Post title

Books, maps, ways out, enigmas, the enigma of capital buried. The unread, the unsaid. A clearing, a  grove, a patch of land hidden from the world. Old Hazlitt, a memento from Kyoto, the blurring of the old and the new. Leonardo, commodified, down to the mystique. Dollar ink to write a book, shades to protect your eyes from the excessive light; headphones to keep the world of sound out. Gelpi's beautiful book on Denise. Jonas, quiet for the moment. The tree of knowledge, the tree...

"If you continue to work and to absorb beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old."

The opening gambit from Casal's book, Joys and Sorrow. Isn't that another Mir? why is 'gambit' a tripping up? In the beginning must we always fall? For who, what? First base.

The old maps were more accurate and so were thought to be less accurate. Abstraction and the clearing (Scott's Seeing Like a State). This distancing, in order to see more clearly. Here we are, post title, with nothing to say...

~~~

"For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free".
---John Berger.

Are there any other kinds of freedom?, Brando asked.

~~~

There is something a lot more enjoyable in writing that comes from personal experience, from having lived well-with an open hand a free heart-in the world. The first lines of Casal's book suggests just this quality; others include: Peter Brook, Thomas Merton. The writing is not about ideas of knowledge per se (if there ever is a per se), but the simple expression of forms (of words, music, images) that have been lived through...an incarnation of a truth in the body's gestures: the wave of a hand, a wise smile, a restrained gaze, the resigned shrug of the shoulders, a laughter that doesn't mock, and a thousand other manifestations or possibilities.

Why do you struggle to think of female writers in the same way, or do you? Carol Shields comes across as wise and you'd expect any biographical work to show that. You're very keen to read the new biography of Penelope Fitzgerald since she, too,  appears to have had a wise head and heart. Then there's the more enigmatic Stella Bowen (who you've only heard of via J.B.). No, this isn't a gender thing. If there is a distinction then it is about abstraction and theory on the one hand and a worldly 'philosophy' on the other. F. Rosenzweig, again.

a mysterious unclarity

After the storm there was no storm.

The memory of things lasts, like the afterglow of a brilliant, vanished world, or an image that survives down the centuries, inhering in the blood- memory of a people.

After the storm the world was not the world. Everything was inverted, strange, and yet familiar. A tree at your feet. Like a drunken Li po you wanted to dive into the watery image, the imaginary world. Your hand would lead the way and your heart would follow. Your hand pure, full of sin...

After the storm the light returned, the sky brightened. Hours could be found in a moment. This late flaring of the sun like time regained. The light leaned into a mild blue breeze, touching every surface, becoming universal. It reached the west of Wales, a bay that suddenly lies flat and open to the skies. Like a grave, the pool that gathers leaves and twigs and bits of broken images to itself, it was a time of indistinction. Like Monet's pond, or love, or something.

To walk in the dark with an image in your heart. If faith is below the left nipple then where is a lack of faith?

The dark hunger of a life, a world in the dark pool of your eyes. A storm in a teacup, the tea sipped with infinite calm a thousand miles away.

A woman asked you for a word. You asked what it would be worth. " A picture," she said, a picture of a storm.

'If I have said nothing of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment...I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting..a face broadly formed...This tender body varied all the time, like a plant...'

---Yourcenar.

mysterious clarity

He achieved that rarest of  things; a heart free of bitterness.

---G. Dyer, on Camus.

~~~

What shape is the human heart, again? Oblong? Must one be outside it to see it clearly?

---after Holub.

~~~

It is said of P. Fitzgerald that she wrote (I like to say 'writes') with a "mysterious clarity". Nothing really happens and maybe nothing is meant to happen. That is life. Instead there is a cool, plane surface of prose on which, now and then, one detects a faint scratch; it is as if a whole world lives in that groove/grove or as if the backdrop to a life is suddenly illuminated by what goes wrong.

~~~

What would it mean to accept the cards one has been dealt, to not think or hope too much that the next twist will deal you an ace? For some, either by choice or temperament, either by ignorance, lack of will or because they've faced terrible circumstances, there will always be a foreboding sense of a deepening darkness. The world is a dark place and when one thinks of the coarse thinking, the violence, and all the hatreds it is not unreasonable to favour withdrawal, quietness, escape. 

~~~

Slowly reading Yourcenar and the question that strikes you again and again-and one that is quite alien to us in many respects-is the one posed by Hans Jonas: how do we go on without a sense of immortality or the timeless?

