the academy

book came in, via alex, via anton. always nice to trace out debts, previous 'owners'. there are no owners of ideas, though. like going to the great library, next to Tollinton market, flicking through the beautifully hand written cards, stumbling across all sorts of antiquated books that no-one's ever read, or maybe ever will read, checking the back-flap of another to see that the last time the book was issued was 1957. the quality of a person assessed in terms of how they write their '2's'. that's lost on the internet.

well, i'm trying to read this in conjunction with Putnam's book on jewish philosophers, and Hadot's, which i've just got in but not sure if i'll ever have the time to read (as with most of my other books). no matter. but i was struck by the 'critique' of Rorty and by these lines...

[see! one has to use the word 'critique' to make it sound fancy!or 'discourse']

well, it may not come as a great surprise to you, but i don't think academics are particularly clever people. i mean, this obsession with debunking, originality (one has 'discovered' that so-and-so was actually a homosexual or that he likes marmalade on his toast. hurrah!). marginal critiques, incremental knowledge, the torturous, convoluted prose ..all to say what is bleedin' obvious.

perhaps i could be more specific?

economics.

do economists realise how spectacularly narrow their approach to reality is? what do they know? very little, i suspect. certainly in proportion to what they claim to know. yes, yes, one understands that they have fantastically sophisticated 'techniques' up their sleeve but a frog at the bottom of a well won't get very far in his description of the world if his axioms are wrong, no matter how good his reasoning thereafter is.

"the first principle of economics is that humans are motivated exclusively by their self-interest" That was back in 1881 when the love affair with physics, mechanics, was infecting the subject.Edgeworth, in case you're interested.

that is "human nature", that is rationality. what we are and what we ought to be. How else can we model reality..the world is too complex for us! To invert Keynes' saying: better to be precisely wrong than to be vaguely right.

And also, one meets lots of very bright people on one's way but they often are, not to put too fine a point on it, major league assholes. No, not the petty politics (that's everywhere, i guess) but the hugely inflated egos and one-upmanship that comes as a result of thinking one has something important and intelligent to say, the disdain for ordinary, simple pleasures.

i met one person over the summer, sharp as pins. really is. but when he went on about how he was using the techniques from economics to look at the hajj I had to wonder: are you serious? No, there's a good data set...
another is doing a game theoretic analysis of Hitler. I kid thee not.

and then one of the 'gods' here says to me in his smarmy, smirky, self-confident, trickster way: it's crucial that we participate in the production of knowledge. yeah, okay, where's my spanner. production?!

yes, you know, the 'knowledge economy' and all that.

Oh, you mean human capital and other barbarisms?

Anyway, here's the line:

After all, people lacking in experience are childlike in many ways, and fables are appropriate to a childlike mentality. Consider Rorty's utopia and his ethical theory...In fact, Rorty's injunctions are little more than the stock lessons of children's literature.

five easy pieces

the quietness, the space. the northern soul against sun-and-wheat-consciousness. reticence before mystery. horizons where lost futures meet. and fall. an endurance beyond pessimism. sheltering before the fierceness of the day. the darkness of the mind alone without God. difficult freedom. silver inherits the black. a fleeting glance, reflected light, stone heart. your face. a memory. of shade and solace. a sense of one's own gravity, the lightness of the world...the seriousness of having no purpose, the ability to not be oneself and to be okay with that. a sadness that will not break. the finite slowness of being, curving away from the hands. the cosmic play, the blueness of distance. the desire to escape, the love of things that die, the death of things like love.

intellectual heroes

What common strands of intellectual endeavour, style, or approach do these two wonderful writers share? Or, perhaps the question should be: what do I perceive to be the common themes that draws me to both. I had never thought about that when I put their iamges together like that, spontaneously. The power of the image to inspire thought or to remind one of long-lost affinities.

Augustine, of course! A studied fascination with, and horror of, extremism. The 'studied' bit is important. But it's more than that, a certain temperament that is perhaps best encapsualted by the phrase, 'for the love of the world' , which means: a proper love of the world, the interweaving of, the expression of, one's humanity in society, politics; charm as the last corner of the human world; the importance of restraint, continuity, durability against the enemies of civilisation: the flights of fancy, the seepage of reality, that occurs in dark times.

the changing face of islam

There was a time when Islam inspired great learning*, beautiful art, architecture, and poetry (not to mention spirituality); that is a rather uncomfortable fact for those who want to see it as nothing but a tribal heresy or to those, the puritans within, who think that anything related to culture is an "innovation". In a similar fashion, George Steiner is surely right when he says that it is hard to imagine a lot of the west's cultural greatness without Christianity and the 'pull to the north of the future'. No use putting this to one side: something is lost when we forget those second spaces.

