Extremism

"All truth is on the boundaries."
Tillich.

When you were younger you thought that made a lot of sense. Always being an outsider, a backbencher, in some way someone on the margins, the sentiment appealed to you. Life on the periphery; renouncing centre.

Of course, the idea of constant experimentation or the thought that truth had to come through suffering didn't much  appeal to your conservative instincts but, no, when it came to it resistance to names and definitions, to fixed categories and the various boxes people wanted to put you in resonated with some u formulated desire to remain in the shadows. And could there ever be any questioning, curiosity or doubt if we weren't prepared to let go, if we weren't willing to not look back? As Auden would have it: not a possession of the truth..a lonely kind of freedom, perhaps?

We tend to think that we live in an age of extremes ( partly, no doubt, because capitalism has had a levelling effect- some might add: a levelling down effect). Do we really live in a "risk society"? Could it not be that our fascination with extreme voices, images, thrills is really just a response to our profound boredom? We're bored out of our minds and bore one another endlessly. Under such circumstances there is, as Pope Francis suggests, the allure of darkness.

Why did you clime the mountain?
I don't know. Because it was there.

The exotic and erotic as a way of escaping ourselves. Frivolity and lightness are pursued instead of facing up to the possibility that we are " weighty creatures" with a nature that points us to the good- if only we could find our true image, our unique panache. The extreme individualism of late capitalism actually produces a terrible inward conformity- which is to be expected given the reign of matter and the hold of mechanism on our thinking.

" Tourism is the march of stupidity"
DeLillo.

Desperation and anxiety can be marketed as long as they're  authentic. Confess all, let it all hang out ( a legacy of the sixties?). In a therapeutic society reticence is merely a form of repression. You are everything, the teacher, the student. Ultimately, coz you're worth it, baby. Self- help books proliferate because there's not much of a self left. Obsession with the details, the gossip and the jumble in our lives is really the product of a reality in which we are little more than ghosts in a machine.

An interesting article on Melissa Broder in the New Yorker.. Interesting because it reflects, you think, something of our current sensibilities, our narcissism and shallowness. I liked you more when you were a virtual entity. The sad story, and it is a terribly sad story, of a young woman addicted to drugs, alcohol and now the Internet. The need for (online) recognition that increasingly blights the lives of young adults.A line from someone writing in 1939:" the intellectual and spiritual hopelessness of the current period". At the level of society that's surely right, isn't it?


Yesterday at the V+A you saw a young woman in shorts holding an iPad at eye level . She walked like a zombie,  her arms fully extended, clutching on to the infernal machine tightly with her outstretched hands. She turned the machine a full 180 degrees trying to capture every moment. Asia, South East Asia..been there, "done that". And that's what we've all really been reduced to in some sense: passive recipients of an endless stream of information, unable to listen, look or talk properly.

Guarding the eye in the age of show. Illich, as always, was ahead of the curve. Restraint means one doesn't always try to get ahead of oneself. To keep pace with your stride.

From a Muslim perspective there is the idea that our hands, our tongue- our bodies- will bear witness to all we did and didn't do in this life.Balance and moderation are  something that stand opposed to the manufactured frenzy  of our times. In truth, ultimate boredom and and a profound restlessness are two sides of the same coin. A genuine striving and dynamism is the polar opposite of a directionless and slavish following of  desires that are manufactured by powerful people and that lead us nowhere. "Pushpin is as good as poetry". And boredom is not the same as patience, and a world away from the ability to live within our limits, the capacity and the desire to recognise and acknowledge that we live in this place, this time, and it is only for us to live well.

By chance you listened to some ragas the other day and felt the sleep of the senses. Something so dull and dulling about the " mystical East". At the V+A a performance of some Hindu myth which was so naff that Ubo was forced to ask: who allowed these people to peddle their propaganda?  In nearly 50 years I've never heard him say a single word against any other religion.  In fact, he's so balanced, my Jew, that his strongest criticism is always reserved for Muslims (who he sees as " junglis"- and who can blame him!).

We now face the prospect of every second of our lives being filled with junk. Bits of information, trashy news, violent and pornograhic images, advertising jangles and music, music everywhere- on the go, in the high streets, in the car, at home, drowning out the very possibility of silence and calmness. You begin to wonder if fiction isn't a higher order swindle. We want the moral imagination widened by it, we want a finer sense of 'inwardness' from our reading; in short, we want a religious experience without God. Worse, or possibly worse, we want to be entertained, to pass time, to forget our own lives and our own obligation to live a rich life.

Nostalgia Inc.