When one thinks of one's thoughts, words and deeds in the light of eternity one is brought face to face with the reality that much of what we say and do is fragmentary and not worth noting. From a Muslim perspective we are told that the body, too, will bear witness to what it sent forth into the world, that it, too, will be accountable since it is a part of reality and shares responsibility with the soul. Our lusts, our desires, our highest desires...how do these fare with time?

What shape is the heart, again? Were there other rooms there? Some abandoned, like camps in the desert when the travelers have moved on, the structure of the coals and ashes collapsing like the last lines of a poem. A thief, a thief has entered another with the stealth of a fox in the night. You dare not switch on the lights and let the fox tug gently...Everything has its time: the flick of the wrist, the card; the same constellation of the stars comes around again, and the fox's footprints, fresh, deep, and invisible in a heart white as snow.  

notes without a text

Bazlen was a great Taoist master. He taught me more than anyone else, without teaching anything. He was rather against writing, he didn’t think one should necessarily write. He thought one ought to try to be in some way, without necessarily writing about it. He had a stupendous line, which is published in his posthumous writings—“Once people were born alive and slowly they died. Now one is born dead and slowly has to come to life.”

---Roberto Calasso.

F. Rosenzweig:

"My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, bymen rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...

Everyday life, it is clear, cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the sublime realm of theory, no matter how "essential" it may seem when compared to dull, tedious reality."

~~~

A book, what is in a book? Today there is only an imagined strawberry and a mouth.
What can one say? We live in a world where everyone wants to say something, and some people want to say everything. 

one must write, engage, communicate, "express oneself" (unless one doesn't have much of a self in the first place)..one must say "one"....but the name that names least...

Well, what have you got to say for yourself?

~~~

When you're grading papers even the movement of a fly appears interesting. Very rarely will a fly loop around a still centre; and there is nothing casual about its movement. The flight of a fly is full of suspicion and lacks any grace. It becomes apparent why it is so low down on the evolutionary scale. After all these millions of years you would have thought it would have added something to its repertoire, something beyond its innate cunning nature. 

~~~

When it comes down to luck or capricious decisions one often says something like: 'as the gods would have it' and not: as God would have it. Is there something about chance that necessarily implies plurality?

The Caging of America

The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time...

A prison is a trap for catching time.

---from Adam Gopnik's brilliant New Yorker article, The Caging of America.

~~~

Everyone likes a good survivor story...the man or woman who comes out of all the mire clean, at peace with themselves, not bitter but thankful. Of course, that helps deflect any criticism of the system. Focus on the individual case of redemption and not the damned in hell or about who helped put them there. Is this really just segregation by another name?

Who hasn't america been afraid of? Gooks, Chinks, the Yellow Peril, the Red Man, reds under the bed, niggers, joos, faggots, dikes, sodomites, muzzies, witches, drunkards, crack-heads towel-heads, catholics, Mongolians, the Irish; popery, fundamentalism, socialism, pro-lifers, anti-lifers, losers, liberals, drop-outs, people, the people, gun-carrying loners, big government, any government, high-finance, no finance, the insane, the U.N....

