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 Reason and science, for example, make headway against an outdated mode-or so we're led to believe-of thinking and being in the world, one that allows for a reverence for what is only dimly understood, a space for the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
2 comments:
Your mention of Basil Willey reminds me that in my sense of things, the past four hundred years in the West has been a period of cultural retreat, masked by technological advance.
I recognize this most clearly in poetry. Poetry was once a field of subtle nuance and magical transformation.
Before the famous "age of mechanical reproduction", that is.
Willey, on the 17th Century mind-set: "The feeling that there was a divine meaning, or *otherness*, in the universe, as well as a mechanical order, was still natural and inevitable; it had not, as so often since, to be worked up or simulated."
Perhaps the most interesting volume of poetry I have ever owned is an edition of Herrick's poems in which some ninety-five of the pieces have been inscribed with at least a few bars of musical notation by a previous owner. These inscriptions were of course made -- many years ago now -- by hand. They are, simply as marks made on a page by a human being, a reminder that no machine will ever have an ear for word-music, or a mind capable of creating it.
I love Herrick's poetry for its elusive moments, palpable and fleeting as life's. "As colours steale into the Peare and Plum..." ("Lovers, how they come and part".)
"Those counter-charged Tabbies in the ayre..." ("Life is the bodies light".)
"Good things, that come of course, far less doe please,/Than those, which come by sweet contingencies". ("The comming of good luck")
(Which puts me in mind of this from the diary of the artist Joseph Cornell, Wednesday, December 9, 1948: "...the 'all-over feeling that makes of the incidental a never ceasing wonder and spectacle of the spiritual".)
Thank you, Tom, for those lines. My sister was always the literature person, but I will keep an eye out for Herrick.
Yes, I think you're right: it does seem that thee world is colder and more mechanical-and perhaps only with a child's eyes or heart can one avoid that conclusion. Which, to tie the threads together, reminds me of Berlin's wonderful essay on the naivete of Verdi.
Khair..have a good weekend!
(and thanks for dropping in).
b.
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