But, then, if we are honest with ourselves, should we not ask: what is it in religion that inspires so much fanaticism and hatred? Don't think we have the stomach or openness for such questions (in a similar vein, the relation between Auschwitz and western culture is not something that can easily be broached, and is a kind of blind spot. I mean, do you really want to sit and talk and ask how the Trenches, the Gulags, colonialism, environmental destruction, and so much of the violence of the 20th century can be explained if we are so enlightened?).

Lest one lose sight of reality, it should also be readily admitted that religion is not the cause of everything (good or bad) or, indeed, always the 'prime mover'. Fanatics-secular or religious- sometimes see it that way.

But back to the question: why is it that it that there is so much backwardness, stupidity, violence, and rabid fanaticism in the so-called muslim world?

I want to explore this. Someone wrote me:

"[This is what] I cannot understand about Islam, because I honestly don't believe that any other religion - at least now, at this point - can lead to such a way of thinking"

The 'thinking' being, in this case, death threats to writers (and lets put the burning of books, the cartoon controversy etc in the same category).

Now, of course, these are important signs of regression and depravity, of a childish, infantile mentality. But still, I'd say, nothing in comparison to the use of state power to kill, maim, and traumatize-whether it's Iraq or Darfur.

But here's the dope,dear readers. What about the vast majority of contemporary Muslims who did not agree with those reactions and were abhorred by them? Aren't they "Islam" as well?

Secondly, to what degree are such acts and views related to Islam-and which Islam-rather than political acts? "Cannot understand about Islam" seems to imply that there's this ahistorical, well-defined thing that can easily be wheeled in to explain or confirm whatever
prior perceptions one has.

Because I know the person I know it's not a case of simple prejudice. But the naivete is quite startling for someone so intelligent.
...



*Levinas, Difficult Freedom, 'Monotheism and Language':

Islam is above all one of the principal factors involved in this constitution of humanity. Its struggle has been arduous and magnificent..It swarmed across three continents. It united innumerable people and races. It understood better than anyone that a universal truth is worth more than local particularities. It is not by chance that a Talmud apologue cites Ishmael, the symbol of Islam, the rare sons of Sacred History, whose name is formulated and announced before their birth. It is as if their task in the world had for all eternity been foreseen in the economy of Creation...The memory of a common contribution to civilization in the course of the Middle ages, when Greek texts entered Europe via the Jewish translators who had translated Arab translations, can be exalting only if we still manage today to believe in words, devoid of rhetoric or diplomacy.

ways of approaching (hand written, with ink or time on my hands)

my name is
no one

I have spoken and seen my words fall

love that pulls the heart to a new centre

...........and you are
no one and we both
...........................exist

(forgive me, for the mangling and deleting, the twisting, the silences added..and taken away)

~~

Frost and sun snap, a ledge of time, a web absorbed
In moral cognition, her face, loved face, blank.

~~

I have brought it to my heart to be a still point.

