Revolutionary Road

What is the road out of life that is not a road? Is there a way of living that is not a 'road', a way that is not full of distances, longing, homecomings?

The long road back, away from the heart; the long road back to the heart.

The pure, shadow-less road, revolutionary in its openness.

This is the street on the day Man first landed on the moon. The earth became the moon, and man himself carried the memory with him. "There is no God here", said Gagarin and when he came back he found it was true.  

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When it is asked of society, of science or the market: is it capable of satisfying all the complex needs of the human spirit? one does not need to answer; the question is enough.

What sort of knowledge would you have? This is not a shop where you can pick and choose! But, assorted, I guess.

Galileo saw the universe through the lens but not a world.
Tot semblava un mor en flor,i l'anima n'era jo

We live in diverse, divided and distinguished worlds, me & you.
(Whoever doubts this would be well advised to read this blog).

'We want to experience reality in all its rich multiplicity, instead of being condemned by the modern consciousness to go on:

Viewing all objects, unremittingly
In disconnection dead and spiritless.'

'The capacity to live in divided and distinguished worlds, and to pass freely to and fro between one and the other., to be capable of many and varied responses to experiences...'

Yeah, like, whatever.

'I think that something of the peculiar quality of the 'metaphysical' mind is due to this fact of its not being finally committed to any one world.' 

A thought is an experience and modifies our sensibility. Today, thought does not exist because it will be forgotten tomorrow: Je suis Charlie...

'To recover something of his own inclusiveness, in virtue of which his juxtapositions are not quaint, but symbols of his complex vision.'

'Nothing, he seems to feel, has been completely said until it has been given richness and intellectual content by the far-sought word, and then 'proved upon our pulses' with the simpler one.'

To the theoretical mind the mind is 'set', exploring subtlety and nuances at the cost of truth...a false kind of cleverness that is compelled to say everything and bring every detail to the surface or, if that fails, to reduce it to a esoteric formula or equation that can be cashed in later.

"I am a theoretician" a colleague once haughtily proclaimed. But a theory of what, precisely? Theoria, which once pertained to higher things, is now wheeled out on request or demand at the drop of a hat: we now have a theory of everything, which is to say: (of) nothing.

(quotations: Basil Willey)

For Tom:

I see it now-this world swiftly passing.

---Karna.

'Human life is like a day in the existence of the world'
---K. Irby.

~~~

I could have walked alone, cutting through Cassiobury park, aimlessly finding the right direction, between the great oaks, past the mini-golf course-where one could still hear children's laughter- and down, down to the broken wooden fences. To tramp for an hour further down in the peaceful streets illuminated by a Sunday light that returned a certain capaciousness to the world, a world of (second)spaces and easy-going forgetfulness because time had no meaning here. Not a dreary Sunday afternoon,an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year, but a Sunday full of dread nevertheless.

A picked me up and we drove back to the Drive to pick up Mick. "I'd rather not go in. It's too painful." We have no words for death or loss; art, asceticism, intoxication, are finally shown up to be the threadbare consolations they are. 

You don't want to to give in to Larkin's 'no better whined at than withstood' or to think that life is no more than a ring thrown into a desert. There seems to be no "spirtualization" of this moment: what has time ever been but this brokenness? 

The swami, her sister, said I want to burn all our photographs, because this is not me. With what excitement we posed for them in our youth, with what grace and unknowingness we would hold our heads, our face, bright and clear for the world to see.

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.

Stitch, stitch it together with borrowed words. What bleak skill is this! And how we miss the mark, the sign and scar that was always with us.

the way of the future?

An interesting piece in today's Guardian on Lester Brown. His book, Empty Plates, is online.

No one wants to talk about it, but is our (I say "our" out of politeness) addiction to change, growth and technological fixes actually leading us down a blind alley? If technology and markets are the problem how can technology and markets be the solution?

Have previous civilisations collapsed because of greed, "environmental ignorance" (Jane Jacobs, citing Jared Diamond). an old (Qur'anic and Greek?) theme: the inability accept limits leads to hubris and disaster, results in limits being imposed on us by reality.

The old idea of 'control' has gone; we're now talking about survival. 

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world 
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.

~~~

It's nice to go back to Basil Willey's 17th century background, partly because his style of writing exudes a kind of self-assurance and trust in words that is rare nowadays; partly because his style of reasoning is more open than one would typically encounter at the machine that goes by the name of 'the university'.

