Meanwhile..back in the jungle

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Okay, sod that. Liberty, then.

'They [the French] like to be governed, as long as they are governed well.
--Mark Lilla, NYRB.

Okay, sod Liberty, some more trinkets, then?

~

The Paranoid Style (beats Gangam any day):

Dem Joos, snake-injuns, witches, niggahs, fags, retard lesbian-loving liberals, those Paki-wog-Muslim towel heads, them greasy wops, slime ball dagos, slanty-eye chinks, those freedom-hating ruskies..the gypos, the scroungers, the lustful turk, all-time losers, the single moms on heat, the super-predators, crackheads, opium eaters and pansy East coast intellectual elite, the liberal-anti-family-anti-life media, the unproductive, the too-reproductive..to all of you one and all I say: "Fuck You, Buddy".

And God Bless. 

I, Robot

Stumbled across a blog which has the charming thought: maybe we should put robots in charge of human affairs given that humans have been so prone to violence. That is the kind of thought that every two-penny closet fascist harbours now and then. Not too far away, you suspect, from other dark musings: do we really need so many immigrants?

~

Over the weekend little r asked me what nerves are. Not quite sure myself I said that the brain sends messages through them to the rest of the body..so, the brain says, "lift up you hand" and you do. The brain says "scratch your ear" and you do.

Little r was having none of this. "I won't do what my brain says".

~

Back in 1977 Sen wrote a remarkable paper, Rational Fools, which has had very little influence on mainstream thinking. The idea was radical: Reason was not a mechanical decision procedure defined well in advance by narrow axioms but, in fact, the ability to take a step back from your desires (and, more controversially, from your own goals and objectives) and re-evaluate them in the light of experience. Reason, in this more capacious sense, was the ability to subject one's purposes and values to reasoned scrutiny. A person who could do nothing else but maximize their 'given' preferences (even when defined in a broad sense) was in effect a 'rational fool'. 

Intelligence requires judgement and is not mere cleverness and certainly not simply the pursuit of one's self-interest. To understand another person's goals and not reduce them to your own aims sounds like a momentous task and a world away from the dominant strain in economic thinking. Ultimately, to take a step back and evaluate your purposes means that reason isn't a cold and calculating capacity of the mind but, instead, an irreducible characteristic of a human way of relating to the world. Reason is, in this sense, not separate from emotional intelligence or ethics. To see yourself in the right light means seeing other people in the correct way, too. They're inseparable. There is no thinking alone, no subject before language or the world.  

'You'll enjoy it when you get there'

The words she dreaded more than anything were, "You're so different from all I had imagined." In fact, words were just wounds and better put to the side. There was nothing to say, nothing left to say. Distance, she thought, was indeed the soul of beauty. Yes, far better to sit at the window and let the clouds gather silently up above and then write at the small table, gathering in your thoughts, making something out of nothing, remaining half-unknown to him and yourself, because that was the best way to see, don't you see..keep the wine in a dark place, see your own face dimly reflected in the shimmering, distant past, some lines formed then still with you, see yourself as a stranger would see you. "I know what distances are," she whispered. 

The great summer sun on your shoulder now remembered after all these years. In winter, fires fragment and the ashes are so soft, indistinguishable. What shape there was to your life was to be found in the gestures of your hands. She observed the ink stains on her fragile fingers. "Yes," she said to herself, "it is just like this". 

In mid-morning, while the world lost its focus, it was best to keep the windows slightly open so the warm air would enter the house and the childlike patterns formed by the lace on the floor would ebb and flow into existence at irregular intervals. With each mirror recalling another time, it was as if, she thought ponderously, that her life was larger than it really was. There were no formal arrangements, but neither were there any signs of visible decay. "The next person in this house," she said to herself, "will wonder what kind of human being used to live here, what kind of life she could possibly have lived."  