~~

beyond
the importance of place, the sudden
change of sky; death from heart failure so
to say death by death; threatened so joy
to stay sheltered and suck in autumn's decay here
in the album and summer's prints in the earth
an oak tree an oak spray what
........................in the Meaning of Flowers.

~~~~
I look to the end as the greatest cycle of love
a second turn, the greatest in the calculation
of our hearts

if beauty is truth

today, of all days, a lizard, god's mistake. the cockroach, stamped on (and out) as i bent my back in fury, has, after a week, slowly, deliberately been gnawed at by a thousand ants. so much for camaraderie in the animal kingdom. still, humans are not much better.what remains: a wing (without a prayer)...

i return, clothes still tossed aimlessly everywhere, discarded objects. still miraculously retaining the shape of the human. half-alive. the place stinks. a bowl of milk has been left to rot.. blotched, congealed, decayed, maps of continents formed on its surface. the blinds broken, as if undecided to stay up or fall down, distort the light. what kind of place is this? dust and cobwebs have accumulated, become denser. close the door on it. god knows what grows on its own...

the lizard, understanding the presence of another being, dashed behind the clock. you cannot hide behind time!imagine it's heart beating, alarmed, as if on the First Day, the strangeness of it all, the pulse of its ancient rhythms quickening at the thought of death for the first time. or was it death?

behind the mirror, that old rusting mirror, freckled with splashes of brown at its edges. safety in the darkness, like a child. slowly breathe and occupy your mind. stem the chaos. nimble-footed, delicate, rays of red fire illumined on your skin. and yet, like a jilted lover, thinks: such a grotesque form am i!

the strange paths we trace

was looking for the Great Valerio by Linda Thompson and stumbled across this. Anyways...

When memory is of the future
then we may speak of fear and sharpening
and of love too more than of the fallen fruit
of the form that is calling and to that lovely form

---John Riley, Ways of Approaching.

the green knight

It may be that guilt and sadness make me look Oriental.

There occurs a second distortion of the divine image, already so blurred, wavering, struggling. The real question! He stood there looking at the tracks. The most real question!

When does the most real question cease to become a question, he thought.

blotted eyes of men, sunken mouths, and inky nostrils...the knife and the wound aching for each other, until they forget who is who.

Herzog stated it impassively, though with pain, and his mind immediately looking for formal stability, catching at ideas...

remembering Augustine, My God! Who is this creature? It considers itself human but what is it? Not human of itself. But has the longing to be human. And like a troubling dream a persistent vapor. A desire. Where does it all come from? And what is it? And what can it be! Not immortal longing. No, entirely mortal, but human.

Not, God...Not, God, what am I, but who am I?

And the sun, like the spot that inoculated us against the whole of disintegrating space. He looked into the blue vacancy and at the sharp glitter of wingborne engines...

You think we can find solace where we can?

Brother, this generation thinks that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have any true power.

But what do you look for Herzog, with all your ramblings, your ancient instability, blood-daze?Turn your gaze inward, Moses, see what you've become. Only the wounded heart can know, only what is not of time can comprehend the pattern of one's life.

Perhaps that is true. The dream of man's heart, however much we may distrust and resent it, is that life may complete itself in significant pattern. Some incomprehensible way..incomprehensibly fulfilled...and thus a broken circle.

The devil's job in this day and age, if anyone still believes he exists, is to divide:"But life isn't one, you fool! You don't know what's around the corner. All this talk of the self. Know thyself! Don't you see what a fantastic deception that was?!"

But there's a strange division of functions that I sense, in which I am the specialist in...in spiritual self-awareness; or emotionalism; or ideas; or nonsense.

Save your soul, brother Moses. Haven't you suffered enough, haven't you stuffed your head with ideas for too long? A seventeenth-century soul will not get you through.

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language.

Then Herzog said, I remember the colours, Lord. It doesn't matter if you're not listening. It was all here. I know that. No Magianism for me!

The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life. Iris, how well you saw this.

All that is, is holy.

The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fingertips...unexpected intrusions of beauty...

the colours. Life, again.

He painted the lid of the piano with absorption, the green was light, beautiful, like summer.

Ubo

Then Father Herzog said, "I have to sit down, " Moshe. The sun is too hot for me." He did, suddenly, appear very flushed, and Moses supported him, eased him down on the cement embankment of a lawn...

"Even I feel the heat today,"said Moses. He placed himself between his father and the sun.

---from Bellow's Herzog (dark grey)

the dangling man

There he was, dangling, dangling, like a sign in a shop window, waiting for a white hand to reach out to him, turn him around. So that Closed reads Open.

She pressed her child-like face to the window pane; the coldness of it making her aware of the warmth of her own blood. Breath on the dark glass. Is it me, or you, she wondered.

Anna!

She took a step back, caught a reflection of herself through the dark windows, the world finally behind her. The perfect form, yet lighter,more full of grace than she could ever be.

Why do things fall?

Who can say? Time will tell. A law of gravity, perchance? Or attraction. As fire is drawn to the sun, the quick of the mind to a startled crow, snow to the peace of the earth, ink to your lips.

And what if there is a black sun at the bottom of my well?

Then, child, you are free to fall...

Freakonomics

Haven't read this book but it sounds awful. A "rogue economist" who still accepts the mainstream orthodoxy? What's so roguish about that? This seems to be just another attempt to apply the insights from one field to another without much thought and that fits in very much with the "imperialistic" designs of economics (Lazzear, QJE).

It really is old hat. If we're going to think about serious problems like the allocation of resources over time (pensions, the environment), about what is ultimately of importance-happiness, the quality of life and not just more commodities, then I think we're going to need another paradigm, one that incorporates ethics and responsibility and move beyond the shallow conception of the 'self' that is at the heart of economics' methodological individualism; one that has a broader, more pluralistic notion of our motivations and our different evaluative standards, a more capacious understanding of the self and of rationality.

Two books that look much more promising are Jonathan Aldred's 'The Skeptical Economist' and Richard Bronk's 'The Romantic Economist'. Of course, for the master himself, pick up Sen's (non-technical) 'Ethics and Economics'.

Rebecca

Here's the superb Rebecca Solnit talking about landscape and politics.

and here's a great little piece on finding time.

I was reminded of the latter when I was listening to a great radio show that has an eclectic selection of music (Radio 3's 'The Late Junction'); I listen to it mainly for the sheer surprise of finding something unexpected, novel, beautiful, and for the quietness of one and half hours of music.

And my friend said something interesting: you're merely "fishing"; that's of no use, you should be able to download it there and then, if you know what you like. Of course, I'm greatly drawn to that myself-if I read a review of a book I usually think: got to have it, amazon...or if I come to know of an interesting article: click, download, and print without a second thought.

But then the old Kashmiri laziness kicks in; still want to browse aimlessly through a book and a bookshop (especially second-hand ones); still want to read an actual book and not a print-out, listen to an LP or CD rather than something on the computer, and still a massive distrust toward googling, wikipedia, credit cards, mobile phones, having a million tracks on a machine smaller than a Kit Kat.

without title...free

the secret

This is another one of those self-help/conspiracy theory type of films, I gather. Some American has, apparently, discovered the secret to the writings of Plato, Nietzsche and so on and it really is breathtakingly simple: if you think about something hard enough it will come true. The power of positive thoughts. And it's got rave reviews (from Oprah and Nicole Kidman!)

God, you know I'm not religious, but please listen to me and save me from these retards.

C.B. writes in the Guardian: The Secret is a moronic hymn to greed and selfishness.

