Turtle Diary

“The rhapsodies of the previous decade thinned out.” As she entered her forties, “reflection disappeared almost completely.” 
--- Magnuso, The New Yorker.

There is a time for everything. A life stalled, stumbling in the half-lit rooms. 

True philosophy-why talk about 'True'?, or even philosophy...life, a good life, consists in looking at the world (again)...in the proper way, which is to say: not looking as well. In the net, the squares of the mind, you thought you could catch it. But that wasn't the point. Since time began we've placed stones around trees. We're the animal that is defined by boundaries.

The scheme of things-what is that? You don't catch the drift, it's passed you by. 

Master: Bring me the fan with the rhinoceros broach.

Pupil: "It is broken"

Master: Then bring me the rhinoceros.

cogito ergo sum

Not everyone cares about wild animals, but the people who consider them an irreplaceable, non-monetizable good have a positive ethical argument to make on their behalf.

Cimate change shares many attributes of the economic system that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, it is transnational, unpredictably disruptive, self-compounding, and inescapable. It defies individual resistance, creates big winners and big losers, and tends toward global monoculture—the extinction of difference at the species level, a monoculture of agenda at the institutional level. It also meshes nicely with the tech industry, by fostering the idea that only tech, whether through the efficiencies of Uber or some masterstroke of geoengineering, can solve the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions.

--Franzen, The New Yorker.

~~

Those melancholic angels that live in the high world, strangely indifferent to power and earthly territorial ambitions (unlike the baboons). the monks in this kingdom have no interest in politics, only in ritual chants and singing.

'Not only had he the wisdom to stay high and small, protecting his treasured freedoms against the false lure of evolutionary progress into gravid grossness and social complication, but he also found the voice its diatonic home and saw that it was good and stayed there.'

---Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred.

-esque, &

And none is loved as he deserves.
--E. Jennings

Though, sounds like Larkin, Larkinesque. Except for the 'and'..

And death is a disguise.

__ _ _______ ___ ______ _______

Today feels like the first day of summer and so already your mind is lost. Your thoughts widen to beyond the immediate exchanges that fill the days. Nothing to be found at Wisdom Inn, Old & New Books, Book City or Iqbal Book depot, but you weren't looking for nothing anyway.

The first day of winter continues to dazzle..you find your place in it in mid-stream, the sketch never drawn out, a few fundamental gestures you sense are all that is left in the hard and slow place, the one-dimension of a life like a tomb, or an old mirror in which we see ourselves imperfectly. How does gentleness survive in the harsh world without turning to bitterness, without being reified into 'knowingness'?

There is ice in the grass, the sky is full of stars and frost and he imagines that there is no life that is complete. He waits for the return of J_ but knows it won't happen..we wait for what is impossible, the moment he walks through the door and the old times are restored, brought back. 

Winter life, like the way we conceal our life from our self. And he thinks, after all this time: what do I owe you? And he hates himself for this but is incapable of a love that is any more than small acts of kindness. The land, his inner life, is fragile, open and dead; the ghost on the dark windows shows a face that he once knew. The line is broken and won't be fixed, but it will carry on like this, probably forever.

The Cave

“The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me.”

The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement...

“At Tamms, man, it was like a lab,”...

The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country,..

This is the dark side of American exceptionalism

--A. Gawande, The New Yorker.

~

The disappeared: Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan...so many, so much, is unaccounted for. Which is strange, for the state which is founded on statistics (Foucault).

~

Down in the grotty basement of the old bookstore (there are many of these small places and yet I've hardly seen anyone actually, you know, buy a book in one of them. Stationery: yes).

It gives you great pleasure to see M. Hamid's book floundering in this dark place, unread and unreadable. Another person on the game, the bandwagon that is the Islam-fundamentalism-west-liberal-conservative baloney that satisfies a certain clientele in the West. Hampstead, say. Maybe parts of Boston.

The electricity has gone and they're running the back up, which means you can hardly read any of the titles on the broken spines. On the floor lie vast heaps of western fashion magazines, beautiful and sexy women now not part of anyone's fantasies.

Lots of Victoria Holt, Cohelo, Danielle Steele. Then the more random stuff like Wine in Australia, Sex with the Queen, Homosexuality. Large picture books about dogs, horses, cats,..beautiful kept gardens..all the kind of stuff that really resonates with the Lahoris!

Then, out of the blue: books by Richard Hoggart, (the) Elizabeth Taylor, and Thomas Merton (Zen).  

The Absurd

Vietnam (via Tom), Gaza (am I allowed to mention that?) and Indonesia.

A society of monsters.

