What money can't buy

Bob, an american desi, thinks that we can quantify things like love, friendship, loyalty and a whole host of other things. Another american coined it : time is money!

That we can go from quantification to dollarization isn't that surprising (see Bernard Williams' comments on Bentham in 'Morality'). Once we start to conceptualize things in market terms, as commodities that are alienable and cease from thinking of them in relation to notions of personhood, or duties or rights then we're on a slippery slope to what Sandel calls 'corruption'. What matters here is the narrow conception of freedom: negative liberty and, ultimately, a shallow view of happiness (wealth and material goods).

What's really being commoditised here is Time itself (Marx:"Time is everything, Man is nothing" (see the excellent online article by Barbara Adam: "When time is money: contested rationalities or E.P's 'Time-Work discipline'). The Church saw this early on with its prohibition of usury (Le Goff: no-one "owns" time, and therefore it cannot be traded).

What Bob and his like are really saying is that other pursuits like poetry or art can be thought of as leisure and valued in terms of their opportunity cost (foregone income). Again: quantification implies commensurability. This obsession with reducing all behaviour (motivations and evaluations) to a single dimension for "tractability" at the theoretical level. It goes deeper than that, though: it's a political move. As Abe Lerner said, markets solve the political problem. Once we have the measure of life do we get the emergence of a new type of politics (the bio-political)? Once everything is reduced to life and the process of consumption do we lose the world as a place where human beings dwell, meet, tell stories to one another? The decline of public man, of trust, the view of nature as a resource (pure extension), are surely linked to these developments.

Americans -and we're all americans now-reared on the myth that the pursuit of happiness is a right suddenly realise that this obsession with happiness is part of the problem: I can, therefore I must (Zizek).


Well, what's wrong with that, bob asks? Who determines which things are alienable and which aren't, and to what degree? what's the process and what are the justifications for excluding us from thinking on those terms.


I don't think that's the right question..not to start off with anyway. I think we must recognize that throughout human history there's been the idea of the sacred and the profane, of different realms (or "spheres of justice") with their own set of principles to determine allocations of the 'goods' (rights, duties, equality, fairness, happiness, security, needs, merit, capabilities and so on). So, we must start the other way round: on what grounds should we say that one principle-the market- should dominate as a distributive mechanism?


But quite frankly, someone who thinks that friendship, happiness, art or love can be thought in terms of quantities already holds such an extreme view that I really don't know how to respond. Why this perverse need to calculate everything (Sen: evaluation is not calculation) ? Can we really order life, desires, time in that way?

For the other world is like a mirror: everyone sees their own form in it.
---Ostad Elahi.

Darkest Peru, London, and Hollywood

okay, okay, I know he doesn't have any shoes on and so he can't tap like Gene but still, dougal, you have to admit that he ain't half bad for a bear.

Uniqueness

Love is never directed to this or that property of the loved one, but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of a generality: universal love; the lover wants the Loved One with all of its predicates, its being such as it is.

