On the other hand, life and religion are full of colour.

There is much to admire in the Pope's Encyclical. Here are some of his words/thoughts:

Damage stems from the idea that there are no ultimate truths to guide our lives and the notion that we have limitless freedom.

An integral ecology would lead us to understand that social justice is not separable from ecological justice; care for other people cannot be separated from our responsibility to non-human beings and, more generally, the environment.

Without openness and awe in front of nature there is only consumption and mastery: the desire to eradicate what we lack in life with the aid of material things and the mistaken belief that nature is something to be used, tamed..an "input" into the generation of income or human welfare.

"Francis asked that part of the friary garden always be left untouched, so that wild flowers and herbs could grow there..."
[There must always be a space, a time, where human beings stand aside from themselves]

The world is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be contemplated.

Technology has made the earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey. [One dimensional].

"Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection..Each of the various creatures..reflects in its own way a ray of God's infinite wisdom and goodness." 

God's goodness "could not be represented fittingly by any one creature." (Aquinas).

[This notion of abundance, of an overflowing goodness, is likely to strike modern ears as wildly inaccurate. But it is only when you consider that it is humans who have turned abundance into scarcity, the beautiful into ugliness, that this rings true. In addition, this is an incredibly humble stance: to recognize one's own smallness, limits, without despair, without impatiently trying to achieve something that we are not capable of and, ultimately, something that we don't really wish to be. And since no-one being contains all truth and merit, it follows that we should respect other beings, other ways of being. Pluralism, in its best sense, is intricately related to humility]. 

[From a Muslim perspective: Lord of all the worlds. Equally, the orthodox position that Islam is just the last in a long line of revelations, each with their own distinct approaches. There is no one "saving truth"].

"Respecting the possibilities offered by things."

"Life gradually becomes a surrender to situations conditioned by technology.."

To be conscious "that we live and act on the basis of a reality which has previously been given to us, which precedes our existence and our abilities."

No system can completely suppress our openness to what is good, true and beautiful.

When the day is done

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,

My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,

My crop of corn is but a field of tares,

And all my good is but vain hope of gain.

The day is gone and yet I saw no sun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,

The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,

My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,

I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,

My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,

I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,

And now I die, and now I am but made.

The glass is full, and now the glass is run,

And now I live, and now my life is done.

---

With thanks to Bob and Tom for pointing me here.

~

I'm homesick for a place I don't know, or that I've never left. I have nothing left to say and don't know how to say it. A dark planet was discovered, hidden after all this time, and in the human heart...

A story by Breece sounds hollow, contrived. There is nothing to follow: no letters, staged reading performances, contracts, deals, signings, secrets revealed by lost lovers out to make a buck. This is it, the final form, the last-day face that said it all. No 'progression', no reference to other books, no storyline, just this slim volume between your fingers, a life condensed to a few thousand words, contained within this thin jacket, the imprint of a hand on a windowpane, your breath in the early morning winter, January, now.

No afterglow, no fame, just a moment of rediscovery and then sink back to where you've always been. If you have not reached winter, then where?

Fat Tails

According to Weitzman there is about a one in ten chance (10%) that climate change will result in temperature increases of 6 C in the business-as-usual scenario. That, to put it quite simply, spells catastrophe.

Reading the haunting book on Chernobyl you don't have any great confidence in nuclear energy as a solution.

Perhaps the key to thinking about climate change is not in terms of "consumption smoothing" (inter-temporal optimization) but in terms of insurance against catastrophic changes.

But maybe that, too, is the wrong way of thinking. After all, why should I buy insurance for someone else (future generations)?; also, if there is a pay-out that cannot replace the damaged environment nor can other people directly benefit from the pay-out (as in life insurance). So, what we're really talking about is risk management and our responsibility for avoiding a catastrophic situation.

The first approach (optimization) is fraught with all sorts of technical and ethical difficulties (not least: what discount rate should be used). I'll write a post on that later but W. Beckerman has, for me, the clearest exposition of the technicalities involved in the Ramsey equation.

~
There's this amazing scene in one of my favourite films, the original Planet of the Apes (one is constantly reminded of this given the way in which ISIS and other fanatics have risen to prominence). And it's this: when the old religious order finds out that there is evidence of another kind of world, one that preceded theirs and that was in some sense more intelligent (but more violent). The apes replace that civilisation with something cruder but less violent because less technologically advanced.