The quiet confidence of someone writing in 1933, before it would all fall apart, almost unaware of what the future might hold in store. Is that very different from our situation today?

We think we know the facts when it may simply be that a line of reasoning resonates with our prior, unexamined assumptions. Reason and science, for example, make headway against an outdated mode-or so we're led to believe-of thinking and being in the world, one that allows for a reverence for what is only dimly understood, a space for the tangible, felt qualities of reality. 

Reason as away of organizing experience. Of course, we're never permitted to ask whether it also destroys experience.

'I've increasingly been certain, as I've grown older, that it's good to be very consciously a remainder of the past, one who still survives from another time, one through whom roots still go far back, and not necessarily examined roots. I'm aware of the tremendous privilege of coming from certain traditions, and of having been deeply imbued by them.'

--Illich.

'To an enjoy an unorganized earth, and one that cannot be organized within a future.'

That's a beautiful, glimmering thought. 

~~

It is a beautiful Spring day and the wind blows through the light, disperses it like fragile chains..the light that holds, like a stylish undergarment revealed with the swaying of the body. 

This light is so very old and you marvel to think how it returns, how it has fallen on other lives and will continue to do so when we're gone. The swerve, the return of angles, faces grown softer with time, seen in the right light. 

There are a few students, bare-armed, flowing hair, with the unique look of those who are alive at this precise moment, minds unclouded by too much recognition; others, with less of a future to look forward to, look on from their high windows, past the useless library-words won't suffice today-down on this scene of passing beauty, the spread lawns, the fluttering leaves, wondering how it is that we manage to weave in and out of time, and what strange turn our lives can take.

This old sunshine, today, is freer, less burdened by fidelity to repetition and ritual. The light, for once. Remember the colours, and drift where you will. A stray reflection, late on: you want these days to stay a while, to speak without quotes or speculation...

'Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before'

Freedom breaking out of structure is a moment in your heart...and, then, a moment remembered.

White, fall.
like a spell.
Erase my name now,
from your still heart

In the time that remains (or: a late style of thinking)

'There were the lonely fortified monasteries, like little arks floating and keeping the adventure of consciousness afloat. The brave souls, the monks and bishops who carried the soul and spirit of man, unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages.'

---Lawrence.

~~~ ~~ ~

In the time that remains, the last days, what possibility is there for sound thought, for thinking straight?

It is difficult to not believe that the frenetic attempts to store everything, make an accurate record of what we stood for-the vast citadels of the printed word, the genome project, the Eden centres, the clouds that would hold every image, every word we ever spoke-is in reality a sign that, deep down, there's a bleak acceptance that we're sunk, without the skills or even the desire, maybe, to carry on.

Not the barbarian hordes with their black flags but us, it was us all along, the modern-day nomads with no sense of home (this idea of nomads being homeless is itself a modern myth..(Hugh Brody))unleashing forces we would little understand.

Wasn't this the very idea of techne? How to control, manipulate, without understanding? From now on we would act in nature, and after me the deluge..

And didn't that sensibility (or lack of sensibility) ultimately derive from, or co-exist with, a view of nature as dead matter, pure extension, and a notion of a High, abstract God, a divine, transcendental power? Newton's God, as Blake might say. 

Force, power, mechanism..that's all that's left to us, the only rigour and objectivity we can imagine or muster; it's either that or the random play of an arbitrary will. From now on, life is either a mathematical discipline subject to cold, irrevocable laws or it is a realm of "pure" freedom, a game. 

What is state power but the administration of things? People and nature must become things, statistics (stat-istics)in order that the state harness their productive power. Creativity and innovation are just another form of energy to be tapped. Since we never studied history never was it understood that this very same power would escape us and, worse, turn (its) back on us. 

The Red Man had warned us, of course: What goes around, comes around.

And we're back to our old Gnosticism if we keep both views in mind simultaneously: the divine spark within resisting the prison it finds itself in. 

~~~

Discussions about the appropriate discount rate may not be the most salient feature of climate change. Certainly Stern-your old teacher-is correct to call it an "ethical parameter" (to think that mathematics is independent of us is part of the problem). But why should we care about future generations anyway and can we, given that so much of our thinking is concentrated on ourselves and the short-term? Capitalism, with its valorization of speed and its desire to break-up any continuous narrative, anything that reeks of durability, continuity, itself makes it harder for us to imagine the interests of future generations will be of any relevance since they're likely to be too different from us.