The sun shines, the rain continues to fall. The world doesn't shake, no capstones shift. No-one can understand or come to terms with a single death since time began. "A mystery". Anything more than one becomes an absurdity or a statistic.

A man with the saddest face imaginable, his eyes deep in their sockets, sweeps the brown leaves into a pile so they don't choke the drains with an effort that may be full of devotion or utterly meaningless. As I walk by him and think of his diligence I am reminded that it is only the possession of money that allows one to say: "fuck it!".

There are no more deserts...only the city.

The city is a false desert today where no-one finds no-one.

Infinite justice, Walker would say.

'Only the man who has fully attained his own spiritual identity can live without the need to kill, and without a doctrine that permits him to do so with a good conscience.'

---Merton.

Really? "Only"?

A man looks into the mirror and doesn't see himself. "After all, man is not as bad as all that, is he?"

_ _____ ___________ ________ _ _ ____ -______ _____ ___ _
-

A long moment passed. The old buildings and homes abandoned, density not so different from Siberia; our lives and loves thinning out...we live indoors and know no frontiers.

The ancient light, fragile and indestructible, without words-except the ones we tentatively give it-returns, unbidden and always will. Lives without a name, tilts the balance in our favour, even though it doesn't know 'south' or 'north'. The small arches we imagine and construct that allow it to filter, diffuse, fall and disperse. but even without us the trees have done that for a thousand years. 

We go on blindly, diminished, bracketed out, with fewer images-some kept in our wallets, close at hand- go on with our jarred and dimmed senses, the needle pointing true, not quite broken but on the edge of failing, you know, barely visible to most-what else could the case be? We go on, 

as the tundra swans
inspired by the tilt of the earth
get ready to leave
for the exact northern marshes 
where they were born.

(P.Dale Scott)


{Photo courtesy of Roxana}

Distraction

'Harvard Magazine describes how “faculty members across Harvard are exploring and inventing new ways to engage students and reimagine education in today’s global, digital, and fast-changing world,” (there are those catchphrases again!) and “adding a digital twist [...] to enhance teaching and learning on campus and beyond.”

We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” (to use Thomas Friedman’s word in a 2013 Times column) for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it. [...] We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.'

--A. Winer.

~

There's that dreaded word: capitalism!

Much of the analysis of the effects of the internet is about the psychological impacts (on the ability and desire to read, say) on the individual. Skimming, surfing, procrastination, attention deficit, verbal hyperinflation, the lack of silence and stillness in our lives. But, again, it's very much the individual and not really about society. Fair enough. But what you'd rally like to see is an analysis of how this fits into the narrative-economic and political-of capitalism. 

'Still, we and our ways of living are dying all the time. The tech giants will continue to ply us with their addictive products, personal devices will proliferate, and we’ll keep looking for ways not to feel alone...techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building.'

It is game over; you know that in your heart of hearts. The things you take seriously are a laugh; and what people take seriously you can't but help feel amused by. Sounds patronizing, I know. 

In the time that remains. D'Est.

Today, the ancient light falling all around you; the darkness of your hands. 

defences

“Penguins have stood for the idea that our potentialities are greater than the pressures of our time”.

--R. Hoggart.

~  ~

A defence against what, precisely? What can you keep out? Who hasn't reached middle age and thought to themselves: the world is an increasingly superficial place?

One world. The global village and all that baqwas about being "connected". The real connections flow depending on whether you have capital or not. 

For most people in the world there is only the standing for their own survival. To be a human, the way a cloud's a cloud.

~

G. Monbiot has an interesting (and frightening) statistic: given soil erosion the world has perhaps only 60 more harvests to go (this stat. comes from the FAO!).

The end(s) of the university

For the most part, though, Delbanco sees the true college as threatened in many ways. In research universities, passionate and effective undergraduate teaching offers no prestige, no profit, and no prospect of permanence. A governing scientific ideal, which emphasizes the ongoing transformation of all fields of knowledge, relegates the transmission of knowledge to at best a secondary status. Humanists, whose subjects do not show progress—Charles Mee, who adapts such plays as The Bacchae, is a fine tragedian, but you mustn’t confuse him with Euripides—are marginalized in academic life unless they adopt a kind of parody of the scientific method, and begin tabulating all the forms of plot used in Victorian novels as if they were a literary counterpart to the human genome.

Saddest of all, the serious courses on the bases of the Western tradition that Delbanco sees as best adapted to opening minds and building characters are rarely required. And even at Columbia and Chicago, where students have to take them, they are mostly taught by younger faculty and graduate students who can be assigned to them, along with a few true believers from the older faculty. Most younger professors look forward to their release from this sort of required generalist teaching, for which they have neither the training nor the taste.

