change of heart

Met affers the other day. Odd. He's on the path. Think he wants me to join as well. You must submit to Allah and then question. Dear, dear amiable old affers, one of the brightest and most genuine friends I have, as open-hearted as anyone I know. But don't you know, we're Kashmiri...and I only seek the astounded, astonished heart? God is not a question, or an answer.

In any case, the only person who could make me submit was the dougal-and that, too, when I was young. Twisting my arm behind my back..the Jim Brakes special (if you've only watched WWF, you won't get that).

Too contrarian, my friend, too Jewish by far. Nothing settles, capstones shift. An afternoon like this, with its deep winter shadows in the long, parched grass, slanting away into the silence forever, is all the mystery my heart can take right now. Borrowed light. The sun is distant now, darker, friends and dear ones older, some have slipped by, others frail, less sure of themselves, a bit frightened. But the voice, the voice of the loved ones doesn't change. And Ubo still looks out for me, with those sad button-eyes. The world is not with us enough. This, unless God wills it, means I will not have a change of heart.

cage of time

Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater.

"Insofar as he has neither essence nor specific vocation, Homo is constitutively nonhuman; he can receive all natures and faces."

I guess this is the modern way: the tracks of Man are what man is; one must walk one's own way, find one's own distinct style: reason, essence, and nature are not given but, rather, discovered in the living of a life, in the experiments of living. Unpredictable, and even sometimes addicted to unpredictability. More: the ability to erase the tracks, the traces of what one previously was. In a "second space" does one remember the first? Does the butterfly recall anything of its former existence, or state of soul? Do we?

"The animal has memory but no memories". Is their life but a dream within a dream?

Captivated, captivation: to be held by an irresistible charm.

Shortly after meeting Hannah Arendt, Heidegger wrote: "The demonic has struck me. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. In the rainstorm on the way home, you were even more beautiful and impressive. I should have liked to wander with you for nights on end".
--Courtesy of Roxana

captivation signifies essential withholding of every apprehending of something as something.

"On the one hand, captivation is a more spellbinding and intense openness than any kind of human knowledge; on the other..it is closed in total opacity.

Yet the tick is immediately united to these three elements [of its environment] in an intense and passionate relationship the likes of which we might never find in the relations that bind man to his apparently much richer world. The tick is this relationship. She lives only in it and for it."

from "it" to "she"!

"The tick was kept alive for eighteen years without nourishment, that is, in a condition of absolute isolation from its environment...in that period of waiting the tick lies in in a sleep-like state similar to the one we experience every night....[and so] without a living subject, time cannot exist.

Is it only man and woman who see time as a cage,time as time, time and again?

The dark night of the soul:

"But what becomes of the tick and its world in this state of suspension that lasts eighteen years? ..And what sense does it make to speak of "waiting" without time and without world?"

--quotations from Agamben's 'The Open'.

freedom & reason

A question: can I know what I want without knowing who I am, what I am? And is it always a question of wants (not needs, rights, obligations, capabilities)...in which case the question turns, once again, on what is meant by the self, the 'I'?

Two students came up to me last year and said, you know what, freedom in the west means that incest is okay. Yeah, okay. And I know where they're getting this from, who they're getting it from.

1.Freedom. Not western freedom, eastern..

2. Engaged freedom, not abstract freedom (though principles are important and they inter-act with one another).

3. A constellation of ideas: freedom for all means universality, equality. But also: liberty, equality,and solidarity don't always go hand in hand. Pluralism.

4. Lots of things to say on the evaluation of freedom (Sen, Sugden, etc) but...

In a dream last night I saw the words, I, I. and thought: freedom is this doubling up, reflexivity which is a breaking out of nature's circles. As the rastas say: I&I. Saw the swami, hugged her. Freedom is a space, the space of absence, the ache, the longing in one's heart. No heart is as free as a broken heart. Broken circles. A jewish thought, a 'sound' thought: exodus, the ability to think,and think again (second spaces). Riddled with it, by it.

Freedom is connected with the things we have reason to value. But it is also spontaneity, the ability to move (and not just what we move to). What would be the highest freedom, then -there are degrees, yes? Spontaneously moving to what is beautiful, true, loved? What the Allama calls a 'higher' fatalism?

what is freedom?

a question.

a series of questions.

love, hope, desire...

how you write is what you write: grammars of the soul:

love & hope & desire.

&.

distinctiveness and connectedness.

I & I.

reflections

You write, in your strange, crooked way. Incomprehensible, undecipherable to the last: the Queen's English cannot be understood by a mere peasant or gypsy. And what are words without a body, a gesture, a face? Do angels talk to one another?

I quietly reflect, alone with my thoughts: if you are not part of my world, and I am closed to yours, then what is the world, and why speaketh of the world? Not even a lark sees the open. I do not look out for you, but spy within. Truth is in a breast, yours, not mine, is folded for safe-keeping,crumpled, worn at the edges, opaque like an image in a dark mirror, a distant reflection of your true likeness.