There is something, however, about the faces of these people which causes you to immediately think of one word: dignity.

~~~

America has more than 6 million people in jail, on probation (or parole).

3 % of the adult population.

700/100, 000 (which is 4 or 5 times the European average)

But that's just an average figure. For black men it is:6850/100,000

Pathologies of the institutional life

One of my greatest desires has to be the desire to be left alone (not to be alone, which is quite another thing).

At the university one increasingly hears a lot of jargon, bullshit, fakery, pseudo-serious posturing, a lot of old malarky, and codswallop dressed up as sophistication, and so on. We will "produce" (that should be a giveaway for starters): "leaders", "world leaders",..we will be "a centre of excellence" (well, yes, who is going to say we'll be a centre of mediocrity or just-getting-through?). Critical thought, critical reasoning..our students will be "global citizens" in a multi-cultural, fast-changing, technology-saturated, false world of soundbytes and meaningless aggression. Ethics 101, business ethics 102, will guide students on how to come across as, well, "ethical".

We believe in racial/sexual/gender/ethnic/ physical/religious and all other kinds of equality (except we don't). We must "look forward". The knowledge economy, for Christ's sake. In the space of 140 characters describe your contribution to the university. Absolute subservience, I would say, Sir!

Let us set up a committee to decide on the value of committees. Aha, communism lives on in the uni.

We must "empower" the students today, the leaders of tomorrow (and bollocks to all of you in the past). There is zero tolerance for zero intolerance. We must "equip" our students with the "skills" that will enable them to navigate an ever-changing future, but also prepare them for the worst (that they will not have a future thanks to us).

We must produce generalists for the market..that is what the market wants...people who are so general that they don't know or can't be bothered to answer any questions. We must move to massive online education. Why not multiple choice questions (they work so well for SAT)?

Descartes was:

a) a town in rural France
b) left back for France
c) an 18th century prostitute
d) I do not know.

Partial credit will be awarded for all rough work. Only answer in the space provided. This is a closed book exam, though you may phone a friend. Do not write in pencil. Do not write in pencil...Do not write...

Kandahar

'That will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and the blue icecaps on the mountains; the lines of white poplars fluttering in the wind, and the long white prayer flags; the fields of asphodels that followed the tulips; or the fat tailed sheep brindling the hills above Chagcharan, and the ram with a tail so big they had to tie it to a cart. We shall not lie on our backs on the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We shall not read Babur’s memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way round the rose bushes. Or sit in the peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh.

We will not stand on the Buddha’s head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes-the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields; the sweet resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or a whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet.’

---Chatwin.

~~~

The long view.

For a brief moment you can imagine the vague light, the crackling fires, the poor people huddled around it,warming their hands, as not so different from a scene depicted by Brueghel.

It is strange to think just how deep-rooted the instincts for human settlement and the great desire for regularity are? Habits and habitat. A phrase from Smith has always struck you: "habitual reflection". When does freedom become our second-nature?

~~~

In your darker moments you sometimes think Pakistan will go the way of Afghanistan. Certainly we've been pulled to the frontier and coupled with the influence of the towel-heads things have really deteriorated. But, on the other hand, there must be at least 5,000 women in this city who wake up and put on some lipstick before 11 o'clock-for work or the sheer pleasure of it; and tens of thousands who get their kids ready for school. That must count for something in the long run.

We tend to see things from the perspective of our own lives, the narrow time-horizons of a human life. It is difficult to imagine that others before us suffered the same wounds, were touched by the same rapture and joys. And yet that sense of strangeness is not so different from how we think about the lives of our contemporaries in far-flung places. The fundamentalists may be very different from us, but the fundamentals still apply..."a kiss is still a kiss.."

The Platonic Form of McDonalds

'They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work'

~~~

McDonalds is the same all over the world. The same food, the same design of the "restaurants", the same colours, and even the people are trained to say the same things: "Have a good day, please come again". Fuck off! It is very odd to hear a Punjabi being so polite and one can almost see them gritting their teeth as they switch to McDonalds training mode. Follow the rules and repeat after me: I am a human being..I am a human...I think the background "music" may vary but it must be an equal music...i.e. equally mind-numbing.

The funniest thing at McDonalds is their attempt to add a "cultural element" to their "menu". This year it's 'the Brazilian' because of the World Cup. Ain't no way I'm going there to order one.

In this way capitalism resembles communism-and that isn't too surprising when one considers that both are deeply (though not necessarily exclusively) materialistic in nature.

It is perhaps surprising, unless one thinks about it, just how conformist and mechanical capitalist societies are. Of course, the state has played a large role in the homogenization of the population (education, national myths, language, exclusive loyalty..Simone Weil: the state and money are the new gods). But the market also requires standardization (property rights) and commensurabilities (how else can exchanges take place?). The false universalization of the market (and economic theory): we are rational, self-interested individuals.

At the Camps: "I was just doing my job". Each being is just another number, replaceable by a machine or another "human". Does it make a difference? When does it all begin, though? Is this not just a continuation of the practices and thought of the war machine? Line 'em up. The disciplining of bodies. The speaking up for "one" nation, the zeal to lose oneself in abstractions, to imagine the map is the reality.

~~~

Nature likes diversity. Was thinking about this when a  friend said: the mullahs' attempts to enforce uniformity (from dress code to profession of faith) go against nature. Is that why fundamentalism leads to so many deformations, so many warped souls?