~~~~

There's more...

Was talking to someone yesterday who has taken to writing long complaining letters to the Punjab Chief Secretary and to President Obama. And he's mystified that he hasn't received a single response to date!

And then he tells me:

you know, I'm reading a book on World War II. The author clearly shows that the Jews orchestrated the whole thing.

My only response was: are you delusional? I think I was off form. I should have said: Are you fucking delusional!

The number of people here who need psychological help is quite alarming.

Another person on the same day told me:

you know, they control the world's finance.

Yes, but who exactly is "they", I replied.

The Jews, she said, smiling.

Hmm.The next time some dickhead comes up to me and says something like that I'm going to say:

you know, you're wrong, it's the aliens from Alpha Centauri. I read about it in Dan Brown's latest book: 'Muslims are from Mars, Infidels are from Earth'. But don't tell anyone, it's a secret!

And so here endeth the rant for today.

oneness and otherness

The spirit is the same; it is the spirit that is shared, held in common, lovingly passed on.

Not blood, or land. If I say land, then that is because it is the land that has given birth to the life of the spirit, because it is a reflection of it. And it is that which I re-call, that I fondly remember.

Fact may blossom into truth, the temporary into the eternal. Do not mourn what is lost, for in truth nothing is lost. This play of shadow and light, exhalation and inhalation, is with us always. Everything moves in a circle, everything can be deep if you place yourself at the right angle to the universe and are drawn to it.Learn the meaning of 'and'.Remember the colours.One is not a number.

~~~~

Two angels among the throng of angels
paused in the upward abyss, facing angel to angel.

Blue and green glowed the wing feathers
of one angel, from red to gold the sheen
of the other’s.

These two, so far as angels may dispute, were poised
on the brink of dispute, brink of fall from angelic stature,
for these tall ones, angels whose wingspan encompasses entire
earthly villages, whose heads if their feet touched earth
would top pines or redwoods, live by their vision’s harmony
which sees at one glance the dark and light of the moon.

These two hovered dazed before one another,
for one saw the sea feathered, peacock breakered
crests of the other angel’s magnificence, different from his own,
and the other’s eyes flickered with vision of
flame petallings, cream-gold grainfeather glitterings,
the wings of his fellow, and both in immortal danger of dwindling,
of dropping into the remote forms of a lesser being.

But as these angels, the only halted ones
among the many who passed and repassed,
trod air as swimmers tread water, each gazing on the angelic wings of
the other, the intelligence proper to great angels flew into their wings,
the intelligence called intellectual love, which,
understanding the perfection’s of scarlet,
leapt up among blues and greens strong shafted,
and among amber down illumined the sapphire bloom,
so that each angel was iridescent with the strange newly-seen
hues he watched; and their discovering pause
and the speech their silent interchange of perfection was
never became a shrinking to opposites,
and they remained free in the heavenly chasm,
remained angels, but dreaming angels,
each imbued with the mysteries of the other.

Denise Levertov

a fish on land

I got caught in a storm
and it was your soul, red.
I took a few steps out
but some say I was dead.

I am a fish without the Tigris
I am the Tigris without a fish.

A jewish thought:

meYou
01
?!

hg-b

individualism

experience never gets sorted out, except by the mind that insists it must be.
---Rebecca Solnit.

Individualism has become something of a bad word nowadays-associated (at least in some circles) with hedonism or the shallow aspirations of the bourgeoisie (bread and circuses), or with a narrow, private self that is oblivious of other people and their well-being and of that of future generations; in short, a myopic, self-centred, "constantly-moving-happiness-machine" who prizes negative liberty above all else-even to the detriment of the conditions that allow that freedom in the first place.

Individualism is, in that sense, not only morally unacceptable, but also doomed to undermine itself as social capital(Putnam) and the public domain (Sennett) are whittled down to size. D. Bell: the cultural contradictions of capitalism, Bauman's liquid modernity, the market vs the republic, the emergence of a psychological, therapeutic 'society', alienation, disenchantment and so on.

When did it begin?

The Renaissance? The Reformation? The Revolution? The Romantic quest?

Always a falling away from Edenic state: tribal unity, Popper would say. Community, Tradition, the Church, norms, the family. The origin always has more value. But from a Muslim perspective there is, I think, no fall and the world is a ladder,a book of signs, a metaphor. In some sense, "all that is ,is holy" (but not the holy) and the aspiration is surely not a negation of the self but a deepening of it. Individualism is not, then, about the self or economic man but in a fuller sense-to use a Christian term- the person, the whole person.

So, here I would say individualism is not, obviously, just about negative liberty or freedom without truth but ,as Sen says, about things we have "reason to value". The hardest thing: proportionality: reasoned pleasure.

And I think we should also talk about the direction of change, of advancing freedoms, rather than the levels of attainment (i.e look at comparisons). My own personal view is that the idea and reality of the individual is of great spiritual and political importance.

Isn't the most important thing to find one's name, to know who I am (not what I am) ? The 'I' is not a fully-formed entity, whose nature or essence is set in stone and articulated by authority, but a searching, wondering mystery that is open to modification in the light of fresh experience, that seeks open vistas, and acknowledges other mysteries...is a broken circle.

Free association, free roaming, free choice of commitments.
--Rebecca Solnit.

a blue shadow

And now, b, repeat the rituals you have of beginning and ending...

fish sandwiches on brown, grain mustard, latte in a paper cup. the same seat. the New Yorker. The whirl of nostalgia. A book of poetry, scribbling, Strauss (the Blue Danube, if you must know, since knowing is something you set great store by). A final glance back at Charing Cross road, your home away from home. Fading light on the street, in the trees, on the windowpanes. You knew this moment would come, remember seeing the printed date of departure when you got here and turning your face from it. You try to hold yourself together...

Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand could by itself
much better than real sea or sand or cloud.
It chose that way to grow and not to move..
But roughly but adequately it can shelter
what is within.

"I grow", she said
but to divide your heart again.

Shelters. How precious they are to you. A star inside a rectangle, a recollection.

When I first saw you I was there, looking aimlessly through a dark window, looking at books; I stopped in my tracks, saw your face for the first time and those sad/funny eyes looking back at mine. What took you so long to find me? I smiled and quickly turned around, in case you were a dream. How was I to know that you were there in front of me all the time, a reflection of my very own soul?

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

I looked up. Clouds and time passed. And now you, a blue flower that doesn't exist, are like a blue light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame in my heart, casting a blue shadow.

Life is a dream within a dream, or so it seems to me. Or maybe it is a series of dreams that I stumbled into and couldn't remember? When I am asleep you are awake.

You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us,
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleepy women

When you open your eyes
we'll walk, once more
among the hours and their inventions.
We'll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations
Perhaps we'll open the day's doors
And then we shall enter the unknown.

How strange is the time between us! You walk forwards and I backwards, into my life. The swami explained: this is the way it is in the end of days, this is how it is when the world ends, when no-one loves no-one.

---from E.B. and Octavio Paz

to die alone

Do not vilify Time for Time is your Lord
---a Prophetic saying.

We are more than God in the knowledge of Death.
-----Allama Iqbal

Loneliness means at last I am whole.
---from The Wings of Desire.

Every single creature on this earth dies alone.The search for God is absurd if we die alone.
-----Donnie Darko.

Is Religion possible? The absence of God hasn't made the world any less opaque, any more comprehensible; in fact, if anything it has made it more mysterious. Things that are abandoned, people that are forgotten, burn with their own muted light, their own melancholic blue flame, when previously they would have been absorbed in a dazzling whiteness. Is it only now that man is confronted with the problem of time in all of its purity? The withdrawal of God only heightens the question of whether faith is possible-it does not abolish it.


The fire in the stone is its inner sense of the passage of time. It is only a trick of the mind that imagines any permanence inheres in its being. Its shape is never fixed or still, but always formless, striving to overflow its own bounds, undergoing an endless process of metamorphosis. This transfiguration which we measure in millions of years is but the blinking of an eye in the life of the stone. What is this restlessness but a search for God? But even so, it is a striving that is imposed on it, from without , as it were. It is like an angel that thirsts for more knowledge.


If we could go back in time would we change a single thing? The one thing necessary?


A rabbi once said that in order to establish the reign of peace it is not necessary to destroy everything nor to begin a completely new world. It is sufficient to displace this cup, or this brush, or this stone just a little, and thus everything.
-------Agamben, The Coming Community

Donnie starts out as an unbeliever...he doesn't even question this. But then he gradually realises -at the theoretical level at least-that if one could see all of the possible outcomes of a life then we would be able to see that God commands time. But what of free choice in those circumstances asks the teacher. This is not a possibility that arises since to place oneself in that 'God's time' is to accept a higher fatality that is like an arrow: destiny is a direction not an outcome.

At this stage he is now an agnostic since he cannot 'prove' his faith one way or the other. Faith is possible but not necessary...something that exists within the bounds of reason.

Only with an act of love does he realise time. Then time is not a concept or a biological fact but a lived experience; love is an act of sacrifice that redeems time and makes other futures possible. And like God's absence, it is a supreme opening up, a sublime act of generosity, to the loved one.

Love means freedom from the idol-temple of the days.
---Allama Iqbal

On a day like this

On a day like this a few brave souls-a select few in the whole wide world- had the courage to live their own lives. Such a thing is quite remarkable, if you think about it. Not the pottering, plodding, slouching mediocre accountant-and-pen- pushing soul of the flatlands. But a genuine and dazzling 'I' that dared to say 'I'.

P. Fawcett, HG-B (next post)...

The hubris and the decadence of the individual. The decline of social capital, a terrible alienation from, and the sheer uncontrollable desire to escape from, the earth and other human beings..the self-centred egoist with his fantasy-fuelled extremism who is driven, ultimately, by mecahnisms of compulsion beyond his control or knowledge. The isolated 'will', the petty or tyrannical ego that can see nothing but itself: he who sees ratio sees only himself.

Well, yes, but what else would you have? Bound by community, the tribe, tradition, religion, societal norms, the gaze. Become a mummy and wrap oneslef in cloth to hold back time? Stuff your head with theories because theoria is beyond contingency?

It was all a pretence. Only someone who can say "No!" is truly alive. To know this, to live this, is to be not bound by the days.

The tree grows inside me.

----Rilke.

The further one moves inwards the closer one comes to the exterior, the open.

To pass through the threshold one must stop being a social being.

---Simone Weil.

song of the summer

This was the best version i could find. If anyone has S. Isbin's wonderful, wonderful rendition, please pass it on. Danke.

song of the summer

Hard to decide. Guess it's got to be something French. So far:

Andecy, Isbin; Miroirs, Ravel; Easy living, Stan Tracey; Ikon of Joy/Sorrow, Tavener; Something in the air, Ziggy.

Any recommendations, people?