This turning inwards, the curvature of one's soul, means that I become a barbarian to your gentle-ness. ess, esse est percipi, b. Remember? The hands grope, grasp things that cannot be seen, whether they exists or not. The hands can only mark time. How to speak, then, of things I have never seen and will never know? What to write, when you cannot speak my name?

another time

time is the space between me and you.
---Seal.

we were born in the wrong age, you and I. you, too late; me: too early, or something like that. the grey that intervenes between lives. probably would have anyway. does fate have a specific colour, like the time of day? today in class you said: a life is full of empty spaces. passed them by. as well it might. a rather morose thought for such young things to hear. an average life is, well, average. settle the accounts.

You remembered the colours, just in time. The wall, a shadow of the difference. But there are other places, other times, actively open to a different rhythm, the pulse radiating out from a centre that is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere. but first let your clothes fall to the ground. the light, heavy with promise, is neither of the morning or evening, but comes from somewhere.or at least it sounds like that.

axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved on our pulses.

Bricks of the wall,
so much older than the house -
taken I think from a farm pulled down
when the street was built -
narrow bricks of another century.

Modestly, though laid with panels and parapets,
a wall behind the flowers -
roses and hollyhocks, the silver
pods of lupine, sweet-tasting
phlox, gray
lavender -
unnoticed -
but I discovered
the colors in the wall that woke
when spray from the hose
played on its pocks and warts -

a hazy red, a
grain gold, a mauve
of small shadows, sprung
from the quiet dry brown -
archetype
of the world always a step
beyond the world, that can't
be looked for, only
as the eye wanders,
found.

---Denise Levertov.

a voice in the wilderness

&

There are moments of grace, of lightness; you cannot catch them or bind yourself to them. Which way things flow, whether Form embraces content, is something that is given, radically undetermined.

Undo your hair, unloosen it and let it fall, that I may unlock your secret and come to you. And through "un-" & "Ur" we shall walk side by side, you & I, return to the centre, before time was time, the world the world. A rope, a ladder, was sent before us and is everywhere in the universe. How ridiculous! More so that we fail to see it.

Hold fast. Shall I tie the knot for thee? One bow or two? Learn to let go, gently, unfasten what binds. I am in you now, and you are in me. What is meant by "&"?

Untimely thoughts, like a clenched, unopened hand.A freedom out of bounds. The curve of self-reflection around an invisible centre. That is you. Inside & Outside.Loop the loop.

the name of a dog

The sight of man now fatigues..We are tired of man.
---Nietzsche.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
---Kant

He would appear at morning assembly [the last Kantian in Nazi Germany] and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men.
---Levinas.

The paragon of animals-and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognised in the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation rite goes wrong in an army unit or on a high school campus and soldiers die or get injured in the course of performing a stunt, assuming a humiliating pose or undergoing sexual humiliation.
---Zizek, LRB.

The beast. Within or without? You name it, Bob. A history of the Camps, still to be written. When did it start? The British and the Boer War? Even this desire to put things in the framework of thought, the quotes like the parentheses bars of respectability, says what, exactly, about the distance created by distinctions?

The sub-human, without mind or reason: the Red Man (Hugh Brody), women, jews...rat-like, slithering snake-like, the animal frenzy of the irrational disturbs you. Chaos, dirt, chain it up, box it in.

Name? You don't have a name.

Number, then? You have a number, don't you.

Speak, you fucker, isn't that what distinguishes you from the animals. You have a voice. We'll hear it. Rest assured. You're not even a number you sad fuck. Donald was right: "we don't do numbers"

"From the start, Western culture has not considered it evident that animals participate in the plenitude of nature, in its wisdom and its order...In fact, upon close examination it becomes evident that the animal belongs rather to an anti-nature, to a negativity that threatens order and by its frenzy endangers the positive wisdom of nature. It is this frenzy that defined madness in the 17th and 18th centuries: the animality that lends its face to madness in no way stipulates a deterministic nature for its phenomena. On the contrary, it locates madness in an area of unforseeable freedom where frenzy is unchained....

not that the animal is silenced, but man himself is abolished"

Again: the question: the attempt to brutalize the other..does this not speak of the animality-if one wants to put it in those terms-of the oppressor himself?

The great conceit: that one is somehow rational because one possesses sophisticated techniques of oppression or because one has theories of human rights! And always the same defence mechanism: we, the Americans, the Muslims, the Indians, the Zionists..are always on the right side of the purity/danger divide; it's always the other that is subhuman.

contemplating pigeons

Please do not feed
the pigeons.
They are a health hazard
and a nuisance.

I saw this sign, tucked away in the corner, at Acton town station. This is one of those places that is at the end of the world, half forgotten, half abandoned, and yet is still mysteriously populated by old people shuffling about in their 1950's thick woolen chequered coats, people with old- world grimaces and crooked teeth, a place that is permanently bathed in sunshine, as if it was always a Sunday afternoon there. Past Ravenscroft. It's better not to stop there, but quickly pass through, convincing yourself all the time that such places do not really exist...

