Exupery, History and the French!

'Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable minds—Marc Bloch and Camus among them—thought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most had failed its makers. Certainly, one way of responding to the disaster was to search out some new set of abstractions, of overarching categories to replace those lost. But a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is. No one put this better than the heroic Bloch himself:

The first task of my trade (i.e. of the historian, but more broadly the humanist properly so called) consists in avoiding big-sounding abstract terms. Those who teach history should be continually concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract. In other words, it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate all their attention.'

---from Adam Gopnik's article in the New Yorker.

~~~

Of course, this isn't just France. What would academic economics be if it wasn't so abstract? And you wonder if the old idea of philosophy as guiding people how to live a good life isn't somehow lost in all the technicalities. Another game, at a higher level admittedly, but a game nevertheless. 

Is thinking, then, related to or dependent on the right way of seeing? On being at the right distance but also about knowing when to focus on the particular, the singular, and when generalizations are limited?  

strawberry sunday

A visit to a lovely small farm (one acre) on the outskirts of Lahore to gather some strawberries. There are some huge landowners in this country but the media size of farms is 3 or 4 acres. 

As you sat in the shade and Manzoor, who sat on his haunches, sorted the strawberries for us I couldn't but help notice his incredibly bony and elongated hands, as if they were extensions of his arms, his very personality. For how many years, you wondered, had he been planting and picking strawberries? For how many generations had his family been involved in agriculture, repeating the same gestures, the same body movements, over the same seasons so that they had been integrated into the style of his thinking, the fashion of his talking, his ideas of fate and freedom?

Given that agriculture has played such a large part in the history of the people in this region (and in world history, as well) you have to wonder just how the structures of ownership, the nature of production, leave their mark on the personality and character of the people involved. 

You can romanticize all you want about 'the land' and the peasants ability to accept reality, but if truth be told it's always been profoundly hierarchical, hasn't it? One can talk about the time of agriculture being antithetical to the time of capitalism (cycles of return vs linear time). But one surely has to remember just how constricting some of those circles could be..same old, same old.

A line from Graeber:

'The logic of identity is always entangled with the logic of hierarchy'.

Man, those strawberries sure did taste sweet. And you hope your strawberry jam and frozen yoghurt turn out well. But you can't but help think of those bent backs in the early morning, of the people who scratch out a living from a small piece of the earth, and who probably always will...

time is a journey, not a destination

222. A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.

223. This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

224. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness. History will perhaps judge the latter with the criterion set forth by Romano Guardini: “The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age”.

---The Pope.

the 60-second news

And if it rains in Hong Kong, so what?

A man would cut off his little finger rather than save the whole of China.

~~~

We're all connected now. I read about it somewhere. Six degrees or something. Or was that global warming? I am a citizen of the world-even though I can't afford a house in this part of the city. I've been to Italy and sampled the culture there..yes, it's true, the pizzas are much better there and the women prettier too(at least before they get married).

There's a famine in Africa. And capitalism is to blame. Or capitalism is the solution...I forget now. I am a sensitive soul, far too sensitive for this world if you ask me or my mother. I was just reading a review on empathy in the NYRB. I'll dig out the figures one day to prove to you bastards...I was trained as a theorist, which is why I can't tie my own shoelaces. In the so-called "real world" people without culture and pedigree irritate me. How they manage to talk to women or order food at a swanky restaurant, so un-selfconsciously, amazes me to this day. Art is my middle name though I can't get to see most of the nudes online due to some ridiculous censorship policy. Didn't Heidegger once say, in his late period: to dwell in the cave, far from the sun's light, is to feel cold?  

I have downloaded 10,000 books on my Nexus. I have lots of classical music stored...only the good stuff, like Mozart and Wagner. I saw the film version of both. Lots of riff-raff in those days.     
...