--Sebastian Smee

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was

what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch,

matchwood, immortal

diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

---Gerald Manley Hopkins

~~~

Okay, you know I don't give advice on this blog, especially since my own life is messed up and because I detest missionaries, "experts" and busy-bodies who feel they just have to tell you how to live your life, but I did want to say this, and it's contained in the words of this song.

Against the false universalism of the market and the boxing-in of our identities by 'the religious' today we have to-more than ever- once again learn how to speak of the 'I' in all its specificity and dazzling uniqueness. And that means we cannot stay silent, we have to speak about You. The world's shortest poem-and probably one of its best-is: Me. You.

May God preserve us from the 'intelligence' of the academics and the narrowing down of our horizons by a false, abstract notion of the individual. We can see other people clearly only to the extent that we see ourselves clearly. 'To see' is not so much an intellectual act as a moral act. To see, with awe and wonder, the awe and wonder of others, is to be at the right distance from them and ourselves; it is a matter of being attentive to what differentiates us and what unites us.

The fateful slumber floats and flows
About the tangle of the rose.
But lo the fated hand and heart
To rend the slumberous curse apart.
---William Morris.

Down in the orchard
I met my death
under the briar rose
I lie slain

I was going
to gather flowers
my love waited
among the trees

Down in the orchard
I met my death
under the briar rose
I lie slain

the leaves glint in the wind
turning their quiet song
the wings flash and are still
I sleep in the shade

when I cried out you
made no reply
tonight I shall pass
without a sound

If the night is dark
and the way is short
if the way you take
is to my heart

say though I never
see you again
touch me I shall shiver
at the unseen

the night is so dark
the way so short
yet you do not wake
against my heart

emptiness ever thronging
untenable belonging
how long until this longing
end is unending song

and soul for soul discover
no strangeness to discover
and lover keep with lover
a moment and for ever

I shall live
in grief desiring
still to grieve

I shall go down to the lover's well
and wash this wound that will not heal

beloved soul
what shall you see
nothing at all
yet eye to eye

---G. Hill

brier:Eurasian rose with prickly stems and fragrant leaves and bright pink flowers followed by scarlet hips

The end of religion?

[Watch this first..hilarious!]
-----------------------------------

I was sent this.

Not really my cup of tea (Charles Taylor's online 'Social Imaginary' is so much better than this plodder's crab-like thoughts)

Claim: secularization means the devaluing of religion and a religious mentality (perhaps even a contempt for it). Liberals in the States or Pakistan think of religious folks as backward, simple, naive, and/or fanatical. They don't even understand the modern world or science.

Revisionist claim: Well, no, actually, religion hasn't gone away. Look at America and the growth of conservatism everywhere (Iran, Pakistan, Algeria)

Here's what Habermas calls the resurgence of religion:
a) missionary expansion (tablighis and the Protestants are everywhere)
b) a fundamentalist radicalisation
c) "the political instrumentalisation of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions"

This was such utter crap that I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Since when are those things religion? Are we to say that the Taleban or the God-forsaken Saudi expansion, or the evangelical movement is a resurgence of religion? God forbid!!

a) these missionaries are laughed out of town when they go to the rural areas. Most of them are modernists anyway with their half-baked notions of science and modernity.

b) As many others have argued, the fundamentalists are actually just a reaction against modernity and in that sense are also a part of it. I mean, their critiques of the West -to the extent that they even have them- are just re-hashed versions of the counter-Enlightenment.

c) The "mullah regime" and violent extremists are denounced by ordinary muslims so does it make any sense to say they -and only they-define what is meant by religion?

More crap by Habermas: "In fact, Muslim immigrants cannot be integrated into western society in defiance of their religion but only with it"

What bollocks! Most of the muslim immigrants I know (my parent's generation) never even thought in those terms, nor did the majority of the people I grew up with or know indirectly. And the same holds here, in the land of the pure: identity is a mix of all sorts of factors: class, education, ethnicity, language, local religious affiliations, tribal or feudal cultural practices, etc. It's ridiculous to assume that immigrants or 'muslims' should, or can only, be thought of exclusively in terms of their 'religion'.

Does Habermas even know what religion is?

Kumayl said:

"I asked my master Ali (RA): Is there only one soul? He replied: O Kumayl, there are four souls: the vegetal, nutritive soul; the sensitive, animal soul; the rational, holy soul; and the universal, divine soul."

By another name

Unmöglich ist immer die Rose,
unbegreiflich die Nachtigall
---Goethe.

For Heaven's sake, do not talk about the rose!
Talk of the nightingale who is separated from his rose
---Rumi.

I am amazed, o rose, to see your kindness,
that you can sit together with the thorn...
---Hafiz

Joy and pain are the same shape:
you can call the rose an open heart, or a broken heart.
---Mir Dard

The nightingale read from the rose petals a word which a hundred commentators can explain only with difficulty
---Jami.

It looked to me from afar like a bouquet of roses
