The social

For some reason everything coming my way is related to the social- or, more particularly, to the decline of social democracy: Jacobs, Rogan, Collier and now Tomasello. 

Underlying the crises of social democracy in the 20th c. (of which neoliberalism is simply an extended modern version) is the tension between the individual and the social (or what Gellner would call: atomism and holism). The political manifestation of this tension was, of course, liberal, free-market regimes on the one hand and totalitarian or collective states on the other. Social democracy being a kind of compromise solution (as long as prosperity lasted and as long as societies weren't too diverse). But it really was, in hindsight, a papering over of the fundamental question. And to believe that the state rather than solidarity, fairness and fraternity (as expressed at the institutional level (firms, trade unions, say)) could solve the social problem was, perhaps, problematic from the outset.

So, what of the social is left-apart from, it might be said,a  dim recollection of older instincts and habits? Rogan says, rightly in my opinion, that there's no going back to the older metaphysical perspectives and languages. Reciprocity may have worked in small-scale societies and when society was underwritten by religious scripts, but after so many years of self-interest, avarice and with the emergence of large-scale institutions is there really any going back? Society is much more bureaucratic and impersonal. Markets deal with the needs of strangers.

In some sense, you get the feeling that Adam Smith was grappling with this all along. What can bind people in a commercial society? And so the idea of sympathy comes to the fore (since religion is too divisive). But, as we've seen, unless it's expressed in particular forms it's hard to rely on moral sentiments alone. Which leaves us where? the near-absolute dominance of a shallow kind of individualism?              

In the time that remains

The story of the world in a year, the story of a life in a year (the last book you bought is one you will never read but since anton recommended it and since she is always the person to turn to in such matters you bought it anyway: Anniversaries).

What can be told, without what went on before, and what goes on after. The silence after is nothing like the silence before. 

I liked the cover of the book and it seems to dovetail with Rogan's book, The Moral Economists. There's a collapse on the cards, one can sense it: the smouldering smoke, the powder dust that has fallen on people's faces, the signs erased, the grimaces on people's implacable faces. Even if you could name it, so what? The question is: what can you do about it? How to begin again? I think this will be the question for us when climate change steps up a gear and grabs us by the collars. What resources, institutional, physical, and above all internal resources are available to us to stave off disaster? Not education and not religion, probably. Few will inhabit and breathe poetry; music will point us there but little else. What chance of reconstruction, then? Or is there a kind of Benedict option, a withdrawal and a waiting of it out? Turn your back to the future? Or, worse, give over to the forces which you name as fate and enjoy your two moments in the sun?

Do you trust in the continuation of the good life?

What a story it's been, what a ride!   

   

Crisis

To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that … it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.

--W.H.Auden.

Interesting book on Tawney, E.P. and Polanyi. The idea that they were responding to a social crisis, trying to steer a middle path between market individualism and state collectivism/totalitarianism, a conflict or crisis that would devour so many in the 20th c.  Underlying it all, you suspect, the attempt to recover the notion that we are, at heart, social beings. And for Tawney, it appears, this was connected to the (Christian) idea of personhood. But that idea couldn't float in our secular times and so the moral and spiritual critiques of capitalism turned to economic ones (distribution) or environmental ones (climate change a constraint on growth).

Then there's Alan Jacobs's book (just acquired) on the response of Maritain, Auden and Weil to the nihilism of the second world war and technology.

Earlier, there was Keynes and the social welfare consensus to patch up the ravages the economic system inflicted on people in the Great Depression.

Now, it would appear that we're living through another crisis (or the same prolonged one), a new dark age perhaps. And what is the response? Well, there's been a tremendous amount of soul searching but part of the problem is that there aren't really any public intellectuals who could hold the public's attention in our fragmented, distracted times. Part of the problem, though, is that there are so many different voices raising the alarm. Maybe Piketty has got some people thinking. Dunno. 

As always, the issue is a complex one with many different dimensions to it. What, Tawney would ask, is at the root of the problem? Maybe that's the question that's not being asked? Yes, lots of writing on anxiety and fear; on the looming climate catastrophe; on the dangers of technology and the internet; on the crisis of education, the crisis of masculinity; the end of the book, the end of creativity; the spreading of neoliberalism's tentacles into the very fabric of our social being (human capital, social capital, cultural capital); the threat to democracy by the 1%; and the rise of the far-right and populists in so many countries.

How liberalism failed. When and how capitalism failed. Economic oligarchy and the impossibility of democracy. The sixth extinction kind of thing. Artificial intelligence and the end of the specifically human ways of interacting, speaking; the loss of a sense of place; the demise of civility and conversation.  

