Stray thoughts

    Late at night, the last train on the hill above, the dull thumping of its engine, a single drumming heartbeat as it disappears. It's later than you think.

    In the early morning hours a sound that is a clear as it is piercing. Are these gulls or geese? Do geese fly that low? Sibelius.

    'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed'

     --S. Blackburn.

    The situation is fluid. The false openness that is dreamt up by the machine: anything is    possible..."find your beach".

   A great aunt, austere and imposing, unknown, really, once said: Life is a closed envelope. Leave it like that.

    'In our age Man is not defined by his specific nature-which cannot be defined otherwise than  in a divine context...'

   --F. Schuon.

    It is true to say that in a former age there were far more many limitations; life everywhere  was narrower, more confined. The hierarchies of class and gender dealt a crushing blow to  individuality. But now that the 'self' is a surface illusion, a collection of trivial thoughts,  riddled with confusion and anxieties, it is worth doing a bit of accounting: what has been  gained, what has been lost?

    In a conversation with the mighty Q: the deep cynicism of politics is reflected in how the only perspective that is of any importance is the one that promotes my own interests. "That's precisely," he adds, "what you learn at public school". The only principles worth espousing are the ones that serve my interests. But it's not just politics and the media which have been thoroughly corrupted. In banking or higher education it's essentially the same thing, namely: gaming, showmanship, the relentless jockeying for position, pettiness    magnified to the nth degree by the delusional belief that one stands, somehow, above the fray.

   Of course, you thank your lucky stars: you couldn't have survived for a single day in the so-called real world. But it's always been a temporary respite, a refuge and not a home. Really is a  grand fraud. To live a life negatively, as a form of escape from the shallowness of the times, mere survival..this may be the only option open to us, but it is the possible starting point of something else. To find a centre elsewhere is, from the mainstream perspective, to be an ec-centric.

   All the tidy photo albums, the pictures carefully and securely placed therein...how we crave order in our lives! We think memory, that bag of tricks, will do the trick.

      Dennis Potter says there is only 'now' and that is true. But the present is only present to us when it is bound by the future and the past (bound not in the sense of being hermetically sealed since the boundaries are porous). Without a sense of the past and the future the present is lost too; it becomes something light, open, empty, a pure succession of fragmentary moments that cannot be stringed together. We imagine the passage of time for an animal is something not altogether different. 

    Everything in capitalism works to break up narratives, to destroy the notion of a coherent self. The inner form of life is replaced by a kaleidoscope of shifting images. The profound challenge of our time, to paraphrase Cameron, is to cast off the deep shadows cast by Thatcher, to undo the knot in our heart, and find our time again.