'And in our own deep space, our desire for exotic fish rips through a world scarcely better known to us than the red planet’s surface. Trawlers are now working at depths of 2,000 metres. We can only guess at what they could be destroying.'
--G. Monbiot.

'This transference of one good thing to another, unrelated good thing is part of the peculiarly American urge to satisfy all appetites at once and it’s eroding the idea of pleasure as context-specific.'
---E. Brockes.

'Checks and balances alone don’t work: they have to be animated by an honest acceptance of mutual responsibility between firms and society – a moral ethic that must inform unions, regulators, shareholders and systems of corporate governance alike. VW lost the plot. But so, in a more profound way, have both the apologists and critics of western capitalism.'
---W. Hutton.

We live in dwellings whose design or philosophy we have not chosen.Even the word " dwell" sounds anachronistic since an increasing number of people cannot afford to buy a house. We work for a wage, often with little concern for how the type of work matches our personality or our deepest aspirations. Another antiquated word: vocation. We eat food and have absolutely no idea of  how it got to our plates or what it is doing to our bodies. We are persuaded to buy increasing loads of ( Chinese) crap that we know will not last and that serves no useful purpose. We aim to get an education in order to find a " better" job and the 1% still control a huge share of our wealth, the military industrial complexes wage wars in our name, and bigots still have a monopoly on the interpretation of religious texts.

Run that by me again...how, exactly-and in what sense- are we free?

The history of remembering/forgetting

Isn't it written somewhere, to be sunlight, not history? Home, not here, in sunlight, late. We ask to be absolved, and elemental.

What great simplicity is this if not time on my hands? All the elements seen, n-1, . It was never about you, Z; it was always about you. What name or symbol for the unseen element of our lives? 

There she was, fizzing out of my life, streaming away, a white trace of possibility all that remains. Not quite discovered, erratic, unpredictable, and wholly and deeply problematic. Prone to memory loss, if I've got that right. And that's just the start of it.

~
In the history class the bespectacled teacher asked: "If you could be anyone in the world, who would it be?"

I would be that person who didn't come to class today, the person who sat under a tree and was a simple red 'x' on the attendance register, living a shadow-life.

~

I never wanted to be myself, thought the puppet. All wood and strings, one glass eye to make me look half real.

~

A cloud is just a cloud. There's no metaphysical foundation, no picture album to remember it by. It rolled into your view and out, straight out and beyond. It was that simple, really. It had no relation to yesterday's formation and knew absolutely nothing of tomorrow. Denise saw one dissolving before her eyes and was speechless. Constable, even with his quick hand, alert mind, stopped, amazed, and put his brush down in case he missed it.

~

Bringer of light, the ancient Greeks said, their own light a distant memory. Centre of moment, of childhood, of the morning.

"In this moment" "before" "anyone, ever" "died""before we were born?"
"in this moment forever before" "before we went to war"
"Before we died" "In this moment, now" "In this moment before, it is
not before" In this very moment" where is it" "where we
haven't died" "or died inside" "In this moment we haven't" "in this moment no one" "in this moment, no one has ever, died" 

{words by Alice Notley}

There are too many Welsh people in England

(With a nod to our little Aussie friend!)

~

To sleep like this, with one hand stuck in the pages of a book, the index finger pointing to a single word. And in the morning, rubbing the sleep from your eyes, you would find the word gone, just a clear and bright empty space. 

~

"Which dead language would you like to learn, Latin or Welsh? Latin will help you in medicine."

And Welsh?

"Welsh will help you in forgetting"...

~

Scenes from the old country, when you were young. The streets and back alleys registering the slow decay, the huge black wooden gate with its peeling paint, that had to be heaved open, sliding on its rusted rollers.

In the garage, where we played cricket on Sundays, thick, heavy sacks of coal that we used for 'tracking' and cartons of malt vinegar. That is how you remember, brokenly:

this weaving
even where it was broken
was always perfect.

You say 'garage' but in a former time it was something else. What something now is is determined by how you use it, approach it.  

the garage that had floated to us
like an ark from the days of horses
and I stood at the corner and listened..

to an old man, with old words, his story deepened by our listening. I suppose we never really belonged there, have never belonged anywhere, I guess. But still, and still, after so much time has passed, the blood still comes to a frenzy when it thinks of England shaking.

{lines from W.S. Merwin}

Homesick for the Earth

What times we live in. 

Books to look out for:

T.J. Clark on Bruegel;
Bernofsky on Walser;
and Larissa M on goodness

~

Kelman: ye nee kanna fuckin rite. 