Take up your pen again in the last light, and think and write naked, knowing your false self would always fall away in such moments. He's looking over your shoulder. You imagine him looking. Outside, the darkness gathering, the windows turning cold, the wooden furniture coming to its own stillness. Find that one sentence that takes you back. And, when you get back to that place of silence, return and drift back to that old room, alone, as if time didn't matter any more, you'll understand, vaguely, obliquely, brokenly that you'll enjoy it when you get there.   

Another kind of circus

"Indeed, the typical graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics training received at Anglo-American universities during the past 30 years or so, may have set back by decades serious investigations of aggregate economic behaviour and economic policy-relevant understanding. It was a privately and socially costly waste of time and other resources."

--W. Buiter. 

That's Buiter, mind you, not some radical or non-economist. 

What the university and what economics offer is a fragmentary perspective. We're here just to ask questions, not tell you what the answers are; it's all relative; identity is a construct, gender is a construct (what isn't a construct, one would like to know!). Which is all more than convenient for late capitalism which eschews the notion of fixed markers and any idea of sociality in favour of an "atomistic" individual (a 'picture', if that's the right word, that is enhanced by the prestige of science).

So, in this universe it is quite possible-likely, even-that some people can be fantastically clever in a technical sense but, because they have no depth of historical understanding, no philosophical inclinations (and even if they did, it is beaten out of them pretty fast by schooling and the disciplines so that no fundamental questions can be posed), the result is always a partial understanding and a partial critique. 

We can never understand what's really happening because we cannot relate changes in ideas to both wider changes in cultural values or to our daily lives. A better education, for instance, would allow us to relate neo-classical economics to neo-liberalism and to tease out how their interactions play out in our attitudes, preferences and feelings as well as how the latter are given expression and, in part, formed by our institutions.

The greatest success of the system is that it has hoodwinked everyone into believing that they are free (or, more accurately, that freedom can be reduced to the act of choice and that every social formation is, by definition, an infringement on that freedom). Closely associated with that idea is the belief that everything can and should be alienated (that itself entails quantification, abstraction, commensurability and institutions that both allow and encourage the sale of the self).

Freedom is sipping an extra light soya latte made with fair trade coffee beans while you update your facebook page and skim the news flashing on another screen. You pay for the "experience" with a credit card issued by a bank with a dubious history of financial dealings-but, hey, which bank hasn't. And all the time you convince yourself that you're hip enough to have escaped the clutches of capitalism and the desire-machine-the "system" that imposes its values on you when the truth is that you're already deeply implicated in it with your own little private rebellion. You ain't the ringmaster, for sure, but you've jumped through enough hoops.  

What can never be countenanced in this great era of individual autonomy is that you've been sold down the river. That the very resistance against the mainstream is now what the mainstream wants never occurs to you. Rebel sell. The shock of the new. Pushing the boat, resisting conformity..repeat after me: We're all individuals. And the pathetic sight of seeing the Guardian flogging 'Je suis..' pencils in solidarity with those who stand up to authority. The uber-cool computer geeks who make a billion from their own back garages, the "innovators" and "entrepreneurs" who create wealth for us all. And who isn't an entrepreneur now that self-management and self-improvement is the order of the day? 

The bourgeois bohemians and the hippie chicks that are into Zen, "spirituality," mindfulness, deep ecology (but then again, so is your typical CEO of your big multinational). Cultural capital, social capital, sexual capital. The word capital..er..sort of gives it away! 

  

   

'A circus for the desperate'

“Actually, I won everything. I won short people, tall people. I won fat people, skinny people. I won highly educated, OK-educated, and practically-not-educated-at-all. I won the evangelicals big and I won the military.”

[Youze just bout covered it then, boss. You beez in the box seat I be thinking. Jesse gonna help you bring hellfire down on dem dere heathens]

'If it doesn’t matter what Trump believes, and if it doesn’t matter that he lives in a gold and marble palace while his employees earn less than a living wage, then he might just be unstoppable.'