When I saw it from near, it was fire
---Khaqani.

And the night flowed back into the rose until the night was the night no longer. And who could say if it was the sadness in the rose or if it was the fire in the night that led one to the other. But this much is true: the rose is but an image of Beauty, and is destined to fade and die. A painted bird for a painted rose.

The nightingale still has grace as long as it remembers springtime and dreams of the fragrant rose. Even in a black sun there is the faint memory of the rose, like a single red thread. But what of crow?

If the crow were to see its own ugliness,
it would melt like snow.
---Rumi.

The Gift

God is not an accountant, but if He was I think the only things in His books would be a record of what we gave to other people and what we lovingly received from others.


C had asked what the first story was I could remember (it was the magic porridge pot, a story of how a gift is not used properly ) but this one also came to
mind. That an idea "comes" to us says what, exactly?Hyde's words are simple but profound...To give is to receive. By giving we have more, we are more.

(and now I remember that I had promised this book as a gift to someone! Sorry, I've lent it to a student, Z. Will try and get it to you. Promise.)

The gift does not stop with me-if it does then it is just a matter of private accumulation. Can market transactions be social exchanges? What do we give of ourselves (to others, to nature, to God)? One of the worst types of people, or one of the worst aspects of us all, is this miserliness of the self...as if we could store some things up against Time; this fear of emptiness means we surround ourselves with things. An american desi tells me of how americans are obsessed by this idea of "my" (my space, my life...)

What is it to live a life with an open hand, to not calculate the returns ? What would it be like to accept that some things are given to us and other things are not? Is our life only of our own making, or is it only given meaning by what is shared, by what we share?

Hazrat Ali (RA) says: you should possess your possessions, they should not possess you.

You don’t know how hard it’s been,
to find you a gift.
Nothing fits.
Why bring gold to the seam, water to the sea?
Every idea of mine seemed like hauling spice to
the East.
No good to give you my heart, soul,
you own both already.
So I got you a mirror.
Look at you.
Think of me.
---Rumi, courtesy of 'Copenhagen'

Gould, the Taleban, and Crows

I don't know why, but I find myself increasingly listening to this. Just listening to it, not seeing it. Wish I had a musical ear. At the moment it seems the more I listen to it the more I pick up on their distinctness. Perhaps later I will see the unity in it.When I first listened to it I had the semi-blasphemous thought that, you know, when one reads the Quran the text seems to be the same in different places but when you hear it each surah has its distinct flavour, tone.

The playing itself is so 'alive', as if there was a perfect meeting of structure and inspiration, spontaneity after years of dwelling in the music, rather than performing it. It's as if the technical was brought within the folds of human meaning again.

Said on Gould: order and "new thinking"..a rejection of the vertical. A 'late style' means revisiting origins.

~~~

But I mainly listen to it to blot out what's going on around me..the disintegration of the country into the chaos of poverty, lawlessness, violence, fanaticism and stupidity. Of course, art and poetry are futile, extravagances even, in the face of so much suffering (as is an academic life) but..

Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught poetry and the imaginative arts are practically useless. Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of the self which lies at the base of every individuated life. In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil-no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense, it is unlimited. It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which the accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed.

~~

oh yes, crows. Talking to KP yesterday. He's been attacked by two crows almost every day for the last two weeks.

"They only attack me, not the person I'm walking with..what do you know about crows?"

Corvidus...

"That's not much help. Why me??I need to go to some 'elder' or sage who can tell me what this means"

"Well, in England they're sometimes associated with battles and carrion"

"Here", KP says, "if one sees some crows outside one's house that's very auspicious..something good will happen to you"

And then he adds, gingerly:

"Either that or death is coming for you"

"Er...that bit of folk wisdom isn't very reassuring!"

No poetry

"There's no poetry", said Bush, the Taleban, the engineers and the accountants, shuffling the pack..."there's only the dealing out of reality".

"There's no poetry", said the poet, poetically, picking the joker...there's only the silverpoint of memory, fingers smudged with ink, the kajol running from her eyes.

Total Recall

There's something terribly sad about bloggers (or maybe it's just the ones I read are a bit melancholic). For others, though, this is the way of the future (there's always been resistance to new forms of communication). One even hears the word 'community' quite amusingly bandied about (yeah, right, whatever) and no doubt there are 'theorists' hard at work analyzing how it all ties in with late capitalism, post-modernity, Foucault or Zizek.

What interests me though is the sheer self-conceitedness of it all (for a little while, anyway. After that the interest wanes). I-am-the centre-of the -world. Please notice me. Confess! (and don't miss out the juicy bits!)

C, in her characteristically lucid way said: it's a bit obscene, having the image of someone up there long after they've passed away.

