nothing more. Here he is, the free-floating self, with his hard-won freedom from family, society, the state and religious authorities. The self is not determined in any way by any substantive notion of 'the good'. The individual's freedom to choose is the good, whether it makes his life go better or not. In a world governed by laws and regularities here we see the isolated will completely determining itself, making a leap, as it were, out of the causal network (Gnosticism, again?).

Of course, one has to recognize how organizations and authorities have cramped and blighted people's lives for centuries  And one only needs to be reminded of the horrors of Communism and, more generally, of the deep reach of the all-pervading state to find something deeply appealing in this 'existentialist' or Protestant view of the individual. But, could it be a reaction to a peculiar  set of circumstances in 'the west'? After all, the centralization of the state, the concentration of power, was bound to set off all sorts of counter-movements? And could it be the role of the Church, as a hierarchical religious institution and authority, naturally induced a kind of rebellion in favour of determining one's own moral and spiritual outlook? Does the problem go back further? Does it have something to do with an opposition between the secular and the sacred, lived time and the 'end of time' (as George Steiner once suggested)?

Must we always veer between two extremes: a picture of pure or absolute freedom, an empty freedom, perhaps, but deeply cherished nevertheless, and on the other hand, tyranny or a rigid determination of what we 'are' by factors that lie outside our control? 

the quietest room in the v&a

You find the most beautiful places in the world don't have many human beings in them: old churches-just wood and stone and high windows-in the midst of the city; run-down libraries and their dusty books, with the odd eccentric small kid, his shirt hanging out, the only feature of his face that anyone would remember being his thick black glasses with their heavy lenses; Mosques have far too many people in them to be beautiful, but the mausoleum of Imam Bukhari in Uzbekistan is peaceful, with its trees and cool running water, and in Istanbul there is the wonderful Rustum Pasha, which no-one can find...

Postman's park in London, for anyone who is interested.

Must admit my nerves are a bit frayed at the moment. The excess of light in 'the south' wears me down. Search for quiet rooms, unlit back rooms to escape the din and babble, tourists and academics, and what the moderns love to call "access" to the whole world. Think there's probably a bit too much access to it if you ask me, but there you go, that's just me.

The best thing about the v&a is that it is endless. Your attention may, all of a sudden, be drawn to the smallest of unassuming objects and there's a strange satisfaction in thinking something has escaped all the analysis and fanfare created by the culture industry, as if the object, too, had been seeking out this quiet space. 500 years, a thousand. Human hands passing over it, human history running by its side, all of that dissolved and forgotten behind the exquisite glass case...

The most alluring of the quiet rooms, though, is somewhere else. The heart's desires are stilled, time is framed behind the silver, slowly inheriting the black, and the clocks all tell the wrong time. In winter the back garden becomes Japanese in its repose and each room relates to this absence. Sun and time pass here, mostly over it and sometimes in it, and yet still there is the memory of a cool shade that resists the fierceness of the days. This is the only empty room in the world I would trade for. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't another room in this room of mine?

This tapestry moves

as the morning lights up.

And they who are in it move

and love its moving

from sleep to Idea

born on the breathing

of a distant harmonium, To See

is their desire

as they wander estranged.

---Ed Dorn (via Nomadics)

Get a call from ambs at 12. Could I introudce tim Williamson and organize the discussion with the students over Skype.

Yes, sure. When is it?

Three hours.

Bugger!
~~~

Williamson has written six books, 180 articles, taught at Oxfrord since 2000 and is a visiting Professor at MIT, Michigan, ...

First impressions: something of a boffin, one of those intensely private people, the sort of academic's academic.

The philosophy of philosophy.

Given science is the dominant paradigm how can philosophy justify it's own approach, and what is distinct about the philosophy of philosophy? Why not rely on the sciences (pure or linguisitcs or sociology) to understand life, the world?

Why should philosophers be content with sitting in their armchairs, thinking they can grasp some truth without engaging with the world, without subjecting their theories to the possibility of refutation? One response to that is to say that they do require 'verification' from other people in the world. The meaning of the words they employ, for example, only make sense in relation to their association with public rules, public understanding of the concepts. There are no private definitions. But if that's true, then why not just stick with linguistics? What is distinct about philosophy?

Thought experiments. Through a simple (not necessarily extreme) case or situation, one can derive quite a lot, get quite far in our understanding of the internal relations between concepts.

For example, a simple definition of a man: a non-feathered bi-ped. But one could, presumably, pluck the feathers of a chicken and yet that would not be Man (and why bother with the act..one could imagine doing so and conclude: this is not Man). So, logic and consistency can get us some way, remove illusions, help us see more clearly. Isn't that what philosophy is about?

Williamson's other example: in a society of masochists a great amount of pleasure might come about by seeing a man tortured on television-more overall pleasure, that is, than the tortured person's displeasure. And, again, through this thought experiment we might plainly see that Utilitarianism is problematic.

Intution and reason:
...