~~~~

Transcending oneself without transcendence.

--E. Bloch.

Not to get out of oneself; not to withdraw into oneself. Not this, not that (the Hindus would say).

Never trust a god who doesn't dance (sorry, m, still can't stop laughing when I think of God on a tractor).

Does one have to be an atheist to be a modern muslim? Some will flinch at having any pre-fix to the word muslim. Fundamentalist muslims will say: there is only one Islam. Yeah, okay, er...so try telling that to the Shias!

~~~

Coming to the end of Herzog. Disappointing, to be honest. Too fragmentary. Some dazzling flashes, though. In particular, this:

At the corner, he paused to watch the work of the wrecking crew. The great metal ball swung at the walls, passed easily through brick, and entered the rooms, the lazy weight browsing on kitchens and parlors. Everything it touched wavered and burst, spilled down. There rose a white tranquil cloud of plaster dust. The afternoon was ending, and in the widening area of demolition was a fire fed by the wreckage ... Paint and varnish smoked like incense. The old flooring burned gratefully - the funeral of exhausted objects. Scaffolds walled with pink, white, green doors, quivered as the six-wheeled trucks carried off fallen brick. The sun, now leaving for New Jersey and the west, was surrounded by a dazzling broth of atmospheric gases.

douceur de vivre

Do you forgive me these November days?

---Anna.

~

Be mysterious, be in love, and you shall be happy.

---Gaugin?

~

Can you be French without speaking French?

~

Non.

~

But if you're heart speaks so?

~

C'est possible!

~

There is a place in the heart where all is stillness, like a shelter in a storm, and to there I withdraw and speak my silent words to the beloved. At night she enters my tent, looks at me out of the soft brightness of her eyes. Then we are both lost; I am in her, and she is in me. And who, then, can say who is who, or whether I am a believer or an infidel? Why do you stay in the world of distinctions, gentle one?

~

...[a] world in which serious things were done with a sense of play-where even war and theology could become a sort of game.

~

...a joust, jester?

A Place Between

She's gone forever
I know when one is dead, and when one lives...
Thou'lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never!
----King Lear

meet me, child, in a place between.

There was a time when time wasn't time; when the point was not yet a circle, the line not yet a square. There was time. There was a time when time was not the space between the thing and the thing said, when it didn't spiral, curve, fall.

and now? and now it is empty, like a sunday, or bare unadorned hands that relinquish desire despite themselves. Old man's hands. greying. the self-revealing gestures of the soul. When time is everything then man is nothing, said Marx. when man is nothing then he is full of memories. was that augustine, your more learned reader(s) asks, or was it from a fortune cookie (says Roxana).

close the books, now. when all is said and done, not much has been said or done. haven't we dazed ourselves with fragments for long enough yet?

From Thomas Merton:

inner identity is not "found" as an object, but is the very self that finds...

we are so close to ourselves that there is no relation. be.

..we are obsessed with what is repeatable. Reality does not surrender itself all at once. security is the ability to strike a deal again. always "getting" the best deal...

life consists in learning to live one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling life..to do this one must recognize what is one's own...

true freedom is openness, availability, the capacity for gift.

'sell' knowledge, 'buy' wonder. This is precisely the opposite of what a university aspires to. Not to be taught, but pointed to the places between. Experience without thought may be empty, but is at least more real than thought without experience.


'Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we've been there, we've seen it, we know all about it. We've done the globe and the globe is done.

The same is true of land travel. We skim along, we get there, we see it all, we've done it all. And as a rule, we never once go through the curious film which railroads, ships, motor-cars and hotels stretch over the surface of the whole earth. Peking is just the same as New York, with a few different things to look at: rather more Chinese about, etc. Poor creatures that we are, we crave for experience, yet we are like flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which the world like a bon-bon is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it.

Our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything. When they listened to a lecture with lantern-slides, they really held their breath before the unknown, as they sat in the village school-room. We, bowling along in a rickshaw in Ceylon, say to ourselves: "It's very much what you'd expect." We really know it all.

We are mistaken. The know-it-all state of mind is just the result of being outside the mucous-paper wrapping of civilisation. Underneath is everything we don't know and are afraid of knowing.'