And what is that evidence? A talking doll found in the rubble. 

~
Given the possibility of threshold effects and feedback loops it's not absolutely clear what kind of "system" we'd enter if temperatures increase by 6 C. Will we be in a system of non-linear and irreversible changes? Certainly earth hasn't seen these levels of concentration of carbon dioxide (400 ppm) for 800,000 years. The period of settled agriculture is perhaps only 10,000 years long and has obviously depended on favourable climate changes.

So, the question is really about survival. Not just who survives but what survives? Will a recognizable human form, the Image of Man, continue to exist?

The American Dream

 To be white now has no meaning divorced from “the machinery of criminal power.”
--Ta-Nehisi Coates.

To dream the dream that the dreamers dreamt. Dream on. We have our own dreams. As soon as I could walk I knew how to dream.

~

Blind spots. People don't like to talk about them much. The way men can't understand women; the way so-called religious people are contemptuous of non-religious people; the way in which racism-which exists everywhere-has been institutionalized by white people over the last two centuries.

Think: South Africa, Australia, America and the idea and practice of segregation, camps, ghettos. In some sense Israel is a continuation of this rather nasty dimension of European history. Think: colonialism and how it was deeply intertwined with notions of racial superiority. And, of course, Nazism. 

Foucault's apt formulation: Nazism = State Racism. (The bio-political pushed to its extreme).

As one might well ask if men have really got over their misogyny I think one can also ask: have Europe and America got over their intense race consciousness? 

The Red Man, the Black Man, ..ain't really man enough.

~

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky...

Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leapt to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs...

a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun.

Fifty Shades of Laughter

Not quite sure who Grayson Perry is..sounds like some kind of performer. Side note: give anyone a platform and they become an actor seeking out the laughter and 'companionship' of the audience. You can see academics at TED doing their best to throw in a joke here and there, cultivate some two-penny act, become a showman, an entertainer, a "communicator" (can anyone beat Reagan here?)..forget "relevance" and academic acclaim; nothing beats being a media whore-except, of course, for being a servant of the state as a public policy wonk, a self-styled expert who will sell his soul for some greenbacks and the dream of a comfortable life out in the sticks.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts in his Reith lectures:

"By the early 70s, you know most things have been at least sort of tried or suggested, and now we're in a state where anything can be."

There is something mildly irritating by the casual use of, you know, the language, like. It's all sort of, you know, vague, confessional-ly, kinda of like how a teenager speaks, you know, right, like we was in Essex or something.

But put that to one side and get to the meat..

"The avant-garde is now a period style."

And the art establishment sort of looks down and goes, oh yeah, nice rebellion! Welcome in!

[And take your clothes while your at it, luv]

We were now in a period where anything could go.

[Against that, cultivate some mode of thinking that is stuffy, arcane, esoteric and impossible for the plebs to understand-even if it is utter nonsense]

We've accepted a lot of things that were weird now are normal..."We're all bohemians now". [Or, as the like to say in late capitalism: "Everyone's a nomad!"]

[Rebel. I told you to rebel. Je suis Charlie..]

And if you think about it [no, don't] all the things that were once seen as subversive and dangerous like tattoos and piercings and drugs and interracial sex, fetishism, all these things sort of crop up on Saturday night on family viewing.

[Of course, we sort of don't want to think of subversiveness as independence of thought, or as a way of dealing with the fact that the political and media machines have worked us over].

But what they don't realise-by being all inventive and creative, they're actually playing into capitalism's hands. 

The art world is the perfect model of neo-liberalism..

So radical art of the 60s has become a kind of messy play lifestyle accessory for the Fifty Shades of Grey generation.(LAUGHTER). 

Outrage has become domesticated.

But realness is a thing, you know that has a high currency..the currency of a bohemian-ness, lefty, arty-fartiness..especially in the urban ecology.

A part of his [Graham Fagen] installation if you like was a pile of sweets and they [a group of students] all just started eating the sweets! (LAUGHTER). You know that's their argument.

I mean Piero Manzoni in 61 famously canned his own faeces and sold them for the weight, equivalent weight of gold. 

[Hey, you can't blame all of the decline of western civilisation on immigrants!]

And we should all say yes everything we do is really brilliant.