Don't get it (not for the first time). James Wood is usually so perceptive but the stories here are dull, pounded so flat that any break in the monotony seems like a ridge. Keep to plainwords, tell it like it is, and run down things to the bare minimum, a single breath. True to life, but a kind of life that is windowless, without any second spaces. That is how people in the tenements speak and he's got the ear for it. The down-to-earth language isn't terse, knotted (Breece) but neither does the presentation (is there a re-presentation here?) of the simple, ordinary words lead on to the extraordinary, as they might.

~

Penelope Fitzgerald's canvas is a small, detailed one-and that is probably why the books will always appear to be somehow second-rate, or lightweight, not quite there. Not marginal lives, but low-key, unsuccessful ones (the whole thing turning on the meaning of the word 'success'). Not some great refusal to accommodate oneself to the world and the times one lives in, but a small step to the side, a life lived in the half-light, the counter-light (to use a term picked up from fff).

~

Dwelling. Ivan Illich:

The things we love are specific, irreplaceable, incommensurable. If something is lost over time will there be new ways of looking?

A way of looking, speaking, the gestures of the hand, have been lost (and it ain't the fault of the refugees or asylum seekers!). 

But what is a work of art if not an 'open work' (Eco), something that is taken up again, lovingly, in a different context (T.S. Eliot). Some hitherto unseen strands lay revealed, a movement unfolds from beneath the wings. For centuries the cross was not a central image in western consciousness but only becomes so later on-and yet it was always there,latent, implicit, at the very heart of things. Beauty is always a reflection of jalal.

Don't tell me, what you always knew.
---INXS.

You'll find bridges inside yourself
[None lead to you]
---Supervielle.

In the hallway the thickly woven tapestry depicting the familiar scene, the greatness of soul, the fierceness of the heart. And now, only a few grey outlines, the inner structure of the action, the long- worn gestures, the oblique way in which a poet finds an accidental truth.

Now the in- dwelling, a life without form, only blind seasons. The asylum worlds in which we find ourselves, lost again. You've brought the wrong papers and cannot prove who you are.

Our face, older now, seen through a glass darkly. But do you remember the first days, when we set out, the fullness of words, the light clear and bright?Here, the boundary world of finders, keepers. What was borrowed must be returned. The whirl of life congeals on these contracts.

The hunters return unsuccessful, with darkened faces, hands burned under the sun. Some ancient ritual forgotten. Quiet. This is how they speak, true to life. Lives continues under their eyes, distant. November fires fragment and nothing is forgiven. The search, all these years: a few footsteps in the snow, the traces of absences. There are no more journeys, just the shadows that measure the distances from the invisible axis, around which our true life turns. 


(black mountain: monbiot)

In the time of no time, there is no place either.

'..He'd had a dream that a submarine came to Guantanamo to rescue the detainees. That night, he said, Guantanamo Bay was filled with helicopters and ships with their searchlights on, looking for the dream submarine.' 

--Laurie Anderson (from a remarkable article in The New Yorker).

'One of the saddest parts of the project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat slyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantanamo because they might get "on some kind of list".' 

'What does your own story sound like to you after so many repetitions, denials, revisions?'

Among the first interrogators was a woman who began the session by saying, "Think of me as your mother." 

'The French pronoun on, as in "one knows" or "one thinks"-our royal we"-becomes more and more mysterious..In the transcripts there are also chilling pauses "No response from the detainee".'

~

I was wondering to myself the other day, thinking about all the fences that are going up in Europe (incidentally, it never ceases to make you laugh that the Israeli's call their wall a "fence"!) And you've never really understood this but it seems that in recent times a lot of white people have been keen on setting up fences, camps and border controls. Think about the Reservations on which native peoples have been kept, allowed to (and probably encouraged to) drown; think of the Camps and the Gulags; think about apartheid; think about the caging of America (which, actually, should be: the caging of black people, not America); and think of that other camp that goes by the name of Gaza. 

People must be processed, she says, without batting an eye. One has to stop, literally stop in one's tracks, and remember that human beings have made soap out of other human beings. 

Of course, all this reminds you of a line that Ubo used to tell you (probably from Orwell): When someone says "a few enemy lines have been obliterated" they really mean: thousands of people have been killed and maimed.

Processed! Thoba! In the old days, when people could write and speak English, one might have heard the phrase, 'one has to go through the process' or, 'your application has been processed'. Cheese is processed, people are not. Really is quite simple when you think about it.

There are no more words. "Up" means "down", and we're all free (Tracy Chapman). Fort-da, Da-da. No response, no response from Zero Eighteen. Zero Eighteen.