Franzen's krauss book is truly awful...or maybe it's just krauss. The mass of detail, footnotes and opinions can only be of interest to a scholar who has specialized in the period...which says a lot, I think, about scholarship and the idea of " periodization".

Franzen promises to redeem the work by saying how its narrow focus opens up issues that are relevant to our times...which is what we really want when you think about it. There's got to be a better way of doing this. Anyway, 80 pages in you're giving up.

Isn't blogging, though, just another symptom?

wood

'Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand or cloud
much better than real sea or sand or cloud
It chose that way to grow and not to move

..while the light goes around it
like a prowling animal..

It may be solid, may be hollow
But it can shelter what is within'

Wood: stable/unstable. The fragility of all that lasts.

The floorboards-for whatever reason-suggest a way of life.

~~~

Wooden floors-especially patterned wooden floors-will always remind you of school, of assembly where you pretended to sing the psalms and the long corridors that held the extremes of silence and noise at different times of the day. What you remember of school is the wood and the long windows..and the light that related one to the other.  A story, in glass and wood, is the human heart.

Wood suggests a strange kind of authority. 

Wood, keeps handprints, footmarks, smudges, screeches, all the signs of touch in fact, for a lot longer than expected. We retreat into the woods. People engrave a heart or a name into the surface of wood. "I was here", to match wood's eloquent presence.  But it is only the surface. Wood shines darkly. The concentric years continue. You go against the grain, imagining centre.

Wood survived the fire (Kyoto). Wood is the fire.

---

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

the future that never was

For those of you who were hooked to Star Trek, Space 1999 and others, there's this brilliant piece:

http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars

'My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens.'

~~~

The end of the (American) dream: work hard, play hard; respect and decency; trust in institutions; a sense of stable values: everyone knows their place (women, especially); God is in His high heaven. Science and technology will, inevitably lead to progress. If time is linear then we will move on ("stages of growth"..from material to the spiritual, in some versions). A belief that freedom and democracy will eventually triumph, superstition and tyranny will collapse (since falsehood by its very nature is perishable). 

There will be new things, new wonders. We will be startled by the future and our own opulence. The "economic problem," Keynes said, would have been solved. 

And yet, the odd thing is that in popular culture at least there's a strange fascination for apocalyptic or post-apocalyptical narratives, a wish for it to all end (maybe out of exhaustion?). The idea that we'd "get there" in the end loses its appeal when we're not even sure of what "getting there" or "success" means. Like modern-day Eloi, we're bored stiff (Simmel: blase). 

The end of the 'space age' is symbolic of that spectacular failure of imagination. But could it have been that what was imagined wasn't that great in the first place, that our dreams were tarnished, impoverished, not fundamentally different from those of a peasant? The poverty of our imagination. The dream of freedom is given shape by the former constraints that it aspires to escape from. What kind of forward dreaming, what "ifs", without the divine? Gagarin gets there and says: "there's no god here"

The poor man's son parable by Adam Smith. You get what your heart desires and suddenly realize, perhaps too late, that it isn't all it was cracked up to be; it's just cracked. 

But if there's no forward momentum to time now (there is only "now") then where does that leave us? Nostalgia for some pure past, before civilization: the tribe, the race, 'home'...the past that never really was?

Can we ever get over the importance of myths in structuring our reality? We need a story...In the beginning...(you can't understand anyone without a story, which is why, I suppose, blogging doesn't connect you to readers). 

Against all this simulation, "virtuality", the screen savers, the computer wizards, the online addictions, "updates", "instant access" (to what, precisely), is war the only real thing? Is violence-as Mailer once asked-the only way of reassuring oneself of one's status as a being (animal or otherwise)and not an automaton, nor merely part of a declining phase of history? Nihilism: "I" against "I".