~~~

The role of the unstructured in our lives. The permanent background of it (death, laughter, play, the imagination, grace). The law vs the lawless heart. The unsayable. The name that names least is the name. Of course, one might also say that it is a different kind of order. Eco: the open work is still a 'work'. A broken circle.

~~~
Will Self has a fab. article on the end of the novel.

Faith & Doubt

"A chance transformed into destiny by a continuous choice": my Christianity...

A chance: from birth and more broadly from a cultural heritage. sometimes I have replied to the question: "If you were Chinese, there is little chance you'd be Christian." To be sure, but you are speaking of another me. I cannot choose my ancestors, or my contemporaries. There is, in my origins, a chance element, if I look at things from the outside, and an irreducible situational fact, if I consider them from within. So I am, by birth and heritage. And I accept this.'

---P. Ricoeur.

~~~

In the faith of the fundamentalists there is no room for doubt but you have to remind yourself that in the best traditions there has always been ample space for uncertainty. Laughter, trust in the unknown, too, are not unrelated to such attitudes, perhaps? To which the question might be pushed back one stage: at what level is there doubt and why this desire to move it back all the way to the origins? Isn't that just bad faith? Doubt love, one's senses, one's common sense, the world as it is, the mind's capacity to know (why does this even become a question?), then what is left? And why is this a starting point in the first place?

If to be human is to be finite, limited, then is it a superhuman capacity or effort to accept one's limits? In this light Rumi says: "He who knows himself knows his Lord" (to which there's an added commentary: to know the finite is to know something of the infinite). Of course, "knowing the finite" is only a limit.

~~~

I think as one grows older one understands less-or at least understands that one doesn't understand that much and probably never will. You also grow more confident in leaving the crutches of books to one side (I read that somewhere). 

To accept the "chance element" in one's life? To do so one already has to have faith, some kind of faith. You can't imagine an acceptance of all chance elements being a truly human response.

I sometimes pray: "please God, don't make me religious". To be religious is to be questioned.

~~~

Academics often get stuck on "perhaps" and "maybe", and have a tendency to say "yes & no". Given the certainties of so many other people this is a good thing. But surely there's a time to say: No. Yes. No? 

Exupery, History and the French!

'Searching for the causes of that collapse, the most honest honorable minds—Marc Bloch and Camus among them—thought that the real fault lay in the French habit of abstraction. The French tradition that moved, and still moves, pragmatic questions about specific instances into a parallel paper universe in which the general theoretical question—the model—is what matters most had failed its makers. Certainly, one way of responding to the disaster was to search out some new set of abstractions, of overarching categories to replace those lost. But a more humane response was to engage in a ceaseless battle against all those abstractions that keep us from life as it is. No one put this better than the heroic Bloch himself:

The first task of my trade (i.e. of the historian, but more broadly the humanist properly so called) consists in avoiding big-sounding abstract terms. Those who teach history should be continually concerned with the task of seeking the solid and concrete behind the empty and abstract. In other words, it is on men rather than functions that they should concentrate all their attention.'

---from Adam Gopnik's article in the New Yorker.

~~~

Of course, this isn't just France. What would academic economics be if it wasn't so abstract? And you wonder if the old idea of philosophy as guiding people how to live a good life isn't somehow lost in all the technicalities. Another game, at a higher level admittedly, but a game nevertheless. 

Is thinking, then, related to or dependent on the right way of seeing? On being at the right distance but also about knowing when to focus on the particular, the singular, and when generalizations are limited?  

strawberry sunday

A visit to a lovely small farm (one acre) on the outskirts of Lahore to gather some strawberries. There are some huge landowners in this country but the media size of farms is 3 or 4 acres. 

As you sat in the shade and Manzoor, who sat on his haunches, sorted the strawberries for us I couldn't but help notice his incredibly bony and elongated hands, as if they were extensions of his arms, his very personality. For how many years, you wondered, had he been planting and picking strawberries? For how many generations had his family been involved in agriculture, repeating the same gestures, the same body movements, over the same seasons so that they had been integrated into the style of his thinking, the fashion of his talking, his ideas of fate and freedom?

Given that agriculture has played such a large part in the history of the people in this region (and in world history, as well) you have to wonder just how the structures of ownership, the nature of production, leave their mark on the personality and character of the people involved. 

You can romanticize all you want about 'the land' and the peasants ability to accept reality, but if truth be told it's always been profoundly hierarchical, hasn't it? One can talk about the time of agriculture being antithetical to the time of capitalism (cycles of return vs linear time). But one surely has to remember just how constricting some of those circles could be..same old, same old.

A line from Graeber:

'The logic of identity is always entangled with the logic of hierarchy'.

Man, those strawberries sure did taste sweet. And you hope your strawberry jam and frozen yoghurt turn out well. But you can't but help think of those bent backs in the early morning, of the people who scratch out a living from a small piece of the earth, and who probably always will...

time is a journey, not a destination

222. A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.

223. This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

224. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness. History will perhaps judge the latter with the criterion set forth by Romano Guardini: “The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age”.

---The Pope.

the 60-second news

And if it rains in Hong Kong, so what?

A man would cut off his little finger rather than save the whole of China.