[Course it dont matter to us nothin'. This guys a winner and he gonna kick those losers out of here, big time, I tells ya] 

The Future of Capitalism

or

This is what capitalism is supposed to be about: the bright, lighter-than-air, technological wonder that leads us into a future where we know no bounds, no ties to terrestrial roots, just sheer productivity taking us into a weightless economy, instant connection, free associations. The boundless human spirit and all that jazz.

The reality is, unfortunately, that a lot of people are wading through excrement and refuse and that the gizmos, even when you can afford them, are just excrement and refuse packaged in a nice way (what Adam Smith would call "trinkets and baubles", the desire for which is the "deception" that keeps the "industry of mankind" moving forward).

~

What we need to think about is capitalism as a historical process (that academic economists do not even countenance the use of the word is itself quite revealing). And so, if we look at the last 40 years and think about the secular stagnation of growth, rising inequality (the 1%) and rising debt we might wonder if capitalism is facing not just temporary structural difficulties but a more profound crisis, a slow, gradual but inevitable decline. Is financialization a symptom of this decline?

I think one could go further. When one thinks about the decline of the public sector and its ethos (David Marquand, Tony Judt)-something that goes beyond privatisation but includes it; if one thinks about the inability of democratic politics to rein in an unfettered capitalism (since the left has sold itself down the river thanks to Clinton and Blair, the trade unions have been decimated and the universities are firmly in the camp of the neo-liberals); and if one couples that with the vast extension of 'commodification' and a consumer culture into all walks of life, something that is almost ubiquitous in our very thinking, then you've got a recipe for a perfect storm.

So, it's not just structural fault lines one needs to look at; it's the very culture of capitalism that is leading us down to a world of very few alternatives (this was the radical point of Illich back in the seventies: reliance on the state and the market for 'goods' actually led to a diminishing of our autonomy).

It's not the 'external' constraints on capitalism that we should be thinking about ('external' being the word Calhoun uses). What does it mean to say the looming ecological crisis is external to the history of capitalistic development?

What is more interesting is the view that there is an internal contradiction in capitalism, that it will undermine itself? How so?

Well, this goes back to Polanyi and the idea of fictitious commodities. Land and labour, for example, can never fully be made into commodities but there is a tendency in capitalistic development to try and set up equivalences everywhere (bring down everything into the nexus of the market and a system of equivalences or commensurability where the final arbiter of value is money or commoditized time). But here's the rub, the contradiction" the system has always needed and relied upon an 'other' (non-capitalist sector-Nancy Fraser) in order to extract value. This can take the shape of colonial enterprise where you can get cheap labour (think slavery or modern-day outsourcing to countries where regulation is weak) or it can take the shape of reliance on 'affective labour', trust, goodwill and a whole range of 'social capital' that is not produced by the system.

So, the real question for sustainability arises when capitalism itself undermines the very base on which it relies. What happens when the state is not there to tame its wilder instincts? What happens when people lose their motivation to work hard or save because they are living just for the moment (this what Daniel Bell saw a long time ago in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism). And what happens when one of the chief contributors to innovation and the creation of social value is throttled by the market (i.e the public realm)? When land, like everything else, is privatized does it fall into ruin (Wendell Berry). If not, how else would you explain the incredible amount of environmental damage inflicted by this mode of production, this way of life?  

~
What is the relation of academic economics to all of this? (Of course, academics like to pretend that they're value-neutral or that their subject approximates to a science). they just lay out the facts and policy people make the judgements.

The reality is, however, that there is an intimate link between economic theory and market societies. Neo-liberalism and neo-classical economics are not one and the same thing but one needs to examine the relation between the two.

"That it [economic orthodoxy] afforded a measure of justification to the free activities of the individual capitalist, attracted to it the support of the dominant social force behind authority."

--Keynes.

The neo-liberal university

Was lucky enough to listen to Craig Calhoun's lecture on The Future of Capitalism and then have lunch with him. 

Some observations.

Think his book, The Roots of Radicalism, is really fascinating but this talk was too narrow. Wolfgang Streeck is, to my mind, a far more interesting thinker. His article on the future of capitalism really joined the dots.