That someone should say "please" only confirms that this is England. Note: it is not "do not"...not a command but neither a request; a thousand years of English tradition are summarised in those words: the law is binding but it is a tradition, a set of customs and precedents and common sense behaviour, not a directive nor a moral imperative.

What troubles her, though, is the use of the words "they are"; this has the ring of metaphysical certainty about it. Can one be so sure that all pigeons are a nuisance or is it only these ones that have reached the end of the line, the retrogrades that have escaped the centre? It is as if one wanted to define the very essence of pigeonhood in terms of this one characteristic (and let us not forget that they may have many other traits as well). Surely it would have been better to say : "they may be a nuisance"?

I imagine an elderly Benthamite figure sitting there, calculating the exact costs and benefits of allowing the pigeons their freedom; one has to weigh this against the "nuisance value" they impose on us humans; the problem of making inter-personal comparisons of utility pales before the difficulty of making inter-species ones!

Some pigeons think by being still, the Greek ones, that is; others, the muslims and jews, think whilst walking or fluttering their wings, as if in a mystical frenzy. Athens and Jerusalem.

My attention turns elsewhere. I see my shadow clearly outlined against the brilliant light; with my black hat and long coat the shadow comes to resemble a chess piece or a Russian priest against an infinite white landscape. Never have I seen myself so clearly as I did then....

---photo: courtesy of Roxana.

happy smiley people

What is worse than the sullen, pretentious, pseudo-depressed fashionable moping around of the ill-spirited ones? Give me, feed me, Pasolini, Bergman, "realism"...dress it up as "existential angst" or rebellion against the superficiality of 'the bourgeoisie', the triviality of consumer society. Dark, and deep, the un-nameable, mysterious gnostic soul that fears symmetry, order, allegiance, that finds meaning, authenticity, in sickness and alienation. Pain & Suffering are real; they alone are profound. Already half-dead before you've even lived!

Well, perhaps only the smiley happy people, the boring, sickly-sweet dullards, with their Christian-Muslim moronic pamphlet-induced morality; the nice brigade, the flatlanders, the insipidly virtuous do-gooders cowering behind their picket fences and family life who want to talk about "life" and "positive thinking". Fuck, the whole world's American now! And have a nice day!

What counts as health, a good constitution, strength nowadays?

The strange thing is that the world bank wallahs and the economists/economic historians have noticed something quite peculiar: it doesn't work!

As societies grow richer they don't necessarily become any happier. Put to one side, dear reader, your scepticism as to whether happiness can even be measured, and your concerns about why happiness should be a way of evaluating how good an individual's life is going (why not freedom, say?); put to one side your profound queries about the social choice problem: namely: how do you aggregate across different individuals in society to get an idea of how good a society as a whole is doing? I mean, even assuming that one can make inter-personal comparisons of subjective well-being (happiness) what is tis notion of overall happiness? The greatest sum of the greatest number or the happiness of the least happy? Or perhaps greater social happiness occurs in a society where happiness is more equally distributed.

What's going on?

1. As average standards of living improve you think you need to have even more income, more goods, just to be at the same position you were before: the hedonic treadmill. The people in rich countries are not much happier than they were at the end of WWII. Great expectations,
and ever greater (and more frequent) disappointments. Looking for a partner: shop around. Fish.


2. Even if your income does grow but it doesn't grow as fast as that of those in your peer group then you're screwed. Rivalry.

3. The constant effort to acquire more and more may mean that you miss out on other things, things that you actually value-both intrinsically, and instrumentally in happiness terms: family life, trust (social capital!), a relaxed state of mind, peace, time (time is not money!). So, diminshing returns to income.

Self-help. Get help. Always the same individualised 'solution', a solution that itself has become a commodity and is relentlessly marketed. If you're unhappy, it's your fault, bud. That means never look at the capitalist system itself, how it generates, has to generate, this ceaseless stream of desires. The success of capitalism, comrade, depends on the promise of happiness, of it always being just around the corner. The pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. A right, for Christ's sake!

scarlet time

fate up against you will,
you will wait until you give yourself to him
this time, unwillingly mine

sour grapes

You cannot have everything you want. Get used to it. You always want what you cannot have. You've got used to that as well! Predictably irrational.

What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished?
---Milosz.

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.

--Exley

Would you like some of these delicious purple grapes dear fox, asked crow.

No thank you crow, I probably wouldn't like them anyway. The swami had said: "never try what you don't like and never like what you don't try".

But you are a fox, fox, and a fox should know many things. I've a good mind to...khair...

But tell me my beloved crow, you whose mind is like bronze and whose will as resolute as stone, if I drink this pleasing wine of yours will I be free, like you, alone above the world?