Start the week:

We may be the first civilisation that doesn't leave a trace of what we thought and felt in any memorable public monuments. Creative destruction and 'instant living.' And yet, paradoxically, it is just this rapid shifting of our background scenery that impels us to collect the fragments of our lives and hold them ever so closely to us. I think this accounts for the conservation movement but also for the vast cathedrals of the minds, the public libraries in Washington, Paris, London ...(see Steiner, 'Errata'). No matter that no one reads 'linearly' any more..as long as it's there. (So think the Eloi). And we'll soon be able to watch everything on Youtube or read everything on google books. Fantastic!

From the archives:

Does anyone actually go back over their previous blogs and think: what was the point of writing that? I have catalogued..er ..what, exactly? The life I didn't live -a bit like the archetypal Japanese tourist who enjoys the experience of watching the video of his trip to Europe more than the actual bloody thing!

New Yorker: Alec Wilkinson:
(you're going to like this, C)

Some people are now running a project so that every detail of their lives is meticulously recorded, scanned, noted, digitalized, taped, and stored. It's called lifelogging. Friends, family, former students and children: avert your eyes now. Done? Good.For fuck's sake!

Open eyes.

Of course, it could be argued that this is just an extreme form of blogging, just as blogging is the accentuated form of a diary. What is this pre-occupation with the authentic self ? A fear of death, of missing out on the lives we never had, of organizing chaos? Maybe it's the desire to weave a thread through the different pieces of our lives and say, at last, here is a coherent story.

Your lifebits could be surfaced, made present as patterns on an ambient display. Or compressed and shaped like a movie so that something emerges from the mess , the enigma, that is a human life. 'Lifebits'? You've gotta laugh.

Horwitz, president-elect of The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence:

I would like to see computers provide a fabric that would extend us in areas where we're weak. If you look at 20th century cognitive psychology what it showed was that people had vast abilities coupled with limitations and bottlenecks. ...[such as] people forgetting things, and being biased in their judgements. To create a computation that understands those grooves and nooks and crannies ..using it in places where a computer can do well in a complementary way to extend people....

It comes to understand how you organize your memories, by what you choose. It learns to become like you, to help you be a better you.

I kid thee not. Computer geeks may be fantastically intelligent in a limited way but there's a reason it's called artificial intelligence!

On hearing the computer fan whizzing late at night Bell (the man running the experiment) says: My system is consolidating new memories. It's like a human being dreaming.

Logging everything means we can go back and analyse our tone in an argument, re-examine our stated life-goals and see if we've met them. Then we can see what went wrong (will certainly save a lot of money on therapy). The pattern of things that happens to us is what we are. That's deep, real deep...more to the point: we should be able to make some money out of it. And like real memory we'll be able to delete those inane memories or events we don't want to recall (like me blogging about this). Forget the Madeleines.

Z. Bauman:

In Borges' story Funes, thrown from his horse, is incapable of Platonic ideas..that is, of abstracting: of putting certain aspects of what he saw in focus by leaving the rest out. Instead he was able (had to!) to perceive every grape that had been pressed into the wine, and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard where you and I, with one quick look, perceive three wine glasses on a table. Two or three times Funes reconstructed an entire day without without once erring or faltering, but each reconstruction itself had taken an entire day. Having found not only the task he had set himself was interminable, but that the whole idea of such a task was pointless, Funes complained: 'My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap'.

The Invisibles

I was thinking today of all the invisible people on blogs (readers, anons) and all those who are trying to become visible ('writers'), thinking of missed conversations, and things I've never said as well. I mean, despite all the fanfare, does blogging actually connect people in any real way? I don't know, talking with someone over coffee, hearing their voice, seeing their face (er..and bodies) just isn't the same.

I've nothing against invisibility. Growing up as an outsider/foreigner one is acutely aware of the desire to be seen and not to be seen..the freedom of not being seen, of being on the margins, roaming around there, is something the mainstream probably just doesn't get.

We all become invisible, loosed from body and duty, left to drift on the night breeze, to do as we will, to cast about for what we like to be when we next occur.That, let me promise you, is not an empty moment...Just to slide away like a whisper down the wind is no small freedom, and if we are ever lucky enough to win such a setting-free, we should use it, for it is the only naturally occurring consolation that comes to us, sole and sovereign, without props or the forbearance of others-among whom I mean to include God himself, who does not let us stay invisible long, since that is a state he reserves for himself.
---R. Ford, The Sportswriter

But even this seems so different from the forced invisibility of marginal groups (women, the poor).

In T's village over the weekend:
Wonderful hospitality,as expected. And to see the shrine of the saint who's at the head of the main Sufi order in the Punjab was something special. The saint, sick of the world, moves here to escape the prying eyes of the world, to be alone with the Alone. But I'm not religious and so wasn't really moved. What did stick, though, was this:

Standing in the fields at 1 in the morning, erecting these long nets, set in the shape of a large 'L' so that we could shoot quail in the morning. No-one around for miles-and certainly no quails-just darkness and the moonlight floating effortlessly on the swaying grass, and the recording of the quails chirping away in the background so as to attract them to this spot.

And then someone told me that an old woman, a sixty-year old woman, who had been collecting firewood had been brutally raped one mile from here. And all the ghoulish details followed. And I thought to myself : most people in this country-the rural and urban poor-are just invisible in a way that is as close to being nothing, a no-one, as is possible.

The human figure is progressively disappearing from pictorial art, as no object is present except in fragmentary form. This is one more proof that the human countenance has become ugly and outworn, and that the things which surround us have become things of revulsion.
---Hugo Ball.

The Dying Animal

Love is a shadow
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

---S. Plath



Listen: time passes.
Listen.


She held out a hand to him. His fate was entwined in that primordial gesture of woman. One falls in love or one falls out of it..but one falls...


