Devils

"Souling"- the practice, on All Hallow's eve, of going from door to door asking for "soul cakes" and in return singing prayers for the souls of the givers and their friends. "Souling" is of medieval origin; now trick-or-treating.

via Robert Macfarlane.

~~~

A Christian woman accused of blasphemy has-thank God- been found not guilty. But the maulvis have been wailing and foaming at the mouth since last night ("who will rid us of these turbulent..."). Devils on the streets. 

Little r was dressed up as a devil for Halloween. God knows what the domestic help (a forlorn woman from a village) must have thought. [That really does make me sound like some sort of character in a Russian novel before the Revolution]. I'm not sure if there are depictions of the devil in Islam so maybe things are okay. r asked, "How do I look?". I replied in a mocking tone: "It's like, soooo you."

One of the fortunate consequences of the fanaticism of the mullahs is that the whole city is closed down today. So, it feels like the first day of the year in London. Grey skies, not a soul about, fresh espresso (which the Guardian, curse them, claim is not as good as filter coffee). I can hear the crows but they're lost somewhere up in the smog. Started Alexievich's Second-Hand Time. 

My double life continues, which is to say my half-life does. Dia-bolical: divided self? Note to self: But don't take your unbelief too seriously, old bean.

~~~

Ali Qasmi really looks the part. He has an old 19th c. beard that Marx would have been proud of. Dressed up in a suit and tie for Halloween. "Who are you?", I asked. "An Islamic banker", said Q. He's got a devlish twinkle in his eyes. In Qatar I thought he'd hung himself out of boredom. When we visited a shopping mall (what else is there?) he said to me, "look at that sexy woman over there". But, Q, she's wearing a burqa! "I know, I know, but I saw her ankles."

He's an old school historian who hates new-fangled words like "multidisciplinarity". Everyone wants to change things all the time. But it takes time, everything takes time. I look at his gentle face closely. Actually, it's not the historian speaking but a fellow Kashmiri. Leave it be.

In an age that has convinced itself that activity is preferable to inactivity it is a pleasure to meet someone who still wants to talk about books. A line from Brodsky struck me this morning: They [he and his friends] preferred to read rather than act. 

I prefer to read than write. And sometimes I don't. And then I don't care about "preferring" or even the "I" that prefers or prefers not to. Instead, a crow haphazardly making its way through the dense fog...

1969

Some things remain the same and some things pass.

--Ronald Blythe, Akenfield.

There is something of the matter-of-fact about the statements of the people that populate Blythe's wonderful book (not finished). This makes the simple statements actually more profound, mysterious, because they've been lived inwardly rather than 'thought'. Similar, in some respects, to Alexievich's superb Chernobyl. It's the voice of the hedgehogs- people who have only known one thing and one place. An old-world solidity that comes, one imagines, from living close to the land and being in touch with the seasons. Less idle chatter, more connection to harsh realities ( which echoes G. Thibon's observations in Back to Reality). A certain kind of narrowness, no doubt, but can there really be a sense of missed opportunities if that's the only kind of life you've ever known?

That's the way it was; and that's just the way it is. Fatalism and the harshness of the conditions of life are perhaps intertwined with one another. The existence of an apparent profusion of opportunities can, on the other hand, lead to superficiality (I say "apparent" because Chesterton's remark should always be kept in mind: after all the frenetic whirl of changing opinions, fads, machines..the "factory remains").

~~~

Zizek writes that in 1970 Agatha Christie wrote an odd book in which she expressed her utter bewilderment about the direction England was taking. The 70s, the decade in which nothing happened, the afterglow after the raging 60s. Nothing new to be said: just retro and conservatism.

Agamben: By the 1870s the bourgeoisie had forgotten all its gestures; from now on they'd have to be recorded, preserved.   

~~~
It is time we spoke in plain English. At the end of times we must recall the most primitive of words and feelings, that long-forgotten love of the world, those old human instincts that drew us to beauty (of a woman's face, the order of our homes, of nature gloriously free from the touch of human hands). Plain and simple words. But also great ones, for the smog and soot from the world-ending fire is reaching us already. 

No-one compares

I really like John Milbank's work. The little I can understand, that is. A philosopher and a theologian who writes about the importance for religious thought of 'the social' and relationality. So, it was surprising and disappointing to see him write this about Sinead O'Connor's conversion to Islam:

"Sinead O'Connor's conversion suggests that Houillebecq has it right. Liberals will embrace an authoritarianism to escape their own contradictions if it is respectably other and non-Western. She is a civilisational traitress. And has no taste." 

Pretty strong stuff! Ultimately, I wonder if this goes back to something R.W. Southern wrote in an intriguing small book many years ago. Islam has always been inexplicable. The real trauma was not just the violence (actual and alleged) nor was it some kind of 'civilisational' conflict. The deep rooted hostility has always stemmed from the question: If there is only one true path how could God allow another religion to emerge? The only answer to that must be a kind of repression: it is, and has to be, a false religion. No-one and nothing compares. 