---D.H.Lawrence

July 21, 1969

..[t]he fatal disorder of worldliness which rejects worldly happiness.

Innumerable millions of passengers had polished the wood of the turnstile with their hips. From this arose a feeling of communion-brotherhood in one of its cheapest forms.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places

Once again, once again walking yet always on the spot, another country, other towns, the same country...Gagarin did not "find God in Heaven"...the new condition of existence in the weightlessness of a space 'without place' is still experienced by the first man sent there as a here, as the same, without genuine otherness.

Is there a door he hasn't noticed? Is there a bare wall where two windows open?

---Bellow, Frost, Blanchot (via Levinas)

July 21, 1969: something in the air

And now: Z

scintilla animae

The last note was contained in the first.

She said "no" and really meant "yes"
she said "i hate you" but spoke so softly..

You looked for a song,andecy, by sharon isbin-but as fate would have it, it cannot be heard. You looked for a word, because your eyes didn't meet. Spellbound by silence, you wait to melt, to burn...

If we were constant beings by nature, like angels, it would be easier. But we are flux, mere flux. No, not 'mere' flux-necessary, right & proper flux.
---Muriel Spark

He says Yes
to No; and in saying yes he says farewell.
---Wallace Stevens

How to win friends and influence people

I remember Thanksgiving with my wonderfully generous hosts in Boston, a Jewish family with two really smart kids. During the meal the eldest (eight years old) was quizzed :

"And what's the capital of K's country, India(no matter that we were from Pakistan) ? One out of one. Good.

"And who was the first Sultan of Delhi?"

Don't look at me kid. But he did, from the corner of his eyes. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders, deflated. But now they were looking at me. I'm buggered.

And so the whole meal passed in this pathetic game of approval and rejection. I felt myself gradually slouching into my chair. I was going to ask the kid to pass the oranges but thought better not, they might ask him when oranges were first introduced into Europe!

I came across these lines from Gaddis:

On the one hand the parent looks for signs of potential failure-this search arises in part from guilt and anxious preoccupation about himself. On the other hand he looks for signs of talent-this must not be wasted.

I couldn't but help think of all those false smiles, the picket-fence perfect lives, the beauty pageants and the strong desire to be a celebrity, to be someone , to be liked. (Roth's portrayal of 'the Swede' is brilliant on this).

The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.
---Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

First best. Kick ass. We gonna show those towel-heads in I-raq..

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.

Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports...
---Norman Mailer , New York Review of Books

But what of those who don't make it to first place, all those scroungers on welfare? What of those who do not answer to the 'calling'?

Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss.

Step up to the rush for second place. One has to wonder if what Solzhenitsyn saw as the constant desire to have still more things, and a still better life (the American Dream) ..imprints many western faces with worry and even depression doesn't go to the heart of the matter. With so much pressure to be the best, to always have the perfect life, have all the answers to the questions, is it any wonder that in order to keep the quiet desperation at bay life should be lived on the surface only? (Roth, again)....

and the day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You....mortifying confessions, group therapy, primal screams and "making it"..Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self esteem....books on how to be happy, how to obtain peace of mind, how to win friends and influence people (sold 15 million copies), how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.
--Gaddis.

I don't know. Perhaps some think this war on Iraq is another game (play station for the troops, something else for the politicians). The death of other people's children is insignificant: no mournful flutes for them, no playing of Barber's Adagio, just the grim reality of dust returning to dust. There is some talk now of "lowering of expectations", of hoping for the second best. Maybe one day people will start to ask, as in Lord of the Flies, if the beast wasn't within, if there wasn't something terribly flawed, right from the beginning , with the first best.

Somehow I doubt it. Talking of Vietnam, Gerald Ford would say:

It seems a shame that at the last minute of the last quarter we don't make that special effort,..It just makes me sick.

More troops to Iraq anyone?I can see next year's bestseller, having won Muslim hearts and minds : How to Win Friends and Influence People.