Oh fox, the problem with you is that you ask too many questions! And they're usually the wrong ones as well! Remember Khayyam said drink and forget your bondage to the idol of the days. You have been tamed by your love..an oriental at heart if ever there was one! But I, I am free to desire what I cannot have, to imagine and love blue flowers and blue horizons, to dream much and to visit distant lands that do not exist.

Fox, who hadn't been to university, found it difficult to comprehend crow's wise words. Too worldly to truly appreciate crow's beautiful, wondrous poetic soul. And he began to hate crow, hate the thing he loved.

But still fox looked up to crow, munching on her grapes, oblivious of poor old fox and what he was going through. Fox was lost, crow found.

sky gathers light

a figure a long way off could be, un-

named, the centre of the world and in between

this known and this unknown, the exclusive, the vague,

in these gaps we gather guilt, and love, and die.

Crow asked fox why he was sad, why he was always hanging around this tree if he really didn't like the grapes.

That's hard to say, answered fox gingerly. Was it the light within that failed or fate itself? Had I wished it otherwise would I have broken through the dark glass, would the mirage have fallen away? Who can say? I am me, and you are you.One of us lives, one of us dies, but which one of us is free?

Crow laughed at fox. Oh fox, you are silly,what can you possibly mean?! You do talk utter nonsense sometimes.

Well, crow, you have never thought of me, so if you can really desire what you cannot imagine possible, then wish yourself me.

But that is easy, little fox! And crow fell from her great height, to be a bit like fox. As she did so fox, with one almighty leap, pounced on her and devoured her and the grapes in one gleeful swoop.The red and the black, the red and the black...

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices...wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal.

But the swami was right...those grapes, even in such a sweet mouth, tasted sour!

---John Riley and Denise Levertov.

the road to nowhere

"Although awareness is an achievement of individuals, it is not a subjective process, and it tends to be guided by others as well as oneself...western thought has always had difficulty accounting for this human ability to share awareness"

i-We.
In the world, therefore i am.
i am, therefore i think (sometimes).

blogland:

Like the no-places that are airports, shopping malls, service stations, there's something insipidly vacuous about blogland. As if a place for raw emotions ceases to be a place, a world. The paradox that an excess in the possibilities of communication actually means that real communication becomes less possible. Could it be that instead of opening us up to one another and to the world (and one assumes that these go hand in hand) that the information superhighways are not leading anywhere but back to the self-the self, mind you, not the person who acts and thinks and lives in the world? We're all connected now, or so they claim. Has that led to a decrease in selfishness and self-centredness?

Perhaps this passiveness, inward-ness has a history, in which case the de-materialization of the world is itself part of the world (in the same sense it might be argued that de-politicization is a political strategy).

Stop, look, listen.

In our workplaces, schools, and leisure/entertainment environments this seems every less likely. Go with the flow. Time-work discipline (E.P.)

Our intellectual trends have exalted specialization and abstractness over common sense and hands-on know-how. common sense. Hannah...

"[n]one have been able to break out of the solipsistic circle so as to test experience against anything other than their internal feelings"

Here's where the economists come in:

"What motivates us is a subjective state that causes positive feelings; what turns us off is a subjective state that causes negative feelings"

Pushpin is as good as poetry. What is right, true, or beautiful is a matter of matter acting on matter. You listen to some music on an LP. There is no experience. It can be replicated mechanically by something else since it can, ultimately, be reduced to "primary qualities". Values are lyingly added. The experience machine (Nozick)..a brain in a vat, a spark in the grey cosmos.

The Palestinians blah blah blah...

What you've noticed is the brothers' heightened sensitivity when it comes to this issue-and this one issue alone. And what's more remarkable is that this victim mentality is adopted by Pakistanis, Indians, and other bleeding hearts in the face of utter silence to the very real injustices perpetrated by Muslims on other people!

Slackness, disconnectedness, scatteredness of attention.

"A society in which fewer and fewer people have control over their experience and fewer and fewer people learn how to take pleasure in expanding their horizons is ripe for nihilism"

(citations, Bentham and E.S.Reed, The Necessity of Experience)

theatrical reflection

The problem with fucking originality is that it leads to reproduction.

Absence of mother is the necessity of invention.

Don't know why, but ropes seem to be featuring in my conversation quite a lot recently (don't ask). So, it was a delight to come across Hazlitt's essay: quick, and light, daring and agile, a dazzling virtuoso performance.

To grow up is to become conservative, mature; shake off that earlier childish coat of idealism and spontaneity and settle down into the received wisdom of the men in hats, settle for the conformities, platitudes and worn-out cliches of the bourgeoisie, or settle in with the flat-landers with their cheap pieties and tiresome religiosity.Make peace with your God. The stone-like, implacable faces of the intelligentsia are so serious and dour; to be lost in abstractions precludes all flexibility and suppleness.

my eyes have seen
what my hand did.

Certain movements and impressions of the hand and eye, having been repeated together an infinite number of times, are unconsciously but unavoidably cemented together into closer and closer union.

ethics without principles

4.103. the search for order is not without its merits; not without its demerits.