Theme park plus Sudoko. You know, people want an outrageous and exciting experience from art and then they want to slightly puzzle over what it's about. (LAUGHTER).

You know it might be art rather than just an interesting website when it has the grip of porn without the possibility of consummation or a happy ending.

anti-

The problem with any form of criticism of the status quo nowadays is that one will immediately be taken for something of a lunatic. So, for example, any criticism is often dismissed as a "rant". Or, in that charming American way, one will be told: "lighten up, dude". Of course, on the other hand, criticism, as long as it does not pertain to the fundamentals, will always be permitted, encouraged even. A ceaseless flow of views and counter points of view help add to the confusion and thereby detract from any serious discussion.

The fragmentary view of journalism is, in fact, the model for almost everything. Up to date, de-contextualized and instantaneous pulp thrown up to pass the time and make a quick buck at the same time. There is no news that stays news. 

Trump is a case in point. Today's clown (incidentally, the papers now push 'book of the week' or book of the day'). Focus on his craziness (or even his hair style) but you'll be hard pushed to find any analysis of how that kind of populism is related to: the decline of political parties, shifts within the Republican party, the history of ranters or, more broadly, the morphing of the conservative tradition into bigotry and xenophobia in many parts of the world. There is no discussion of who the right wing is speaking to or, in fact, of the decline of the white working class (or to, as they now call it, the hollowing out of the middle class).

Isis is another good example. Again, there is hardly ever discussion of how this group came to be formed but also, taking a step back, of what the relation between the growth of conservatism post-79 and the rise of extremism actually is. There is no discussion of the role of the Saudis in the support of radical groups or of some of America's other friends in the creation and funding of the Taleban. And very little sane discussion of the possible connection between religion and violence.

~

Education: what counts as research is really very often, you suspect, just an extension of current results or an application of some given framework of analysis to some new area. An incredible saturation of mediocrity trying to pass itself off as the "cutting edge". The dull reality of it all is a lot of gaming in which the administrators and faculty are both complicit. A series of partial analyses and a mania for debunking, the inability or unwillingness to discuss anything related to ethics (science is, after all, the mode of inquiry to be imitated) results in an education that is for the large part incoherent and unrelated to fundamental questions about the good life. As is consistent with a liberal political view, there is a profound scepticism over the very notion of a good life (or at least the possibility of their being any consensus on this).

And, of course, education itself is increasingly seen as a certificate, a passport, that helps you move on in the world. Human capital. the name gives it away, really.

Stefan Collini, writing in the LRB, is quite scathing of the extension of the audit culture to teaching. Again, it is instructive to see these changes against the background of the rise of neo-liberalism and the culture it has spawned. But any criticism of the neo-liberal university is likely to be dismissed as a rant or as a demonstration of one's hopeless naivete. Power often succeeds not by demonstrating the force of its arguments but by brute force itself or by its capacity to mock and deride (Leo Strauss, intriguingly, makes this point in reference to the Enlightenment's attitude to religion: since it could not disprove religion it had to resort to ridicule).

~

What also caught your eye was this, by Bendeict Anderson:  

A glance across the social sciences and humanities for the ‘great theorists’ of the past century makes this abundantly clear, whether in philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Levinas), history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, de Man, Barthes). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Chomsky, who revolutionised the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer.

'Because you need to add something to this ordinary life, in order to understand it.'

Chernobyl is a portal to infinity.

You can't understand anything without the shadow of death. And only on the basis of Russian culture could you begin to make sense of the catastrophe.

They appeared on this earth, fell in love, raised bread with the sweat of their brow, continued their line. Waited for their grandchildren. And then, having lived this life, they left the land by going into the land, by becoming the land.

~
In a few decades, in a hundred years, these will be mythic years. Then who will remember what. Already I hear your voice from a distance. Was it always there, just under the surface. Already our story is in a book and I look upon my life from the corner of my eye. Already, the dust on our grey faces...already a dark sea, and nothing to say.

It's impossible to suffer like this without any meaning. Without any of the old words.

Where is the word that is found in nobody's heart?

(Words mostly from Alexievich's remarkable book. Some are my own)

Why read?

We collect books now as we would any other commodity. The idea that we cannot read or understand everything- and were perhaps not meant to- strikes us as a profoundly odd outlook in a day and age when everything is possible; it suggests a narrow minded approach, even, given that we are, supposedly by definition, insatiable, transgressive beings that escape all definitions. 