I watched the awful 'Into the Wild'; only the last scene when his photograph is shown do we realise this was a real human being, and not the caricature we see depicted by some rather hammy acting. But the lines ring true still: it is important to give everything its proper name. He comes to realise, painfully, the great truth: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

~~~
Literature: as a diversion, a way of forgetting, a way of remembering....

'..[y]ou feel even more than you ordinarily do the poignancy of every last grace that's been lost'

The only solution to life is to live more of it, pure excess, an explosion of sensibility, the anarchic, orgiastic spirit delighting in the revelry of transgression against bourgeois conformity, norms, moral standards. Those pointy heads with their seriousness, their platitudes and worn-out cliches..Islam is peace, America is the land of the free. Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire. Bakhtin, Bacon, the rehabilitation of Nature. The other Bacon: our ultimate reality: flesh.

One cannot "save" a life, just as one cannot "save" time. At least the devil has blood pulsing through his being, unlike this phantom being, this cardboard cut-out: man and his "limit-loving class". A rebel -with or without a cause..that does not matter..the will is all that matters-and after me the deluge...why did you climb the mountain? Because it was there. Desire is everything. You are what you desire. Books on how to assert yourself, books on how to cope when you fail to assert yourself. Greed is good. Consume your way out of terror..consumption is the terror that behind this desiring there is nothing but a dying animal.

the end of america, the beginning of america.
Small-town conservatives and red-necks. The horror of difference (witches, negroes, gays, jews, catholics, commies,towel-heads). The Puritans were the agents of rule and godly virtue. When did it end, this experiment in dictatorial intolerance? Elvis, the car, the pill, the Charleston? The empire of virtue replaced by the empire of candour. In your face. Express yourself. Kick-ass attitude.You want the truth, you can't handle the truth, bud!


The end of capitalism, the beginning of capitalism.

This wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past. What Tawney called the mimicking of the 'divine frenzy', the moment when the world is obliterated. Laughter and nonsense against authority. Life is a cabaret, my friend. Radical dissent. Transgression = creativity. The shock of the new. The authority of the present. The normalization of the repression of guilt, the repression or forgetting of movements upwards...the only question is: how to enjoy our liberation from (drum roll) the family, society, religion, tradition, the past, the state. Free, free at last. How to liberate pleasure from reason. The Tree of Life, not the Tree of Knowledge. This dying animal is an animal. And that's that.

But why, it may be asked, was life a problem in the first place? And nowhere is it asked why this unfettered individualism has led to such pathological behaviour, so many addictions and compulsive neuroses. Is the gambler an individual at all? The settler sees wildness, emptiness to be filled with his own projections. The nomad sees an inhabited world that he shares with others. Nomadic space is about co-existence, not distance.

Do not pause-for to pause would already be a victory- to reflect on how convenient this is for late capitalism, this production of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising. Bio-politics. The efficient management of life, the bringing of the life process into the public realm, subjecting it to techniques of control and manipulation and analysis. This gives way to the second-stage of capitalism: liquid modernity. The dissolution of the world since everything can be traded, is fungible, until there are no more boundaries. Global citizens! Nothing is sacred. Just this bare forked animal before you.

Do not ask why you must always escape yourself (even a holiday is called an escape!) or, politically speaking, what it means for the impossible to become possible (Arendt). Just do it! Spectators, voyeurs before the pornographic. The triumph of the surface, of trivialization, the banal, of entertainment.

(citations: Roth, Rieff)

~~~

There is great pathos in this view of us being nothing but dying animals and the fanaticism of the Puritans hardly appeals to but a rare few. But is this all we are ? (I don't mean that as an intellectual question but, rather, as a question of how do we live : joy in contingency?). Do we not knowingly, lovingly, name the world? We look to find our true name with God and know the great importance of finding the proper names for things, of speaking in the right tone. Do we not know that we are dying animals? And think , write, create in response? Even if we die alone, we do not always live alone:

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

The Moment

There is no such thing as "time"; as soon as we name it , it slips out of our hands. Serial, objective time is mechanical, cold. But there is no such thing as a time that is completely 'outside' of us, independent of our perception even though we dimly suspect that time's arrow is another name for necessity. Time, the mystery of mysteries, is the bitter wound within us, secreting its poison-ink with which we write the stories of our lives.

~~

Science, philosophy and theology only skirt around the hems of its outer garments...the truth of it lies elsewhere; the world, insofar as it is causality, is but the "veil of God", the antechamber that leads to an infinite hall of mirrors.

~~

We act, we think in time but our thoughts are "in" time not as an object like another object; they occupy the nunc stans, being neither future nor past.

~~

She fell into my arms,

and the world stood still

~~

No saint or 'thinker' reaches the same height of awareness as one who is conscious of roads that have been denied him, of the loss of a loved one at the hands of time; but time is not just memory, she is desire. We need to 'think' God and love Him (Anselm)...one wants to feel the stars and not just see them.

~~

Eternity is the style of desire.

~

Forgetting.

A terrible case of amnesia; he could only remember things he had said within the last seven seconds....beyond that was eternal silence. One is forced to think what a life without continuity and memory would be like (even the 'saved' remember how sweet the fruit on earth tasted). The complete fragmentation of a life, where one raw sensation is followed by another, is unbearable and is nothing but a description of Hell. His life is a raft beyond which is a void. To live in the fleeting moment is to live without recollection and without hope, with the sovereign becoming of a Dionysus or a Bacchus.

~

Sometimes one would like to lose oneself, to forget by finding joy in contingency. But a sober awareness always returns to the world...

~

Every time he meets his beloved it is as if he is meeting her for the first time..she is the only person he recognizes in this confusing world of images and half-fallen beings. But to live for such a moment is a curse. ..it is to live a totally closed life, one in which there can be no dreams and nothing but an empty landscape stretches behind and beyond him.

~

This man who is 'walking death' remembers only one other thing-music, the piano music that he could somehow, miraculously, still play with an intensity of feeling that was unparalleled in his life; he could draw upon this hidden reserve of emotion at will, it was the only thing that persisted, that anchored him to something in the world; it was as if this was the only home in which any feelings could survive, the rest being but a frenzied dash across a tightrope. Below the abyss, nothingness.

~

He wondered how certain notes could evoke particular states of being, how they could pull on the strings of our heart as if there was some sort of hidden relation-mathematical and spiritual-between all that was in the universe and all that was in a human heart.

~

The creation of a single self is as the creation of a whole universe.

~

It is said that all moments are the moment, each one is, if we are but open to its possibility, the time in which grace or love make their appearance; and it is only our turning away that allows the moment to fall away. And since each moment is connected to the next is anything really lost? Does not one prefigure the other, hold within its very heart a trace of the other? A heart that is broken is always receptive..is it not said that I am with those whose heart is broken for My sake (and here one wonders if there can be any other form of breaking, is not the heart always broken?)