Are these all just the same unresolved conflicts being played out in our century? It's hard to not think that that's the case.        

Finnis(hed)?

The knives are out. Not many, but some students at Oxford want to out him unless he outs himself. Are his views about homosexuality reprehensible? And mass immigration? I don't know and these aren't issues that I really think about too much to be honest. I really don't care what other people do in their own bedrooms and I find it hard to believe that homosexuals can't be good people, involved in loving relationships.

I did read two chapters of his book, Natural Law, and I find him to be an outstanding thinker. Even if he wasn't, even if he was just a plain old thinker, does he have the right to express his views or should he be silenced because they are discriminatory?

Well, from what I understand of the sound and the fury (which isn't much, admittedly) I think it's outrageous that he's being asked to leave by these students. What other views should be silenced or effectively banned? A Christian who (privately) thinks Muslims are heretics or an atheist who teaches that religion is merely a construct, an illusion..what about them? And what does one do about the uncomfortable fact -I think it's a fact- that most people of a religious persuasion (Christians, Jews, and Muslims, say) think that homosexuality is morally wrong? Should they be barred from teaching as well? 

I don't know where this could go. All sorts of people have all sorts of (abhorrent) views. What might we end up with? You can think what you like as long as you only loosely or vaguely believe it and as long as it doesn't hurt me (personally, emotionally)? You must (the irony here!) sign up to the idea that everything is a construct and be willing to give up what you formerly believed/thought..nothing is sacred, everything is up for analysis, ridicule, rigorous questioning; there is no such thing as human nature or essences; there is only sovereign becoming, radical doubt. You have to accept that! Confess, damn you! Well, you can doubt doubt itself but then if you want to then please get out of academia (some might say). That orthodoxy (and economic orthodoxy, more particularly) can't really be questioned (sorry Newman, sorry Macintyre, take your feckin' Aristotle and your curs-ed religion and shove them up your *!^*). 

Should Marxists be allowed to teach economics? Why are only academics who subscribe to the tenets and methodology of neo-classical economics allowed to teach? I think the Finnis controversy is going to run and run. It will move beyond him or even this specific issue. Maybe trans. discussions will be next. Let's see.    

So, two questions, as I see it;

One, a question of academic freedom. Two, is that view of homosexuality reprehensible, backward, medieval? Of course, just because a view has been widely held by large swathes of humanity doesn't in itself make that view correct. But it does make me wonder. Are the rights of religious groups/individuals to express their views legitimate (or only legitimate if they correspond to liberal standards)? 'Liberal standards' here seems to me to suggest particular views rather than a process of inquiry.    

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. 

How the mighty (may) have fallen

That he had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned," he told French magazine L’Obs.

--Bernard Godard on Tariq Ramadan.

~~~

I want to stress that these are, at the moment, only accusations and not facts. I'm not usually given to speculation but if true then this is pretty damning and horrific. For the people involved but also-and I'm not sure if it's appropriate to talk about the social ramifications right now- it means the end of one of the moderate voices on Islam in Europe. Of course, if the allegations are true that doesn't really matter. What does is that those in power are exposed. Ramadan may or may not be guilty but it is clear to me that men with money/power can be manipulative.

In a limited sense I've seen it at my university with male colleagues cultivating a 'manly' persona (in some cases having affairs with students. That's been rare but it has happened). I think the more pervasive expression of authority is to have young women hang around you. What a sad, sad state you have to be in if you want to have young women, half your age, look up to you). A more typical Lahori/Punjabi thing is to buy yourself what used to be called 'a keep' in the old days (in short, a mistress or a 'second wife' or a high-end prostitute, basically). And I've seen that, too.  

What is it a sign of? Some deep-rooted, primordial male need to dominate? A need to collect 'trophies'. Of course, I'm suspicious of such ideas. They don't mean that much. What difference does it make if these attitudes developed over the last ten thousand years of agriculture or were there right from the beginning? Or is it more specifically to do with the age we're at (since it does seem to be a particularly middle-aged thing I include myself by saying 'we')?

But back to Ramadan. Not that you've read any of his stuff but he always did come across as suave, gentle, sincere, and liberal-or at least open-minded. My sister even interviewed him for a newspaper a few years ago. Must dig that up.

        

Misc.

One of the above was valued at $450 million. I'm sure you can guess which.

There's something to be said about preservation here-the desire to keep things from the distant past intact. The defacement of the sleeping Buddha is a tragedy (being 1,700 years old makes it the oldest of its kind). Horrible as that it is there's still some hope in the fact that it has been restored and that it will (hopefully) be exhibited. 

But the sale of the Leonardo is also a symbol of the astronomical wealth of some people, the vast inequalities of late capitalism, and not simply bout the love of art. In effect, the commodification of art is what this is all about. Will the painting be viewed by the public or will it just be an investment, part of someone's private collection?  

