Responsibility

Some sense of what can now be expected was given by the Israeli reserve major general Oren Shachor, who explained: “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.”

---S. Milne, The Guardian.

It always surprises you why the Israel-Palestinian 'conflict' (perhaps occupation is a better word) always elicits such strong and passionate views from people not directly involved in it. I mean, when it comes to Darfur or gas attacks on the Kurds, East Timor or East Pakistan there is a great reluctance to even acknowledge any great injustice inflicted by the brothers, let alone beat one's chest about the suffering. The occupation of Kashmir fails, for some odd reason, to get people very excited (perhaps because 'mystical' India is beyond reproach...more likely that large potential markets don't favour much honesty).

Benjy: Hamas is 100% responsible for the deaths of civilians (Palestinian and Israeli). 

Now, in terms of causality the argument goes: IF they didn't fire the rockets Israel wouldn't have responded and there would be no deaths. That makes some sense, but is causality the same thing as responsibility? If Israel didn't pound Gaza then there would be no deaths. So, how far does mechanical causality take one? 

I think the argument about responsibility entails an idea about freedom:Israel did not have any choice, therefore it is not responsible; Hamas did have some choice and are therefore responsible. But is that true? I suppose Hamas would say that being cornered and living in conditions that have been equated with a large camp by some that they had no other choice. 

You don't buy that from either side. 100%? There are very few cases in life where something is 100%.

~~~

Mark Edmundson:

Perhaps there's always a  tension (if not contradiction) between the simultaneous need for transmission and continuity on the one hand, and the need to see things in a new, fresh light on the other. Broken circles. 

'The primary reason to study Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who at a cocktail party is never embarrassed (but can embarrass others). The ultimate reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. They may help you to cut through established opinion — doxa — about who you are and what the world is. They may give you new ways of seeing and saying things, and those ways may be truer for you than the ones that you grew up with. Genuine education is a process that gives students a second chance. They've been socialized once by their parents and teachers; now it's time for a second, maybe a better, shot. It's time — to be a little idealizing about it — for Socrates to have a turn.

For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists. She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does. Does she come to college as a fundamentalist guardian of crude faith? Then two necessary books for her are Freud's Future of an Illusion and Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ. Once she's weathered the surface insults, she may find herself in an intellectual version of paradise, where she can defend her beliefs or change them, and where what's on hand is not a chance conversation, as Socrates liked to say, but a dialogue about how to live. Is the student a scion of high-minded liberals who think that religion is the OxyContin — the redneck heroin — of Redneck Nation? Then on might come William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience or Schopenhauer's essays on faith. It's this kind of dialogue, deliberate, gradual, thoughtful, that immersion in the manic culture of the Internet and Adderall conditions students not to have. The first step for the professor now is to slow his classroom down. The common phrase for what he wants to do is telling: We "stop and think." Stop. Our students rarely get a chance to stop. They're always in motion, always spitting out what comes first to mind, never challenging, checking, revising.'

So, something in-between the reverence for the status quo and the constant need for change (which is concomitant with the ethos of late capitalism). If a good education is about balance then it has to be said that a lot education isn't very good-training students for the market or inducting them into snobbish and elitist ideas of knowledge. The extreme specialization and levels of abstraction in many fields ultimately making the approach to the question of how to live far too removed from life itself to be of much relevance. Academic, as in: redundant. 

In any case, modern conditions of life militate against thoughtfulness, slowness, and second spaces, against a few, limited possibilities being known in any depth.

Fragments

A. Resnais: Muriel - Escena final from jecoero on Vimeo.

Overheard on the 'down' escalator at Tottenham Court Road, a young black woman turning at an angle to speak to her friend says, with a broad and wide smile: "It's only now that I know what she was saying".

~~~

A page turned to at random:

'It's only a quarter of an hour to Charing X from here'
--Malcolm Lowry.

~~~

A radio 4 interview with a doctor treating a man injured from the ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

"Is he a fighter?"

"No, he's a lawyer"

[roughly]:
And there you see the complexity of the situation...how the same events can be viewed as being very different depending on...

Er..how can the kidnapping and brutal murder of three kids be seen from 'another point of view'? How can the killing of an estimated 120 people be viewed as 'understandable'?