~

But the sages and old men will tell you otherwise. There are but a few moments in life that arrive unheralded, a brief interlude amidst the cyclomania of the world...what are often called the "window of opportunity" and these are the moments that we are most desirous of. It is they that, like an invisible axis of our lives, a golden thread that runs through our being, structure all past events and all future ones too; it is that very moment in which one is awestruck by beauty, love, knowledge, that all of time collapses to this single gaze; it as if all meaning is condensed in our response to such a moment, this fork in the road. This moment does not annul all other moments but contains them in a loving embrace...the keystone of our lives.

~

Listening to Arvo Part:

There is dissonance and strife, a discontinuity in the narrative and then, as if from nowhere, a chord suddenly emerges and acts like a balm on the open wound; it draws all other voices to it, bringing them home, resolving them in what only now looks like a pre-determined harmony.

The first note emerges from the silence and carries with it something of the mystery of all that is unformed, unspoken. The first note opens up the possibility of infinite worlds...which way it goes is something beyond human comprehension. But the longer one holds that note, avoiding resolution, the longer the options remain open. Do we search to replicate such a note, do we try and elaborate its unfolding in time, seeking the pattern that is weaved around this centre?

~

This moment that starts from nothing and which disperses in no-time whatsoever, is destined to return to nothing as well. But in such a movement it tells us that there is a past, present and future since the present, the moment, never lasts and always recedes into the past and the future always breaks-up the 'now'. Such is the fate of all moments. But from amongst all the moments there is a realisation that some, more than others-and not just the first- give shape to the whole sequence.

~

There are times when we feel that everything fits: that we're in the right place at the right time, that there's been a dazzling co-incidence of fate, an alignment of the stars and the trajectory of one's life, the perfect intersection of lines of causality with one's own haphazard choices; but with this comes the apprehension of how horribly wrong things go, how for most parts we seem to be out of sorts with the turning of the heavens, out of tune with its harmony.

~

Even worse, there is an understanding that time is lost, irretrievably so, and that some choices in the decisive moment cannot be undone (could the man who rejected Christ have foreseen that this one elemental gesture would determine his eternal destiny?, had we the chance to love again would we make the same decision?, and there's the paralysing knowledge that our life which traverses but a small span of the great arc of being, had to be, could not be anything but, the way it is. Which is to say that time is a falling away from singularity , a dispersal, and from this follows the tragedy (and beauty) of life: we chose and are chosen to live but one life amongst many.

The unStranded instant

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again.

---Bresson. (courtesy of anton)

From John Berger:

"His method was the antithesis of Bresson's. The photographic moment for Bresson is an instant,a fraction of a second, , and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. the photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is measured ideally not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant , but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told...

~~

His best photographs are unusually dense [where happenings are related]. The subjects are narrators.

~~

[Mr. Bennett (above)] His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit. ..

~~

A young Rumanian peasant and his wife..above and behind them, diffused in the light, is a field and, above that, a small modern house ..Here it is not the the substantiality of surfaces which fills every square inch but a Slav sense of distance ..And, once more, it is impossible to separate this quality from the presence of the two figures; it is there in the angle of his hat..the way her hair is tied up. What informs the whole photograph-space-is part of the skin of their lives.

~~

I am as you see me.

The I am is given its time in which to reflect on the past and to anticipate its future..a life story.

northern elegy

Without Title

This is nothing compared to the mesmerizing Walden, but still...

Everything has its season-winter too. But what is Winter if not the memory of Spring? Icicles grow, imperceptibly, like your tears within. Inching their way downwards. Without title or an inheritance, sorrow becomes your name. When they break you think your heart will too. A heart, a toy, made from glass. It was bound to break, don't ask...or was it? Are there not other ways of disappearing, friend?

When ice becomes conscious of the sun, it doesn't last long:it warms and melts and flows away.

---Rumi.

There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life.

---Penelope Fitzgerald

His gaze, contemplating the stars, remains alert, available and released from all certitude.

------Seamus Heaney on Italo Calvino's Mr.Palomar.

I heard it said.

I heard it said, there is

a stone in the water and a circle

and over the water a word

that lays the circle around the stone.

~~~~

Today, I wanted to get away from thoughts about 'black winter'. Why not ditch the 'black' in the pretentious 'black sun'? In any case, the fading autumn light here is too beautifully mellow for me write like that today-and there are other black suns out there, a lot more darker.

I just wanted to link to

this since it's one of my favourites and it's one of my favourites because so many different people contributed to it!

After word

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THERE’S a certain slant of light,

On winter afternoons ……

When it comes, the landscape listens,

Shadows hold their breath;

When it goes, ’tis like the distance

On the look of death.

---Emily Dickinson.

(Courtesy of astarte)

~

~

December in Romania:

December brown set in about three...These were the shortest days. The afternoon light no sooner came in than it was on its way out. It was cold, too. Brittle scales began to show on the street puddles, a crystalline bitterness setting in. Where the light withdrew, the yellow-brown of the stucco was pocked with mild blue. On the open porches over the way-bottles, wet rags hung out to dry frozen at the points, and vine twigs. The glory of the day carried things easily when the sun shone; but when the sun passed, things seemed abandoned, they became dissociated, and you had to find a way to take them up yourself.

---

Saul Bellow

手勢令, じゃんけん, Rochambeaux

Ice and stones speak a strange language that we somehow understand.

Stone. Water.
Fire.Water.
Fire. Paper.

Acts of Resistance: nothing remains undefeated, capstones shift, everything can be trumped, every order overturned; what was "low" may be "high," that which was more solid than a mountain can, in an instant, pass away, and become a cloud again.

Stone.
For age upon age you patiently wait. A perfection that is closed-in upon itself, supremely self-contained, self-centred. Created for black sleep. A fierce inwardness, an unremitting asceticism, binds together a thousand forms so that they never take shape and then displaces the shell of imagination with abstractions. Without the will to live and die you are sunk into a grey nothingness, a mind alone in the universe vaguely remembering the colours. Yours is the strength of the boundary.

Paper.
Nothing defeats stone, unless it is weightless.Pascal, after all those dark days, finally comes to understand. It comes to him with the clarity of Revelation, and is at first blindingly obvious. It is, after all, the simplest of things. He writes it down and, lest he forget, sews it into his clothes. This great, irreducible truth, is a different type of strength. But life is not a formula, or a series of golden rules. There is always the blue unknown. Our skin ages, sags, creases. The flush of youth fades. Our bodies change; they grow and decay, and wound easily. He unfolds the paper and,as if looking back at a rather pleasant dream or a forgotten lover, wonders why it made so much sense to him then. Is there a truth beyond words, an understanding that is adequate to the senses? We want to see and feel the stars.

Fire.
You break up the intelligence of the mind and all that is solid. Some say you are life itself, the vividness of the gold in the green, the glint of light that bounces of chestnut trees. Blue and the Red. Mournful silence, exuberant spontaneity. The shape of the world is moulded by your hand. Giver of light and warmth: solar generosity. Pure excess and unconquered flame. Even 'the Fire' is called a "friend". Always changing, and yet always the same. And even though there is anarchy in your heart there is still a spacious order of the sun: volo ut sis. You help the dead across the boundary, and transmute all forms. Are you time itself?

Water.
Only what is elemental, less complex than fire can defeat it. The great redeemer, giver of second chances. The true origin. Like a stream that joins the sea, who is to say where you begin and where you end? Without you: no journeys and no longing.

'round midnight

Talking to S, a complete character, about donkeys of all things! And he said this: what a strange animal it is. He's an animal that has "life" (or power) but who is in reality without life. His life is dedicated to serving others. I sometimes see him on the way home, at three o'clock in the morning, or around midnight, and there he is, there he will always be, tethered to a small wooden post. I know there is a world inside him but he is statuesque, motionless like a sack of stones. I'm sure he has desires like me and you but he's stuck there, and he'll be there for a year, two, six. And if he feels unsettled or restless all he'll say is "ahem".