Confucius say: best form of revenge is to live well.

There are many sayings or things you read that sound all profound and wise at the time but then when you stop and think about them, or when you move on and live a bit, seem quite trivial.

You grow even more suspicious of cliches and general principles as you grow older. 'You', not 'one'. As if the sheer passing of time should confer a stable pattern on things. That seems unreasonable. An 'extravagance', an irrationality, to assume that there is only reason. What you include and what you exclude is surely not exclusively a matter of reason itself, but determined, hinted at, by the way you live?

So, to mention revenge is not to get over revenge. Secondly: 'best'? Thirdly, it's plainly ridiculous: in some minor cases, such as being at the receiving end of a rebuke, the best thing may indeed be to walk away, take things stoically, see the bigger picture. But in other cases, serious cases of injustice, this hardly seems like a very good approach. Anyway, that 'bigger scheme' doesn't appeal to your fundamental temperament and the second thoughts generated by it.

Yes, you are less certain in some things, and more certain in others. Some see you as dogmatic, others as too liberal. Doesn't matter, you have to find your own way and that means letting others find theirs. That, despite all the quotes here, is what you're sure of.

If you will something for yourself then you must for others. Must? Not sure.

The question: what do I know, what should I know, do I know an other's mind, hardly seem the right ones at all. Do you even know yourself? Can you? Surely only God knows who you are?

You live in time, this particular slice of time and space that you occupy, that has been given to you. To be aware of that, is an act of humility. With imagination you can reach out, but not everything can be reduced to system or a concept. And you reach out as a person, not with the mind alone. He who sees Ratio sees only himself.

You cannot legislate for, make certain, the presence of love, friendship, grace.Thankfulness, hospitality, pleasure in the world, the widening of one's horizons, repose, wonder in the presence of the mysterious, delight in genuine human kindness, spontaneity. All can be ruined by the satanic mills. To see, to see now and now.

O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

---Denise Levertov

total philosophy

Notes of a comprador partisan intellectual:

What I find so amusing is how seriously some people take themselves. This love of buzzwords: comprador, contrapuntual, the liberal elite, 'the other', 'western liberal humanism discourse'...this great desire to appear intelligent and 'deep', passionately moved by something, anything, so long as one gets over one's own boredom...you should read one author, and one author only.

Yeah, okay. But that really sounds like a terrible, whining fanaticism.

Charm, the last corner of the human universe.
---my Hannah Arendt.