Side-note. People in positions of power are incredibly smart in a worldly sense (duh!). We're talking about corporations here with lots of different interested stakeholders and considerable sums of money, properties under their management. Vice-Chancellors and Directors are a thick-skinned species who can never, I mean never, get flustered by what you say, no matter how directly you speak. Think of all the years of exposure they get through participating in and witnessing all the day-to-day wheeling and dealing that is to be found in academic departments, board meetings, governing bodies, policy circles and the corridors of political power.

Pretty soon you learn what the game is about and if you don't like it, don't play it. You probably learn how to be "pleasant" or "charming", how to speak the lingo, think strategically, "weigh up options," make accommodations. In some sense I find that somewhat impressive but my sounder instincts lead me to feel quite repulsed by it all. 

There's something suspect about the way in which an academic can turn out phrases like "global brand" and "global leadership". "Leverage" is another favourite word. And the fascination with league tables and rankings is simply quite amazing but to be expected in an audit culture. Then you think to yourself: are these people merely fighting a rearguard action? Given the huge cut in public funding the leaders of these institutions-and this is the final triumph of capitalism- find themselves scrambling for funds and hobnobbing with people who manage funds (ordinary people have money; really rich people have funds). 

It's as if they're drawn into a crazy game where the only way to save yourself is to kill yourself (or your ideals, to be more accurate). Walk like an Egyptian. Only thing is, before you know it you wonder what you were trying to preserve in the first place and if the extension of markets and the market mentality isn't such a bad thing after all.

But this just makes you wonder: has the university always had its back up against the wall? Hasn't it always been part of some larger project, subject to a number of external constraints? For example, the idea that a university education could further strengthen citizenship in an aspiring middle class? And the notion that it can and should contribute to the economy via the "production" of knowledge is also not without precedent. 

Once the disciplines sided with science (even before STEM)-in terms of their methodology, their ideal, that is-what did you seriously expect? So, to say 'social science' forces us to ask the further questions: what is social about them; what is scientific? And the answer, of course, is very little. The answer is that the methodological individualism that underlies those studies and the aspiration to be a value-free mode of inquiry already ties in-perhaps too neatly-with the dominant trend in political liberalism. 

That the social sciences have nothing to say about what it is to lead a good life (except, perhaps, for offering its own one-sided mangled notion of the life of the mind as a contender), that it can retreat into a rarefied world of theory or questionable empiricism, set up its own class system and esoterica, indicates, above all else, that it is very much a part of the system.

To suggest a way of life, or to esteem continuity and character, is already to place oneself, in some regards, in opposition to capitalism. To be enamoured by the word "global" and to speak in the language of the markets is already to give the game away. 

A friend from York resigned himself to these changes in a typically Larkinesque way: The university is gone. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves (or placing too much hope in the unpredictability of life). 

Calhoun made a lot of an American judgement that said that corporations were not souls, not bodies, which meant, effectively, that they were not subject to moral judgement. A punk student at the back, having none of it, asked: "Why not? Why can't we criticize the multi-nationals?"

The usual cartwheeling and acrobatics followed. Worth remembering, you thought: Mr. Calhoun is on 430,000 pounds a year and the LSE is just down the road from Whitehall and the City. No, no, God forbid, we can't morally criticize any institutions (unless they're public ones). 

Perhaps the most interesting thing he said was on the distinction between very good thinkers and great ones. And here the question really arises whether an incessant focus on publishing and technicalities will preclude someone from thinking deeply and critically about the fundamental questions (which never really go away but are cast in a new light by each generation). 
It is an interesting thought experiment to imagine whether some of the greatest thinkers would now get tenure. Imagine Wittgenstein. In his lifetime he published one book, one article and one book review! Would a Hirschman, for example, even be tolerated today?

   

Ridicule

This may sound like an obvious point, but when you can't prove your argument resort to ridicule. In effect you're going beyond the question, You can't be serious?, because that still presupposes some level of engagement. Instead what is aimed for is an absolute form of dismissal. 