~~~

We're all connected now. I read about it somewhere. Six degrees or something. Or was that global warming? I am a citizen of the world-even though I can't afford a house in this part of the city. I've been to Italy and sampled the culture there..yes, it's true, the pizzas are much better there and the women prettier too(at least before they get married).

There's a famine in Africa. And capitalism is to blame. Or capitalism is the solution...I forget now. I am a sensitive soul, far too sensitive for this world if you ask me or my mother. I was just reading a review on empathy in the NYRB. I'll dig out the figures one day to prove to you bastards...I was trained as a theorist, which is why I can't tie my own shoelaces. In the so-called "real world" people without culture and pedigree irritate me. How they manage to talk to women or order food at a swanky restaurant, so un-selfconsciously, amazes me to this day. Art is my middle name though I can't get to see most of the nudes online due to some ridiculous censorship policy. Didn't Heidegger once say, in his late period: to dwell in the cave, far from the sun's light, is to feel cold?  

I have downloaded 10,000 books on my Nexus. I have lots of classical music stored...only the good stuff, like Mozart and Wagner. I saw the film version of both. Lots of riff-raff in those days.     
...

Franzen's krauss book is truly awful...or maybe it's just krauss. The mass of detail, footnotes and opinions can only be of interest to a scholar who has specialized in the period...which says a lot, I think, about scholarship and the idea of " periodization".

Franzen promises to redeem the work by saying how its narrow focus opens up issues that are relevant to our times...which is what we really want when you think about it. There's got to be a better way of doing this. Anyway, 80 pages in you're giving up.

Isn't blogging, though, just another symptom?

wood

'Wood holds together better
than sea or cloud or sand or cloud
much better than real sea or sand or cloud
It chose that way to grow and not to move

..while the light goes around it
like a prowling animal..

It may be solid, may be hollow
But it can shelter what is within'

Wood: stable/unstable. The fragility of all that lasts.

The floorboards-for whatever reason-suggest a way of life.

~~~

Wooden floors-especially patterned wooden floors-will always remind you of school, of assembly where you pretended to sing the psalms and the long corridors that held the extremes of silence and noise at different times of the day. What you remember of school is the wood and the long windows..and the light that related one to the other.  A story, in glass and wood, is the human heart.

Wood suggests a strange kind of authority. 

Wood, keeps handprints, footmarks, smudges, screeches, all the signs of touch in fact, for a lot longer than expected. We retreat into the woods. People engrave a heart or a name into the surface of wood. "I was here", to match wood's eloquent presence.  But it is only the surface. Wood shines darkly. The concentric years continue. You go against the grain, imagining centre.

Wood survived the fire (Kyoto). Wood is the fire.

---

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

the future that never was

For those of you who were hooked to Star Trek, Space 1999 and others, there's this brilliant piece:

http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars

'My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens.'

~~~

The end of the (American) dream: work hard, play hard; respect and decency; trust in institutions; a sense of stable values: everyone knows their place (women, especially); God is in His high heaven. Science and technology will, inevitably lead to progress. If time is linear then we will move on ("stages of growth"..from material to the spiritual, in some versions). A belief that freedom and democracy will eventually triumph, superstition and tyranny will collapse (since falsehood by its very nature is perishable). 

There will be new things, new wonders. We will be startled by the future and our own opulence. The "economic problem," Keynes said, would have been solved. 

And yet, the odd thing is that in popular culture at least there's a strange fascination for apocalyptic or post-apocalyptical narratives, a wish for it to all end (maybe out of exhaustion?). The idea that we'd "get there" in the end loses its appeal when we're not even sure of what "getting there" or "success" means. Like modern-day Eloi, we're bored stiff (Simmel: blase). 