&

The most difficult word to say today: &

Someone, a long time ago, sent me this:

'The letter "Waw", which in Arabic means "and". The Sufis call it the letter of Love because without it, nothing can come together. We say "the sea and the sky," Man and Woman." The "waw" is the meeting place of love. It is also the letter of the traveler, because it gathers together things and beings.' 

and,

'There are as many ways to God as the number of human beings on earth." This quote alone is a representation of the vision of Sufism.' 

That reminded you of Levinas and his wonderful meditations in Jewish Revelation.

The world's shortest poem: Me. You.
One of the best, though, is: Me & You.

Socialism at its best is a political philosophy of '&'. It is shocking to see how the working class has swung over to the fanaticism of the right (fixated on migrants, Muslims, refugees), a politics of hate, which is to say: distinctions.

All that you have come to love about London was ultimately a reflection of that attitude at the institutional and cultural level (the public parks, the public libraries, the charity shops, the NHS, the National-as well as the other galleries and museums).

There are some lovely lines by Badiou on ' togetherness..a ' we' that doesn't subsume the individual. Exupery says it well: looking out in the same direction. ' Fellowship'. Arendt' s image comes to mind: the table around which everyone sits ( it is worth emphasizing the ' everyone' bit), equal & distinct.

There's a lovely scene in the original Far from the Madding Crowd where they all sit at a table in the twighlight. Everything is suggestive of change, shifting places ( the beginning of spring?). Everyone is distinct, but not equal!

Hirschman on the ancient feast. Gopnik, too. An old form of sociability. Communion?

A life in common. Dewey' s common faith.

You wonder to yourself just how much the  quality of conversation has deteriorated after Thatcher and Reagan and the lurch to the right. Society is just a fiction ( Bentham). "Any old pig will do" you imagine Cameron saying.

In stark contrast to the ideology that maintains we are atomized individuals, and that supports a rather shallow understanding of autonomy there's Iris M's: The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
' Bound and free' was the Beguine's view, I remember the dougal saying.

The plebs have been duped into believing that their " values" are under threat by all these muzzies and fuzzy wuzzies. And as long ad they don't question the power structures, the structure of dominance, the elites are happy. Bread and circuses. Really is old hat.

A line from P. Fitzgerald: 
'Not an unbeliever, sir, a free thinker..As a free thinker I can believe what I like, when I like'.

A sentiment that would be utterly  lost on the fundos and people like the Aussie woman alike. & sometimes makes for very strange bedfellows!

...

Qadosh

There is something exhausting about talking with right-wingers. No, it's not that; one invariably comes out of the 'discussion' feeling somewhat dirty, tainted. There is, I suppose, a deeper question of how or to what extent there can be any genuine engagement with people who have such cold-hearted feelings, implacable faces.

In a recent discussion I was told "There are already too many Muslims" in this country. Replace those words with black people, Jews, gays, women and see how it sounds?

On a bit of probing (and one doesn't need to scratch the surface for very long) there was a lot of backtracking: I was only concerned about the integration of Muslims if we let in so many refugees (or words to that effect). Of course, he had earlier let the cat out of the bag by saying that he was worried about "values". 

So, this is what it's come down to. We can't let refugees in (refugees, not migrants, you fuckers) because their values are not kosher. "Two legs good..." Amongst those "already" in the country are members of my family (consultants, GPs, lawyers, businessmen, university lecturers, and pharmacists; if I include friends there are bankers in the city, hedge fund managers and accountants). But that's not the point. If they were taxi drivers, shopkeepers, unemployed they'd still be, y'know, like, human beings. 

Then this Australian woman chips in -I'm assuming she's Australian..there are far too many Australians in London! Doesn't sound very nice, does it?- and writes, "After the 9/11 atrocities we should think seriously about allowing so many people in of that faith" (more or less). 

"Right" (to quote Donald Trump).

And after Brighton and the IRA perhaps fewer Catholics? Where do you want to draw the line? Falluja, Gitmo (too many Americans?), The Welsh slaughtering the English in the rugger (too many Taffs?). So, there you have it, guilt by association. If an EDL thug had expressed similar views one wouldn't be surprised, but this is from those who think of themselves as being educated people, for Pete's sake! Crikey! If that's the state of the nation then pity the nation!

The question, she says: "Can we blame then for wanting to make up for their initial disadvantage?" Where's the problem with that, couldn't I explain instead of shutting down the conversation?

"The whole way through and I'm not doing it. I'm not doing it, darling."
---De Niro.