--Anthony Grafton, NYRB.

~

To live wisely and agreeably and well.

--Keynes.

A university education will never consider any of those qualities except if it makes the claim that 'to live well' is the same thing, or at least dependent on, the ability to live well-and that ability itself does not boil down to anything more than the possession of money and wealth.

Capital's final frontier is not space but the inner space that is the human being. 

It is, of course, important not to overplay this: in comparison with the dehumanization that occurs in every day physical work the university is still a place of privilege. But it is important nevertheless to point out the ways in which capital transforms mindsets and practices in different walks of life.

in many cases it's already too late. By the time students get to university they already think there's only one game in town and they've learnt-quickly and cynically- that what counts is the bottom dollar, the stamp on their degrees, the ability to network, to fake their way through life with a tremendous sense of entitlement and disdain for complexity or ambiguity. 

Those that carry on will, you feel, more often than not come away with a false sense of superiority, spurting all that nonsense about the "life of the mind", thinking to themselves: there's another, possibly "higher", game to be played here. 

JB reports Lucian Freud to have said:

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex.He said unless you've had anal sex with a girl she hasn't really submitted to you."

'...days earlier a mob of male attackers beat and kicked 27-year-old Farkhunda before tossing her off a bridge, setting her body on fire and throwing it in the river. Like many Afghans, Farkhunda used only one name.
---CNN.

'Her father said she had complained about women being encouraged to waste money on the amulets peddled by the mullahs at the shrine.'
---BBC.

'But this power structure is cracked, it always has been; that’s why it has to be constantly propped up through force, violence and the threat of violence.'
---Finn Mackay, The Guardian.

'THE chancellor George Osborne may have missed it and the Bank of England has still to give its verdict, but the most visible sign that the economy is indeed on the up has appeared: women’s hair is getting shorter.'

--The Sunday Times.

~ ~ ~

To learn to enjoy things and beings-that's what true intelligence is, and in the face of that, the most brilliant intellectualism is no more than a parade of imbeciles, of those who are lacking in life.'

'They created the commodity and the commodity defeated them-that's their whole history.'

--R. Vaneigem

after capitalism

'Pre-capitalist economies were mainly concerned with maintenance; with the cycles of farming, craft, and manufacture; caring for children and caring for the home. ..Much of it was repetitive and much of it was contained in a relationship. Capitalism by contrast introduced linearity into the economy with the idea of cumulative growth, and an economy based on things that are simply used and then disposed...I suggest that in the long view more of our economy will again become circular, concerned with maintenance and sustaining, albeit greatly enriched by knowledge and information....

In the material economy we increasingly aspire to homeostasis and equilibrium, just as we do in our physical bodies. But the world of knowledge..has the potential for limitless growth. Put these ideas together and its easy to see how our ideas of growth may change from "more and bigger" to "again and better", which is already how we think about things such as friendship and pleasure.'

--G. Mulgan.

~

The strange thing is that in the textbooks a market economy is always described without any reference to historical conditions, to power or to culture. In the Robinson-Crusoe model there is no money, no institutions and a very parsimonious notion of both the individual and rationality. In the standard framework time is not taken seriously and we assume agents have perfect knowledge, information. They are the "robots" that Lucas talks about.

The idea that crises might be endemic to the system or that malpractice, corruption, fraud, rent-seeking, imperfect competition, and externalities describe the usual functioning of markets rather than being the exception, is not something that is or can be countenanced.

It is not surprising that welfare economics does not form any part of the economic curriculum any more since we don't want to bring ethical questions of fairness or distribution into the discipline which is, or so its adherents claim, a "science". 

A "frictionless" market that produces the "best" results-a "first-best world"- is really an ideological construct. There can be no discussion of the history of ideas (economic thought, for example) or the role of the state (violence) in instituting markets and a market society since that would detract from the assertion that markets are a "natural" system of justice.

There can be no discussion of dispossession (colonial or modern)since, by assumption, we are all supposed to have individual rights (over our labour, at the very least)and only engage in voluntary trades. How these rights emerge or the pattern of their distribution, is not something we are encouraged to question-for good reason.

In short, there must be no discussion of capitalism as a system. Instead, we focus on abstract, ahistorical models and partial inquiries into specialized and disconnected areas of study. There can, therefore, be no question of 'how we got here'. 

What strikes you as particularly strange or perverse is that for all the emphasis on autonomy and freedom in a market society it appears that we are, for all purposes, "excellent sheep", accepting whatever desires or lifestyles are created for us by corporations and more than eager to wave our little flags in support of the war machine. If you say "king and country" then why not "blood and soil"?  