The future wasn't true, nor was the past. In fact, hasn't the whole notion of truth been banished? If there is only 'sovereign becoming'-and "process" is,as Hannah informs us-a key word to unlock the century-then who is the person who can stand apart from it and say "is" or "I"?   

~~~

C. Booker wrote about how the seventies was the last decade, the time when people realized nothing new was going to happen, just be rehashed into new forms (montage, cut and paste). The retro decade. Also, the beginning of conservatism (political, ecological..fundamentalism and nationalism). The end of stories: the big picture is that there is no big picture.

...

"..a historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation and pastiche..."    

common worlds

"But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic, unprofitable, businesses is inevitable..But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that binds us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost"
---Bowley.

~~~

"First like this, then like that," she said, but in the fluttering of an eyelid  she was gone.

Ask eye to see its own eyelashes 
(Chinese proverb)

~~~

What remains to be said, remains to be said. 

Do I only imagine that I once had a country, a language, a word for each thing.  When the child was a child he pointed to the cupboard. "What is it, now!" But with time they realized the child only wanted a cube of sugar. With time we know each other without words, with the simple common gestures we share, such as the pointing to what we need or like. It takes love and time to achieve silence. Someone only has to describe a picture of someone I know in a minimum of words and the image is clear and bright in my mind. 

I am often mistaken for someone else. I, too, often make the same mistake.

What happens with the disappearance of a way of life, a way, a path, a vantage point? What trace of shared times, which gestures survives and are passed down without our knowing? Faith, today, in your smile...Today, there is no time for the other, just the insistence on our lack of essence, the dull acceptance of the fact-or so we are told-that we are lost. 

How to find one's way back? We stand, backs up against the future, averting our eyes.  Some clearing, bright-hearted, always there. Plenty Coups, faced with the inevitable is thrown a lifeline to the unimaginable, and it comes to him in a dream. Are dreams and sleep the last routes out? 

The past is a thick book full of sliding photographs.  There is no country, no religion, no race or tribe.  There is an understanding that alone, together, we fall.

~~~

We are drunken ecstatics who have let our hearts
Go to the wild.  We are musty scholars
Of love, and old friends of the wine cup.

(transl. Robert Bly)

This door is the mouth of love,
Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop.
Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold,
Swept up at every meeting,
Scattered at every leavetaking,
Living at the edge of inside and out,
Like a kiss.

a cat is never on the side of power.
---Chris Marker.

I think we enter this place, a university, a home, a museum, a random building to forget or lose ourselves, to step out of the grey rain that takes something away from us. We enter into contracts not sure of who we are. A page, a line, a word from a book catches your eye and it gives you immense pleasure to see the page number has been marked before with a diagonal. The human mind and the human heart returns again and again, unbidden, to something familiar.

There is the possibility of changing one's voice, of squinting to keep the world out, the lower key and imagined gentleness...

'a greeting,
As gentle and as loving as I can make it
To you, today, beyond all changing days.'

It exists, shadow-like, like religion in the desert of the pagans, like a reflection in the water that recomposes itself in stillness, like a token, a ticket one is handed at a park or amusement arcade, but it does exist.

There is this longing for home (a, our); there is memory of the slowness of time somewhere, bundled in some forgotten corner of the house.

The late afternoon sun is in our faces. There is an image, a final image that sobers me up, makes me pause and that I cannot face.  It catches my throat-and already by saying "my"I have said too much. What weight there is will always be with us.  We will always be here, no matter how wide our travels, how deep our reading. 

We take a step in, thinking we can avoid the structure of the world only to see it replicated.  But there are other rooms. You wait, as if patience was the last of your virtues. Someone with a veined hand-Swami or Ubo-turns the handle and opens the simple door and you hold on to what you already knew.

1706

'S rejected the 'cavils of philosophy' in his own time with its quixotic search for analytic precision in domains far from moral concern and, in any case, where precision was far from attainable. Thus, Rene Descartes was of much less interest to S as a sceptic than as a deluded seeker after certainty...

S had a pragmatic side which dismissed the possibility that human feelings and thoughts might not have a relation to a determinate reality.

...

