Achtung

1.	Theology. a divinely conferred gift or power.

2.	a spiritual power or personal quality that gives an individual influence or authority over large numbers of people.

3.	the special virtue of an office, function, position, etc., that confers or is thought to confer on the person holding it an unusual ability for leadership, worthiness of veneration, or the like.

Also, char⋅ism .

---

Origin:
1635-45; LL, Gk, equivalent to char- (base of cháris favor, charízesthai to favor; akin to YEARN EXHORT ) + -isma -ISM

Synonyms:
2. charm, magnetism, presence.

Oh, the research I had to do for this post!

Admiration, to be solid and lasting, must be founded on proofs from which we have no means of escaping.
---Hazlitt, 'The Indian Juggler'

There are no proofs unless they are felt on the pulses
(after Keats)

How can you admire that which is randomly given, from above, a pure gift, rather than dexterity, perseverance, effort, artistic and mental brilliance, something which is superfluous, superficial, like beauty? The magnetic charm (karma, destiny) of it, the sheer animal wonderment, the relinquishing of the self to a dazzling, magic spell.

Does God judge us by appearances?

I suspect he does.

sorrow dance

Every
Child
Has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who only knows four words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
"Come dance with Me."
Come
Dance.
--Hafiz

(courtesy of nikki)

sparks, sparks learn to live in the dark, come to live, like fragments of a black sun or points of light in a dark stream. the soul that flared on, streaming forth unworried. this you were, and this you are. turn. life looked at backwards is not the same! you see the colours, in all directions. the heart that is turned, b, the qalb, ploughed and uprooted. ubo, dancing on one leg, arms outstretched, about to fall. free, not knowing beginning or end, but with deep sorrowful eyes. ubo, my jew.


'He was of ecstatic temperament , extraordinarily sensitive to music, and among the endless jigs, hornpipes, reels, waltzes, and country dances that his father played ..and to which the boy danced in the middle of the room, there were three or four that always moved the child to tears, though he strenuously tried to hide them....

He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality...[His poems] remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone., who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him,a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious , ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.'

---Claire Tomalin

kind of

In the depths of the forest your image follows me.

And how are things today? Kind of better?

Kind of.

A category of blueness that shades into different realms. A category that is not a category. The chill of the warm mind, the tangible slowing down, the intangible evasions. Abstract, obtuse intelligence, a second thought. Still life. The cracked reflection tells a true story.

When you leave a place you remember to turn the light off before you go. Same as it ever was. Darkness. And then reality dawns, filters through. So many faces hard-set, a picture of harshness endlessly mimicked, when kindness, well, that's original, one of a kind.

Caught a fish. Thought she was the moon. Sweet she was. Though salty tears. Tender flesh. But bones. Sharp! Speechless. Threw her back. To where she belonged. With the moon. In the river of the night.

the cultic animal

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people-maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range....

It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities....

I don’t think the Kindle will make any difference to what I’m talking about, which is that the book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen and it can’t compete with the computer screen I don’t think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can’t measure up.

---Philip Roth.

'We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity...

We have never had...a satisfactory liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn'

--Iris M. ("Against Dryness")

Well, yes, 'the end of the novel' is, perhaps, only second favourite to 'the end of the west'..the 'west' begins with an awareness of its own end, is rooted in contingency, scepticism toward the facile attempts to seek permanence, surety. Cosmos, Nature, God, and eventually reason itself must give way.

What will be lost? That's the question. A narrowing down, a greying of the imagination, as if one were looking at faint lines on an empty canvas? A turn of phrase...how a phrase turns you, or summarizes layers of thought & feeling, eventually only to concede to the realm of facts, thought, light.

Pleasure, uselessness, and slowness as a form of resistance against the manufactured restlessness and strivings of an image-ridden commercial society. Snobbishness and terrible pretentiousness. Of course. But that presumes an 'other, and you like to read for yourself. Silence as a commons, the preference for preferring not to. Already 'preference' is the wrong word.

Second thoughts: there's something peculiar about always being attentive, something suspect about self-absorption.

the fool of fools

You know, you're always putting your foot in it, you fool. Writing or saying something when you know silence would be better. Shouldn't an education be about what to say and what not to say? To know when to say the right thing? Gawain! Hearts and minds, said the great natural philosopher.