Don't like Hannah? Well, that's okay. Err. isn't the whole point of reading not to make an idol of the author you like, to think for yourself..there is no 'total philosophy', or one thing necessary. Foxes, not hedgehogs (oh no, not another Jewish, land-grabbing,anti-Islam,pseudo-intellectual,post-modern punk mystic, empire-supporting, Zionist state prostitute for the bourgeoisie). You're not a freshman. Ayatollah Said, Mufti Chomsky, Lord Russell. For heaven's sake, get over it child.

~~~~

scrambled eggs

I was wondering to myself -is it possible to wonder with other people?- are there really only two types of people in the world: not, as previously thought: those who wear hats and those who don't; not muslims and infidels, Kashmirs and non-Kashmirs but, rather, those who like scrambled eggs and those who like 'desi' omelettes (let's not even mention, shall we, the barbarians, the wandering third, those very, very strange people who don't like breakfast)

But yeah, scrambled, like two people together, loosely, freely coming together to be greater than what they are individually; light and elegant, imaginatively quick, not set in their ways; simple, uncomplicated but also scrambled, aborted, a second thought...when style also says something about substance. Attentiveness and slackness, scatteredness. Not the fused and confused singleness of the omelette, the fake oneness and unity: politically speaking: "crack a few eggs to make an...."

Well, yes, it was all washed down with wonderful, gloriously unashamedly muddy, silt-like coffee, bitter to the dregs (none of that fucking latte..there are only two types of people..those who like latte...).

Wandering and wondering. Nothing like sitting alone, walking alone, having the ability to be alone without striving for anything, without the sociality of being seen and conversation, without the closedness of 'two' (of course, tea and coffee are also fundamentally worldly pleasures).

A line from The Fight Club: When you're dying people actually listen to you and don't just wait for their turn to speak. To be alone is to die a little, as is to think. But only a little, and in the right way.

the poets wander. a curious line in the Qur'an. Plato? Wandering thoughts. Exiled. From the margins.Sound thought. Chatwin, here: songlines. The Buddha: walk on! Knulp: aimless wandering, desert/alpine theology.

Cartesian Prisons

A former student recently asked what it was like teaching...

I remember reading somewhere (Foucault?) that prisons, schools, and factories all shared the same architectural structure. But I wouldn't know, never been to a factory...which is, I guess, quite revealing. We talk about 'the theory of the firm' and all sorts of things (such as credit markets, labour markets etc) but have little idea of how they actually work. Well, yeah, you could perhaps get away with that by saying you're a "theorist" but why do you want to get away and shouldn't theory have some relation to reality?

Discipline. Input-output. Quantification, grades. Hierarchical structures. Stifling monotony.

The options: the high road of academia, lofty detachment, research for the sake of research, contributing to the production of knowledge, belonging to a community of enlightened, noble individuals, participating in informed conversation, the 'higher' things in life, far, far from the madding crowd with their cheap, easy and unrefined pleasures and simple happiness... the life of the mind, sifting through the facts, unrestrained, unqualified scepticism (that never morphs into mere worldly cynicism); subject something to the rigour of the mind, scientific assessment, analysis, break it down, think on the margin, contextualize...and other such buzzwords, jargon, and wooliness that is often pulled over the eyes of the gullible.

The low road of instrumentality, preparing people for the "real world": work, following the set pattern, increasing productivity; or a higher degree where you can fill your head with even more theories, learn some tricks-techniques, if you want to be fancy. Stuff the heads of the hollow boys and girls, the blank slates, get them used to long hours of hard work, get the consultancies going (get your hands dirty so that you can finance the loftier ideals). Don't waste the university's funds on teaching useless subjects like literature, or medieval history. hiedbiz. Bring on the hard stuff, the cash-generating, golden-egg-laying, cutting edge research work. And damn that old elitism of the toffs and the monks before them to hell. Meritocracy, democracy, any -ocracy, as long as it brings the dosh in, and gives you the veneer of being half-civilised at the same time. Specialization, not roundedness. Multi-disciplinary stuff is good. Always sells. Get bums on seats, to put it crudely, Mr. Mir.

for anton:



Sun light. .....
........Light
light light light

---Denise Levertov.

Here, to smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together it's fantastic. Or to draw: you know, you take a pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line and together it's a good line. Or when your hands are cold, you rub them together, you see, that's good, that feels good! There's so many good things.

---from Wings of Desire.

with time

everything will fade in time...except the desire that it wouldn't. the poet said, "death is no better withstood..." said, foolishly. in the realm of samsara the heart of a rose sighs, but not for you, not for I. ripples of silver light, from the time before, glide past our wrinkled lives, mirror the lostness in your eyes. blue and black blue and black don't rhyme..there was a blue flower that never was. waits, with time, for the time when there is no time.

in a silent way

There's so much fakery out there, so much pettiness of soul and cheap sentimentality..fuck, i think of all that chinese plastic crap floating around the world. But when all that falls away, there's this. And it's real.

Geoff Dyer on the freedom of jazz..the ability to absorb influences, be open to them, give them your own shape, your own signature. A great work of art isn't, in principle, changed by events, by time. Perhaps. But in reality it is. And what is real, is now.

Exodus

Sing it Rasta man,

Set the captives free
Rule equality.
Set the captives free

For the Palestinians, Kashmiris, and other oppressed people around the world.

unique and indistinguishable

Why is it so hard to imagine the Palestinians as a people with their own aspirations, with plain, ordinary aspirations to live a decent life on their own land? It's that simple. Really.

What does it mean to say you can't recognize their humanity? Can you fucking recognize your own?

A common world for all.

Let's break this down:

A common world. For all.

That means: not assimilation into the dominant power structures but neither does it entail ghettoization (like 'the Muslim community').

Rebel-citizen:

That doesn't mean that if you gain power you replicate inequalities, the injustices you suffered on to other minorities...for all indicates a different type of politics. Sameness and difference, to be unique and indistinguishable. There are no more pariahs, outsiders, but also being brought in does not mean being a plank in the structure of dominance.