On the way to Uxbridge had to share a carriage with an Indian family ( probably spent a few years in the States). The father, early forties, in dark blue jeans, a blue blazer, an uncreased White shirt with a lot of buttons undone, neat hair, and white trainers. He encourages his chubby son to unfold and read some mindless story from what is quite innocently still called a newspaper. Some story about 2,000 year old "pooh". Then, at Ickenham he says: " they missed the 'D'..it should have benn "Dickenham". That sends the podgy kid into fits of laughter.

I never did get desi humour.

At the burger joint a heated discussion on Brexit. The desis who voted to leave are at heart,you suspect,  as racist as their fellow white citizens. Says a lot about the state of the nation when education doesn't count for much ( a formal, technical education can still mean you're an arsehole who knows very little as anyone who has been to a university will readily testify). It also says a lot about the power of the media to stupefy large segments of the population. Sky and Fox are masters at this but the Beeb is just the same, although it caters to a different class.

Which takes us to the nostalgia industry, so carefully cultivated by the BBC. Of course, there are economic reasons for churning out such anodyne tosh but there's always a political use to the production of cozy, history-lite images.

Taking back control. Trump and the leavers can endlessly play on the sense of anger and alienation felt by the White working class and the downwadly mobile middle. What better way to do so than blame it on the immigrants/ Muslims who have ruined the fabric of western society. What better way to restore a sense of virility than to create anxieties about an emasculated manhood threatened by rapists and molesters( this is, actually, a very old strategy..Susan Faludi)?.

Norman Mailer, writing soon after 9/11 called it right: since women and blacks now we're emancipated the only way to show who was boss through violence.

Hate crimes, by the way, are up 40% in post- Brexit little England. Hmm. Wonder why.

It now transpires that we live in a post- factual society, one in which emotions and authenticity count for more than reason. Part of that is, no doubt, a consequence of the WMD debacle. But it's obviously more than that. The contempt for "experts", the classless notion of the "elites" ( Wasington, Westminster) is itself supported by the elites!

As always, no discussion of the economy must be allowed. Let's keep this to opinions and what you feel. So, let's not talk about austerity, the state of the public services, demographic changes ( who, exactly, is going to fund the trey population?). Let's not talk about rising inequality over the last thirty years or the awful state of education in this country. Let's not mention that real wages have actually declined since the financial crisis. No, instead, let's focus on the Muzzies and how we, the people, can wrest back control from those sinister Europeans. And let us never ask how much power we had in the first place. Monbiot is on the money today: this could just be the extension of corporate control.

For that to be possible the illusion of freedom and choice must be maintained ( in fact, that was the core of the neoliberal agenda from the beginning)

But okay, the 350 million a week was a porkie; still, there's the 300,000 migrants each year for Christ's sake! Er..except only about half of those are from Europe. Put it another way, 160,000 of them are students!

No, let's keep the fear machine going. Our way of life, our art, religion, too, it's all going to go to the dogs if we let more in.

----

Savage's power of the dog is good in parts but I was underwhelmed by it. Increasingly you ask yourself: what's the bloody point? The lines that caught you, though, were about the passing of the old ways. There is something deeply comforting about nostalgia, that's for sure. But it's political manipulation is frightening.

John Lanchester...

A state of blue funk

Be afraid, be very afraid.

The Newt.

" You should be terrified at the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency,” he said.

The nihilists and extremists are intellectually, culturally, morally and spiritually bankrupt. Are they, then, really a threat to western civilisation or the American way of life? On the other hand, they are not politically bankrupt and receive some tacit support from the wider population and, more importantly, are bankrolled by the Qataris and Saudis ( the great friends of America!Go figure!).

"What is the matter with the English, that they are so scared of everything?They are in a state of blue funk...

That silly little individualism of 'the Englishman's home is his castle'..worked almost up to 1800.

They are all suburban, pseudo-cottag y, and not one of them knows how to be truly urban.

England is a mean and petty scrabble of paltry dwellings called 'homes'.

This life here is one vast complex of dullness! I am dull!My spirit is being dulled! My life is dulling down to London dullness.

It is just mildly warm and safe. You can't burn your fingers at it. Nice, safe, easy:the whole ideal. And yet under all the easiness is a gnawing uneasiness, as in a drug-taker."

D.H.L.

Make it great again, Don,makes us safe. The Great Restorer seized the moment, looked anarchy straight in the eye with that hundred year, two- dime hustler look, said, 
"This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism, and weakness,” he said.


Restore our moral authority in the world. In a word, kick ass and God Bless!
Deliver us from evil.