~~~~

Haven't been fasting regularly this year-for the first time in ages. Feels weird. S said to Asim, I'm fasting but could you bring some coffee..and don't forget the biscuits. The social pressures to do so makes me wonder. As Amir once said: the difference between the 'west' and the 'east' is that we know we're donkeys!

~~~

Javed said that God doesn't like two types of people: those who believe in other gods, and those who have lost hope. We, as a people, believe in Bush or money..thinking that they'll do it for us, get us there, smooth out our lives. But when one has lost hope one starts to believe in false gods.

First Philosophy-or a Jewish 'thought'

In the beginning was the deed, not the word.



I can't remember if Goethe or the Allama first said this. Anyway, 'first' is not always a number.But to put it this way is not to suggest that action exists without 'thought' (what the Gita would call 'contemplation').



Holiness within, selfless action without.

----The Gita.

I see someone in pain. I stretch out a hand.
I do not ask: what is pain?
I do not think: is he really in pain, how do I know?
I do not calculate what the benefits and costs of action are, what the
overall calculus of pain and pleasure is.
I do not reflect: do I know this person,
is he my 'brother', am I his keeper?



The act is not a form of knowledge but an acknowledgement of otherness; but if it is not an 'idea', neither is it a feeling. Is it, then, out of a sense of duty that I am impelled to act or do the social norms condition me so?



Second thoughts: we enact morality.



It is tempting in this day and age to favour a conception of ethics that talks about duties and rights (the former cuts us off from happiness; the latter from political manipulation). The dominant paradigm, with its stress on consequentialism (itself part of utilitarianism), offers a rather shallow approach to life: pushpin is a as good as poetry and whether Van Gogh is a good painter or not becomes a matter of taste-and that only! The word 'taste' itself loses its older meaning, a meaning that is synonymous with 'judgement'. Instead, it is assumed to be a mere preference and that preference leads to the good (this itself is a mistake since according to Broome not even Bentham went this far). This empty freedom (what Augustine would call a 'lonely freedom') is, of course, deeply embedded in the market mentality and 'market society' (even though society is said to barely exists for the libertarians , or if it does then it does so as a constraint).



So, what do we have: an abstract individual with a narrow understanding of freedom.



Duty, then.

Immediately we must discount the notion that duty is for its own sake; instead; it is a duty to do something that is good (if there wasn't this connection with the good then the diligence of a Nazi to his duties would count as an ethical stance). But, alternatively, there must be some sort of obligation in a duty, a 'force' that doesn't stem from one's own feelings or interests: 'I am responsible to' puts an undue emphasis on the subject. A solution-if there are any such things as 'solutions'- to this quandary might be forthcoming in the requirement to understand that one's obligations must be as general as possible and addressed to the other person's humanity for them to be a universal principle.

But who has ever seen another person's 'humanity'? One can see the human gestures of a caring person, one can hear someone speak with a human voice, but 'humanity'? What is Man? Modernity struggles with this question and after Auschwitz it is not clear that it has any answer. The Rights of Man?!..the rights of an Englishman, said Berkely.

And what do we owe to the criminal who asks, like a wolf, where is my victim? Are we under any obligation to tell him the truth, no matter what the consequences? Are we not obligated to act toward this particular person, at this particular time, rather than some abstract notion: his humanity? Even the great Simone, who was kind of genius, seems to suggest this-and it is an intuitively appealing view: we can only respect or love that which is the same and what is the same is not the needs of the body but the Spirit in Man. I'm not convinced, though.

And what of tragedy? Sticking too close to principles can mean we miss out on the value of the road not taken: we may think it is right to act in a particular way, that we must act in such and such a way, but still recognize that there are trade-offs involved in doing so. The fragility of the good...



Levinas, then, offers us an approach that is far more radical since it is oriented to a startling otherness, a distance that cannot be breached but that must be acknowledged. Volo ut sis. There is nothing higher than this. Don't look for it. It is the supreme act of hospitality. I read the words of a Jew and understand something of what it is to be a Muslim. For this, an eternal debt of gratitude:



A responsibility stemming from a time before my freedom-before my beginning, before any present. A fraternity existing in extreme separation . Before, but in what past?Responsibility for my neighbour dates from before my freedom in an immemorial past, an unrepresentable past that was never present and is more ancient than consciousness of... This summons to responsibility destroys the formulas of generality by which my knowledge or acquaintance of the other man re-presents him to me as my fellow man. In the face of the other man I am inescapably responsible...



This is the anteriority and chosen nature of an excellence that cannot be reduced to the features distinguishing or constituting individual beings in the order of their world or people, in the role they play in history's social stage, as characters, that is, in the mirror of reflection or self-consciousness.

I-We

It gets a bit tiring listening to the endless diatribes against America. The other day a beard wrote how pissed off he was over American "incursions" into the land of the pure and American bombings. Fine. Agree. But you know, once, just once, I'd like to hear those same sonofabitch maulvis talk about America's role in Bosnia or Kosovo and to show a fraction of that indignation when it comes to suicide bombings by their so-called brethren.

Five women were buried alive a few weeks back in Baluchistan. Their reaction: eternal silence.

I don't know. I mean, it's like those Muslims who endlessly harp on about Palestine but will not have a word to say about the genocide of the Darfurians or Saddam's massacre of the Kurds. The Chomsky-brigade! I simply fail to understand why Pakistanis or British-Pakistanis are so obsessed by Palestine.


Fundamental assumption: the individual is the unit of analysis-groups, families, class, unions do not make decisions or the individual makes them independently of his identity, autonomously. In fact, what is society but the collection of individuals in such a view..nothing greater than the sum of its parts, certainly not a social totality.

Markets are then,by extension, nothing but the space of individualized interactions (space, not place), meeting the 'needs of strangers' in a timeless zone, free from culture, society, the polity, power relations, rather than embedded in them (Polanyi, Braudel, Granovetter).

'I' is related to a particular view of freedom. Markets and 'negative liberty'. "Anarchic" (Gauthier).

Can we then say that this shared action is good for us? Or is trust, co-operation, a matter of our own self-interest? What of deontological approaches: our commitment to shared moral values?...a 'we' rather than a self-sufficient 'I' that is independent of the world (Descartes). Group rationality? The world is, then, a constraint to unfettered thought. (Gellner: language and solitude).

On the other hand, we are reluctant to submit the 'I' to the general will or the authority of the wider community (security over freedom, the church, the state vs...)

But to say 'I and we' is already to posit two entities when in reality we chalk out different spheres all the time, and understand that they intermingle. The atomized individual hardly seems to be a person at all! [poor judgements: the gambler]. Are society, culture political affiliations, professional commitments, language etc only a constraint on the I' or is there participation ? Is the 'I' itself constituted by its relation with the 'we' (including what is excluded, the other): I-we.

Bentham (Thatcher): "community is a fictitious body". For the conservatives the anarchy of unfettered liberalism poses a threat to order that can only be stemmed by Tradition, authority, rules, the family ..the tribe. On the other hand, liberal bourgeois order is thought of as peaceful, a break away from the irrational that these forces are said to embody. Organic or mechanical solidarity?

Take two

Inventio:
re-discovering, re-turning..."take two-ness", re-vision, re-vising, re-living, creative repetition.. to draw out of a theme all the possible permutations. Look, and look again. Second-order vision.

'A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us-along with immeasurable riches-snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions but as an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality...

there may be other and better ways of being original than our concern for the writer's own individuality..our self-conscious fictions

We may come to believe that, great as some authors have been , their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence whenever we reckon their contributions we should also remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.'

---From Albert Lord's Singer of Tales

I can't imagine this as striking our modern ears as anything short of blasphemous..."our" hard-won freedoms and individuality achieved by defying the dead, opressive weight of tradition and authority . To walk and think alone. 'I'...then the world. Creatio ex nihilo. The Romantic legacy. How can there be a 'commons of the mind' or 'group rationality'? What is this "muddy centre" before we were. I must see and make the world according to my own lights or be enslaved by those of another.

A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays, and race meetings, and seaside outings, ..in the necessities that crave expression after the church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continual of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened-all this is signified by their language.
--Englands of the Mind, Seamus Heaney.

Edward Said on Glenn Gould:

The search for order and new modes of apprehension-a "new kind of thinking". To escape the need to grab attention [but escape where?]
A rejection of 'vertical' romantic music.

Bach: anachronistic (a return to old Church forms) and daringly modern in his isolation from rituals and conventions. Bach's innermost truth is that in him the social trend which had dominated the bourgeoise (technology, rationalization?] is reconciled with the voice of humanity.

Gaddis: Not the opposition, but the overlap between artistic individualism and collectivist technology.

What's the problem? Technology.
What's the solution? Technology.

The ultimate mystery: the rational and the pleasurable.