The pursuit of knowledge takes on two forms: an endless pursuit with no end; or one that is tethered to a narrow utilitarianism (to promote economic growth (the knowledge economy) or to produce better (more docile?) citizens. i.e. money and power.

Whether one calls that the industrialization or rationalization of knowledge doesn't really matter, I think. 

The notion that we might read books or pursue knowledge in order to transform our lives (or, more particularly, to understand something of the Divine) sounds, again, positively quaint and wholly anachronistic.

Reading has to be about "me" (a form of therapy perhaps) or allow us to delve into the author's inner state or if neither, then pure entertainment, a diversion, a distraction. An older perspective in which reading might be something more than the accumulation of abstract ideas and instead a direct engagement with people and ideas that startled us, or that moved us to something we loved..is that now nothing but a second-hand feeling, a distant sensation? Ideas that might clarify the way in which we understood the world and lived in it.

Reading, knowledge, not as ends in themselves but constituent parts of the good life, pointers to what lies beyond the text. The Tree of Knowledge cannot be separated from the other Tree. And yet that is precisely what the 'life of the mind' now amounts to. In all this one cannot discount the role that science-as a way of knowing-plays in all this. 

F. Rosenzweig:

"My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...

Then there was this:

Not reading or art or knowledge for its own sake (libido dominandi-a desire unconstrained by anything but itself). Some people wish to read everything, which is surely just a subset of the desire to have everything, to be everything. The craze for the latest thing is exploited by industries and yet we cling on to the idea that the individual and freedom are at their apogee. The ever-expanding list of things to do, places to see; the myriad selves any one of which we imagine we could be, if only..Unable or unwilling to note the point where enough is enough invariably results in nature or reality itself imposing limits on us. Is that why Walser wanted to be small, like a Chinaman?

Hugh of Saint Victor:

"Don't vie with them..It is nothing to you whether you read all the books there are or not. The number of books is infinite; don't pursue infinity! Where there is no rest, there is no peace. Where there is no peace, God cannot dwell."

~

There's a wonderful introductory chapter to Nietzsche's Anti-Education online. More, later. Bryter, later. 

'A shadow of madness'

The reaction to yesterday's attack is a mixture of nausea and fear. I guess our university is a prime target given that it is 'liberal', 'westernized' etc. etc. Slogans and labels are all that matter now, I suppose. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers. A single word can indicate that you're in the "wrong camp". Words like humanism or secularism. A name may also mean you will be one of the drowned or one of the saved. More likely than not, though, it will be indiscriminate-and then you'll just be a number.

What does it mean today to say, I give you my word? 

This is what it's come down to. You have to wonder if the brief (brief, that is, relative to the history of the planet) period of human civilisation is coming to an end, whether it was only just an interlude and that earth will return to its older and slower cycles of change without us around. 

In some sense the world has already ended: what is left of nature, what of human nature? The latter, we are now told, was just a dream or a construct anyway, a figment of our wishful thinking, our inflated sense of our importance in the cosmos, a necessary fiction that would keep us going. What is left of the Image of Man?

~

You sense the madness is getting closer; maybe it's been there all along? In any case, what was once at the frontier has now moved to the centre, the sharp edges are no illusion. Drink or prayer, you can't decide. One thing is for sure, this is a lot deeper problem than some people would like to have us believe with their claims that "it's only a small minority...". Sure, but the attitudes of many aren't exactly conducive to an open and tolerant society. And it isn't just one country. 

Religion is over. I think that's a well established fact. 

The other day a fifteen year old kid was in a class and the mullah asked: "Who is it amongst us who doesn't love God?" The kid misheard the question or became confused and raised his hand. At which point he was labeled a blasphemer. Now, here's the really crazy bit. The kid goes home and saws off his hand and brings it back to class to show the mullah. Everyone's happy in this circus: the kid, the mullah, the father...and get this, the father says he is proud of his son. 

~

Voices from Chernobyl is a wonderful but sad book. I'd even say remarkable. What's most frightening about it is the apprehension that this wasn't just something that happened in the past but that it could very well represent our future.

What is left of the Greeks but their myths? 

What will we do when there's no future? How will we begin again?

