They do not see that the streets shine beautifully, that they themselves are walking on stars and water, that they are running in skies to catch a bus or taxi, to shelter somewhere in the press of irritated humans...

--Merton.

The books are falling to pieces, the cards are on the table; with time I've darken'd my mind with words. Aquinas in the 1260s or ancient cities near the Amu Darya, swept over by layers of dust, now sunken, forgotten, a mere flickering of a single pulse in the vast life of an indifferent universe. What takes us from this present moment. The scratch on my arm, the line etched in a fallen stone now invisible, deep as it is in the bright, high grass.

Nothing will last; the spectacle I see behind the glass of my heart is without pomp or splendour.  

   
"Dark and light, certainly, death and life, and the title, which calls up both wakefulness and funeral starkness, intensifies the riddle..the youngest things in the image are also the oldest."     

--Robert Hass.

The moral maze

How Professors Ceded Their Authority | Chad Wellmon 

"The transformation of American colleges and universities into corporate concerns is particularly evident in the maze of offices, departments, and agencies that manage the moral lives of students. When they appeal to administrators with demands that speakers not be invited, that particular policies be implemented, or that certain individuals be institutionally penalized, students are doing what our institutions have formed them to do. They are following procedure, appealing to the institution to manage moral problems, and insisting that the system’s overseers turn the cant of diversity and inclusion into real change. A student who experiences discrimination or harassment is taught to file a complaint by submitting a written statement; the office then determines if the complaint has merit; the office conducts an investigation and produces a report; an executive accepts or rejects the report; and the office "notifies" the parties of the "outcome."

These bureaucratic processes transmute moral injury, desire, and imagination into an object that flows through depersonalized, opaque procedures to produce an "outcome." Questions of character, duty, moral insight, reconciliation, community, ethos, evil, or justice have at most a limited role. American colleges and universities speak the national argot of individual rights, institutional affiliation, and complaint that dominates American capitalism. They have few moral resources from which to draw any alternative moral language and imagination. My students have adapted the old Protestant college’s moral mission to the demands of the institutions in which they now find themselves.

The extracurricular system of moral management requires an ever-expanding array of "resources" — counseling centers, legal services, deans of student life. Teams of devoted professionals work to help students hold their lives together. The people who support and oversee these extracurricular systems of moral management save lives and inspire students, but they do so almost entirely apart from any coherent curricular project.

It is entirely reasonable, then, for students to conclude that questions of right and wrong, of ought and obligation, are not, in the first instance at least, matters to be debated, deliberated, researched, or discussed as part of their intellectual lives in classrooms and as essential elements of their studies. They are, instead, matters for their extracurricular lives in dorms, fraternities or sororities, and student-activity groups, most of which are managed by professional staff members who, for many faculty members, seem to work in a wholly separate institution. The rationalization of colleges and universities has led to the division not only of intellectual labor (through academic specialization) but also of basic educational functions."

~~~

Those in any profession usually inflate its overall importance to society. Academics are masters at this, often claiming that the university or the liberal arts or "critical thinking" will:

save humanity

lead to enlightenment

enhance democracy

help rationally order our lives
further research, creativity, productivity and, consequently, economic growth
weed out prejudice/superstition/tradition.

The truth, though, is that the university is just one institution among others and that it has been rolled over by neoliberalism. It is hard to imagine how it could ever be immune from cultural, political, economic and technological changes in the wider society. 

What is the main aim here (and is it governed by methodology)? Break down, analyse, deconstruct, historicize and problematize. In short: "Truthfulness" rather than the Truth. What, if anything, could unite the various disciplines into a comprehensive whole (Newman's question..which is not a question any more because the ideal no longer remains an ideal).

To talk about the moral or spiritual purpose of education or the university would, I suspect, appear to be some kind of joke to most students (and faculty too no doubt). Pursuit of knowledge for its own sake or to get a job; those seem to be the only two options left: esoteric, arcane, partial and trivial pursuits ("the life of the mind") or the furthering of materialism.

Morishima: 'The Good and Bad Uses of Mathematics':
       

The Dark Age Ahead

Re-reading J. Jacobs' book. The first chapter is the best, setting out a general discussion of crises and how they might be linked (do they re-inforce one another?; is the seed of hope and a possible future already contained in a crisis?). Things can fall apart, spiral downwards; there's no law that states that an equilibrium will be reached. Or if it is, then it's a low-level one of survival: a tired and low-key civilization which is closer to barbarism. K. Clark: 'by the skin of our teeth' western civilisation came through the darkness. One wonders, though, how much of our character, mode of thinking and temperament is formed by a crisis?

Do we become cruder, lazier, more indifferent? Does our language splinter and coarsen so that we lose our finer sensibilities? What do we care about in the end days? Will we, as Milosz asks in his great poem, 'bind the tomatoes' in the Great Scattering? Why tend to crops, to other people's concerns, to our dress or way of being in the world when the order of the world is barely discernible? 

Scheffler's question: how much of what we value depends on its value and the activities that bear value, continuing over time? Without that sense of continuity, succession and transmission is culture even possible? If we live only in the 'now' isn't that a very impoverished kind of existence?

J. Bridle's New Dark Age is really fascinating (will write about it later).

J.J.'s choice of imminent signs of a multi-level crisis are really intriguing (and perhaps a little surprising).

The dissolution of the family. The distortion of education. She's trying to get at the roots here. Climate change is an effect. I'd add technology as a potentially disastrous disruption of the time-worn ways of thinking about what it is to be human. 

Part of you doesn't even want to talk about this. Actually, that's probably (in part) what has stopped us from doing anything about it. The problem is too big, too complex and it almost seems inevitable; against that what kind of language is left to us to talk about these things? We have gladly living with contingency for ages, without a sense of final ends or first things, without myth or tradition or religion or a sense of the cosmos (Tarkovsky). Living for the moment or, alternatively, fantasies of linear progress and endless time, infinite desires. As if we could go on forever. Well, all that is over now but a mindset that was structured by such notions now finds it difficult to cope with the hard realities. 

Our little self-interested perspectives have led to the destruction of the environment. Well, damn those brute animals and damn the future generations (what have they ever done for us anyway?).

What words, then, if not Greek, Biblical, Qur'anic?