~~~~

In the 'bringing forth' of the artisan the instrumental is detached -unlike a tree which brings forth fruit . The human way of "revealing".

Industrail techniques: not an unfolding but a "challenging" of nature (an unlocking, storming of it..see Hannah on acting "in" nature)

Modern technology turns everything into a "standing-reserve", a resource to be exploited. The loss of wonder, the truth of the thing. What is this but the demand for a constant presence. Is there, then, a link between the need for concepts, images in the human mind and technology?

Creativity: one must make something of one's own life. Is there an element of violence in this 'making'? Liquid modenrity: nothing is 'given'. Are we not looking , ultimately, at two views of freedom?

~~~

Notes from Rieff.

Wilde as the prophet of the future..the artist as the revolutionary..free from inherited inhibitions conventions , conformities, authority. Express yourself! Subversiveness. Every man is his own priest (the Protestant contribution). And now: entetainment, stimulation, liberation..the "will" is eveything. A learned rejection and acceptance, the compelling truths, is stifling, cramps my style. An artist creates his own life. No more imitation of models or ideal conceptions of the self..all that is solid...the "dissolution of restrictive shapings". To have and be everything.

The edge of the world

Where shall there be an end of old and new?
A thousand years have whirled away
in the mind.
The sounds of the ocean change to stone.
---Tu Fu.

'Although Taoist-Buddhist painting does not indicate the source of light and shade, its landscapes are nonetheless filled by a light that permeates every form like a celestial ocean of pearly luster. It is the beatitude of the Void (shunya) shining in the absence of all darkness.

[The painter does not] represent the world in the likeness of a finished cosmos, and in this respect his vision is as different as possible from that of the Western artist whose conception of the world is always more or less "architectural".

A Far Eastern painter is contemplative, and for him the world would appear to be made of snowflakes, quickly crystallized and just as quickly dissolved. The less solidified conditions, the nearer they would be to the Reality underlying all phenomenon...

Taoist painting [unlike impressionism with its subjective impressions as fleeting as can be] avoids in its methods and in its intellectual orientation, the supremacy of mind and feeling, both avid for individualistic affirmation; in its eyes the instantaneity of nature is not in the first place an emotional experience; the miracle of the instant, immobilized by a sensation of eternity, unveils the primordial harmony of things, a harmony that is ordinarily hidden under the subjective continuity of the mind. when the veil is suddenly torn aside, hitherto unobserved relationships, linking together beings and things, reveal their essential unity.'

---Titus Burckhardt.

On the edge of the world there is a place where the world is the world no more. There shall we sit and watch stars fall and the snow gently return to the earth. And the starred heart melts as well. And there, deer shall freely roam in Spring sunshine; there will be no heaviness in our steps, no second thoughts. At times I will not be I, and you will not be you, but I will be a cloak around you, and you around me. Everything in nature will be open once again, a flower in bloom. As fragile as on the First Day, without shadow.

We will clearly see our lineage, our blood-rootedness, how we were related to one another from the beginning, the blue and the red. And recall old times. Still, there will be the hint of deathly sorrow in your eye, but only because it added lustre to your beauty.

We must cross the stone bridge to get there. Remember it well!

Send in the clowns

You are a ludicrous soul, b.

Splendour in the blood carries weight.

The more I think about it-and that itself is a mistake- the more I think how superficial and light we are (Tell it, but tell it slant). Well, there you are. There's no point beating oneself over it or trying to find solace in a martyr syndrome or blaming "the times/time we live in"-there have never been so many opportunities to do things not worth doing.

But when we look back we have to ask, candidly, whether our choices were not, in the end of the day, a reflection of our innermost self. Harsh though it is. It's not easy, after all, to take in too much reality.

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

Not the majority, upon whom necessity presses down like a heavy stone, but those who had some degree of freedom. The accountants, the bankers, statisticians...who thought it better to let the dust accumulate and find a kind of security, respectability in that. A timid, bovine acceptance of things that lets circumstances drown out grace. Lawrence was right: all that is important is that one find one's true instincts and hold on to them. To thine own self be true.

It is the light within that fails. Call it what you will: a lack of courage, or ability (and these may, ultimately, be the same thing). The inability to put into some from one's poetic instincts, to give shape to one's creativity with one's own hands or find joy in one's work. Our record is this: what we gave and what we lovingly received.

Ich habe stets nur alles halb gemacht!

We, we negative ones, enamoured by laughter and nonsense, "raucous negation" , radical dissent/descent. No, not even that, for that demands that one possess or love an elsewhere, an otherwise, a there, there. One must know what to take seriously, what one loves and what one hates.

The other american dream-and it ain't Glenn Miller!

The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians.... After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.

--from J. Jones's wonderful 'Wild Ones'

C, I was listening to G. Gould the other day and although the music itself didn't move me the playing of it did seem incredibly fresh, a miraculous coming together of spontaneity and structure. Have you read Otto Friedrich's biography?

The American Dream

Your religion was written on tables of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never remember it nor comprehend it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors-the dreams of our old men, given to them in the solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit...and is written in the hearts of our people.

Your dead cease to love you and the land of their nativity as soon as they pass the portals of the tomb and wander away beyond the stars. They are soon forgotten and never return. Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being...

When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone...At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted , they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and that loved this beautiful land.

The dead are not powerless. Dead-I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
---Chief Seattle.

~~~~

We did not think of the great open plains , the beautfil rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as "wild." Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery...When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was for us that the "Wild West" began.

----Chief Standing Bear.

~~~~

Brother, continue to listen. You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great spirit agreeable to his mind..you say that you are right, and we are lost. How do we know this to be true? We understand that your religion is written in a book. If it was intended for us as well as you, why has not the Great Spirit given to us-and not only to us, but to our forefathers-the knowledge of that book? We only know what you tell us about it. How shall we know when to believe, being so often deceived by the white people?

Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favours we receive; to love each other, and be united. We never quarrel about religion, because it is a matter which concerns each man and the Great Spirit.

Brother, you have now heard our talk and this is all we have to say at present. As we are going to part, we will come and take you by the hand , and hope the Great Spirit will protect you on your journey, and return you safely to your friends.

---Red Jacket.

~~~~

A few points. Compare this to "America owns the skies" and the sheer emphasis on exclusive property rights and legal wrangling, the resounding use of the word "my"...

As Hugh Brody points out in his fascinating book, it is actually the agriculturalists and settlers who are the restless ones, not the "nomads". It is they who see nature and its inhabitants as "mere extension", something abstract, something to be dominated, subdued..a resource (compare this to the Islamic perspective: "they are communities like you").

And don't get me started on missionaries-muslim or christian. Always the same bad faith, the same mean-spiritedness and self-righteousness.

The American dream was built on the nightmare of the destruction of the Red Man and the enslaving and segregation of black people. Guns and religion, gold and silver...we've heard it all before.

Elmer Gantry, the Klan, and the Republican Convention

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

I don't know, watching the Klan convention I couldn't help but think: are they speaking to morons, to children? How profoundly sad it is to see the self-declared "leader of the free world" , the "beacon on the hill" (yeah, I know!) put on such a sorry spectacle. Yes, spectacle is the right word here, like Elmer Gantry's histrionics...the show must go on!

The conservatives, like many conservatives in other places, are really just nasty, bitter people. Old huckleberry harping on about how the "heroes" -and who isn't a hero in the States one wonders- had earned the desks at a school for the school children. Pan shot to weeping veteran. Oh for fuck's sake. How dense can you get? Their utter naivete amazes me.

What a swell guy he is. I mean, his papa used to lift "heavy things" (ooh, ain't you impressed?). Elvis and Jesus, Jesse and the King. Dont'cha see we aints impressed by youz flip-flopping-yella-belly-nigger loving-elites. Man, these people seriously think that there's a "left-wing " media in the States (yeah, CNN, that old bastion of Marxism!) . I kid thee not. It's like the IMF chap I met who said that in his circles the World Bank is thought of as a crypto-commie organization.

Then Rudi, with his little, petty sarcastic comments. And the spin. Holey moley! We're here to change Washington, "shake it up"; McCain and Palin, great mavericks (no mention of the fact, of course , that their man Walker has been in power for 6 years, that he and his cronies are Washington). We put our country first. How very reassuring! Small town hockey mom took them on, the vested interests y'know, and won. Maybe I ain't from no big town cosmopolitan city, but heck, I sure as hell know what the definition of marriage is. "Drill baby drill" and chants of U S A . It's all so bloody predictable, so manufactured. We love our guns and our religion. Let's play to the base (al-qaeda). Oh, jeez, they're so gullible it makes me want to cry.