~~~

Don't think T.W. really gave a good answer to my question. Whilst logic or reason might give us some sort of rough defintion of a human being (by ruling out certain features) it doesn't help very much if we want a positive or drawn out picture of what she is, what we are. For example, to get any idea of what a human response to the torture example might be, we surely need a deeper understanding of humanity than that which is provided by science?

Can one really see clearly by just examining the facts, as it were, and then making a decision, or do values come in much earlier: in the way we pay attention to certain features of a situation in the first place, or how our sense of 'higher' and 'lower' structures our ongoing reflections?

~~~

The temptation to withdraw from the human world has always been a part, paradoxically, of the human world itself. The means may change over the years but the impulse remains the same. Academics-the one's who haven't been enamoured with notions of 'success'-are really just modern gnostics or monks/nuns.

Boredom: could our parents' generation even contemplate such a thing? I somehow doubt it. And yet there was so little to 'do' in those days!

There is time when one wants to be alone with one's thoughts; but there is also a time when one wants to be alone, away from one's thoughts. There is a negative way of reaching that emptiness: through hate, drugs... 

...

we live in peril, die from happenstance,

a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely it’s the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, there’s still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
belonging, momentarily involved
in nothing but the present, skating out
towards a white
horizon, fair
and gifted with the grace
to skate forever, slithering as he goes,
but hazarding a guess that someone else
is close beside him, other to his other.

---J.Burnside.

The hazards of guessing. 

snow country

Summer now: an older mode of sleep;
and this, the running dream that follows stone
and fence wire, digging in
for what remains of snow-melt and the last
good rain, the low road
peopled with bone-white figures: not
the living, in this aftermath of grass,
and not the dead we mourn, in empty kirks
or quiet kitchens, halfway through the day,
but something like the absence of ourselves
from our own lives,
some other luck
that would not lead
to now.

---John Burnside.

With summer half on my mind, sun and the old Chinese clock still at the stroke of two. The winter of the heart an island of grief now. You lose track of where you've been. I try to recall a dream, the first moment of walking into a picture that is my home.  If memory could lock itself into this room...I fumble in my pocket for a chestnut I've saved for just such a moment, to remind myself. Safe-keeping, whilst all around me the light in the black & white photos dances, flares up, as if time's passing was in these silver frames.  My father's bright voice.  The unmistakable days, distinguished from all others. The swami, adding to the silence. The dougal's shoulder, wonky from carrying so many bags...

"What time do you have to get there?"

Three.

"But it's five to three now.."

Don't worry.

...

We traveled far, quiet in the back of the car, as we left snow country, bewildered by this move from the north.  There are many departures; not all are remembered.

The hard land we passed through, place names and histories glancing off the windows; thousand-year old churches, the loss of faith, steeples, oak trees, fences, empty parking lots, streaming by; the empty hours of morning, the talk of Rafi's death, the books we'd left behind, the foreign words we'd forgotten (but the dougal would reclaim). There was too much to take in, so we crouched and ate opal fruits; our mouths watering, our throats dry for lack of things to say. Don't stop, just keep going. It's only a journey, and don't look back or give it a second thought. The world spinning above our heads, as fleeting as the birds in a tree who were startled by our presence, our lack of belonging. But, but, through it all there was memory of deep time, left buried in snow country, of the lives and loves that would slant away from us, until free from us altogether, slipping from our outreached hands. 

...