~~~~~

Wrote that just before the 'surge'. But the same thing applies to Afghanistan: 'We' cannot, simply cannot, fail or be seen to fail.

At the level of the individual, is this frenzy to 'succeed' leading to fatigue, exhaustion, nervous disorders? As the pointy heads keep on telling us, happiness depends on comparisons (with other people and other times in one's life). Not only does the pursuit, then, warp our sense of our self, but it could ultimately be futile-even according to its own narrow standards.

Look back on your life. What have you achieved? Look at the people around you, the high-flyers (who are easy, too easy, to mock) and those who have settled in to stable patterns of bourgeois mediocrity and quiet plodding success. They've done it, managed to grow up, make their peace with the world, religion, God. No-one your age is still a liberal. Conserve. Build. Forget. Learn to count: 1st best, 2nd best...

It happens agreeably enough to this maxim,the Whigs are
friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.

---from Hazlitt

It seems (or I find) the most useful definition of Man is that he is without definition.
---after Hazlitt

Well, yes, there's something a bit fishy about people who want to talk about "the soul" and all things deep and profound, or who always complain about the prosaic nature of the world and its duplicity, her masks; they are, instead, greatly animated and at the drop of a hat ready to swoon like lovers in a tryst of mutual self-negation or like teary-eyed patriots before the flag.

Like Americans who want to reestablish America's 'moral authority' or Christians and Muslims who see life as one steady but uneasy falling away from some intitial pure state, every change speaks only of decadence, and time itself is the great carrier of this disease.

The changeless as an ideal; religion and tradition as a closing of the circle of possibilities.

companions

One of the best things about blogging has been the sharing of books/films/music by my readers and the always insightful comments that have made me think twice about my views. Danke.

Economics and friendship (fellow-feeling):

One of the reasons that economics is a spectacularly narrow approach to understanding reality is that it posits that the sole principle underlying human motivation is self-interest (Edgeworth). Well, actually, that isn't true,strictly speaking,since economic (utility) theory doesn't actually say anything about the substance of one's preferences and instead focuses on their structure. So, for example, to say that one's preferences are rational is not a comment on the ends of one's actions/desires but, simply, that they-as a set- meet some sort of conditions of rationality (such as consistency).

However, for practical purposes most economists actually do take the self-interest idea as a working proposition or as the principle of motivation. It says something about "human nature": what it is, or what it ought to be.

And of course, the picture we set for ourselves-in our institutions, culture, and ideals- is often the one we grow into. The market, the "selfish gene", conflict, the survival of the fittest etc go up to make a constellation of ideas that views things like kindness, commitment, altruism, reciprocity, a sense of fairness and duty etc as fundamentally suspect. They are either veiled forms of self-interest or they are signs of weakness: if we were strong enough we wouldn't need to depend on others. Self-sufficiency is the deal. We are, it is said, at odds with one another. A warre against all.

We've been talked out of kindness, duped by a shallow form of intelligence (academia plays its part here). It would be mistaken to deny the great appeal of the notion of autonomy, but equally so to lose a sense of a 'we' (J.Luc Nancy)

Alan Ryan: "we mutually belong to one another" and this is necessary for the good life. Happiness: I-We.

Kindness-kinship (sameness). Philanthropia: the love of mankind. Caritas and open-heartedness. The desire to connect, to break out of the self, to live with others. Or man as a selfish beast, defined by his biological inheritance?

To be sympathetic to the vulnerability of others is to be so to our own-but not because it is so. Pleasure may accompany friendship but it is not the reason for it. Or, to put it another way, it is a qualitatively 'higher' form of pleasure.

What do we hold in common? Our needs? Our finitude? Is self-sufficiency and narcissism a turning away from the trauma of that acknowledgement? Kindness opens us to others but also to the dread of our own vulnerability and fragility.

Self-interest...assumes that we know what the self is, and what its interests are (next post)

Seneca: No-one can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purpose. Live for others if you want to live for yourself.

'We' as a way of fulfilling one's humanity, our common humanity, without filling it.

Oikeiosis: the attachment of self to the other

R.I.P. Michael

white and light

the mystery of the veil

Two extravagances: to exclude reason; to include only reason.

Well, it appears that the French are getting their knickers in a twist (again!) over the Very Important issue of the niqab.

The first question: why is this the first question?

Surely anyone who was really concerned about the inequalities between men and women, about oppression in France -and the starker ones in the so-called muslim world- would talk about education, work, political participation, patriarchal, tribal and feudal attitudes and practices, access to water, shelter, safety...

Of course, very often religious practices are inextricably connected to some of these issues, but the desire to reduce all questions of identity and all problems to religion (rather than class or justice, say)is, perhaps, symptomatic of a rather fanatical mindset.

Why is this issue, for example, more important than education, poverty or access to good housing when it comes to Culture (note the "C") and citizenship?