~~~

'My king is caught now in a world of trust.'
---Elizabeth Jennings.

Life studies. Where do you live...now.

At the local library, at a desk facing a window, looking out on to tall trees, dark moist and shaded grass. Beyond that the crowded back terraces of a thousand unknown lives. An old, gaunt man sits two tables down and laughs to himself. A man whose bones are almost visible and who reminds you of a piece of walking scaffolding asks for The Kite Runner by someone whose name begins with H. 

"We haven't got it"

"Can you order it for me?"

"Come back tomorrow"

"How does one become a member of this library? I ask because I don't want my wife issuing books on my library card."

A hushed silence of knowing recognition.

there is so much smallness in this small library. Only the poetry section offers a bright-lit window. One section is called 'literature'. 'Fiction' is completely separate.

~~~

Richard Holmes: biography is like music in a way: a search for the line, the theme, the arc that unites a life is like the melody that holds the notes together. Binocular vision: the factual with the dream-like, each taking from the other, crossing the page. 

Far, far more interesting than J. Meades who is all showy, fake, and who suffers from the overcompensation one typically sees in the working classes or self-educated who 'make it'.

~~~

You have nothing to say and you say it well.

~~~

Proportionality. Well, there have been 160 deaths on one side and none on the other, said a man. Well, yes, came the official response. But the threat, the threat.

~~~

Six degrees of separation. Think of a book. Imagine a book.

"I can't imagine a book"

"What does it remind you of?"

"A film"

"No, no. Some other book, title, cover, useless trivia about the author."

"Got it. Plato's Republic"

"Good. What does it remind you of?"

"Nothing, I never finished it"

"A bed, perhaps"

"Yes, two degrees"

The turning tide?

The view from my window, right now, 8.40, Thursday, 2014.

~~~

The Brazil match (fiasco) which was more than a football match and less than one at the same time. The horror-yes, that's the only word-on the faces of the supporters. Someone commented about how though they didn't even like football they were riveted to this spectacle because it was if in a few minutes someone's whole destiny could be mapped out. As the newspapers later said: 'some of the players will be scarred for life'. The idea that everything can fall apart in six minutes and that no matter what else happens in your life later on you'll always be remembered for that fatal night and your part in it.

You blanked out. I think that was the instinctive defensive reaction. As if to say: I wasn't really there and had nothing to do with it...it was like fate hurtling towards you and all you could do was close your eyes. Far better to think that than imagine you were, somehow, a part of the whole, terrible scheme, that you were part of the story.

Right said Fred: it will take a higher power to help us forget/move on. Does the manner of defeat have something to do with the evangelical spirit of Luiz and others? The belief that God is on your side and that grace will get you through, no matter what. The tide will turn, the sky will clear and you'll find your own pace again, your place in history; the old times will return, the old style regained, as familiar as an old note played on the piano that is the old west, that is late music hall legend and that is suddenly remembered. 

But the realization that there's nothing to play for now. Go through the motions and kill time or sit in the long grass or under a tree's shade and observe the tired mothers in the park...

~~~

But the need to break with 30 years of cash-backed dogma against public ownership goes well beyond rail. The privatised industries haven't only failed to deliver efficiency, value for money, accountability or secure jobs. They have also sucked wealth, rentier-style, out of sitting-duck monopolies, concentrated economic decision-making in fewer and fewer hands, deepened inequality and failed to deliver the investment essential to sustainable growth.

---S. Milne, The Guardian.

lost words

The distances are the only things that are real, he thought to himself. With time he had thought they had given some shape to his life. With time. The negative space, the background material, somehow giving the vague, indeterminate and shadowy image some kind of stability. Of all the silences in the world this is the one he knew best and thought it would be incorrect to say that he had grown to love it it was fair to conclude that he had grown so used to it that it glittered like a large, old coin, 1837, he once found in the dust of his backyard. It conferred on him a temporary but delightful sense of knowing the correct words, the way a king might speak after a crown was placed on his head. What was that word, again?

The rosebushes in the cemented front garden were like the 1970s. A locked glance amongst strangers and then it broke, as she turned on her heels. 