Yes, we might on occasion recognize the beauty of its art, the personal piety of some of its followers, and its contribution to medieval scholasticism but, ultimately, it's a deception because even though it recognizes one God it doesn't do so in the right way and is therefore a distortion! (A question to yourself: can a culture that produces so much beauty actually be at root a perversion of the Truth?).        

I


I can't say your name 
without a crow flying by.

Shadows of ourselves

I was a shadow of myself-and have been so for a long time now if truth be told. If I could measure time, that is, so to speak, in some sense, if you know what I mean.

You, too, were two shadows: of yourself and of me (even though it would kill you to admit it). And then you would be one. 

"Take aim and take care!", said the Queen.

He stood there, quivering, unresolved, at the centre of absence, a loss for words; a black sun eclipsed by a darker sun. Some silver coins in the deep inner pockets of his outer coat; with time the silver inheriting the black. The winter light on his hands, alive, the deep creases on his face, the dark river of his mind. All that he owned, fading with time. 

A few crows suddenly took flight and broke the silence. The queen's black net turned heads. Medusa let down her hair and froze a thousand hearts."You fool for so fooling me!" , she said to her shadow. No matter how close, no-one could find the way to her heart, if truth be told, in some sense, if you know what I mean. But it was November, the time of forgiveness. She read him some lines in her barbarian tongue, as if to comfort him: the way is short, the night is so dark, and still you do not find the way...   


What you are supposed to hit
is the bull’s-eye, that black spot,
that precise spot, and the arrow
is supposed to stand there quivering!
But that’s not where the arrow goes.
You get close to it, closer and closer;
no, not close enough.
Then you have to go out and pick up all the arrows,
walk back, try it again.
That black spot is highly annoying
until you finally grasp
that where your arrow stands quivering
is also the center of something.

---Olav Hauge

Clearing

Methodically sorting papers is one thing; quickly dumping huge piles of assorted rubbish into large cardboard cartons is quite another. It seems that there's so little time left for organizing, for sifting out what is valuable from the debris of your life that has accrued over the decades. So, fling the papers, unopened envelopes and postcards into the bins and cartons. There's simply no time for reflection or nostalgia. The whole thing appears botched right now. Receipts, bank statements, past examinations, unread journal articles, a few choice quotes that seemed profound at the time..all destined for the furnace, the trash heap.

What you're looking for, you can't find. The uneasy feeling that it doesn't matter either way. Whether you bring some kind of semblance of order to the piles or not. Let it all go. And then a kind of resentment wells up in you: all of this documentation of your life! To what purpose? Is that who you really were? Nothing inward here amongst the scraps. Khayyam: drink up!

By chance you stumble across a letter from Roxana. Very sweet and innocent. A kid, after all! Who knows where anyone is or who anyone is or was. Everyone's life is shrouded in an unfathomable mystery. It won't settle. There's no clearing here.   

   

  

Shikast

I am part moon and part travelling salesman. My specialty is that of finding those hours that have lost their clock. 
--V. Huidobro 

The hour is upon us; the shadow of the hour. You write into this silent wilderness with a sense of freedom that comes from not being read. All the hours that were lost are somehow still with you! As faint as the smell of tobacco on an old coat, or the ink smudges on your fingertips. 

My specialty is that I do not have a specialty. 'Shikast' is the wrong word because there has never been any desire to win; there has been no game. But a loose sense of being lost then, not lose. And now. 

What is this fascination with games if not to be lost in the rules? Necessity and chance. The old sense of a labyrinth or a maze; and the sense of relief when find your way out. Fold the board, close the book, and return to ordinary life. Lost and found.       

Old School

B bB  
K

When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’

--Hanna Gray.

'Yes' and 'No' in my true love's eyes.

One day Enkan called to his attendant, "Bring me the rhinoceros fan."The attendant said, "It is broken."Enkan said, "If the fan is already broken, bring me the rhinoceros himself."

Master, the circle is broken.
Is that why you call me Master?
Should I fix it?
Maybe.

The word "hippo" is still funny even though "hippopotamus" is too frivolous a word in English to be in any way helpful.
--Gunter Eich. 

What about "rhinoceros" then, Master?
Why do you call me Master?
Is it funny?
It is serious, but still absurd.

It's amazing how far you can get with a bit of cut & paste. I'm not sure if there's an original sentence in the whole damned thing, but I did manage an okay job at stitching the whole thing together. Like a clerk, or Pessoa looking out onto the street from the high windows in his top story office, I sat and wrote, not knowing much about anything real.

How many millions of words are written each day? You begin to wonder if the difference between academic and non-academic really matters in the end. Everyone pontificating on the dire state of the world, on capitalism, or something. What have you added here? A thing without beauty.