~~~

Rachel Cusk: the end of character. Hmm.

Yes, in the Dark Age ahead there will be no books (or there'll be books but no reading. The time of the Eloi). 

There probably won't be much play or games either. Life itself would have become a meaningless game. We might look back on the old pictures of the circus, football matches, religious ceremonies and rituals and wonder to ourselves: who were those strange people?

They'll look back at all those pornographic images in the dying days of their ancestors and wonder: what strange creatures our ancestors were. Or maybe not, because the sense of the past will have disappeared with the future.         

Thinking together.

Herbert McCabe writes with great simplicity (like Thomas Merton), which suggests to me that he's actually lived a religious (Christian) life. There's an arresting line in one of his books: the social is spiritual (more or less). Goes against the grain of modern thought which holds that the private or individual realm is what distinguishes us a thinking and spiritual beings. But what of Blake's: "He who sees ratio sees only himself"? 

I don't know if I'll get round to reading his book on Aquinas (but this is, perhaps, what I should have been reading in an alternative life). That sounds all wrong, too modern, because there's something to be said for accepting the life that has been dealt out to one (I say that not as a generalization because I know people have gone through terrible things; merely stating my own case and why I have so many grounds to be grateful).

What is true is true and not true because the individual mind thinks it. The individual mind can "latch on to" what is true: the meeting of subjectivity with objectivity. 

Stokowski once said-and I really like this line- a musical score is just a "text"; it only becomes music once the human hand gets involved.

For some academics, perhaps a large number, abstract models or theory, the text ripped out of its context is the thing itself. How does it make contact with life? At one level it's all very clever but it is often really just a form of idiocy.  

post-

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. ..

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. 

---Zizek.

1970s. 

The sense of exhaustion, of no more new beginnings or 'experiments in living'. Been there, done that. Nature herself is depleted. Atrophy, winding down..Becket's Endgame, of course. 

The quest for the exotic is more than a century old! The shock of the new fails to shock. What next? After Auschwitz could anything more perverse and degenerate even be imagined? Is the only energy left the ability to move in a downward spiral?

By the 1950s people were already writing about this: the end of Tradition, transmission (Arendt); the 'worldlessness' of capitalism (Arendt again). The sense of an ending and therefore the need for conservation (of: words, seeds, heritage, human genetic material, historical buildings, wildlife, languages, species). The Royals would come in handy here; immigrants, too. The BBC and its shoring up of the ruins with fragments from the nostalgia industry.  

The push to more extreme forms of 'action' (de Sade); extreme sports, "kicks", "highs" in a jaded world. Freedom morphing into a kind of compulsive behaviour or nihilism (Eagleton: Holy Terror). "Have you ever considered any other kinds of freedom?", Brando would ask. Or: withdrawals, retreats, Buddhist mediation, Zen stillness (didn't Spengler say Buddhism would be a "late" religion?). Oceanic feelings, "release", just do it, go with the flow; football as a religion, rave parties: the need to disappear. In the 1970s there were the disappeared (Latin America). 

Abstract art: the disappearance of the human face. Hockney: we are witnesses to our absence. Technology and data flows. Human beings are just data points. Ambient music: everything is mere background now, as if we were living perpetually in an airport, with no departures and no arrivals, just the same old CNN re-runs. The abstract, neutral space that is no place, no place like home: airports, shopping malls, cinemas, and hotels that are all surface, depth less, shiny and eternal. Friction-less - travel light in the desert of the real, grasshopper, because all that matters in late capitalism is the space of flows, the networks. 