Leo Strauss writes of how that was the Enlightenment's chief mode of attack when it came to religion. Either that or create the conditions whereby people would be so absorbed in worldly matters that they would become self-sustaining realities- and the only ones worth considering to boot.

Except the problem now arises: if surface realities are everything then why chase a chimera? If the tension between Reality and Appearance has been the source of all our creativity then what happens when only appearance remains? And the more difficult question (Nietzsche): given that appearances can never be more than they seem, will they even be appearances?

So: the piss-take, irony, cynicism, radical doubt and indifference are the hallmarks of our age. There is no "our age". "Go with the flow". There is no telos of Man, no cosmos, no stable or abiding order. Get over it, dude. Lighten up. Hannah was surely correct to point out that the word-if there is one word-that encapsulates all of this is 'process'. The situation is fluid. From now on: sovereign becoming, liquid modernity. The journey, the self-styled nomads will tell us, is everything. 

We are noting but a part of nature-except nature now is not so much a model of unchanging standards or a hierarchy of being as it is mere contingency, ebb and flow, sheer randomness. A world of luck and power. Consider the lilies. And, of course, all of that would take a sinister turn. Since life is nasty, brutish and short we must submit to an external order. To think that we are but brute animals, straw tossed in the wind, nothing but the Gnostics' blind will, results in us acting like brute animals. Later, not even that. Man is a machine, a number (Primo Levi).

To break the stranglehold of a shallow utilitarianism: art for arts' sake or an emphasis on the esoteric, on expert opinion. Only the difficult and obscure is true (which is another form of fakery, as Roger Scruton informs us). Or, alternatively, if you can't manage the light-heartedness: all truth is on the boundaries, in the extreme. 

A line from Macintyre that really gets to the heart of it: In a world where there are no objective standards (no "customary expectations," E.P. would say), then effectiveness and success are nothing but what passes for effectiveness and success. What passes. 

Which is why we now think in slogans, paint by numbers. ISIS and the nihilists are the extreme example of this: there is no cause or end-point, it is pure mindlessness. At a totally different level, but similar in form, is the endless desire for accumulation of wealth. It is not just the economic system that could be criticized here. Economic theory itself (at least since the 1930s) has not been concerned about any substantive theory of the good. Instead what we have is an abstract 'desire for more'. To what end, no-one can say. What counts as rationality is not so much the pursuit of 'given' ends but consistency, a purely formal notion that exhibits no external correspondence to reality ("internal consistency"). Rationality, then, is reduced to a set of axioms, devoid of any relation to social context or ultimate purposes.

Harad IV

The Beeb is thought by many people around the world to be a bulwark-perhaps the last- against the inroads made by privatisation and the mentalities that accompany it. Public service, ideas service (as some have called it). The notion of an obligation to the wider public that resists a culture of instant gratification and commercial values.

Since one of your best friends works for them it's best ignoring the more sordid details of back-scratching and sucking up that finds its place in any decaying institution. Public school networks and nepotism go hand in hand in the modern economy (in any economy, you suppose). 

But to take a step back. Old auntie lost what little credibility she had after its shameful coverage of the war on Iraq. "Old hands" had now become filthy hands in the service of power. Instead of fulfilling their public duty of questioning those in power they succumbed to the desire to get in bed with them ("embedded journalists") so that they could deliver the "breaking news".

And, of course, it's not even worth talking about Israel and Palestine. Anyone interested can read Dyer's comments to get an idea of how much pressure they were under.

Well, all of that is really quite obvious to anyone with half a brain. What is perhaps less so is their shoddy and comical coverage of politics and culture on regular television programmes. Politics first. To think that the only real programmes on politics are Question Time and that weasel, Andrem Neill with Portillo , will give you some idea of the shallowness of their approach. Need one say any more?