'The Conservatives have become an inward- looking party of the English outer suburbs and southern English shires, and their shrinkage is creating a quiet crisis within their ranks.'

---Will Hutton.

'But the real lesson of Weimar and Cabaret..may be that the ultimately depraving seductions are those of the right. Money, power and those simple solutions that lend themselves so well to propaganda...To defend a liberal democracy and insist on civil society against the easy moral hatreds of ideologues may be difficult. But it is essential.'

--Lisa Appignanesi.

'What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures.'

---D. Shulman.

“I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy.”

---Sheldon Adelson.

Zzz

Sometimes we are tempted to find excuses and complain, acting as if we could only be happy if a thousand conditions were met. To some extent this is because our “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”.

---Pope Francis.

The inability to sit quietly with nothing to do, nowhere to go. In times of boredom we reach out and reveal our weakness or something of our character. To drift and allow things to come to you (or not)..this, it seems to me, requires a tremendous amount of trust (in oneself, in God). And, of course, things do come-it's just that we're not ready to interpret them, or our minds have been sullied by so much false education, or our lives are full of so much self-importance, that we fail to recognize something that tilts the balance, that introduces the one thread we'd been looking for all that time.

The fusion of horizons:

There is no leap to some magical vantage point, some place-the view from nowhere-from where we can suddenly understand our actions, events, other people or ourselves; there is no ahistorical, value-neutral, timeless moment of understanding that stands independently of us. Instead, we come to an understanding-and this involves a process of listening and talking (talking in time(Lowith)). Because our time is limited, because we are finite creatures, there is no final understanding-and given our weaknesses we must accommodate for reversals as well: what we thought we knew when we were thirty can be disturbed and modified when we are forty. The tables can be turned, capstones shift...

Life (or living well) is not a science. What would it mean to say we have a science of human agency? In what sense is economics a social science since it has nothing to say about sociality and the notion of science is bunk.

I-We. Me & You.

'My heart has become receptive of every form
It is a meadow for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
An abode of idols, the Ka'ba of the pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah, the Qur'an.'

---Ibn Arabi.

You wonder what the Taleban or Boko Haram would make of this (or the right wingers in Europe who are hell-bent on portraying Islam in a negative light. Khair...

"Lord, increase me in bewilderment in You"

This is a remarkable saying (Fanny Howe pointed you to it, and anton to her). No starting point, no goal, just a circular movement around what is True.

~  ~   ~

I looked up in the mirror and caught myself thinking..a year has gone by. How swift life is...how swift Death is. The trees still stand firm, the blossoms of Spring fall as they always have. Up above, high clouds wander over us. 

A white flower grows in quietness. 

Nothing is what it was except the stone bridge.

You ask me why I am sad

I do not answer

For my thoughts are carried

like peach blossoms down a stream

Far away from the world.

--Li Po.

Gangnam Style: North and South

'The real world has its limits; the imaginary one is infinite.'
--Rousseau.

Bound & Free 

All great civilisations are based on parochialism...To know even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width.