A human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself.

In an essay you recall Maritain writing that what the medievals lacked was a psychological dimension to their thought, whence their naïveté. Is that another way of saying that they didn't live in time or, more accurately, that they didn't live in broken times?

What characterises us moderns more than anything is surely the view that we are historical beings, living in fractured times. We live without a transcendental reference point, without a notion of an ordered cosmos or a substantive idea of either the self or the good. The second Fall is in that sense a "second turning inwards," a move to the subjective side of things and a questioning of the objective side. Who amongst us can talk of an "essence" of being, or of a quintessential human nature?

We are "thrown" into the world, thrown back on our own resources to make what we will. Find the rose in the darkening sky.

The will that chooses for itself, on its own. It is not, from now on, about seeing ourselves and the world in the right light. Instead, the isolated will must find its own way, without any signposts, without any heritage or guarantees. This moment is what we are and this brings with it a new sadness. What is gained is a new sense of loss.

But when wasn't the world so fleeting? When were our lives ever marked out for permanence?

There is no common world, just individual moments, images that come to us as in a dream. We thought we might discover the world. Instead, we have a suspicion of ourselves, other people and of the world.

This moment, 9.37 p.m., Monday, is like no other. And yet moon, rose, sky will outlast us all, come around again when the tide will have washed our human histories away. The introduction of human beings is the equivalent of the breaking of a circle, the start of something haphazard and utterly unstable into the eternal cycles. The open road, the traffic silenced, Earth returning to a tranquil, cool peace after the fierceness of the day. A few hours earlier you sat on the same steps, waiting, waiting for the sun to fade. How much waiting goes on! For this moment without books and words, the sun off our backs, the light out of our eyes. We can turn our back on it and walk, walk North by nirth west, twenty minutes and you're out of London, away from home, a million miles from anything familiar. To travel much is to know what distances are. The small white room, if memory serves me correctly, that inverted world into which I wAlk, and where I find you love me (a line from Bishop, or is it Paz)?

Liberty, equality and solidarity

I would love to find a cheap copy of one of Fuchs' early novels ( maybe I'll just go back to West of the Rockies). Or Alfred Hayes's 'All of Me'. Find, not have delivered via Amazon or abe. It would be nice to take step back from what increasingly seems like a mad world and read some poetry ( any suggestions?). And in an ideal world finish Rebecca West's Grey book, Pocock's fascinating Maciavelli one. I'll put up pictures of my visit to a city farm later. But for the moment, a depressing return to politics...

In England over the last 40 years there hasn't been much equality or solidarity ( in truth, maybe there never has been). Neoliberalism has seen off what little remained of those ideals ( interesting to read Hobsbawm's claim that one stage 700 families owned 80% of all the land).

In France there is much bluster over the need to retain these central elements in their way of life. A startling WP article estimates that up to 70% of the prison population is Muslim ( 13% overall population). In the UK the figures are 11 and 3 respectively. Netherlands: 20 and 5.5%. It would be interesting to know the educational attainment levels, unemployment rates and, if there is one, an index of access to decent housing. To an outsider it seems that there is obviously something  going wrong in Belgium and France.

And here we come to an interesting question: what is a 'people'? We know this isn't such a straightforward question ( Afro-Americans were not considered to be fully human in the states and the Red Man was, in fact, not even that). In a similar vein, at least when it came to voting rights, women and the poor (landless) were not considered to be human beings either. So, is the idea of a nation based on as specific fraction of the people or is it a universal idea? Given Europe's history of colonialism and racism I don't think that question has really been answered.  What is a black man and what colour is he?

Are refugees actually human beings or are their rights conditional on nationality/ citizenship?

So, this idea of Liberty, Equality and Solidarity seems as phoney as 'the American way of life', another fading mythology on which to hang on to in rapidly changing times. Could it be that what actually unites people is fear of the stranger in  our midst rather than a positive view of the good?  If so, all the energy is on the 'right'.

Hope in a dark time

An old teacher of yours once said, you need to learn when it's the endgame. There's some truth in that, you're sure, but it made you feel uneasy.

Firstly, a lot of people who make such pronouncements do not always have some great understanding of the issues or any special insights into the workings of history. More often than not such statements are a reflection of their own personal predicament ( mid-life problems or a life with a severely curtailed agency).

Secondly, it's presumptious ( though they no doubt see it as being pragmatic). The future is always, to some degree or the other, open and so you don't see how anyone can call it ( this also holds, incidentally, when it comes to the critiques of the neoclassical model and it's notion of "spatialized time").