There it is, the white page in front of you, and you can't resist! The seduction of emptiness. The lack of reserve(s). Ach, no fool like an old fool.

"What I did hate, though, and what finally sent me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term, without saying goodbye or even turning in my grades, was that with the exception of Selma, the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core--men and women both--all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs, and finally I couldn't stand their grinning, hopeful teacher faces. Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible--time-freed, existential youth forever. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth. And literature, being lasting, is their ticket.

Everything about the place was meant to be lasting-life no less than the bricks in the library and books of literature, especially when seen through the keyhole of their incumbent themes: eternal returns, the domination of man by the machine, the continuing saga of choosing middling life over zesty death, and on and on to a wormy stupor. Real mystery-the very reason to read (and certainly write) a book-was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away--live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else.

What’s true, of course, is that they were doing exactly what I was doing-keeping regret at arm’s length, which is wise if you understand it exactly. But they had all decided they really didn’t have to regret anything again! Or be responsible to anything that wasn’t absolutely permanent and consoling. A blameless life. Which is not wise at all, since the very best you can do is try and keep the regret you can’t avoid from ruining your life until you can get a start on whatever’s coming.

Consequently, when these same people are suddenly faced with a real ambiguity or a real regret, say something as simple as telling a sensitive young colleague they probably like and have had dinner with a hundred times, to go and seek employment elsewhere they couldn’t be more bungling."

---Richard Ford.

silent words

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; < class="ital-inline">paṟaiyar, pl. of paṟaiyan lit., drummer (from a hereditary duty of the caste), deriv. of paṟai a festival drum

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined-just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew-
Fresh from his Wessex home-
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.

---Hardy.

That is my window. Just now

I have so softly wakened.
I thought that I would float.
How far does my life reach,
and where does the night begin

I could think that everything
was still me all around;
transparent like a crystal's
depths, darkened, mute.

I could keep even the stars
within me; so immense
my heart seems to me;

....

Like something strange, undreamt-of,
my fate now gazes at me.

For what, then, am I stretched out
beneath this endlessness,
exuding fragrance like a meadow,
swayed this way and that,

calling out and frightened
that someone will hear the call,
and destined to disappear
inside some other life.

---Rilke.

A life avoided. Voided. Cast out from the warmth of the heart/hearth. Thrown here, and by what hand? Fate plays a different tune, walks to a different rhythm. As if she was speaking to him in a foreign tongue. When there is no north north of the future, his northern breast grows to a southern tree, dreaming the strange dream of death in a foreign land, under ancient blue stars.

Here he shall rest, forever young, one of the many who has fallen, as if under a spell. His face, darkened, beautiful, unheld. Lips,once a flame,now sadly frozen, mute, never to speak of love or to love. His smile, the last of his line, his life, a mystery that shall never be recalled. His hand open and simple as it was when he was a child. Hush, play softly, for he has found another life now.

the dark one

Your love, a black lion,tears at my flesh,rips out my bones.
--after Rumi.

Shade, shadow, across your face, a sadness in your eyes that is almost mine, muffled words saying God knows what. Sometimes you wear it lightly, like the soft, dazzling wing of crow, glistening under the black sun.

Your image fades and recedes, takes a step back, ready to fall. The other side of the dark mirror, of my eyes, imprisoned there, hoping that the bottle breaks and does not break.

"And what if it should break, would you not forget me then?"

But I see you most clearly when I do not see you. Even then, I shall stare at the imageless dark mirror. For then there shall be no distance between us. And your flesh will be as my flesh, dark with knowing.

the gathering

"Lacking the independence of life and mind that comes from having a solid grounding in primary experience, many modern professors are little more than intellectual brokers...

The brokering style-repressing one's convictions and withholding judgement in the interest of forging profitable relationships"

---E.S. Reed, The Necessity of Experience.

Strange day of extremes. In the afternoon, after tea, discussing Islamic law with an academic here..he has all the nuances of an academic: cautious thinking, sees all sides, carefully mulls over the arguments, is careful to leave room for ambiguity, knows the source material, knows the literature, the "classical" position, the modernist interpretations. And yet..what? What is it? Why so uneasy, b? Prejudiced?