A humanity prior to society was simply inconceivable if one insisted on natural human sociability...For S, humans were always already social, immersed in society, culture and history.'

"I take my being upon trust"

~~~

There is a great deal of mistrust in the world. For language, other human beings (more specifically: men and women, the 'religious' and non-religious), of the individual mind's capacity to know; mistrust of professionals, experts, politicians, bankers, the media. And yet, things go on, miraculously.

To have such trust in one's senses and in the world and other human beings is today to stand accused of being naive and unsophisticated. One must doubt everything-and the more enthusiastically so the better! Debunk, trash, ridicule, mock, critique, break down, summarize or see everything through the prism of history or the personal. Nothing must be allowed to stand-not the social and certainly not religion, nothing except for the isolated individual. What, then, of common sense, of the sense of the common? 

Nowhere near

There is nowhere near enough time or space in my heart to explain what I'm feeling. There is no forever, just this brief, momentary glimpse, temporarily kept in the iron grid of our memories and hopes. There is autumn, always autumn, and we carry it with us. There are times when we recognize, must..there is no way of saying, no way of understanding. Poetry is a conceit, the rest so much childish games. 

...

There is an apple tree but the fruit too sweet, or too bitter to eat. Much of it falls to the ground, frost-starred. We play cricket together, re-living our childhood for a short while, but already there is a chill in the air and an uninvited guest at the door...

We laugh, laugh heartily. That was our mistake. Not that it matters, either way.  Draw yourself down to some fundamental simplicity or open yourself up.The nowhere, near, crosses our path.

~~~

Thank you for your comment, Roxana. I will try and respond here. When Berger writes:

"The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentially of holding with words the totality of human experience-everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot b hostile to man."

I'm sceptical.

First off, I don't have many fixed views and I think it's important to change or at least think again with time.

But I still think that for large swathes of experience words are adequate to their task-or the gap between the word and the thing itself is not something to fret about. We may always see through a dark glassly. I think there is a time to accept ourselves as we are-and more importantly, to accept others as there are. There is a danger, in my opinion, of "perfection" (assuming words or people must be a perfect match, must capture everything). The thing-in-itself..what is that? I think there is, with me, always a "muslim sensibility" that not everything can or should be 'named' as well a sort of aniconic perspective which always makes one cautious of mistaking the image for reality.

I think I've also written a lot about trust/tawakuul, about how difficult it is to live with those gaps in our understanding, and with our own finitude. The gaps in which we say "if" or "what if". There will always be a longing for elsewhere, for something that doesn't fade and fall. I think our love and loves are divided that way. This, to me, also seems like an essential part of human experience (Mir: the song of joy and sorrow is always with us). And Denise: the world is never with us enough..but also sometimes it is too much with us.

When it comes to certain experiences, events, I think words are inadequate. In front of a great work of art or music one is moved, speechless In extreme sadness, grief, and in disasters or catastrophes words too seem a pale shadow (though images and music may get closer).  I did write "there are times..." and it is sometimes a terrible necessity.

All of this does sound terribly confused. There is a proper love of the world and a proper desire to escape from it, I guess (which suggests there are improper forms). I think we will always look through the dark windows, back on our lives and 'out there', too. What we see may be blurred and indistinct but the longing for clarity is true. I think we will always be torn and there will always be this cross, which cannot be described. 

Fifth Monarchy

The cat's eyes glinting in the morning like broken glass, like trash left on the street from the night before. How much passes between night and day...

The false notes accumulate, making a strange sounding tune. A life lived without rigour or discipline is always susceptible of having those things imposed on it. There is a ' looseness' that originates from a particular kind of temperament; and there is another that comes from much wondering, displacement, and falling back on some default mode of decision making so that one's life resembles a hotch potch of isolated and arbitrary events, stitched together without a text or true image to refer to.