Thirdly, it completely ignores or denigrates those people who are actually trying to change things. The resistance of Kashmiris or Palestinians may in fact be doomed to failure but what do you want them to do? Stop because some typically middle-aged (white) man has, taking a moment's break from sipping his soya latte, deemed their struggle ultimately futile? And even if defeat is inevitable- which it is not- there is something to be said for those who are not conformed to the times they live in.

A line which never ceases to amaze you: 'Falsehood  by its very nature is perishable'.

What seems to be most solid, in our own lives and in wider society, can sometimes in reality be nothing but an illusion. We intuit unity, we posit continuity but we know in our heart of hearts that, at least in our human situation, the nature of life is movement, whether we like it or not.

Nothing stays the same, but I will always love you.
---Neko Case.

At the individual level this kind of fatalism might be called despair or depression. It's hard not to resist since there's a sort of consolation that accompanies it, the consolation of security in a world that is going to hell in a handcart. Ultimately, it's the comfort of a spectator looking on at a disaster or the warm thought that you are at least living in a unique time, a pivotal age, the moment when things began to irreversibly slide into chaos.

'ground gives..capstones shift', things resettle.

The dung beetle carries with it an imprint of the first time, as if the universe's celestial mechanics had been translated into its biological rhythms, as if the stars- their silence and their ways- had been woven into the fabric of its being. And as we move our own shit around who is to say what will endure an what will fade, who will come out on top and who will fall?

The cult of perfection

It is estimated that up to half of all food produced in the U.S. is wasted (against one third world-wide). It would be interesting to know how much water is wasted as well.

That estimate includes food wasted by consumers and producers. The idea being: if it doesn't look perfect, it isn't perfect. The idea of perfection is, obviously, deep rooted but when it gets displaced to the wrong entities it becomes a "cult", just as the longing for the Absolute is distorted into a desire for false absolutes, for things that are in their very nature fragmentary, partial, and contingent. Shirk, in this sense, is not seeing things in the right light, from the right perspective. Not a simple denial of reality, but its replacement by something which can only prove to be illusory.  

Last Resort

A man is killed by a robot- as a last resort. Didn't have the time to wait and see if he'd kill himself or not and, more importantly, we got ourselves the contract so why not test the darned thing out! And you can't accuse the robot of being racist..it was just doing its job, for Christ's sake.

Talking of last resorts...

What would Mr. Larkin have made of this?

After so many thousands years of art is this what it's come down to in the final act? It looks like a scene from a film version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Summer reading: Everyone writing in the Guardian seems to be off to Sicily for their holidays. And so many of the writers/reviewers say, rather guiltily, or out of a reluctant sense of obligation to follow the received wisdom, that they really must, finally, read Middlemarch. And there, in a nutshell, you have it; that's what the Guardian represents: the metropolitan elites (and then they complain that the plebs are voting to get rid off the immigrants!). Ironic, innit?

Down to Foyles and the usual haunts three times and have resisted the desire to buy anything. Actually, that doesn't get to the heart of it: don't have a desire to read anything. Picked up Alexievich's latest, but apart from that, nowt.

Gay Talese and Manor House, the last place/resort from which one might expect any kind of truth to emerge...

Chilcot

I suppose seven years and ten million pounds down the line we're supposed to feel some deep respect for an independent process that holds power to account. In which other country, for example, would you have the government and agencies put under such scrutiny? I can see the validity of that view but it misses the main point.

For me the more important question is: how could democratic governments engage in such a catastrophic war? Once you pose it like that you realize how naive the question is because, putting colonialism to one side for a moment, the so-called democratic countries have been engaged in all sorts of wars ( directly or indirectly) for some time now. Some of them have been supporting all sorts of very nasty people ( dictators, authoritarin governments, etc.) in the name of " national interest".

And so the difficult question is: why is violence so central to the modern state? How is it that the worst instance of extreme violence the world has known was committed on European soil? Bettelheim, Foucault and Agamben are worth thinking about here since all suggest there is a deep current that links modernity with the camps.

The simple question that you often hear Muslims put is met with eternal silence. Why are the abhorrent actions of non-state actors considered to be an instance of terrorism whilst state violence is somehow legitimate? And yet surely the word was first used in conjunction with state power, namely: state terror. Part of the difficulty rests in their failure to understand that the state is the last god in town ( simone Weil). For king and country. Soldiers are supposed to just do their job..ours is not to wonder why. As if to say, bravery or courage is a disposition that has nothing to do with other virtues (discernment) or that is independent of the goal to which it is related to.