~~~

Point of order.

Do rats in a maze follow a strict map (if rewarded then turn right; if not, keep going straight) or do they form a complete cognitive map? And humans? Does reliance on GPS result in us losing that map since, like the rat we simply turn left or right depending on what the electronic voice tells us to do? And does our ability to notice the environment we live in subsequently dwindle? How will we ever find home?

~~~

How to Think.

Not in isolation but with others, for others. This seems like a radical overturning of centuries of a false sense of autonomy. An autonomy, incidentally-and to join up the dots-that is leading to more reliance on machines.

~~~

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

--Machiavelli.

Oy, Tolstoy! Clear off, mate. Brexit means fucking Brexit!

There's something quite sad about seeing a small island race becoming, well, ..er..a small island race. At critical junctures maybe some trait, characteristic or sensibility that has for large periods of time been hidden suddenly rises to the surface. So, even though under normal circumstances it isn't a dominant feature of an individual's or a society's make-up, at points of transition it rears its head. Hasn't there been something petty and mean-spirited brewing for the last thirty odd years of the neoliberal experiment? Is it something more permanent?

The closing of the American/British mind? This goes beyond the narrowing of horizons that results in our attention being caught up in all the trivia and information flotsam that streams in front of us, 24/7. And beyond the shallow, everyday kind of racism that offers an animal-like warmth of petty hatreds to a working class that has lost its bearings. I think it extends further: to a middle class that is enamoured by shopping or private fantasies of drug or alcohol-induced flights from reality; it extends to the self-styled religious folks whose bitterness at the direction the world is taking results in a cheap cynicism and condescension.

~~~

Calasso's The Art of the Publisher:  

The Society of the Spectacle

"The US, with Britain in tepid accord, has been bombing unstable Muslim states for 16 years and has delivered nothing but death and anarchy."

--Simon Jenkins, The Guardian.

One might call this "gesture bombing" if it wasn't so obscene. If this is what civilisation really amounts to then I think Zerzan's point is only reinforced.

“There is no doubt that Isis are brutal and that they have committed atrocities against our people. But I don’t see why the bomb was dropped,” said the mayor of Achin, Naweed Shinwari.

~~

“If there was any honor in fighting, a dog should lead us, because who fights better than a dog,” said the father of Mashal Khan (who was lynched by a mob of 400 people for alleged blasphemous remarks). 

Not be televised

'The revolution will not be right back
after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people'. 

The Arab Spring is brought to you by Coca-Cola and in collaboration with.. 

"There are too many immigrants in this country," said the Australian woman, pretending not to be a fascist. "I'm not a racist but..."

"The problem with Islam is that it hasn't had a Reformation," said the bigot (not really knowing very much about Islam or the Reformation). "I'm all for liberalism but..."

~~~

   

'An incremental tyranny'

News from a strange planet:

"Israel sunk in incremental tyranny," says former Shin Bet chiefs.

Kendall Jenner is 'very upset'. "Anything offensive is just not her. She means well, always." Pepsi can, incrementally, alter the world of tyranny.

Aung San Suu Kyi claims the violence was partly down to "Muslims killing Muslims." Slowly, incrementally, of course.

He was always just himself.

It is sometimes said that we live in an age of forgetting, or forgetfulness. The world is (supposedly) changing so quickly that we don't know whether we're coming or going; technology and skills and jobs are changing so furiously that what we once knew is hardly worth knowing any more; in any case, we can just off-load all that know-how on to some unsuspecting digital cloud (haven't we always been embedding and storing knowledge like that?).

What was I saying? 

Yeah, travel light, grasshopper. The age of 'bookishness' is drawing to an end. The text and the university: that 800 year-old alliance is falling apart. Watch this space/screen. 

Why read the classics? (Calvino). No more canons, standards, norms. Nature, if we talk about it at all, is free-floating, random. Human nature? Do me a favour, pal.

I wasn't myself.
I haven't been feeling like myself lately.

Is there still an 'I' to talk of/to? The political apparatus, the blind bureaucratic machine, is nothing but the production of the empty will, de-subjectification, the creation and valorization of a lonely freedom. Art for art's sake-and we're all free! 

The administration of things. Or, in other words: the management of bare life. To talk of a way of life is already to imagine too much order, consistency, stability. Accept you are nothing but a broken fragment with no determinate nature in a world in which there is no substantive good (C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man). I can be who I want to be, matey! But that's because of the ideological determination that creates the illusion that there is no ideology (or, rather, that the ideological belongs exclusively to the political-and to political oppression at that, too).

It's the economy, stupid. 

You are free to do whatever you want as long as it involves shopping.
(Zizek). 

This is all far too serious. Lighten up, dude. Or: let's just have fun. Or: it's those bloody immigrants/foreigners/refugees Muslims who don't understand our values.

The loss of the world

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

--K. Irby.

Where are you from? Originally?

Thought is timeless, doesn't belong anywhere. Where were you when you were thinking? Nowhere. Who were you? Nobody in particular. I'm thinking, in my own room, in a stove, cramped up. The universal condition of 'man'?

Reason, scientific procedures..a universal way of understanding reality, relegating all the other, time-worn ways to the false, to untruth. As if we could know by forgetting who we are. As if our minds were a vast and continuous continent and not a series of loosely connected islands. In the heartlands our souls are copied out in a huge ledger by a bureaucratic hand. 

With scientific thought and inventions we live in one world and one world only. If something holds it holds everywhere. I stand on a column and survey it all with perfect objectivity, a view from nowhere. With a calm spirit I note down there: two dogs fighting over a bone.

Other factors are at work in modernity, pushing us to ever-greater abstraction and 'placelessness': religion, with its universal 'brotherhood' (neither Greek nor Jew) knows of no holy land. The spirit knows no such distinctions and the local gods are in disrepute. 

The capitalist system is at heart a system that devours local attachments and bonds. Within the nexus of market exchange nothing of permanent value subsists and everything is interchangeable, a substitute for something else. 'Intrinsic worth' is an anathema. Capitalism is the exchange of represented (or abstract) values. And global capitalism just furthers that process of alienation. 

The same city centre, the same airports and, ultimately, the same mental attitudes. Place, as the locus of a distinct history, the flourishing of unique individual perspectives and collective representations, is replaced, through mechanical repetition, by "space" and abstract flows, by the undoing of real communication in favour of the exchange of equivalents.

So, in thought and in practice, the rootless, the vagabond, is held in high-esteem. Which is not surprising. This is not about investing dignity in an abstract individual (with his universal rights) but in clearing the ground so that capital can flow. 

If there are islands there are bridges. But in the land-locked homeland of our contemporary lives there is only a drab sameness. It is precisely under those circumstances that a false individuality is cultivated ("express yourself") and a false reverence for blood and soil propagated. 

At another level this symptom is expressed in a different way: the withdrawal of the man and woman of culture into their own personal aesthetic experiences; high-minded, standing above the fray, immune to the petty temptations of a shallow culture that has nothing to offer but enticements, allurements and distractions. Culture as a form of therapy, a way of disengaging from the sordid world of politics. After all, only the individual counts, says the poet (oblivious of the fact that his own sensibility has been worked upon by the capitalistic spirit). 

So, if the riff-raff are led into a self-absorbed world of spectacles and digital confusion they're not so different from the educated bourgeois, duped by their academic specialisms and cultivated sensibility of indifference. Both share in the inability to think beyond themselves. This shows up in the abuse of the language: 'the political' is now replaced, everywhere, by 'the politicized', the world can only be conceived of as 'worldliness'. One thinks of himself as rising above the world; the other sinks below it. But both are eminently products, not that they know it, of the hollowing out of the world. 

This withdrawal from the world, the loss of a sense of place, the inability to utter the word 'we'..all this in the name of a private pleasure (whether it is a 'higher' pleasure or not is to miss the point). The disappearance of the public world is effected by the proliferation of images, idle chatter, trivialities and gossip. Common sense becomes as rare as the old medieval notion of the common good in a therapeutic culture. 

With the loss of the world the space of appearances and interactions is replaced by the body and its desires (the new body politic) or by an identity politics, or the amplification of fear, personal grievances. Under such circumstances what scope is there for the development of obligations to other people and to, in fact, the continuity of the world so that future generations may participate in it?

And then there's the personal confession, the growth in widow(er)-memoirs where someone's intense suffering must be brought to light, form part of a "meditation". The loss of a brother, a mother,...it's either that or: the world is going to hell in a handcart so let's have fun, it's the only sane response after all.   

Last Acts

"You ain't no Mother Teresa, motherfucker," said the Russian ambassador.

"We didn't start the fire; it was always burning," said Mother Teresa. She secretly wished Billy Joel and not Dylan would have got the damned Nobel.

"You're just a bit of white trash," he continued.

"Uptown Girl..I've never had a backstreet guy", said the ambassador. 