____

Some common sense:

'But it is absolutely negligent to talk about power and abuse without any context, in some gender-free vacuum. If we cannot talk about historical abuse and how male privilege operated to make it so risk-free, then it won't go away. Abuse is always an expression of power. Not acknowledging that power is another way of silencing its victims.'

---The Guardian.

'The media were making monsters of "misguided young men, rather pathetic figures" who were getting coverage "more than their wildest dreams", said Dearlove, adding: "It is surely better to ignore them."...It was time, he said to move away from the "distortion" of the post-9/11 mindset, make "realistic risk assessments" and think rationally about the causes of the crisis in the Middle East.'

the end of days

About 100 years ago the Great War was just beginning.Perhaps nobody could see it coming or, more importantly, what it would entail. I suppose that's what war is: the eruption of anarchy into the ordinary, daily routines and fabric of life. And despite all the planning no-one can tell how things will pan out (maybe that was part of the "thrill" of it after all...a step into the unknown, a step back before the lawlines were drawn). 

On November 12th, 1921, Plenty Coups participated in a dedication to the Unknown Soldier...

The end of the West, the end of the novel, the end of history, of communism, the end of Europe as we know it, the end of faith, the sense that things are in terminal decline, that a way of life will never be recovered. At best some one will read about it in some dusty, neglected volume. Time is lost, never to be regained. Time is a falling away...When did it begin? For Hans Jonas it was the Renaissance (or around then). Before, 'life' was everywhere but from that moment on-but of course, it's never a moment-, with no fixed nature, no cosmos, no patterns or models to follow, or unchanging transcendental realm everything was flux, a mere swerve of atoms and subject to decline and, ultimately, death: entropy. This is it, this is as good as it gets. (Kristeva and Holbein's Christ. Fro now on the great winding down begins, only to be staved off by constant revolution, re-invention)

The end of the future-which suggests there's a history of the future. What happens when there's no north, north of the future, no "ifs", and no possibility of imagining how things could continue.

After that nothing happened. 

The end of days suggests not just loss but something more radical: the inability to say what counts as a loss any more. When a way of life disappears or collapses then concepts, words and ordinary activities that are bound up in that conceptual universe cease to make sense. Nothing happens. The very idea of happening changes its texture; the very structure of temporality is disturbed.

The end is unimaginable. It is now a distinct possibility but no-one knows what how to picture it, how one could negotiate a life in the end of days. What was impossible became possible, said Hannah.

A "storm" was on its way. The enigmatic dream of Plenty Coups. How would they survive? How would they survive as Crow? 

Is the only way of living with the end a kind of nostalgia or can one imagine the contours of the future by projecting the past into it? There was no question of the Crow living on as Crow with the same old ways and rituals since they would not be, from now on, be a material possibility.The question becomes, then: how to live in a new way as a Crow?  

Pretty Shield: "I am trying to live a life I do not understand."

Plenty Coups, 1921...

Art that is trashy, trash that is art.

Oh, don't be so judgemental! Why so serious, it's only a joke. And who are you to judge? Everything is a matter of taste (which means pure subjectivity now, making the concept of 'good taste' largely redundant-except in the rarefied circles of wine tasting). It will all be forgotten in a few years anyway. Ceaseless change, remember!

In any case, the sentiment chimes with democratic sensibilities (no more authority, no more sacred and profane realms. Rushdie got it right, didn't he?).

Let us not talk about needs because that suggests limitation, dependency. What we want is an empty vessel that has no ties to a specific place or time but that can dream of everything. Desire, imagination and luxury as the unbounded, the foundation of capitalism: excess. 

What drives the industry of mankind forward, if not objective value, refinement? The desire for trinkets and baubles, Adam Smith would say. But if "deception" is so central then in what sense is it "forward"? Well, as long as its new and glitzy does it really matter? This disdain for the past, narratives, and continuity is as radical as that of the Commies. Tear it all up and start again from ground zero. Perhaps nothing sounds as unfamiliar to us as 'sayings'...the war against cliches..what we want, after all, is knowledge and not other people's words-whether wise or not.  