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Unrelated points...an interesting lecture by Hamza Yusuf, who you're not fully convinced by. But he did raise the point, unfortunately not followed up on, about how an education that was not oriented toward God or the good represents a formal kind of intelligence. Also, the Qur'anic notion that human beings are " weighty" beings, creatures that are supposed to have gravitas. And yet in our own times might not be said that the compulsion to follow each and every whim leads to a kind of superficiality, or ' lightness'?

To be a slave of one's desires, the servant of power or even the follower of religious authorities, speaks of a disturbing inclination in human beings towards submission to authority, or more generally to the desire to lose oneself in an oceanic feeling, the crowd, the collectivity. The sobriety of religion on the other hand demands a form of ' wakefulness'. As the Allama rather daringly said, ' Even if the Divine reveals His Face I'll still take " perhaps" and " maybe".'

Yusuf: those who go to heaven retain their name. Few of us have the strength to hold on to our name.

To be in the condition of exile makes one sceptical of 'home'.

" May I run, run, and never find".
shah Latif.

" yearning makes the heart grow deeper".
Augustine.

---

The divine name, Al-Wasi...vastness, capaciousness, the all-embracing.

Times of day

T

cast your mind back, but what cast of mind? To lose a sense of continuity, a past, an imagined future, to live only in the moment is not to live at all, in the human sense of the word.

I'll come back to this later since it's not easy. Stitch together with Agamben (VPs), Foucault( society must be defended), Gai Eaton, and Primo Levi.

Re-reading the latter after 20 years, and still it mystifies you but, you think, in a different way. What you pick up now, as a middle age man, is, perhaps, something altogether different. Not the horror of what Primo went through, not the calmness of his prose but the profound sadness that is associated with the other people mentioned in the book.

There is no knowledge here, no understanding, just the stark and unsettling presence of the permanently unfathomable in the constitution of reality. Not a young person's book by any stretch of the imagination and you have to ask yourself why you're drawn to it. The wrong question, perhaps. Focus.

There are striking passages that as a younger man you failed to register, or if you did then only in a superficial way since the deep impression was of a few grey and bleak images and not the memory of individual sentences.

The sense of sleeping on a road, on a bridge, a profound sense of vulnerability and exposure. Human beings, like all animals, need their "shells".

What moves you now (or, more accurately, what holds you still while at the same time setting into train a series of reflections) is not the plight of the author himself. Instead it is the sketches- and what else could they be under the circumstances- of the last acts, words, the recording of gestures that have been passed down the generations, as are the unique ways of speaking, laughing, smiling, of being in the world, that is. The face we glimpse, the broken sentence, half understood, all witnessed as if through a door that is about to close for ever. It's as if someone's whole life is to be encapsulated in, or traced from, that last hour of the day, before the shadows disappear under the dark evening. And there is something trul horrific in the thought that the whole of someone's personal history that led up to that hour is of nothing, erased, a blank space. A way of praying, questioning, vanishes. Continuity is broken up- and that is a feature of Hell since we are creatures who instinctively seek to unify, for who the serial moments of our lives only make sense against a background picture, a narrative.

A whole world, a language, an array of perspectives are, in fact, lost.

A few quotes...but don't look for meaning; not sure if there is any.

Fressen..the way of eating like animals ( on our feet) and certainly not Essen, the human way of eating, seated in front of the table, religiously' .... ..

Wales, my whore!!!

The Missing

On this day we remember the missing. The millions and millions who were living, who are living, and missing. Except we don't. We'd rather forget them all and sip our soya latte or think about the death of a poet, the (trench ) lines of a poet that we know in our heart of hearts will take away nothing, add nothing. God is difficult and distant and it has been raining all day. The grey rain, falling, falling, the sky darkening on a summer's day, as it has done before and as it no doubt will when we are gone. If a wound befalls us it has befallen others before us.

On this day 100 years ago 19, 240 British soldiers died in a battle that would eventually kill a million people. And yet we still cling to the delusion that the problem is religious fanaticism! The hilarity of hearing the dupes sing ' God save the Queen' gave way to a sadness that after all these years a flag can still move a person's heart, that tribal instincts still carom through our being, that a human being thinks it is noble to die unknown in the mud rather than stroll on a promenade on a bright and blustery Sunday morning. 

Not this, not that, the Hindus say. I am not...I refuse...not in my name..instead, the brilliant darkness in the light. What is the " thisness" of my being but a question mark?


Break of Day in the Trenches
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy (5)
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German (10)
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life, (15)
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberga