things are going to slide (or: The New Dark Age)

That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.

there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

--Bronk.

~~~

At the book fair: 

The last ditch attempt to stave off the gradual encroachment of all that islamic stuff, a last song for old Lahore that sounds exactly as you imagine a last song to sound like. Siddiqui books, from near the inside city, Regal chowk, is here. He remembers me as the man who asked fro Frances Yates's book on the North. You pick up a book by Yourcenar, Jane Jacobs's Dark Ages, Mr. Topsy-Turvy for little r, some Sophocles for the dougal, Simenon and some stories by Karen B.

A glorious day, one to lift the spirits after a month of fog and gloom. Some high clouds but mostly an empty, warm and clear blue sky; the flags fluttering freely, the return of the southern mind. 

Books won't save this country and books won't save you. But. And everything seems to rest on that word. Not everything, but something.

Jane Jacobs:

Perhaps there's some universal pattern to our death and destruction, not that that would offer much solace if 'universal' implies inevitability. The recurring mindlessness is not papered over by periods of respite and calm: a warm fire and a quiet reading of a newspaper in a well lit room only tells you of the winter chill that is "out there", a few steps from the boundary walls. 

We have nine snipers all ready, well-positioned, the head of security tells me, but we all know that if it comes, it comes. 

The snow is general. 

This, you feel, will be an age of mass migrations (if the trends in the devastation we wreak on the environment continues). How to name this collapse?

Jacobs could have gone for the big ones: inequality, climate change, the turmoil in the so-called muslim world. Instead, she focuses on what she thinks underlies the main problems in 'the west'.

You remain unconvinced by this approach-and not just because her methodology means emphasizing the local details of specific problems in a few western cities. 

Of course, there are myriad problems and multiple causes to any of them, but climate change, inequality, and privatization (in all its manifestations) cannot be put to one side.

One interesting parallel to Arendt's work is the idea that a 'dark age' consists of a loss of transmission or continuity. This cultural loss means that older ways of living and 'valuing' (places, objects, appropriate responses) are forgotten and replaced by coarser, slacker standards-which in our times translates into the domination of commercial interests and 'values'. A dark age means there is no memory and no future; instead, we live in the bare moment, the winter of the heart and suppose that to be the truth of the human condition (does barbarism have to be imagined first?).

Not: "how much longer will it go on?" nor "will it go on?" but, instead: 'why should it go on?". 

So, J.J.:

In family life, culture, education and politics, is there any willed continuity or do we just sit back and watch the spectacle? Is life just a series of disconnected moments, without narrative, and if so, isn't that just a projection of capitalism's desire for endless disruption, its reliance on methodological individualism? Nothing stays the same, nothing can be allowed to carry an identity.