Hate to tell you this hon., but we're talking about refugees, not economic migrants. "Disadvantage"? We ain't talking about dis-fucking-advanatge. "Initial"? That's beautiful. Who are these pesky blighters on our shores anyway (we've got civilisation, roads, don't you know)?Er..as Fawlty would say: "Don't mention the war" !

And, ultimately, the question that will never be addressed because it would lead to a collapse of their shoddy and pathetic little (Englander) worldview: How do you explain that most of the appalling violence of the last century was committed by states and not radical groups? Sure, some of the violence came from states that were in some loose sense of the word Muslim (think East Pakistan, Timor, Saddam's gassing of the Kurds) but other instances of horrific violence (Vietnam, Hiroshima, The Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, the Indians in occupied Kashmir) were obviously not.

Most of that violence was committed by men and still is to this very day ("too many men..."?). 

~ 
And since the question of what is a "true" Muslim was brought up in that nasty little discussion I had to return to one of my old posts or, more specifically, to the music on it. Today, if a Muslim was caught singing 'Let's dance together in a minefield' he'd be incarcerated! 


   

~
After all that it is a joy to return to Penelope Fitzgerald and hear an older, calmer voice from what now seems like a very, very distant and appreciably more civilized past. Note to self: Must return to her gem-like short stories as well.

Boundary conditions

'For all men make the mistake of distinguishing too sharply.' 
(from Heller, The Disinherited Mind).

Youtube is still down in the land of the pure so this will have to do: dreams

The Aussies have been so good at opening their doors to, er, what shall we call them again?

~

The Romans kept an image of Terminus [the god of boundaries] in the temple of Jupiter...and the interesting thing is that the roof above the place where the image sat was open to the sky, as if to say that a god of the boundaries and borders of the earth needed to have access to the boundless, the whole unlimited height and width and depth of the heavens themselves. As if to say that all boundaries are necessary evils and that the truly desirable condition is the feeling of being unbounded, of being king of infinite space. And it is this double capacity that we possess as human beings-the capacity to be attracted at one and the same time to the security of what is intimately known and the challenge and entrancements of what is beyond us-it is this double capacity [that is truly human].

--Seamus Heaney. 

To go too far in either direction leads to a kind of extremism: the terrible parochialism and narrow-mindedness of the conservatives; or the false progressiveness of the moderns who wants to tear up any sense of tradition or continuity in the name of a formal, abstract freedom and of a future that redeems us (Badiou).  

I think Heaney oversteps the mark here because it is not clear to me that boundaries are 'necessary evils'. Can one truly be a human without boundaries, constraints or some kind of limits? From the perspective of negative liberty and the markets (or a particular understanding of liberalism) boundaries will always be something to be cast off, an 'evil' that impairs our autonomy, creativity and, ultimately, human flourishing. (Of course, no-one wants to mention that much of the great art over the course of human history has been produced by men and women living constrained lives!).


Hell is other people!
--Sartre.

Bruni has another way of looking at other people (already to use the term 'otherness' is to distance oneself) and it is this: the wound and the blessing. Modernity stresses the wound more than the blessing.

In the beginning is a 'war of all against all.' Conflict is the starting point of modern thought: me against you; me against the world; me against nature (See Marshall Salins). This negative approach is carried over into economics (rational self-interest dictates that if it's in your interest to cheat then you should) and politics (everyone's a knave). There's more..it's me against my mother, or me against my father. The social can never be our starting point and love and kindness count for little. What a charming picture of what it is to be a human being! 

~~

It greatly amuses you when people fall over backwards trying to convince
other people that they are really liberal when in fact they have profoundly reactionary views."Actually, some of my friends are black people". Or: I think those poor refugees should be helped (as long as they don't come over here ruining our standard of living, and as long as they ain't, y'know, Muslims).

So, here's the troubling part for the neo-liberals: if you believe in free markets then you should also believe in the free movement of capital and labour (Er.."capital is okay, I hear you say). The movement of factors of production will lead to efficiency and convergence, all other things being given. It's a win-win, no?

The refugees must be "processed" (I actually read that somewhere). Fill in the forms in triplicate and attach two passport sized photographs...If you are Muslim perhaps we can give you a number? 

'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 the Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.'

---Primo Levi.

He has crossed the boundary and found a wilderness. Gagarin, deep in outer space said: "There is no God here". He crossed the boundary and found very few human beings in Europe.

It is tempting to blame everything on Khomeni (and he was certainly part of the problem) but has anyone noticed the lurch to the right all across Europe? That UKIP could get 3.8 million votes speaks volumes about the quality of public debate and the fragility of democracy there. If I was American I would be profoundly embarrassed by the Republican candidates. To think that people like Walker Bush, hockey mom Palin, the brainless Ben Carson and Trump actually have a platform in the land of the brave and the free makes you wonder just how brave and free the place really is. Larkin may have been closer to the mark: apart from the coasts it's a desert of bigots.

~

And this poem, via Tom:

Conversation with a Stone, By Wislawa Szymborska

November 29, 1998

I knock at the stone's front door

"It's only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

have a look around,

breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.

"I'm shut tight.

Even if you break me to pieces,

we'll all still be closed.

You can grind us to sand,

we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

I've come out of pure curiosity.

Only life can quench it.

I mean to stroll through your palace,

then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.

I don't have much time.

My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone.

"And must therefore keep a straight face.

Go away.

I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

I hear you have great empty halls inside you,

unseen, their beauty in vain,

soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.

Admit you don't know them well yourself.

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,

"but there isn't any room.

Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste

of your poor senses.

You may get to know me but you'll never know me through.

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

I don't seek refuge for eternity.

I'm not unhappy.

I'm not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I'll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words,

which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.

"You lack the sense of taking part.

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.

Even sight heightened to become all-seeing

will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,

only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

I haven't got two thousand centuries,

so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,

"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.

Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.

And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.

I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,

although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

From "Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997" by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Harcourt Brace: 274 pp., $27)

Everything is for sale

Dawkins isn't quite a prostitute but his desire for fame makes him close to being one:

"Sorry if I get a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy's alleged 'invention'..."

~
What seems to be most beautiful in Paris is the boulevard..at the hour when the gas lamps shine in the mirrors, when the knives ring against the marble tables, I'm going to walk there, peacefully, enveloped in the smoke of my cigar while looking at the women who pass. This is where prostitution is on display, this is where eyes shine!"

---Flaubert. 

If that fake lyricism doesn't make you sick I don't know what will.

Who isn't a prostitute nowadays..journalists, academics, soldiers, mullahs...

"There are codes that give us clues...But during the day, it was slippery trying to identify who was or who wasn't."

"The social history was horrible, but the paintings were fantastic."

Well, I see, that's okay then! 

What is fetishism but the masking of the true, underlying social relationships?The history of capitalism could be told as the history of commodification or commercialization. Commodification is inextricably bound to modern (liberal) notions of property, contract, agency-but to liberalism in many other ways as well: Rationality, quantification and utility. 

It is also worth thinking about what actually happens in this process: reification, abstraction, alienation, the setting up of false notions of 'separateness' and the erosion of distinctions in a system of equivalences. 

What cannot, today, be thought of as being a commodity? Nancy Fraser's intriguing question: just how far down does it go? (Of course, the process also needs the re-establishment of limits since transgression becomes meaningless without boundaries. See Gopnik: the Caging of America). Nature and human nature, body parts, genetic codes, knowledge, reproductive services, care..the list is endless. So, in this light the 'objectification' of women is just one aspect of a much larger and wider process.

Would commercialization have been possible-to this extent, that is-without a certain Protestant and scientific way of looking at the world taking root? A philosophy of suspicion and radical doubt. The pure, inner self is inalienable-this is posited as an abstract reason or will, devoid of any specific substantive characteristics. Opposed to this 'subjective' side, independent of the world and any relations to it or to other people, is the 'object' side (personal (accidental?) characteristics or one's labour) that can be alienated, at least temporarily so. In fact, to mark off that 'object' side as distinct in in some respects the only way of realizing one's inner freedom.

Nothing must be allowed to touch this pure, contemplative inner self (neither politics nor the body's fragility). Our dependence on other people is, in this regard, too 'feminine', childish, even. The philosopher, the scientist, stands aloof from the world, the great existentialist hero or the observer-the flaneur wrapped up in his smoke so that no-one can see him!- is invariably a man.

He who sees ratio sees only himself.

---Blake.

'Modern economics judges the performance of an economy according to its achievements of three general goals. Does the economy produce efficiently and expand the available quantity and quality of goods and services? Are the resources equitably distributed among different people...'

--Nordhaus, NYRB.

Hang on a mo. Modern economic theory? Where does it distinguish between the quantity and quality? Since it is based on subjectivist accounts of value (preference satisfaction) it says nothing about the nature (or quality) of those preferences, which are taken as 'given'. That's just standard economics. 

Secondly, since when has economic theory been concerned about distribution?! Yes, post-Piketty there has been some concern about inequality by professional economists-mainly because they feel it might threaten the system (read: growth), but it' is pushing it a bit to say that mainstream economics has been or is genuinely worried about inequality. 




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