From the cemetery we looked at our houses from afar

Plainspoken words. In the time of the end of time simple words, without adornment, make everyone a philosopher. The time to tell it like it is and not hide behind the shadows. What can we understand then? What is time? Where am I?   

The acceptance of a life that is lived at the minimum level: an intellectual, emotional and spiritual minimum.

A life of endurance rather than joy or happiness. And boredom, too. Boredom itself is an acceptance that the world will always be the same and nothing can be done about it; an acceptance that our powers and capacities are destined to wane and falter, that we will miss much, fail to comprehend most things, as if a thick blanket had been placed on our heads. An acknowledgment that we live in a second-best world..half a life, a life lived in fractions, with no second chances.

This greater sense of continuity is an antidote to the dullness but also, in part, its cause.

The anguished faces tell of a life that is trapped 'in a moment which is born of all that has happened to them.'

'Faced with the rigid irreversibility of events'-for which there is no preparing, no manual-and unable 'to catch time by its tail, they chase their own, revolving in one moment blindly through all their life.'

Life was but a moment, a single moment. There were so many things he wanted to say but he lacked the words, his hands were clumpish. He thought he could recover, like a child. Though for most of his life he had been a child.

--from John Berger's A Fortunate Man.

~

When one is ill the body becomes a separate entity; distinct from the mind that is now aware of it; distinct from the other parts of the body that are not in pain. A back, in pain, is like a face, or the knotted furrows of a brow. When one is in good health there is no awareness of the body (or, perhaps, even of the passing of time). What kind of illness is melancholy? Our rituals of repetition do not bind us to anything greater than ourselves but have, instead, become purely mechanical or automatic, a form of neurosis. To live in linear time means nothing can be repeated, only mimicked. We give ourselves to time and are carried away by it.

~

You think back: what kind of knowledge-if any-do you have? What does it count for? It's not something that you can remember or that forms any significant part of a good life. It gives very little shape to your daily experience and will not, you suspect, stand you in good stead when the all is said and done and you have to give an account of your existence. 

You bear witness to what, exactly?

London, my London

The 390, a new old bus, from York Way to Notting Hill, plush and rich interiors, the same stone wall, iron-clad faces. There is a kind of world- weariness that is beyond the world.. From the sixth floor apartment you can see Camden to one side, King's Cross to the other. You sit with the elders, having grown old yourself, having always been old, I suppose. The man, fiercely intelligent, compassionate eyes, his teeth nearly falling out if he speaks too quickly. In a former time, he would speak in a quick dialect, racing through the words, leaving many out, and only four people in the whole world could comprehend what he was saying..In former times four people were enough. His self- contained flat is crammed with photographs, prints, computers, books ( dictionaries, archaeology, game theory, Aristotle), blue and white figurines, stone Buddhas and 19 th century nautical instruments. How did they orient themselves in those days? Ubo says we now live in a time when people hesitate when they speak to one another. His friend from seventy plus years ago would walk away dejected when he told him to go away because he had to study for his exams. So his friend just stood under the window and said, " let's talk from here". It is a blessing, says Ghazali, to be a stone for a stone is not nothing. To be a human, this particular human, even more so. To be an individual, ec-centric, like nothing else in the world, is a task, an opportunity. Freedom: the capacity for gratitude. That we can know something of ourselves, of other people.. I can't stomach any poetry today. Nazim Hikmet or Stanley Moss. The world of suffering redeemed by words or flowers!Sod it! Outside the church, past Denmark street, you note a tree curved into an S-shape. You walked here more than a quarter of a century ago and still it is the same. A cheese and tomato sarnie from the wb, great hidden secret of central London. Earlier, Lithuanian rye bread and pickled herrings, soya latte and some chocolate is all the poetry I need. I need no books, sentences, lost gazes. Perhaps Edna oBrien later. On the way back the 1970s fading orange light on the top of side walls, the crown of branchless trees, the high windows of empty apartments, makes you think of Huizinga. The light is dreamy, yet fantastically clear and the sky is full of so many purple clouds you stop to think how each day is different from the other, even as it recalls other times. Somewhere, deep down, London's underground rivers still flow. ' The East river, still musical, distantly related to the North sea'

Blackstar

When the light

What light there is returns at this late time of the year. What light there is resumes its course, overcoming the interlude of the world. In this bright hour I want to speak with you. What light!