The problem of future generations may be analogous to our own relation to our future selves, as Hazlitt clearly saw. Without a sense of belonging to a "continuous moral community" (Baier)why should we bother?

To put it in Scheffler's terms: a desire for things to continue after we've gone, the sense of an 'afterlife', crucially depends on future generations furthering projects that we hold to be deer; on the other hand, can we really give consideration to the furthering of future generations' abstract or formal freedom to pursue whatever they want, or to their well-being without thinking of what the substance of that well-being might be?

In other words, do we want 'other words' and other worlds to carry on out of some vague and fuzzy sense of solidarity with the human species or in the hope that at least if someone survives there will be the possibility that someone amongst them might light the candle again (when the evidence of the last century, at least, makes you wonder whether it is such a good thing that humans survive..after all, soap was made out of human beings in the Camps).

Who or what will survive and what kind of institutions will develop out of the rubble? These are the kinds of questions people are seriously asking. From the economics point of view Weitzman may be correct: the most salient feature of climate change may be the uncertainty surrounding it (what an earlier IPCC called a "Cascade of uncerainity"), the "fat tails": we may simply not know what kinds of systems will emerge. There is, some say, a 5% of catastrophe. It ain't looking good. As Khayyam would say: in the time that remains: drink up!  

dark materials

 The honourable, the venerable and esteemed chancellor of vice sent us these nuggets of wisdom from deep within his fortified ivory tower:

'The quantification of the humanities is driven by an inexorable logic: digitization breeds numbers; numbers demand statistics.'

--New York Times.

(And I thought the British press was crap) 

In case you missed it, here's the dope:

'A vast enterprise that aims to digitize our cultural heritage, put it online for all to see...the transformation of the humanities into a science.'

But could there be another logic at play here, one that has totally escaped us?

'The digital humanities have captured the imaginations of funders and university administrators.'

Now you're talking, amigo.

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'In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public...

It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.'

But when did it begin, this idea that profit is the only measure of worth? Where did this mean spirit come from? Chicago, Kirkcaldy? What is it but 

'the tendency to look for extreme solutions, absolute truths, abstract answers. All fanatics and fundamentalists share this tendency,...'

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Andre Gorz:

Commodity City (and the Malady of Islam)

'In the light of adverse politics and history, the surprise is not that modernity has been a tortuous experience for some Muslims, but that it has been adopted so widely and with such success.'
---C de Bellaigue.

After every barbaric act of violence one hears the usual calls, made in exasperation, one senses: when will Islam modernize, when will it have its Reformation, Enlightenment, etc., etc.

Over the last week Pierre ('Nomadics') has posted excerpts from the fascinating 'Malady of Islam'. It is hard not to agree that something is seriously wrong and that there is, in many quarters, the growth of conservatism, fundamentalism and extremism. It is also true to say that there's a political failure and in terms of economies and culture, too, there's nothing very positive to write home about. 

It is worth asking, therefore, what's gone wrong and to look at internal factors (including narrow readings of texts) for the decline independently of 'external factors' such as colonialism. One needs a cool and detached mind to do so and in an antagonistic climate, an age that is dominated by sound bytes, such reflection is unlikely to be forthcoming. Among the 'internal factors' one might, a la Gellner, look at urbanization, education, etc.

But the thing to note-and it's something that is never commented upon, for obvious reasons-is that lots of Muslims are already modern (which, incidentally, means that they also, now and then, struggle with modernity)without caring to call themselves modern.

You know, people fuck, fuck people over, laugh, work hard, read poetry,...to state the bleedin' obvious!

So, for example, to take one startling fact: in the land of the pure-unlike "democratic" India- most people vote for secular parties and not extremists. Totally corrupt, decadent and useless, but secular nevertheless. 

so, yeah, there's a need to "sweep your own backyard" as Meddeb says. Does that mean that 'the west' should also seriously think about the relation between modernity and mass violence (the Camps, the Trenches, the Gulags, the Bomb)? Ain't gonna happen, bro'.

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'Human activities, free from economic rationality, are at one with the time, movement and rhythm of life.'