Culture. This, too, is just another symptom of the reach of capitalism. Costume dramas and ridiculous "safe" depictions of history are, at best, simply laughable. Even worse are the programmes on books (almost non-existent) and art. 

Art has become all about showiness, consumption and presentation, about 'coolness' and the ability to draw in younger crowds (we've got to make art accessible, break down the elites' hold on judgement (which is all very old hat)). So, cue feigned excitement, dizzying displays of verbal diarrohea, long, beautiful shots of the work of art in glorious technicolour. Passion. Art is always about passion or suffering or madness or power (whatever is falvour of the day). Untangle some details of the artist's life-that's what we're really interested in anyway, a bit of high-end gossip. 

There's a serious point to be made here about how the dissolution of seriousness is precisely what's required for capitalism to extend it's hold (F. Jameson).

K. Clark's magisterial Civilisation speaks of world of stable values. Some will obviously reflect on how the programme also reflects patriarchy and elitism, on how it (in it's time) was symptomatic of a phase of capitalism that demanded conformity to norms, order and deference. 

Is it even possible for anyone to have such a grand vision nowadays or are we destined to veer between the alternative of a fragmentary approach and a false and shallow unity?

I've given up watching television (even the football) but did catch the back of Dateline London with Gavin Estler (a decent bloke). To watch this again made me cringe, what with the thick-skulled prostitutes and well-paid monkeys (aka journalists). Sit in your lovely Hampshire home and pontificate about something you know absolutely nothing about because you haven't bothered to actually do any investigative reporting or even read up on the issue. Here's the trick: show that you are one degree (but only one degree) more intelligent than the average illiterate Joe. Remind people that you've been to university by throwing in the odd unintelligible word, feign some moral concern or, even better, outrage, and with supreme confidence declare that you have some insight into reality from which me and you are ordinarily barred.  

Pick up your cheque on the way out as you bow down and speak to your contacts so that you can get called up again to boost your "visibility". 

~

Millhauser on invisibility.    

        

Often I'm amazed. The light, year after year. The back sun room where children played, where the old world continued somehow. I only need to open my hand and the world I don't know disappears. The cold sunshine, the equality of conditions, a formal sense that out there, beyond, you would always be there.

In the year of nineteen seventy-six the excessive light meant the stout working women with flabby arms brought out their Spanish fans or just breathed deeply under the striped shades. You'd live your whole life out there and never see anything like it again. The old men, reddened faces, their sleeves rolled up even higher revealing burned forearms, pretended as if it was all par for the course-and it was, it all was, since nothing unexpected was ever allowed to happen.  

We flipped beer mats next to the school wall or played marbles in the long hours, rolling them to safety, making equivalences: a "bloodshot" for two "minstrels". The one-off moment of the pitch. And it reverberates down to us even now, and always will, down down, traveling eighty years 
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

Anti-Education

It is tempting to see the Strumpet as a classic example of what it means to be anti-education. To see him squeal in the face of the Pope's comments is a delight, like watching a small kid being called out for being the obnoxious brat that he is. The one thing that can't be tolerated in the modern world is judgement: 

De gustibus non disputandum est.

~
The mis-education of Europe. The 'Rape of Europe,' as the Polish magazine has it, is worth thinking of in light of the rise (again) of the extreme right throughout Europe. One can't but help feel there's something nasty brewing.

Even in polite, supposedly educated circles it is not uncommon to hear the view that the migrants (Refugees? Huh? Is there a difference?) will be the undoing of European civilisation and culture. The fact that Europeans made soap out of other human beings and were involved in a brutal slave trade..no, that cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the dominant and delusional narrative. 

Let there be no discussion of the destruction of culture brought about by industrialization and a mindset that found itself conforming to the machine; no question of the relation between science and culture; and, God forbid, no discussion of how late capitalism with its incessant drive for novelty and disruption, its fixation on eradicating any kind of distinction ("pushpin is as good as poetry" as far as the market is concerned) undermines the very possibility of culture (as understood in the old sense of a transmission of forms that represented a shared symbolic order).