The fascination with Geneva, 1541. That someone could be whipped for having two slices of bread instead of one. There is something fanatical in human nature, like a big, thick black line drawn to negate our words.

balance

And everything that is now already existed then, but

                  in condensed form.

Our days already existed and our hearts...

And the moment when I met you may also have existed...

---Zagajewski

I dreamt of London last night. The familiar back streets around Tottenham Court Road, the old pubs with their glazed windows and smoke-filled interiors, their dense laughter and indelible sense of being out of time. I took many detours and the words "move on" were spoken to me. The need to forget London, lest it become another idol of my days, became apparent. But behind all the diversions, the straying and wandering, there was the uncanny feeling that there was a bright red road to the heart of things and that this road or street would cut out all the inessential-as if to say: there is a central way to a woman's heart.

~~~

The loss of critical reasoning. We are driven by hatreds and gloss them in the form of reasons, ideology, measured statements. But perhaps the truth of the matter is that we've always derived a kind of pleasure from hating, from seeing or imagining absolute difference. Women or Jews, Muslims or gays. Part of us desires this wild imbalance, the decisiveness and surety that comes from excluding complexity. Love and religion, on the other hand, are full of doubt and tentativeness. Unless, of course, they become obsessive, unbalanced, unmoored-in which case they take up and give shape to that aspect of human nature. A not uncommon feature of our history, no doubt.

There's something shrill about the voice of H. Ali and Fallacci (whose Interview with History is a fascinating book). As if to say courage could only be a result of a strong will, of facing the enemy. Do we, today, have the ability to look eachother in the eye and recognize another human face, or are we appalled by the stench of other human beings?

And yet people continue to live on without any deep awareness of the disaster that was the 20th century, a century of violence and war on an unprecedented scale. This ancient chaos, blood-lust, never lost or totally submerged, has always existed. 

Is there another from of reasoning that doesn't discriminate but that includes, that can say with sincerity: "what is good for us?", that can find a hitherto unseen angle between us?

'Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but actually love a fair amount of contingency and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak themselves on that account...'

The 1 %

“Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution,” declared Robert Lucas Jr. of the University of Chicago, the most influential macroeconomist of his generation, in 2004.
---Krugman.

Reading Piketty's very engaging Capital. (If you want a soft copy just drop me a line. There's also a very good summary by Krugman in the NYRB).

Well, I think Krugman is right here. Inequality and distribution is a marginal issue in standard neo-classical econ where the main emphasis is on efficiency. To the extent that inequality is discussed it is usually in instrumental terms: to what extent and in which direction does income inequality effect income growth? That lack of interest is, I suspect, partly down to ideological reasons but also partly because of an assumption that over time things will even out (Kuznets). Another way of saying that is that the neo-classical framework posits that over time there will be a "convergence" so that each country, given the same "parameters" will grow at the same rate. 

Of course, there are empirical and theoretical objections to this view of history. But the main point is, to my mind at least, that 'welfare economics' and, more generally, questions of fairness, distribution and justice are out of bounds to the "positive" discipline of economics. What that means, effectively, is that we do not look at the "evaluative space" (i.e. what do we mean by 'goodness') -or we do so in a particularly narrow way (satisfaction of one's preferences is good)-and we ignore questions of aggregation (or take it for granted that the Pareto principle is the only way to 'aggregate'). 

This lack of perspective is crucial when it comes to the environment ad climate change where Utilitarianism-the dominant approach-is woefully inadequate. 

But why this amnesia? Could it simply be the idea that inequality would be a spur to growth so that even the poor in an unequal society would be better off than they would have been in a poorer but more egalitarian society? Inequality ceases to matter according to this view. Or is it, alternatively, the view that inequalities actually decline in market societies (compared to the inequalities and deep hierarchies in feudal societies and developing countries this seems intuitively appealing).