You read statements such as, "Even if reason removed God from the picture, human spirituality remained intact" and you ask yourself, "says who?" You can say what you want, and everything has been said. Here's another one: "Human being isn't static." Well, maybe it is. I don't know. It seems pretty static for a lot of us. 

~~~

Today in the frail morning light I saw a single crow serenely sipping from the only puddle in the entire field. As I walked on, another older bird, greying with age, held its wings closely to itself, ready to die, you suspect. The sun has entered a phase of decline, following an arc that it knows well. All things under the sun are moments in its life. Nothing new under the sun. Right now the brilliance of the human mind doesn't move me that much.

       

    

B

'Blue is the colour of the light that doesn't reach us. The blue notes that after all this time still sound true.  

Random stuff

I'm sorry to say it, but most men are idiots. This has dawned on me quite gradually. I'm not just thinking about the evil that some commit (from war to sexual harassment and abuse). That would constitute something more than being 'idiotic' and not reflective of most men. It's really that we-men-rarely grow out of our 15-year-old selves. I see a lot of young men, kids really, around me at the university. And what I notice is really just a straining of the ego, the desire to be noticed at all costs. Perhaps arseholes is a better word than idiots? All the fake masculinity, the bravado and noise.The insecurity is outstanding. 

Perhaps we shouldn't look at this in essentialist terms but think about the process of 'infantilization' that has occurred under late capitalism: choice without responsibility. The absolute need to do away with complexity, messiness (does that ultimately entail some form of violence?).

And so the 15 year-old self carries on to middle age. Hoodies, games, sulking, porn and withdrawal. Monologues or a lack of words. A disproportionate interest in property, money, status, sports, political chatter (as opposed to actual political discourse). These are the only things that can be taken seriously. The inflated sense of your own importance because deep down there's the lurking suspicion that no-one's listening to you, giving you your due. 

A fake kind of competitiveness at work, a crass kind of one up-manship. Endless office politics and gossip. At home, drink or drugs to take you away from your self. And still the belief persists that you're at the centre of the world. Mid-life crises, existential angst. If it's books, then they're about mid-life crises and existential angst. Jordan Peterson, angry white dudes, emotional retardation, and the inescapable feeling that the world's going to hell in a handcart. Nostalgia for an age of innocence, now lost. If it's religion then its conservatism- as long as this only applies to personal morals or "modern culture"-and not to the impact of the economic system.           

The Road to Nowhere

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5  degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough.

--Elizabeth Kolbert.

Prediction: In about ten years time all the discussions about post-modernism, transgender rights, the integration of Muslims into western society etc., etc. are going to seem to be strangely irrelevant. Even the eternal questions around the 'end of the novel' and the rise of the robots will, I'd hazard to guess, seem almost quaint from the standpoint of the 2030s. Instead: Fire, drought, flooding.

Elizabeth Rush:

'A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story. Noah and his biblical flood, a tale likely descended from the even older story of Utnapishtim in the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” but there is also Da Yu and the flood that supposedly inspired China’s imperial feats of hydraulic engineering, Brahma and Manu, and, perhaps oldest of all, the 10,000-year-old tales of certain indigenous peoples of Australia, who sing of homelands lost beneath the rising waves at the end of the last ice age. '

--NYT.

   

Children once existed solely to inherit a man's genes, his moral code and his name. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea; it became the norm. That's all gone now. There's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him. By the time he grows up, the rules I live by will be meaningless; the world will be completely different. If a man accepts this then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into this world now is meaningless.'

--M. Houellebcq.

The unbinding of humanity from God lies at the heart of the historical narrative the reader encounters in Houellebecq’s work: lacking a set of moral principles legitimated by a higher power and unable to find meaningful answers to existential questions, human beings descend into selfishness and narcissism and can only stymie their mortal terror by recourse to the carnal distractions of sexuality.
--Louis Betty.

For Tom, wherever you are

The land is harsh and there is no time, my friend. The winter light returns today, fragile and gentle. Like it has so many other days, for thousands of years. Even before our calculating machines the birds could intuit it. When the very last one of us goes there'll be nothing left to tell. Walk in step, find your pace for this winter dance even when your heart's not in it.  

I'm brought back to myself. Time has darkened my hands. A mirror holds the reflection of someone else now. A gaze, these rituals of the sun remain, somewhere remembered, on the inner wrist of time perhaps? The words, the sentences etched on the page. Ceravolo still abandoned (if you're wondering). There he was, Blake on the steps of a church, going up (maybe down). He turned his body; something caught his eye. What, he didn't want to say. The poetry of silence, fingers on lips. I'll wait till the sun comes round next year. Rest in peace.         

Slow thinking

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the 'decision' lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be 'cultivated'.  

Rinku

And this one, which is also exquisite. Reminds me of a bright Saturday morning in winter, London:

'Change nothing so that everything stays the same'

In all the cities of the world, it is the same..The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

--Ionesco, quoted in Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.

