And if we are entering the final season, then what is carried over?
'I write as though you could understand
And I could say it.'
--W.S. Merwin.
~
If the Church is a refuge then it is so in a land full of disappearances, a desiccated land full of burning bushes and empty signs. The forests burned down, the black gardens we've fashioned with so much bleak skill. The particular ways of living in the world, specific modes of speech, the inherited gestures from people who worked under the sun, an unstructured world, all that now fades into oblivion.
If the Church is a ship then it sails in no direction, in a sea long in memory. In the great fall from grace everyone is perfectly content on their own little island, their fantasy island.
'The death of nature and the appearance of life are but distinct aspects of the same new consciousness. '
--Illich.
Life has become the idol of a dying/murdering species.
~
What would it take for the Palestinians to be recognized as human beings?
Adam Gopnik is someone whose writing I've liked for some time now (not going to tell Tom in case he trashes him!). His book on winter is lovely and I've saved his book, The Table Comes First, for later. A book like that has to be read in the holidays. He has a great introduction to Molly Hughes and a wonderful radio talk on Camus but over the last year or so you've come to think that his political views are, well, not to put too fine a point on it, not too dissimilar to those of your average pseudo-liberal intellectual flake.
Je suis...
Don't go there.
But the latest one on the niqab. Here's the thing: he's intelligent enough to realize that he's going to sound like an anti-liberal person (and, good grief, we can't have that!) so he has to engage in all sorts of cartwheels and backflips to get out of it.
One of the hard-won values of a liberal society, he tells us, is individual autonomy (no question of how in a so-called liberal economy we might end up being slaves to our desires or how, in our name, "we" have fought so many wars ostensibly in order to help poor Johnny Foreigner, the more "backward" castes, attain freedom).
And with this autonomy goes the "belief that you can't, either literally or symbolically, mask individuals. Women's right to full autonomy is not optional in our society."
It's not clear what he means by that. If someone masks you then, yes, I can understand the concerns. But what if it is a free choice? Doesn't that accord with someone's "full autonomy"?
"And those who regard it as optional are not those who can expect to participate in it as citizens."
Well, it's not really a question of being "optional" but, instead, of the contested notion of autonomy. Why should what someone wears disqualify them from participating as citizens? That does seem like an extreme thing to say.
"If you wish to join our group, which will give you maximum freedom for every kind of self-expression and religious practice..."
Er...cut the condescending drivel out, old bean. "Our group"! And who is this "group" that gives me freedom (nay, not just freedom, but maximum freedom. Hurrah!)? No irony here, of course. A group gives me my freedom. Except you're not free to express your own religious views because, er, I don't like them! Hmm.
And then this: "We cherish differences, but we don't accept secession"
Is that really the best analogy you can come up with? Is a woman wearing some item of clothing in any way equivalent to secession?
Of course, it's a bit more nuanced than that but you can't help feel that Gopnik is trying to cover his tracks here. In middle age there's invariably a tendency to move to the right, become more conservative, more settled in one's ways. It takes a great deal of will power and imaginative insight to stay free, open to differences.
Calvino, on the other hand, suggests this other way of looking:
'His gaze, contemplating the stars, remains alert, available, released from all certitude.'
One might want to ask Gopnik the question Brando asks: Have you ever considered any real freedoms?
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