The end of the 'space age' is symbolic of that spectacular failure of imagination. But could it have been that what was imagined wasn't that great in the first place, that our dreams were tarnished, impoverished, not fundamentally different from those of a peasant? The poverty of our imagination. The dream of freedom is given shape by the former constraints that it aspires to escape from. What kind of forward dreaming, what "ifs", without the divine? Gagarin gets there and says: "there's no god here"

The poor man's son parable by Adam Smith. You get what your heart desires and suddenly realize, perhaps too late, that it isn't all it was cracked up to be; it's just cracked. 

But if there's no forward momentum to time now (there is only "now") then where does that leave us? Nostalgia for some pure past, before civilization: the tribe, the race, 'home'...the past that never really was?

Can we ever get over the importance of myths in structuring our reality? We need a story...In the beginning...(you can't understand anyone without a story, which is why, I suppose, blogging doesn't connect you to readers). 

Against all this simulation, "virtuality", the screen savers, the computer wizards, the online addictions, "updates", "instant access" (to what, precisely), is war the only real thing? Is violence-as Mailer once asked-the only way of reassuring oneself of one's status as a being (animal or otherwise)and not an automaton, nor merely part of a declining phase of history? Nihilism: "I" against "I".

The future wasn't true, nor was the past. In fact, hasn't the whole notion of truth been banished? If there is only 'sovereign becoming'-and "process" is,as Hannah informs us-a key word to unlock the century-then who is the person who can stand apart from it and say "is" or "I"?   

~~~

C. Booker wrote about how the seventies was the last decade, the time when people realized nothing new was going to happen, just be rehashed into new forms (montage, cut and paste). The retro decade. Also, the beginning of conservatism (political, ecological..fundamentalism and nationalism). The end of stories: the big picture is that there is no big picture.

...

"..a historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation and pastiche..."    

common worlds

"But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic, unprofitable, businesses is inevitable..But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that binds us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost"
---Bowley.

~~~

"First like this, then like that," she said, but in the fluttering of an eyelid  she was gone.

Ask eye to see its own eyelashes 
(Chinese proverb)

~~~

What remains to be said, remains to be said. 

Do I only imagine that I once had a country, a language, a word for each thing.  When the child was a child he pointed to the cupboard. "What is it, now!" But with time they realized the child only wanted a cube of sugar. With time we know each other without words, with the simple common gestures we share, such as the pointing to what we need or like. It takes love and time to achieve silence. Someone only has to describe a picture of someone I know in a minimum of words and the image is clear and bright in my mind. 

I am often mistaken for someone else. I, too, often make the same mistake.

What happens with the disappearance of a way of life, a way, a path, a vantage point? What trace of shared times, which gestures survives and are passed down without our knowing? Faith, today, in your smile...Today, there is no time for the other, just the insistence on our lack of essence, the dull acceptance of the fact-or so we are told-that we are lost. 

How to find one's way back? We stand, backs up against the future, averting our eyes.  Some clearing, bright-hearted, always there. Plenty Coups, faced with the inevitable is thrown a lifeline to the unimaginable, and it comes to him in a dream. Are dreams and sleep the last routes out? 

The past is a thick book full of sliding photographs.  There is no country, no religion, no race or tribe.  There is an understanding that alone, together, we fall.

~~~

We are drunken ecstatics who have let our hearts
Go to the wild.  We are musty scholars
Of love, and old friends of the wine cup.

(transl. Robert Bly)

This door is the mouth of love,
Whether it leads to the mosque or the wine-shop.
Souls inhabit the dust of its threshold,
Swept up at every meeting,
Scattered at every leavetaking,
Living at the edge of inside and out,
Like a kiss.

a cat is never on the side of power.
---Chris Marker.

I think we enter this place, a university, a home, a museum, a random building to forget or lose ourselves, to step out of the grey rain that takes something away from us. We enter into contracts not sure of who we are. A page, a line, a word from a book catches your eye and it gives you immense pleasure to see the page number has been marked before with a diagonal. The human mind and the human heart returns again and again, unbidden, to something familiar.

There is the possibility of changing one's voice, of squinting to keep the world out, the lower key and imagined gentleness...

'a greeting,
As gentle and as loving as I can make it
To you, today, beyond all changing days.'

It exists, shadow-like, like religion in the desert of the pagans, like a reflection in the water that recomposes itself in stillness, like a token, a ticket one is handed at a park or amusement arcade, but it does exist.