What is missing is the way in which different types of inequalities interact (is there a cluster of disadvantage, for example?). How do inequalities in gender, power, nutritional status, say, interact with inequalities in income and assets? These, to me, seem to be crucial but immensely difficult issues. And what happens to inequalities over time? By what process are they exacerbated or diminished (here one would have to take on board the connections between markets and democratic political systems).

not-110-A

'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.

This is not 110-A but what it might have looked like with time, or what it looks like in translation, through another's eyes, in another part of the world. Who lives there but a poet, or a shabby drunk, out of sorts with the times he's living in. 

Someone writes and I hone in on one word, slightly out of place, because one word can reveal a whole personality when there's nothing else to go on, and when nothing else will go on (a trick picked up from Columbo in case you were wondering).

To be desired-not for what you are, but that you are...that seems a form of recognition, awareness, or serious playfulness that makes us human (what does a snail desire..okay, okay, cheap attempt to get Lea to comment). A humanism older than the Renaissance, older than religion. The light changes, something grows in the shadows, a book falls from the shelf on to a thick rug. The world behind the windows, the world that slips from our hands. You pick it up, as if to think fate itself would find the word, realign what went askew for all those years...He saw his life halting in the pages of an open book.

What manner of living is this? What measure does your soul comprehend?

I wanted to learn you by heart
There was only time
for the opening measures.

"Entertain me!" she said. Has my life been anything else? (Incidentally, not the first person to utter these words..it is written on my forehead, I suppose).

110-A has gone, a memory of white spring and lemon trees and cane chairs in the verandah set at the right angle to the sun.  Each home lives on in us, reminding us of what we're not. We have no more possessions and our relationships, too, seem ghost-like and insubstantial. It is like looking in a mirror and seeing only yourself. My hand matches your hand-at least in its style. Some fundamental gesture is taken from us for no reason. But, every so often the light will return, pitch its tent...this old sunlight on our back, warm and generous descends and unloosens us, undoes a few top buttons. Most of your dark hair is swept back but some  rests and curls on bare skin and you, too, find you are divided, split.  

What binds us if not physicality: a band of iron, a house...A house, the circle of our heart. There were no landscapes except for this one, the inner world we faintly knew, reflected on shining dark windows, growing in density with each passing year.  All stories in this house are the same-no matter where they take place. Only different people step into the same character types, speaking the same words with foreign accents: a 'K' becomes a 'R', softer, gentler. There only ever was oneness and otherness. 

Is to become smaller, less oneself, also a way of being?

'the strawness of straw, the humanness of the human, is their divinity'

(picture by Roxana; words by Denise)

The Phenomenon of Life

I've lost my copy of Jonas's brilliant Phenomenon of Life and only vaguely recall some of his dazzling insights/explorations. I'm a bit slow that way. What struck you was the idea of continuity-perhaps one of intelligence-between plants and animals. This goes back to a shamanistic understanding of life that sees and values 'connectedness' over discontinuity and autonomy. If human beings are at the centre of existence (an unfashionable claim in these deflationary times)then they are linked to all else that exists; alternatively, if we are on the 'circumference' of life, representing its greatest extension into the unknown, then we also carry the notion of 'centre' with us. As what? Impulse, memory, myth?

Oliver Sacks writing-wonderfully as ever-has this to say:

For Darwin, the ability to modulate responses indicated “the presence of a mind of some kind.” He also wrote of the “mental qualities” of worms in relation to their plugging up their burrows, noting that “if worms are able to judge…having drawn an object close to the mouths of their burrows, how best to drag it in, they must acquire some notion of its general shape.” This moved him to argue that worms “deserve to be called intelligent, for they then act in nearly the same manner as a man under similar circumstances.”

Greenlaw

'His men gather him up.
He must play his part in the pranks and pleasures to come.
The day, the night will be long.
He who takes flight without thought
Has to haul out of himself each word, each gesture
As love spreads through him like lime through feathers
And settles its weight.'
---Lavinia Greenlaw.

The green law, inescapable. The law of what is lost, of what arrives too late to take root. What is fixed will break. What is in the books will be forgotten, more or less.