~~~

Espresso. Wholewheat bread with 'malai' and blackcurrant jam. Grapefruit: bitter at last! Everything has its time. Wait for the kids to wake up. It's Autumn but you wouldn't know it. It's Fall and my heart is still whole. Drift, drift..

~~~

In our late-capitalist consumerist dynamic we are bombarded by new products all the time, but this constant change is becoming increasingly monotonous. When constant self-revolutionizing can maintain the system, those who refuse to change anything are effectively the agents of true change: a change in the very principle of change.

--Zizek. 

~ ~ ~

Chesterton: in all this whirl of change "the factory remains" which I take to mean: with all these changing ideas, opinions, and fashions the basic structures of dominance remains in place; and materialism produces its own monotony. We commit the oldest of sins in the newest of ways.  

A Time to Keep Silence?

A glorious early morning. No-one is around and the light is frail, perfect, the sun and earth having found an equilibrium. You sit outside on a bench like an old man, a young man, and read whatever takes your fancy. What utter freedom: warmth of old sun on your hands, old words from fingertip to eye.

Tea. Custard cream biscuits. Harry Frankfurt's Reasons of Love- which I'm unsure of right now. Love is a mode of care. What do we care about? For Frankfurt the fact that we care at all seems more important than what we care about. Can we, then, ask: what ought I to care about?  

Care is like a second-order desire/preference, a way of evaluating our primary wants/desires according to whether we identify with them or not. But-and this is where I start to become unsure- we love what we love. Love itself gives us the reason to do something (love/care is something that moves us and is essentially volitional, not cognitive or affective). I do not, for example, love someone or something because I know it/her is of value. I'm simply drawn to the beloved because that's the type of creatures we are. Is that biological argument? 

There is no independent reason here that allows me to evaluate the thing or person prior to me loving it/her. Love creates its own reasons.

All of this is, of course, deeply appealing. I do not love my children because they have specific characteristics which I think makes them worthy of my love. Is one ever worthy of love, of being loved?

On the other hand, if love has nothing to do with the characteristics of the beloved or the particular objects - and they are always particular, not derivative of some universal 'value'- then might I not care for anything? I care for this old handkerchief. It means a great deal to me because I love it. What, ultimately, is the difference from such an attitude and the economist's 'taste model' which maintains that because something is desirable it is good. Perhaps we have moved beyond even that: the desire, the freedom to desire, is the real thing of importance (not the object of one's desire).

So, it would seem, we are not drawn to the beautiful or the good (or specific instances of them), as if to say that those things were, by their very nature desirable. Does everything start in the subject, then? Hmm.

More lemon custard biscuits. Close the book. Two chapatis and bitter gourd. Sleep like a log for one hour under the fan. Drift, drift...The desire for sleep, said Knulp, overcomes all other desires. 

~~~

Rowan Williams's Augustine -only just started-is a profound book.

R.W. on Merton: the desire to be unknown, to be transparent to God. When we are silent then God 'reads' us. One of my favourite books in recent years-recommended by the remarkable anton- was Paradiso. Aware of things beyond your understanding. The best books read you.         

.

Onward and Upward ?

"Above the skies, he looks around and tells us what he can see, or rather what he can not see: Boga Nyet!: There is no God! Below him are the toppling towers and domes of churches and mosques, left behind and condemned to imminent collapse by the soaring achievements of Soviet science. The old religions are withering away. Reason and research have raised humanity to a new idea of heaven – we can now all join Gagarin in an achievable paradise, empty of divine beings, and full instead of starry promise."
--The Guardian.

Levinas sees it differently. This is a moment of claustrophobia, nihilism. There is no escape, no transcendental dimension to our lives and therefore no more "height". From now on we're all flat-earthers.

"To take this seriously, we may hear in it a
very important assertion: the new condition
of existence in the weightlessness of a
space 'without place1 is still experienced
by the first man sent there as a here, as
the same, without genuine otherness. The
marvels of technology do not open up the
beyond where science, their mother, was
born. In spite of all these movements,
there is no outside here! What immanence!
What a wretched infinite! "

--Levinas.

And Arendt (1958) writes about the incredible paradox: just as we come to see ourselves only as finite creatures, inextricably earth-bound, we come to hate the earth (our greatest dreams are to escape from it). But also [she doesn't say this, or use the word 'hate'] our hatred is expressed in environmental destruction. Maybe this also explains the hatred for peasants or anything that is related to the land? (Lesley Chamberlain's Motherland' is excellent on this).

~~~

Dear C, 

Apologies for the very late reply. Yes, the book is out. Rumour has it that 3 copies have been sold!