~
The introduction by Reitter and Wellmon to Nietzsche's anti-Education is quite brilliant.

At the heart of it is not simply the question of what the university stands for, or what it ought to. There is the more fundamental question of what the purpose of learning is and if that purpose makes any sense against a background culture which either opposes the importance of learning or, more to the point, refuses to even countenance the possibility that it is a question of any relevance in the first place. Get over it, dude. 

What kind of life is the life of the mind? Is a one-sided life a life in any recognizable way? This is not just about the career academic, the prostitute who is on the game, but also, and even more so, about the highly specialized expert who stands separated from worldly concerns with his or her genuine (or cultivated) disdain for ordinary people and ordinary life.

Is it possible that the university, along with the media machine, only aims to cultivate a false individuality, a commodified individual, a talking head that knows a few big phrases, a few mathematical tricks (Roemer calls this 'mathiness' rather than mathematical skills). To what purpose? That is not the question we have been trained to ask! 

Morishima: The good and the bad use of mathematics. 

The belief (belief!) that formalism, abstraction and detachment offered the only path to truth gets displaced by the more common notion: the model or our way of thinking is internally consistent and sod the truth. The truthfulness of our methods is what counts.

'Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness.'

The 'drive to knowledge' alone would be just as unhealthy as the hatred of knowledge.  

Gold in the shadows

There is a gold light in certain old paintings

That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

It is like happiness, when we are happy.

It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,

              And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross

              Share in its charity equally with the cross.

       2

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.

With so much to look  forward to he looked back.

We think he sang then, but the song is lost.

At  least he had seen once more the  beloved back.

              I say the song went this way: O prolong

             Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

      3

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.

One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.

The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.

Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.

              And all that we suffered through having existed

              Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

--Donald Justice

~

What once was is still there, or just about. The threads of time on the sleeves. The sound of the children playing in the yard during the recess, heard in interior corridors, off polished wood, or somewhere. And God, God further away than he's ever been you think, taking a break from it all, for a while, slouched on a doorstep somewhere. 

"Look how the kids grow" someone says. It was only yesterday.  Only the golden light is always itself, even when a faint presence on a frail autumn morning, or when hidden in the Roding's dark. Or when you read a line or see a face and remember something you'd almost forgotten. 

Revolutions

'Democrats of nearly every rank throw money at the people they call “innovators” while telling working-class Americans that little can be done about their ruined lives.'
--Thomas Frank.

There is much discussion about the populism of the right but, of course, with no hint that the established forces will, if they haven't already, be using whatever can muster the spirit in these late days for their own purposes. The very thought that anyone can challenge not just the military-industrial complex but the finance-media one too is, quite frankly, preposterous. 

The old maverick card doesn't wash any more. Old hat. 

Talkin' about a revolution..
Poor people gonna rise up and take what's theirs..

~

'The flower's pollen 
is older than the mountains.'

--J.B.

At least fifteen million years ago, and possibly as many as forty-five million, they landed in the sticky sap of a tree that is now extinct, in a kind of forest that no longer exists on Earth.'
---The New Yorker.

When the forests have been burned
their darkness remains.'
--W.S. Merwin.

~

The revolutions: Our lives move in circles of varying circumference. The smaller, tighter ones of our daily lives; biological and seasonal cycles that link us with older generations, other species, trees, wind, flowers. Cosmic cycles that we chance upon through our instruments or imagine in perfect abstraction or in our colour-soaked myths, linking the moments of our lives to the elements, the stars, all that is vast and invisible at the same time. Even the darkness in the human heart, you half imagine, has its time and place in the ebb and flow of the universe. 

It is amazing to think that what is apparently 'low' or insignificant can survive for so long; and that what is apparently mighty and puffed up falls with a crash, leaving no trace but a line in our storybooks! Kings and powerful men make the mistake of assuming the small pattern of their lives is a mirror of some wider, more universal one. 

How things eventually turn out and who is on what arc, which trajectory, is not something we can fathom.