--A. Gorz.

Think of all that plastic rubbish-trinkets and baubles-floating across southern seas, brought to you by a one-click, one-movement of your finger, a one tick of your mind, the desire welling up in you from god knows where and god knows which god. 

What is the shallowness of modern life but the weight of material things?

In the beginning man had infinite wants and limited resources. If that is true you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out you're sunk. But, of course, it's not a truth of human nature (the cynics today would add: there is no human nature). Instead, scarcity is, ironically, wheeled in in the face of opulence to keep the machine going since to talk of determinate needs- established by societal norms or ethical standards or religious values, or consistent with a picture of what it is to be a human being-is to introduce the possibility of self-limitation, which itself implies autonomy from a system that churns out endless desires and anxieties.

Enough is never enough. The american dream: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness! God forbid if we were ever to find happiness!

Austerity: finding joy in limitation, in a small-scale key. 

If we live in linear time then we are at a loss for words. Our accounting mentality means we count our losses. Of course, it's actually now worse than a linear view of progress since time itself is broken up, "atomized" and continuity or duration disbanded and denigrated so that fashion and innovation-the shock of the new-can create the space in which even more junk and profits can accumulate.

...

To connect the dots: there's a sneaking suspicion that at least part of the suspicion towards Islam (or religion in general)resides in its radical critique of capitalism and the capitalist mentality-which is to say, religion has always offered the resources or possibility of a stand against a system that has such a deleterious impact on human values and the environment (and the notion that these two can be separated is, ultimately, one of the root problems). There is no pure disembodied 'I' opposed to an empirical self: we are what we make of ourselves, here and now..and what we make includes what we give of ourselves, and how we connect with what is given to us.

Other beings are, to use an Islamic phrase, 'communities like us'. To say 'being' is already a step against the mechanical and instrumental view of nature. 

Offshore

To live in a dim world, the light on the wood dark with age. To exist for large periods of time in a way in which one's life is unknown, testing the waters for their depths, sensing the ancient forces of the earth in the pull and flow of the Thames. The lost rivers, gravitational moorings, thick lights colliding in the night like 'metal coffins'. 

To survive catastrophe, destruction and eke out a living, some pattern, in the heart of the day. To rest with one's head on the pillow at night and not be full of anxiety. Your hand unclenched, the inner wrist of certainty, the gentle folding of clothes and their placing in a cupboard an act that tilts life on earth to order and regularity.

There is something precise in the writing, something half-submerged in the way in which the words are arranged. A word is put down and two paragraphs later its shadow will emerge. The clear, calm voice of England. That's not something one might hear in a Bellow or a Roth or an Updike. There's also a tremendous sense of sympathy which comes across as natural, controlled, measured. Nothing seems superfluous. Someone, writing of her short stories, called them little gems, highly polished, cut stones. That is true. But one could also think of brief sketches made in watercolour. What remains, after all this time, except the same fundamental human gestures? The gifts we receive in the early morning light, coming to us from God knows what shore...

'She works every inch of her canvas. Her minor characters are as fully realized as her major ones. She is a novelist who watches over the fall of each sparrow...always reminding the reader of the ability of her characters to pursue independent lives behind the scenes, and their offstage activities are as important as those that are performed in public view.'

'The point of view of an amused, highly intelligent, and supremely charitable god.'

---J. Raban

No deep habits of the soul, no profound insights; no recognizable gestures, no clarity in the fullness of time. Instead, the Sanskrit heart says, Not this, not that, looks out and observes the distances, the lengthening and shortening of the shadows, the drift of the world, day by day.

Mirror, mirror

'The sight at any moment
is as complete as the human heart is.'
---K. Irby?

In the mirror of our lives words are lost in translation. Over time the silver inherits the black. In winter we sit around fires, our bewilderment increasing by the day. Hands bear the true sense of loss..

We grow into the image we have of ourselves, Iris said, meaning picture, meaning not the word.

'I mean: we are human. Human is not 
to be something we know, but to be as the Jews say God
must be, without an image. What happens takes no 
care for how we look, what part we take,
or whether we can. Something there is will be.
Caress me, be kind. We have no history.'

A word in translation is the thing: the strangeness that lives on in our heart is like a tune we recognize by the first notes, but whose words we have forgotten.