---Patrick Kavanagh on the universal and the parochial.

~~~

Of course, some might say the South is too permissive, the North is obviously repressive. If that's the choice, then better to err on the side of freedom. It goes without saying that the imposition of limits (by the state, religion, the family) is often a repressive measure. But are there any other ways of "measuring" one's life, finding some kind of joy or meaning in a common, shared and small-scale world or set of experiences? 

If capitalism and modernity are about eradicating barriers, transgressing (though it has to be remembered that it re-imposes those limits by expelling many from its privileged domain and also, paradoxically, requires "spheres" that are not subject to market principles, mentalities and practices) then is there any meaning-except the negative connotation-to the idea of limits?

In a weightless world Bark, the former slave, felt the need to tie himself down, the need to bind himself in some way so that he could experience what it was to be bound and free-wasn't that, precisely, the human condition? To be completely free or completely bound (by nature, say) was to be either a god on the one hand or a beast or angel on the other.

There is something desperately sad about the North and the child-like state the populace has been reduced to, fainting or sliding into a trance at the sight of the Great Leader. But there's also something all-too predictable and mechanical about the freedom of the South: the Hunter's Club could be anywhere and the people in it could be anyone.

By chance:

“When you’re nineteen, all the girls get plastic surgery, so if you don’t do it, after a few years, your friends will all look better, but you will look like your unimproved you,..”

The 'Bagel-girl look'. Go to the Improvement Quarter, Gangnam district.

'Question: Which entertainer do you most want to look like?

If you get the result you want from plastic surgery, what’s the thing you want most to do?

[] Upload a selfie without using Photoshop

[] Get a lover

[] Find a job

[] Enter a competition for face beauty

One doctor told me that he had a patient who showed him a cartoon that she wanted to resemble.

Now we all have these basic things, so the competition has moved up to comparing one’s looks, health, and spiritual things as well.'
{from The New Yorker}

revolutionary road

Blue Valentine Closing Credits from Josh Noble on Vimeo.

The intensity of the shallowness was all he had to go by; the false smiles, the blinking out into the light at this late stage of the day a kind of familiar bewilderment. The intangible sense that something irrevocable had occurred, that some great ship had passed him by in the distance and he had made no note of it, been unable to recognize it. 

He looked down at his fingertips, unstained by a decent day's work, his  father would have said. His hands were blotched, without form, the one great constant in all the flux, in a strange way bearing witness to the lack of brilliance, the ordinary, unremarkable striving that didn't mark anyone out; if there was any precision or rigour then it was the kind of abstract type that would always keep him one step removed from reality. 

The flood of memories held back, just one allowed to surface...the deeply satisfying smell of smoke that clung to his father's coat, from another, older and more reassured world. "Our personal lives will always seem small in the vastness of time" and now that he recalled these words they seemed true and his life remarkably even smaller than he'd imagined it would be.

At parties there was nothing to say any more, just this profound desire to get through-somehow-and make for the darkness and the quiet. Everything that could be said had been; and what had not, had not.

The world without foundations, the turtle's feet sliding. That's the way it goes, he thought to himself..you see all those lives slipping by, like so many multi-coloured headlights over the bridge, without any sense of a destiny. Keep on moving unless you stop and wonder why you were moving in the first place.

How does it unravel, this silver thread? What images are inherited by your face? He had no answers and wasn't even sure if these were the questions.  

In another world, another time, who would we be? He couldn't even imagine pulling himself together in this place. Eyeing the fatal flaw in his own character, he thought he could name it. He wondered how it would pan out, enfold him in its final mystery; he secretly longed-if he was honest with himself he would tell himself this-for its dark compulsions to break him open and reveal that final image, anything but endure more of the average greyness with which he surrounded himself, and in which he had lost so many years of his life.

winter sleep

In winter you forget, you remember?

What words were said and unsaid. 

You brought some snow in from the cold, your feet sinking deep into the drift of the outside world, the transformed patch of land that was as still as the night and the stars. You held it in the palm of your hands and placed it in a silver bowl, next to the fire. 

How long before Spring? How long before you forget the words that were said, unsaid? And who could imagine the possibilities in that ice-world, the emergence of red and green from the winter sleep of the heart.

Let us have winter loving that the heart...The season where you are not to be found. And so I shall write you on my white page, and there you shall exist, a single brush-stroke of concentrated time, a pattern within the loving mind.

{Lines by Elizabeth Jennings}

Angina Days

My face and the world. I see it now, remember it when a voice calls my name.

The world in her face. 

The word and the world, branches of the same tree.

~ 

You saw A, propped up on the bed, blood stains on his shirt which was open at the front; a third heart attack. They called it an "angina" but I insisted on calling it a heart attack. The old mockery never deserting him. 

There is something profoundly sad at seeing him in this state. All the friends who call look old and worried themselves, and secretly wonder to themselves: how does he survive. Which is to say, really, how do any of us.

F comments that A now looks like Foucault without the mind. A doesn't know who Foucault is and lets it pass. The restaurant will probably fold, there are lots of things to think about. "I've never studied physiology but the heart is only three inches big, isn't it?"

What use is factual knowledge today?

'The wind is full of black dust
It scours the names of the gravestones
and etches this day
into us.'

~~

'As the eyesight gets weaker,
you take an extra step
to make out your friends.'

This is true. I now hesitate before waving to someone until I'm up closer and can tell who it is. I waved to a student thinking it was a colleague. Before, I hugged a woman and spoke to her for fifteen minutes before a friend told me she wasn't who I thought she was. 

"Who is she, then?"

"I don't know, but it isn't who you think it is"

I wasn't even drunk. It suddenly clicked and I remembered that she was indeed someone else but couldn't for the life of me remember her name. 

The other day I met a student at the gym and asked him, somewhat surprised, if he wasn't finishing up this year.

"Sir, I graduated six years ago."

"Oh."

'Names with i
or names with o,
the effort to remember.'

Everything that cannot be put under 'blue' or 'Rothko' or 'stories' or 'Philosophy' or 'art' comes under the heading of Life.

'Someone with a is
addressing me now.'

Here we wait, idle, like monks with time on their hands.

{Lines by Gunter Eich, Angina Days)