Near Gower Street

The old camera was simpler and therefore better. The old way of looking at the world was simpler...

Yesterday, a glorious early morning drive, past small plots of land (wheat, mustard). The light is golden, gentle. Everything's at peace with itself. The ploughed soil, dark brown and firm at this time of the year. All the ancient ways surviving. Cows grazing..later on a group of camels (with their multi-coloured saddles) passed by you. The trucks with their dazzling, ornate designs, quiet and determined on their long haul. At the service station, deep in the heart of Punjab, they're serving espresso! (not half bad as well).

On the way back you stop on the roadside to see some people making lumps of golden, raw sugar from sugarcane. You wonder how long the process has been around. A thousand years? It's boiled in a huge metal pot under a wood fire. The aroma of the sugarcane is sweet and comforting. A man in wellington boots tells us that no chemicals whatsoever are used in the process. 

By the road an old man sells it by the kilo. He seems remarkably content in life and smiles at us warmly. How long has he been doing this kind of work? What is there to say to strangers? If he asked us what we do we would not be able to explain anything to him in any great detail. I ask D, "What, exactly, is the point of our knowledge?". "Not much," he replies, but lets it go, since this question is too close to home. New York, London, tens of thousands of pounds, so many hours of intense devotion to trying to understand fairly frivolous things; a life given over to asking the wrong questions, abstractions, theories. All that has led to this inexorable moment at dusk in an unfamiliar land; we stand at the roadside, bewildered, as limited as the man selling the sugar that has been made to crystallize and then harden under the winter sun.
   
It is night now. The lights come on at the service station as we swill down cups of hot milky tea. The mood lightens, as some people contemplate that the day is done. We look past palm trees to the dying sun. "If there weren't these damned kids on the trampoline we could be in California," says D. That time has gone, like much else.

We drive back in the enfolding dark, with less to say to one another. D wants to listen to the Pet Shop Boys. By the side there are the controlled fires (rice?). Each pile burns brilliantly, separately, deep into the fields, in a time-worn ritual. The fire, pure and clean, seems to burn with very little smoke rising into the night sky.

At the toll plaza entry and exit is noted with some seriousness. The journeys you've made over the years.

You stand over the basin and wash your face with a handful of water. Don't look in the mirror in case you see yourself. Make preparations, as best you can. Another early morning departure, another journey into the unfamiliar. Who is it that goes, who is it that returns?       

   

Robinson

there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

--Bronk

Before Robinson there was only Robinson. When you've lost sense of direction there is no Englishman, no Saracen.

start again. the drift of the world brought me here...

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from?, she asked 

Originally?

No, but where are you really from?, demanded the racist 

Originally?

Country of origin?, asked the pale looking official. 

I come from the land of the pure, where the purer the land the more bitter the almonds, he said, lyingly. Then Robinson looked out to the sea and remembered the colours:

"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."

--Isak D. 

V.S.P.

A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden, studying its branches and its leaves. I look a long time at flowers. And I am always on the watch for the dramatic changes in the London sky.

--V.S.P.

No, not read. Too late to start. But the small sketch (in one of Dougal's books) did leave an impression. 

And now? As age has caught up with you and you find yourself catching your breath on the stairs. Or forgetting names or squinting to make out the face of the person walking towards you. Who the hell is that?!

The old practical ways, inherited from Ubo, linger on somewhere deep down. There seems to be less and less to say- and I don't know how to say it. Ignore the signs, don't look for wisdom. Carry on, in fact, as the clown you've always been. 

I can't say that life is narrowing down appreciably because it's always been- at least in some sense-narrow. Out of choice more than circumstance it has to be said. A needless distinction, perhaps, for how is one's character distinguished from the times one lives in?Still, you note the old Puritan hat you wear with some distinction (not pride) is nearly threadbare after all these years. Most of my clothes have holes in them for some odd reason. Moths or just general wear and tear.  

The other, special hat of yours you keep safe on the top shelf for Christmas visits to London has been worn only once, the day after your birthday. It blew onto the tracks at Woodford and stayed there all night. Recovered it on Sunday morning and was amazed to see that after a brief dusting off it was as good as new! So, there it rests, along with the other hats and the unworn ties from the 1970s (why did Ubo have so many brown ties, you wonder).

I don't study anything with any attentiveness. Instead, drift, drift. There's been no change in the sky for six hours now (if that helps). The only tree that exerts a magnetic pull on me is a million miles away, north by north-west... There is a road, there is a word, that would make sense of all of this, if I only I could find it (okay, okay, James Salter, if you must).

A sign of old age is that there are fewer signs and you don't know who you are. Apart from that, all's swell.