What do you want them to do? Content themselves with poetry, nature, their own suffering?

the conscious pariah
"aware of his position, becomes a rebel against it-the champion of an oppressed people. His fight for freedom is part and parcel of that which all the down-trodden..must needs wage to achieve national and social liberation".

"he does not recognize the class order of the world because he sees in it neither order not justice for himself"

It is society or the fundos or the state that has reduced him/her to the state of a non-entity, a nobody, someone not quite real. It is not a matter of choice.

"K, in his effort to become indistinguishable is interested only in universals, in things which are common to all mankind..[in becoming] a people like other
peoples".

"for only within the framework of a people can a man live as a man among men, without exhausting himself".

---citations, The Jew as Pariah, Hannah Arendt.

reflections

...via sight

.[b]efore the metal shaving mirrors
and see the shaky future grow familiar
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
---Lowell.

Pariah

–noun

1.	an outcast.

2.	any person or animal that is generally despised or avoided.

3.	(initial capital letter) a member of a low caste in southern India and Burma.

---

Origin:
1605–15; Tamil paṟaiyar, pl. of paṟaiyan lit., drummer (from a hereditary duty of the caste), deriv. of paṟai a festival drum.

Can one choose to be a pariah, to be marginalized. Not simply a question of language, you think...something done to you, not by you; to be taken out, or down, is not the same thing as to step out.

Workers of the world unite!

What unites us? Why should I stretch out my hand to you, jew..black.. woman..shia..homo..stranger...bum? Our common humanity, our common, suffering humanity? The needs of the body, the wounded body, or the spirit? Common experiences? Shared human nature? Do you believe in such words today?

Sameness or distinction? What are the philosophical grounds that bind me to you, and why the need for grounds anyway? But you want to avoid the religious connotations, Christian or Islamic. What, then? Blood and soil?

What can it mean to say our commonality is in our suffering, and can that be the basis of a communality? How can that form a world if it is intensely private? We have shared rituals for mourning, but for suffering?

This kind of humanity [fraternity, brotherhood] actually becomes inevitable when the times become so extremely dark for certain groups of people that it is no longer up to them, their insight or choice, to withdraw from the world..this kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariahs..[but it] is dearly bought...

And in invisibility, ...only warmth and fraternity of closely packed human beings can compensate for the weird irreality that human relationships assume whenever they develop in absolute worldlessness, unrelated to a world common to all people.

The 'muslim community' or citizenship? Get the the.The former seems narrow, claustrophobic, and imposes its own hierarchies. In many ways, I think Jinnah was profound here. 'Muslim community' is not, for me anyway, the way forward. An Islamic state-mullahdom-Sunni or Shia, can only veer to totalitarianism given the level of backwardness. But in principle? Even then: no.

Now this human nature [humanity] and the feelings of fraternity that accompany it...[is] in political terms absolutely irrelevant.

Flight from the world, inner emigrants, may have strength but not power...strength and power are not the same; that power only arises when people act together.

It would scarcely have been a sign of humanness for two friends [A German and a Jew under the third Reich] to have said: Are we not both human beings? It would have been mere evasion of reality and for the world common to both at the time.

---citations, 'Men in Dark Times', Hannah Arendt.

Qadosh

out of place

question me an answer

She smiled at the questions,as if to say:'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
---courtesy of Rinku.

She always asked the seriously impossible questions first: why am I still I, and not you? These were followed by the no less difficult casually impossible questions: why does time divide and not unite, and why do people fall? Then the seemingly impossible questions such as: my soul, why do you sigh within, why do you lie next to me, frightened, startled?

But this is about you, not about you, or me, or you, or anyone else. Of human beings in general..distance, good?...there is this unending strangeness, quirkiness, like nothing else in creation, that asks questions for which it has no answer, for which there can be no answer.

But how do you know, how can you know, what is possible and what isn't?

See!There you go again!

If everything begins with a question, then how does it end? You ask a question of the idea of me, the image of me, the image that is sustained by memory and desire. As one would ask a question of a wooden idol or of oneself.Why can one say: make an idea one's own, but not make an idea of one's own? Do the questions cease when one sees clearly, face to face? What is required, necessary?

Can there be 'requirements' in such matters?
Tilt your head slightly to the universe. The world isn't clearer that way, but closer.

Does 'you're so impossible' always have to be a bad thing? The 'so' a superabundance of impossibility, the unattained but attainable self?

I am you, when I am I...
A net snared a net:
embracing we sever

---Celan

...and the whole earth was google

'When looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men.And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge these to be men.By the faculty of judgment which rests in my mind, I comprehend that which I believed I saw with my eyes'.

When do you think that was written? Don't google it!

Okay, okay, 1650, believe it or not!

And then there is this:

In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.

---Adam Smith.

Well, I'm not a particularly big fan of computers or computer-people, techies (who are often, I think, really just geeks masquerading as intelligent people). In thrall to precision, certainty, and to quick, reliable,and simple answers, they are not too dissimilar to the businessman who wants to get down to the bottom dollar.

My pet theory is that there's a hidden affinity between accountants, computer-people, and maulvis. Balance the books, 0/1, black and white, don't read between the lines. I remember one such irritated chap asking me: why do you bother reading fiction, why not just stick to the facts? (this was the very same perosn who thought his grandmother was especially religious because she had never taken a step outside of the house).

Idleness:

I remember a senior colleague, when asked why we should have summer classes, replying: "we should keep the students busy". Yeah, right:input/output and all that.

"I want it,and I want it now".

--Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Slowness, laziness as a form of resistance to the modern world.As opposed to the obsession with quantification and condensed, bite-sized "information" (wiki), skimming, surfing, and browsing. The 60-seconds news. Even the language is revealing here: "the marketplace for ideas".

broken circle

Have you ever considered any real freedoms?

---Brando, in Apocalypse Now.


n and r (but not the vowels, I daresay) are sceptical of this idea of freedom and bounds. Well, yes, so am I ! Being brought up in a very free way-how else to put it?- I guess I've never been a stickler for rules, order, system. Danke, swami, ubo. Perhaps that's why I can never take any authority figures seriously and why I'm so sarcastic/irreverent toward them (and you thought it was just my bad manners and untidiness!) Well, okay, don't make a song and dance about it. We never really took religion seriously, either...which was, I think, actually, a profoundly religious approach. If you get it, you'll get it.

So, here are some excerpts from a book I'm reading (please note, O mighty Dougal, I say reading, not read!).

In order to enjoy negative freedom a person already has to be a person.

Having any old preferences, interests, wants, desires, is not, actually, what makes us distinctive, or individuals. As Frankfurt (and Sen after him) says: the idea of a person depends on second-order preferences, the ability to take a step back (and out) and evaluate our impulses. Judgement requires distance. Negative freedom is necessary, but not sufficient. What, ultimately, counts is the expansion of our capabilities and that is bound up with the very notion of positive freedom: human flourishing...what we can do, and can be.

I act, therefore I am; or even better, as the Russians might say (see Lesley Chamberlain's wonderful 'Motherland')..I act therefore we are; we act , therefore I am.

freedom as genuine self-realization, as the growth and enrichment of each person's experience, according to each person's lights.

Is this a substantive notion of the good? If so, is there a (democratic) consensus or does this open the door to paternalism. One must be sceptical of general theories, but at least here we're being made aware of the delicate balance between freedom and necessity. The question becomes not: how can I know, but how can I think, here and now or, even better, how can I live, here and now ('can' is not necessarily should or ought).

But here's the dope:

To view institutions as enemies of freedom, and all conventions as slaveries, is to deny the only means by which positive freedom in action can be secured..convention and custom are necessary to carrying forward impulse to any happy conclusion. A romantic return to nature and a freedom sought within the individual without regard to the existing environment finds its terminus in chaos...Not convention, but stupid and rigid convention is the foe.

this-ness

"It is this that in days of yore was granted to us as our sustenance!"-for they shall be given something that will recall that past.

---Q:2:25

If the world is already so beautiful, Lord, if one looks at it with your peace within our eyes, what more can you give us in another life? With what other senses will you make me see this blue sky above the mountains, and the huge sea, and the sun which shines everywhere? Give me eternal peace in these senses and I shall wish for no other than this blue sky.

He who at no moment said 'Halt' save to that which brought him death, I do not understand him, Lord, I who would like to halt so many moments of each day to make them eternal within my heart.. . This world, be it as it may, so varied, so vast, so much of time, this earth, with all that grows in it, is my homeland, Lord , and could it not also be a heavenly home?

I am a man and my measure is human for all I can believe and hope: if my faith and hope remain here, will you blame me for it in the afterlife? Beyond me I see the sky and the stars, and there I should still want to be a man. If you have made things so beautiful to my eyes, if you have made my eyes and senses for them, why close them seeking another howl if for me there will be no other like this! I know you are, Lord, but where you are, who can tell? All that I see resembles you in me... Let me believe, then, that you are here.

---Maragall

Churchill, on hearing that Gandhi was in town again
said, apparently, "not that bloody fakir again!"

I guess we live in an age when "inwardness" and spirituality is the thing. Either that or the stark contrast of "brute reality" ; as if to say: we are nothing but thinking machines or matter in motion or little more than a bundle of swirling,unconscious, irrational desires. So much for the optimism of science!

In both there is a sort of renunciation of the world, the human world. The gnostic, no less than the materialist, 'thinks' of the world as 'mere extension'..thinks, doesn't see. For the hedonist, as for the ascetic/sufi, pleasure is deceptive, alluring, but never quite real.

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.
---Hannah.

In some sense, capitalism is not 'worldly' but, actually,a devouring of the world, of public spaces, beautiful appearances, to be replaced by the virtual world and inner feelings, the only thing that's real, authentic. The abstract, 'thin' self living in an abstract space, rather than this unique person, in this specific place, at this particular time.

J

If we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor... you are free- you are free to go to your temples mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state... in due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims- not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.
---Jinnah.

What on earth have the fanatics and the rich done to this country! Of course, in his day the fundos used to call Jinnah a kaffir. The same vitriol can be heard when the word "secular" is mentioned. One day muslims will wake up and realise "the beast was within" -and the problem was not the media, "the jews", "the west".

Get this. The other day two students were walking in the corridor and the guy hugged the girl. Okay, everyone recognizes that that isn't appropriate behaviour in a public space in this culture. But still, not the end of the world. Well, a colleague sees this and twists the chap's arm behind his back and then punches him. Then he shouts at the girl and asks her if she isn't ashamed of wearing those flimsy clothes.

Well, yeah, that's what it boils down to; they couldn't give a fig about social injustice; what matters, ultimately, is temptation. Which, once again, goes to show that a Ph.D isn't, in itself, worth jack.

here are some of Gandhi's views...quite startling. Which is not to deny that he was a great leader in his own way,and in his own right.

jimi, crazy horses

Mongol, Ali, if you're reading this...this is the girl for you. Man, with that funky coat as well.

Bach this is not. If this is traditional music then I'd like to ask again: how can there be freedom within bounds? [yes, more of my "crusade", Z.]

Strains of this reminded me of the fantastic makrani music.