The sawmi said time is not the same. By which she meant: you enter another room, walk to another floor, and still have no picture of the house. Denise wrote: a gold ring is lost in the house-and even if you don't search for it, you know it's there.

A mirror bordered by wood is a world within a world, a world of one-off sentences, of two-dimensional experience, an icon of black and gold..we see through a glass darkly.

We walk, like ghosts in the sunlight, out of time. The sympathy of a random gaze your way draws you out of your reverie.

It is futile to look for the self that doesn't change while all its properties and relationships do so.

Avoid mirrors, reflections. Your list of books 'to read', your lives 'to live', grows longer and more improbable with each passing year. You find yourself where you are. When the mirror has nothing left to say, then are we free? The fantasy of distance..was this any different from the fantasy of nearness?

The intoxication of images and mirrors: to see and be seen-in the right light, or at an angle to the universe, your fall in the direction you're leaning.

The fractured image, restored in the mirror to wholeness, albeit momentarily, like a word recalled or held on to, a memory of former times..

(words by Bronk and Blackburn)

Enduring Freedom

'I wonder what Americans would say if they were shown graphic footage of the results of US drone attacks, some of the many wedding parties or funerals we mistook for gatherings of terrorists and reduced to “bug splats,” in the parlance of those dispatching our missiles.'

---Charles Simic.

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They had been, according to Major General Curtis Lemay, who was in charge of the fire bombing operations, "scorched and boiled and baked to death". President Franklin Roosevelt's son and confidant said that the bombing should continue "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." 

A few days before the bombing of Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Radford boasted that "Japan will eventually be a nation without cities - a nomadic people". 

---J. Berger.

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We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

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'Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

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'Much of what I have experienced in the wide world has vanished completely from my head over the years. It was three in the afternoon, a rainy day.

I felt a compulsion ..above all to be one with myself again. ..I resolved to carefully detach myself from an existence in which I could not place my trust and to return.'

---Walser.

the requirements of being a person

What is a black man? And what colour is he? Are the Palestinians even a people?

The so-called superiority of human beings is certainly brought into question by the simple fact (and it is surely a partial truth of history) that human beings have often found it difficult to recognize or acknowledge other people as simply being human. Alternatively, they've struggled to see Women, Blacks, Jews, Foreigners, Muslims, Unbelievers, Gays, etc. etc. as being fully human, "the way a cloud's a cloud".

You could be 3/5 ths of a human being-that's the concession we make to you; or, if you were the Red Man then you couldn't possibly be counted, since you don't qualify, don't meet the requirements.

Don't match up, don't tick all the right boxes; don't have the right colour/language/mind/passport/faith/legal status.

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'We can never say for example that such and such a person has the full set of required characteristics for being a human person and therefore deserves our respect, and that such and such an individual doesn't have the full set and therefore doesn't deserve our respect.'

There is 'an essential mysteriousness that one can't simply deal with by listing it in a number of things that are true about us'

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'In fact, the elephant recognizes the language of his homeland, obeys orders, remembers what he learns, knows the passion of love and the ambition of glory, practices virtues “rare even among men,” such as probity, prudence and equity, and has a religious veneration for the sun, the moon, and the stars.'

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'According to the account of Megasthenes, dwelling upon a mountain called Nulo, there is a race of men who have their feet turned backwards, with eight toes on each foot.

On many of the mountains again, there is a tribe of men who have the heads of dogs, and clothe themselves with the skins of wild beasts. Instead of speaking, they bark; and, furnished with claws, they live by hunting and catching birds.'

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He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.

---Primo Levi. 

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sorrow dance

 

I send word to my parents not to worry about me,

When I descend into the river, I am still the body of a daughter.

In life I have not yet pinned up my hair,

My body drowned in the river's waves-I sigh at the incompleteness...

How sad to see my reflection in the river!

Taking leave of the mirror I knit my eyebrows.

_____________________________________

From one perspective it was all a dream, the moments of life on earth, the joy and the sorrow, the dance out of time taking place in a particular place. The dance outside time, that we see only now, looking back, the moment unfulfilled but ecstatic, oblivious of the shadows that will pass over our faces, the lines that deepen our hands. 

The same gestures passed down the centuries, surviving from village to town to the bright city, the inclination of the head, the inflection of your voice, not unlike your father's...