By what ancient ruling is green the colour of envy? In the law of distribution who is to say who gets what? There is something obscure and maybe obscene-in the "why" of it as well.

and our faces, our hearts, as brief as time

If home is our origin then home is our final longing as well.

You grew up all at sea, almost living in one large room, flooded with light, the golden light falling darkly from outside...one room and one story. A corner house, living in two worlds. And now? And now you live in many rooms, drawn to many varied stories...

The Dougal and I were crippled or paralyzed, I suppose, by too much love and a slow, provincial kind of life. Small-time people. All the old houses in our street had dark stairs. Now time seems only to move forward, a new kind of mystery into which you have not been initiated. Much of your life has been lived turning away. A path that is always walked on ceases to be a path. Nothing has been negotiated and yet it seems that so much has been settled. It is a wise man or woman who can accept the limits of their lives; only a saint can live without boundaries.

When one looks at a tree one is amazed to think that part of it lives "half in darkness". From a certain perspective all is continuity; from another the branches and leaves have taken many detours, are at a wide angle to the core, and the forgotten roots. To live in the open is not the same as living in the shade...I almost wrote love.

all the while

you are indwelling,
a gold ring lost in the house.

The curve of your life must return to what it's always known, some centre that has been lost, to what's always been prefigured but never grown and taken shape. That first light that is now a memory, locked and with the key missing. Stairways, corridors, hallways known only to the host. Resident? Date of arrival? Last port of call? Have you suffered...

A long cupboard mirror behind which we found an ancient camera. The early part of the century still lived on in a shadowed life throughout the house, even without its rightful owners. The mirror, there in its solitude, that knew you better than you knew yourself. We interpret eachother. 

And now some "obscure directions", N by NW. There are no guide books, just the blind groping for a second chance, some deep impulse carried within that tells you you're lost. Write it down, slant, garbled:

You have come to the shore
There are no instructions.

What angel carried me thus far. Like a ghost I have lived many lives, all incomplete. Human experience whittled down to a bone, a random string of quotations, lives in parenthesis. 

[..]
]
[
fall
[]


Gulp and take the sting, the nettles enclosing our hearts. Brief, brief though it was there was no understanding. And I wonder to myself, like a muslim wavering on belief and disbelief, 

What magical denial
shall my life utter
to bring itself forth?

As you read this, dark pages are turning within me. If you find the word whisper it to me, as you once did when we were children.

(words by Denise)

pixelation nation

"The new American dream is to build a really (cool) personal brand, and the result of all that tap dancing on all those individual platforms is a pervasive kind of narrative decadence. We race to consume and regurgitate the hour's large and small events for each other like patricians in a postmodern vomitorium -- to know them first, translate them into bitter capsule form fastest, and be shocked or stirred or perceived as in any way less than totally savvy about these things the least. Even within our self-contained realities we become dulled to what's real and what's not, and further desensitized to what lies behind our fellow performers' virtual scrims."
---Michelle Orange.

The way of the future: 24/7; a blank, block of time, broken down into bits but with each moment blurring into the other.  We move through time (or it moves through us); it is there as a constraint ("time is money"), something to be overcome, never integrated into anything deeper in our lives than shopping, consumption or staging ourselves. 

Average number of hours slept by an American:

1900: 10.5 hours
1950: 8 hours
2000: 6.5 hours.

We are supposed to be "all there"...even when asleep we're floating just under the radar..the slick movement of the hand following the eye in a friction-less world. "The sleep of reason brings forth..."

The ancient alignment of the body with the rhythms of our Earth. The seasons, replaced by dry-as-dust abstractions, pleasures that offer no repose or replenishment.

Bertie:

'Whatever we may think, we are creatures of Earth, and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are essential to it as summer and spring, the rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more to than the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted throughout the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter....

Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of this contact with the Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what....
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.