In this hour loss holds the memory of life. The circle that stood clear, unbroken. Now the year has passed in an hour. When I think back I can count the moments on my hand. Light and shadow on my hands, " yes" and " no" in my true love's eyes.

Now the Roding is flooding, spilling out onto its banks, forming shining silver pools on the land. What light remains is the colour of old fires. Crow stood on a branchless tree or on the stump of another in what the kid called " the tiny park". Crow, who has been there sine the beginning looked directly at the star, his mind all fire, and wondered if he'd live to see the light dance again in his homeless heart. " I have known only one thing, but imperfectly". The ancient sun on his back the only thing in creation older than him. When the light fades, then he becomes what he really is.

It was not the time for poetry or for any kind of words, actually. Words just flow and are flown down the river. The river, this river, one of many, is a mirror, is a bridge and all the things we cannot speak of. Grass and weeds and stone are one. And the wine bottle, drunk to the dregs, yesterday's happiness, the smiles and small talk mingles with the startling image of deep shadowed fish.

 I read this somewhere, " The life of man is like grass: it blossoms, dries out, and then goes into the fire". Behold it all...but the eye is not constant.

To stop and take note of all the departures and arrivals. Some weep, some embrace. Make sure you have the right papers, the time on your wrist is true, then walk, falteringly, into a new hallway, a room, blinking in this new, unfamiliar and artificial light.

And all the time the waters are rising during the night. In the early hours, in the darkness it will steal into the houses, leave its silent mark on the basement walls. We see it in a dream, even in summer, even in summer and the grand, floating days.

The frail, crumbling light, the fragmenting fires, the ankle- high black waters laying waste the mind's invincibility. Everything moves in circles, and when the light returns it will be without witness.

Life on earth

The grey clouds lifted by 10.15 and a kind of clarity was restored for a brief while. By eleven the sky had grown dark again, the angles of light on the ground narrowing, the cold rain biting on your face...

You observe everything from a distance: a policeman speaking but saying nothing; a woman in her early thirties, hair pulled tightly back, large bangles, lost in a reverie; a postman in his bright orange top delivering letters and packages faithfully; three drunks sitting on the steps of 'the temple' (a restaurant); and the joggers, running to clear the system, a different image of themselves in their head. This small patch of land becomes bright, illuminated and full of memories by mid-afternoon.

You like to watch the old second-division matches, slower, more passionate, less moneyed and therefore more real than the commercially run premier league. They remind you of The Big Match on Sundays, just after roast lamb and mint sauce. You drift in and out of sleep...how much of your life has been spent in dreams! You walk on the Bridge, hands in pockets, and wonder to yourself if you'll suddenly wake up somewhere else and just scratch your head, trying to remember this feeling.

January in the north is always so clear. You remember how small life is.

Life on earth carries on without us. You look out of the window and think of all the time-the end of winter, Spring, early summer- all that will pass before I'm back. You walk past an old woman in a head scarf at the charity shop, her back bent double, almost horizontal, so that she's barely able to raise her face to see anyone. How many seasons old people have seen..how much they know of distances!

As you grow older books become less important as you try to figure out what's really important and what can be let go off. There is less to say as well.

Is there a sentence, a word, that will get you out, get you back, make sense of it all? G minor is, said G. Steiner, fundamental to western sensibilities. He might as well have said this fragile, waning northern light, the early-evening dark silhouettes and deep shadows carries with it the same sense of loss.  

After the deluge

' It was the same world, but people were different.'
S. Alexievich.

The earth, the earth itself has absorbed the catastrophe, and is scarred by it. What kind of political and cultural institutions will emerge, what kind of human sensibilities will endure, or will there only be a human wilderness, a succession of blank years and forgetfulness? The poet remembers a line from former times, "Once we were beautiful, I'm sure of it."

Amy Davidson writes, in a fascinating New Yorker piece, of the Great Famine ( 1315-1317). Years of rain and crop failure precipitated food shortages which by some estimates resulted in the death of up to 10% of the population. Patterns of settlement, the deep continuities of human ways of living are disrupted..a deep shadow is cast..the very idea of the future is brought into question: how to go on, what is essential to preserve and what can be let go off without a loss of identity? This already assumes that the human will remains intact and also, crucially, that its scope for action remains unimpaired. But in times of catastrophe both of those assumptions come under pressure.

