A London child

Well, I'm not really a Londoner (though it is the city I love mostest). Neither Greek nor Jew and all that. Too many stray thoughts by far, too many false starts. Where to begin? Wales, Kashmir, Taxila? And now? And now I live too much out in the sun, and my sensibilities are increasingly formed by this excessive light, though I maintain a craving for dark grey skies, the stillness and anonymity of a remembered grey. 

'Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.'
--another Saul.

The importance of not fitting the narrative: be ye not conformed. 

Q: How would you like your Paki, Sir?
A: Not too rare, thank you.

Of course, it's a lot easier when you're put in a box: are you a lunatic (fundo) or one of us, a barbarian or a lackey? What cannot be tolerated, at any cost, is the strange hybrid that loves aspects of western culture but sees through its materialism and detests its war machine (the reality, though you'd never know by watching t.v., is that there's quite a few of us out there. Iran, for instance, is full of young people who hate the mullah as much as they do 'the west' (politically speaking, of course)).

Ec-centric, off key. 

But this too is a game for some. The breakdown of narrative is precisely what is engendered by (one might even say required of) capitalism. There can be no narrative, just moments of instantaneous pleasure. Identity, as the academics love to tell us, is a construct (well, what else could it be when talk of essences or human nature is not permitted).

There's no place like home, there's no place.

The ridiculous claim to be a citizen of the world. Or, equivalently: world cinema, world music. One must accept this vacuousness on pains of being drawn to the other camp, the culture industry's manufactured nostalgia or the right-wing reactionary tale of the loss of purity. The false universality of market choice is the only 'world' that is allowed to stand, which is to say: one must take up a perspective that is equivalent to a 'view from nowhere' (or, to put it in its older, pre-scientific formulation: 'the view from the point of the universe').  

To see something today, to truly see it, is not to participate in its being like a shaman but, instead, to take a step back and think of it from a distance, as it were, so that one catch the phenomenon objectively..and already one eye is focused on what use can be made of it (Jonas was surely right here: we live under the shadow of technology). 

We live in the world like voyeurs. What would be meant, today, by the notion of 'right looking', the 'loving glance', the restrained gaze? We've lost the words for different ways of looking (Illich). 

To look out innocently again, the child's unchanged song of innocence remembered with great clarity..an older street in London that still exists, somewhere in the shadows, and even if unfound always there, indestructible, from time out of mind. 

In an age that sets great store in the expansion of knowledge it is surprising that it is never asked: what is really worth knowing or: how deeply do you know anything. Can an expansion in one domain lead to a forgetting in another? There is, no doubt, a lot of empirical and theoretical knowledge that is quite useful, but there is another kind of practical and empirical knowledge that has to do with how one can live a good life. And there is a different 'theoretical' perspective that is not pure method but aims to understand the 'higher' things. Theory, in that sense, is as much determined by its object as it is by its procedures. Such an understanding of theory goes against the grain of modern thought whereby everything (there is no 'higher' or 'lower') can be theorized (Jonas, again). 

In that older form of understanding one could be quite 'unread' and lacking in technical know-how, almost to the point of naivete, but still wise. Contrast that to the people who know an awful lot about their own very narrow field of specialization. That is not to deny the very real societal advantages of this division of labour, but only to pose the question of what actually counts as intelligence. Formidable advancements in the scale of information and knowledge still do not amount to greater understanding. In fact, the scattering of it across various disciplines and the increasingly theoretical nature of it means it has often lost its ability to represent anything meaningful to us. 

'The hand tells the bowstring:
   Obey me.
The bowstring answers the hand:
   Draw Valiantly
The bowstring tells the arrow:
   O arrow, fly.
The arrow answers the bowstring:
   Be my light
The target answers the arrow:
   Love me.

--Aleksander Wat.