There is this longing for home (a, our); there is memory of the slowness of time somewhere, bundled in some forgotten corner of the house.

The late afternoon sun is in our faces. There is an image, a final image that sobers me up, makes me pause and that I cannot face.  It catches my throat-and already by saying "my"I have said too much. What weight there is will always be with us.  We will always be here, no matter how wide our travels, how deep our reading. 

We take a step in, thinking we can avoid the structure of the world only to see it replicated.  But there are other rooms. You wait, as if patience was the last of your virtues. Someone with a veined hand-Swami or Ubo-turns the handle and opens the simple door and you hold on to what you already knew.

1706

'S rejected the 'cavils of philosophy' in his own time with its quixotic search for analytic precision in domains far from moral concern and, in any case, where precision was far from attainable. Thus, Rene Descartes was of much less interest to S as a sceptic than as a deluded seeker after certainty...

S had a pragmatic side which dismissed the possibility that human feelings and thoughts might not have a relation to a determinate reality.

...

A humanity prior to society was simply inconceivable if one insisted on natural human sociability...For S, humans were always already social, immersed in society, culture and history.'

"I take my being upon trust"

~~~

There is a great deal of mistrust in the world. For language, other human beings (more specifically: men and women, the 'religious' and non-religious), of the individual mind's capacity to know; mistrust of professionals, experts, politicians, bankers, the media. And yet, things go on, miraculously.

To have such trust in one's senses and in the world and other human beings is today to stand accused of being naive and unsophisticated. One must doubt everything-and the more enthusiastically so the better! Debunk, trash, ridicule, mock, critique, break down, summarize or see everything through the prism of history or the personal. Nothing must be allowed to stand-not the social and certainly not religion, nothing except for the isolated individual. What, then, of common sense, of the sense of the common? 

Nowhere near

There is nowhere near enough time or space in my heart to explain what I'm feeling. There is no forever, just this brief, momentary glimpse, temporarily kept in the iron grid of our memories and hopes. There is autumn, always autumn, and we carry it with us. There are times when we recognize, must..there is no way of saying, no way of understanding. Poetry is a conceit, the rest so much childish games. 

...

There is an apple tree but the fruit too sweet, or too bitter to eat. Much of it falls to the ground, frost-starred. We play cricket together, re-living our childhood for a short while, but already there is a chill in the air and an uninvited guest at the door...

We laugh, laugh heartily. That was our mistake. Not that it matters, either way.  Draw yourself down to some fundamental simplicity or open yourself up.The nowhere, near, crosses our path.

~~~

Thank you for your comment, Roxana. I will try and respond here. When Berger writes:

"The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentially of holding with words the totality of human experience-everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot b hostile to man."

I'm sceptical.

First off, I don't have many fixed views and I think it's important to change or at least think again with time.

But I still think that for large swathes of experience words are adequate to their task-or the gap between the word and the thing itself is not something to fret about. We may always see through a dark glassly. I think there is a time to accept ourselves as we are-and more importantly, to accept others as there are. There is a danger, in my opinion, of "perfection" (assuming words or people must be a perfect match, must capture everything). The thing-in-itself..what is that? I think there is, with me, always a "muslim sensibility" that not everything can or should be 'named' as well a sort of aniconic perspective which always makes one cautious of mistaking the image for reality.

I think I've also written a lot about trust/tawakuul, about how difficult it is to live with those gaps in our understanding, and with our own finitude. The gaps in which we say "if" or "what if". There will always be a longing for elsewhere, for something that doesn't fade and fall. I think our love and loves are divided that way. This, to me, also seems like an essential part of human experience (Mir: the song of joy and sorrow is always with us). And Denise: the world is never with us enough..but also sometimes it is too much with us.

When it comes to certain experiences, events, I think words are inadequate. In front of a great work of art or music one is moved, speechless In extreme sadness, grief, and in disasters or catastrophes words too seem a pale shadow (though images and music may get closer).  I did write "there are times..." and it is sometimes a terrible necessity.

All of this does sound terribly confused. There is a proper love of the world and a proper desire to escape from it, I guess (which suggests there are improper forms). I think we will always look through the dark windows, back on our lives and 'out there', too. What we see may be blurred and indistinct but the longing for clarity is true. I think we will always be torn and there will always be this cross, which cannot be described.