In the evening I, the well-adjusted Aitchisonian, meet up with my old class-fellows, some of whom I haven't seen for twelve, fifteen years. They greet me, the hermit, in the familiar way: "bhen-chord [sister-fucker]...where have you been?". Fair to say that academics don't have much of a standing in this crowd! The Urdu-speaking friends are strangely quiet (no-one dominates like a Punjabi!). H, a mild-mannered sufi is laughed at and the only person to mention religion is met with howls of derision. This is how it was in the old days of Lahore. No-one can give a fuck about anything. Amongst the rabble are two failed politicians, a film-director, landlords and businessmen. I'm considered an "intellectual" because I haven't shaved and my hair hasn't been combed for three days.

The conversation turns to familiar themes: drink, prostitutes, lady-boys, peep shows etc., etc (you get the picture). An old friend, who remembers me as "collie bear" wants me to sit with him. Slightly fairer kids were always the favourites when it came to the mock homo stuff (probably the real stuff as well). Must ask T.

One rather plumpish and lecherous chap recalls how he tried to bribe the Islmaiyat teacher (a notorious homosexual) to tell him what was in the final exam.

A: Sir, just write down the verses for me.

R sahib: It is not possible.

After much of the same and lots of pleading A finally says: Sir, shall I wear my tight shorts?

Raz tells H: "I always see you at book shops and around that crappy art stuff". H is too polite to say anything. You know, they're the best places for picking up sophisticated women. A different class altogether."

Another recounts his conversation with a Russian prostitute (he called her an escort girl but no-one knew what that was)from Bukhara.

"But I'm Bukhari, me Bukhari, from Bukhara originally!", he says excitedly. "My forefathers were from there"

To which the Russian replies: "you had four fathers?"

"No, no, my an-cestors"

"No understand. Your sisters?"

explaining men

anton said something interesting the other day about the possibility that there isn't much practical difference when it comes to thinking about a person as human and not fully human. I mean, when you think of a black person as 3/5 ths of a human being (or whatever it was) doesn't that already open the door to subjugation and oppression? When you say the Red Man is really a child then you're saying what, exactly: that you can steal his land because he doesn't know how to make productive use of it? And what does it mean to say that one man counts as two women witnesses?

As always, you need to reflect on your own tone of voice to avoid the smugness that says other people are not being reasonable.. Not just as a teacher, or as part of a moment of reflection on a blogpost that can then be conveniently be forgotten about, but as a person.

I'm still not sure if it holds, though, or if it always holds. Seems like a lot of low-lying conservatism and hierarchical structure is based on the ground assumption that others may be human, but no too human. It seems like a further step to think of others as totally devoid of any humanity.

The wonderful, wonderful Rebecca Solnit writes:

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

The full text can be found here

southern freeze

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

---Susan Sontag.

Some more idle, arbitrary chatter:

back in the soulful days, when being cynical wasn't seen as a sign of intelligence, a rite of passage to an understanding of the world, a mark of maturity. That kind of whingeing fanaticism tires you, grates on your nerves. the hysterical frame of mind that sees evil, barbarians, everywhere. there's something northern about it, perhaps. slightly unhinged. wants to shatter everything-religion, the state, society, the very notion of truth- with a hammer, is in love with sickness and suffering, even as one harps on about health. Man (and not just man) is sick (and God isn't feeling too well either!). Killing someone is viewed as 'incivility'! What the fuck? All that is needed is one that see another person as a human being. Evidently not!

You don't think understanding is a revelation of an idea, but a meeting of it half way. What Hannah saw: those who think there is only the world, animal life, come to detest the world, want to escape from it, and from life itself. And yet Hannah, the Allama, aren't idols. No need to get so upset or defensive about them. He who follows Iqbal doesn't need to follow Iqbal.

Chatter. Yes, that's it! That's it precisely! Had this very same discussion with the dougal in the morning, over delicious German bread and honey with Lukas and Anjum. Hierarchy, the men in pointed hats, the 'knowers' and the experts. Kenneth Clark was perhaps right after all: they're often thick as swans. Knowing isn't everything. Why does this often go hand-in-hand with a contempt for ordinary things, for mere 'opinion'? The opposite of muddled thinking isn't the absence of thinking, but a different approach, a different notion of clarity, one that includes caritas. That's work, hard work for some..not a matter of wondering whether another person is human or not but, rather: how can you be more human. Right-seeing is also about seeing oneself clearly. Not a definitive image, but an approach, an exercise, an exploration.

anton, love your images and words to bits, and am in awe of your intelligence, but do let me finish a post first, dear one!

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.