' After that, nothing happened'
Plenty Coups

'We lived through everything, we survived everything..' but along the way we forgot much. How to find one's way back when there are no more paths?

To imagine a form of life is to imagine a language. But already the words we once knew with certainty have become obscure. I knew a word that was in nobody' heart.
There is no more image of Man, no more speech; we live as if in a dream, one moment unconnected to the next.

'A human being can be an enigma to himself because he doesn't know why he lives as he does..he understands his words but he is foreign to his life.'

After the deluge our alienation from nature, the world, is mirrored in our alienation from other people and ourselves. The strangeness of a time that does not pass and that makes the past incomprehensible.

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At Foyles you realize that they're not really interested in books. They're in the business of selling books (probably for not much longer though). So, unlike smaller book shops you sense they have a much keener eye on current interests and fads. The fact that the ground floors of the big shops are increasingly filled up with stationery, best sellers, mole leather notebooks and other paraphernalia makes you wonder..how much longer?( DHLs essay on the monks carrying the last remnants of European civilisation with them on their backs, the narrow margins by which the word survives seem irrelevant when one considers providence).

But you do wonder if the tide has turned. At the old Dillons fiction has been moved to the first floor. You read the list of books to look forward to in 2016 with horror since it's just another game.

Martha Nussbaum once wrote that at certain times, perhaps like ours, the idea of non- relative virtues and perspectives is dismissed and replaced by the thought ( or at least the feeling) that it's all a game, a third rate play on a rickety stage. In such an age chance or power determines outcomes. God, if he is still talked about is conceived as a distant, all-powerful " force".

~~~
The thought that human beings were an open- ended project, a work in progress, once struck as liberating. But now the lack of essence, of being, strikes us as shallow. The 'thin' view of rationality, the partial understanding of freedom, leaves us with a rather fragile notion of the self. 'The good' itself has become an empty word filled in by whatever we please.

The old peasant words in 'Voices' bear a weight that is carried by a thousand years of experience and contact with reality. Our own words and thoughts, in comparison, refer back to what, exactly?

A song for old England

The last days of winter, the morning hours, the dark light on the windowpanes, the bright light that inheres, that is woven into the darkness, all this ancient light under the surface. Like an hour against which all others are measured.

An old medieval string of notes survives, passes hands. The same hour of the soul is remembered in Wales, Argentina, Spain.

At the end of the year there is a kind of remembrance of all that has been lost, of ways of speaking, standing, holding that no longer formally exist.

You listen to some great short stories..Eudora Welty, Cynthia Ozick, Steve Millhauser, Cheever, Shirley Jackson. A word from the last year carries over, as you read a book between the last and first days, across the year ( another kind of weaving).

The writing here comprises four or five word sentences. After the catastrophe the land returns to its primal state, harsh, unyielding. That is what human beings have done to it. What words are left between us? Plain spoken words as close to the things they name. But now there is no time we only keep the names, not the things. Only the real, ordinary words spoken by real ordinary people will suffice to tell of what can't be spoken. Only they can hint at an experience of what lies beyond our capabilities to understand.The words we say in prayer get closest to what we are. The sentences must be full of silence and sadness; the words like dark light in the early morning hours...

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Ozick' s 'shawl' and Millhauser retain something of that child- like innocence, as if we were reading a fable, something true about elementary human nature. In both its as if we're saying to ourselves that at this late stage in the day we have to dispense with the superfluous, with artifice, cultural padding. Underneath all those layers lies something that we'd lived with all along but had lost in this, our so called age of sophistication.

A line from Luc Sante makes me think this is the last book I'd ever pick up..." Paris was licentious. Paris was the capital of ass." This is in stark contrast to the simple language in Voices from Chernobyl.

---

Listening to a lovely lecture on Ghazali. He's the best scholar of his day but still thinks there's something lacking! Something slightly fake about the whole thing. His self is exhausted-is that another name for melancholia?- and he understands that that's a result of him thinking that all his efforts and success have come only from himself.

On a journey he takes his books with him..his latest work that has consumed him for the last three years. He's stopped by a brigand. Ghazali implores him not to take his beloved books. The brigand laughs and says, " what kind of knowledge is that, that I can take away from you so easily!"