Sensing his moment: "Take a chance on me. I'm still free," he replied.

~~~
I heard that, on a day when a car bomb killed three Americans, Paul Bremer's last act as Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to issue laws making it illegal to drive with one hand on the steering wheel or to honk a horn when there was no emergency.

--Eliot Weinberger 

I heard the rebels were just a pack of towel-heads from the desert, the remnants of a remnant that we whipped together. We, boss. I heard the Great Man say: Your enemy's enemy ain't your enemy. I see another axis of evil brewing before ma eyes. I aints got me no shame so I gonna call them out, good and proper.(Boss tell me wez got to fit the Yellowskins in there somehow) 

~
I heard these foreign names mentioned in a pub quiz. Do they mean anything to you: My Lai, Faullujah, Shatila, Hiroshima, Abu Ghraib ? Here's a question you won't hear in the pub..this is a tricky one, I must say. Even I was confounded for a while. How many people have been killed in the DRC? We said in unison: Democratic! And then we laughed. In any case, there's a repeat of the classic sketches from The Two Ronnies on the box tonight. Who's on who's side? It's all so confusing! 

The artist of the floating world

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9.11.9

It was neoliberalism; it was globalization. It was the hollowing out of the middle classes, rising inequality. It was men, white men, who couldn't take the fact that women had jobs, didn't need them so much. They could get sex anywhere now. It was the world turned upside down with blacks dominating sports, with blacks getting the vote (and even their own president, goddammit). It was the gays, the baby-killers. 

It was the declining sperm count, all them high-rise towers crowding out the sun's beautiful natural light. 9.11. The whole world is nothing but a sea of numbers. Those financial wizards in Babylon, with all their hocus pocus and unreal minds, they be the ones that got us here. 

We ain't great any more. I want you to know that. The inner cities are being taken over by the jungle, the Chinese..did I mention them? The old yellow peril sneaking up on us like that, the two-timing snake-belly Fu manchus. It was all that; it weren't none of that.

It was Ming, it was some towel head in a desert or a thousand foot cave under the earth plotting the destruction of our beloved country. Old Europe. Faggots and Queers. The elites and them so-called liberals with all their fancy culture and media outlets; it was the Silicon Valley hipsters making money out of nothing, without an honest day's work to show for it. It was those pointy-head academics telling us we was no good, nothin' but white trash coz we ain't read no book. Well, we socked it to them all, just likes I said we would and now you ain't smiling. We're going to take you down, down, down so you can feel the heat we been feeling all this time. I  know you don't like it, but that's how the dice have rolled my friend and the simple, god-fearing folks have spoken and they're saying it, bright and clear: Fuck you, buddy! 

~~~

Meanwhile, the world carries on spinning on its axis in this beautiful wide space. The old sway of the earth returns, life goes on. The old ancient light filters through the trees as it always does in November. Peasants working on the land or in the city start fires and it stings your eyes so that someone from a distance would think you are crying for no reason. Is that a way of living? 

What happens to the old clouds, the sea left behind by the new wave? 

But I write to calm your nerves, my friend. Have a cinnamon roll, get some sleep.

A whale was swimming near the coast last night. No-one saw it, it was a kind of rumour and only the kids really believed it. I was in a deep and heavy sleep at the time. I stretched out my left arm at an angle, like a stone, or like a stone imagines. The rest of me still in the dreamworld. Where has my life gone? I move stiffly, wake up in a dream. Your name is in the air. In an hour they'll sing this song, drunk in forgetfulness but I will have come to my senses.

The internal sunset
after the darkness
has stopped moving.

I remember sitting on a bench, late into the evening, the stars nearly lost in the blue of the sky. Sitting there like an old man already, watching so many things pass you by..the long-legged women in short skirts, for example. And not even Hercules could move me from that bench. At a certain time in your life the clothes fit, the coffee in your hand, the wind in your hair, a closed book by your side give a semblance of timelessness. Here you sit, in late Fall, and God clearing away the leaves in my heart. November is a time for forgiveness.

But the whale, the whale, the whale.

The whale looking sideways,
hiding a woman in those eyes.

Sit right there, through the evening, each hour becoming more like a ghost under the soft moon. This life under the trees breathing world. What shape is the human heart?

I dream a lot and sometimes I see you. Once on a moored ship, under artificial lights and all that empty blue ocean. Your smile like the rains that flood our time on earth.

[His heart was clear on one point:
he knew whom he loved.]

It goes on.

Love, morning, stars
blue now in the 
continuing lighting
of the heavens.

Don't tell me what you know is true.

Here, my hand is loose, my heart is dark. A whale was swimming near the coast last night. I think I missed it but heard its sad song in my central dream.

{Lines from Joseph Ceravolo}