Art must be kept free from ethics, politics to maintain its freedom to explore, to shock us out of our bourgeois complacence. Except, of course, all that is old hat and terribly boring. A fascination for the ordinary can only be of interest when it is in tension with the extraordinary. Otherwise it just sinks into mundane banalities, pettiness and trivia. A constant desire for the new is as predictable and stifling as the desire for no change. 

~~~

Tracey Emin's bed to sell for 1.2 million. Are you serious?

~~~

There is no "up", no "down". No good or evil, just the law. Truth is what you make of it. Fabrication.

What is fake and what is real? 

Scruton: http://bagginsandco.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/fakin-it4-33.html

the last word

Gaddis...the last days. The mad scramble to make sense of it all, to gain a semblance of coherence. Hands and words flying in different directions. Entropy: the gradual winding down of the universe/body/mind. Learn to breathe-like a newborn, like a Buddhist. 

Accumulate, try and put into order all that has always escaped definition, system. Delete, select, assess, distinguish, judge. Weed out all that isn't necessary, try and whittle it down to a few essential truths. Looking back, as if you were dead already. The ticket stubs, the letters with their frayed edges, notes written in ink, journal articles on obscure topics, copies of the NYRB kept in large plastic boxes, like incubators. 

Is there a single gesture, a simple word, that encapsulates what we are? Our need for a starting point, a name or a number that isn't a name or number.

'Everything undertaken for its own sake is worthwhile'

Cut the chord, like a Gnostic reluctant to venture out. 

Stay inside, live within yourself. 'Short distances, definite places.' All that happens has already happened. 

'The knowledge-and ignorance-of generations is in the hands...a momentary gesture's capacity to contain the timelessness of myth...He photographed all sleepers as if they were the beloved.'
---G. Dyer.

Gedney, in the final hours, the same street photographed a thousand times, making it semi-permanent.What do you remember, which street? Retreat, avoid all touch, out of sight...the inner street...He looks around, and notes that nothing is completed (maybe nothing ever can be). The perfect book is a book of quotes (living (,) in other words). The task: to find the true image, to remember the two or three images that mattered. 

The last words (how many?). The last seven images. Things close at hand. The photos show 'the clutter of his desk, the things he used on a daily basis (paper clips, brushes, stamps, pencils), the things he used for seeing: magnifying glass. spectacles...The last frame is a close-up of his art books..packed tightly on a shelf.'

~~~

Swans in reality are a lot larger than you'd imagined. You observe with great equanimity the ripples fluttering on the surface of the pond. A swan tries to straighten up and unfold itself at the same time. Because this sudden movement comes against a backdrop of perfect silence it seems timeless, almost mythical. You lie down and look up through the branches of the tree to a crystal clear sky. The tree becomes less real, more like a painting. The great swathes of clouds up above move silently together and interlock, as if in a dance, blotting out the blue. There is some great law-like movement here you're witnessing and it is pleasing to think that this process is ageless, objective, beyond any subjective impressions.

An old man sits on a bench away from it all and gazes with such an intensity at the ripples and calmness of the surrounding that he probably forgets himself and where he is. Has he always lived like this, part of him always with the statue's aloofness and detachment or has it only come to him now? I turn to him, my father, my Jew. It is time to leave.

Elgar on speed

Listening to snatches of a programme on Elgar on R3. The way you live and the way the programmes are made means that you only hear snippets, fragments-the very notion of a limited whole now sounding terribly provincial, old-fashioned and narrow-minded.

One thing that struck you was the different pace at which the same music was played and the setting of the pauses. Is a text, a score, infinitely flexible or is there a structure, a truth, that must remain invariable to be known over time? How much is up for interpretation and what weight does the individual have in the collective phenomenon of the playing/listening/reading of something over time? How much of what we consider to be valuable depends on continuity, the persistence of something over time?

~~~

24/7 is a great little book on time and the extraordinary modern pressures placed on our sensory capacities-in order for capitalism to break down any further natural "barriers" to its progression. In some sense just an extension of E.P.'s wonderful 'time-work discipline'. 

The need to cram more and more experiences into a given time period means, ultimately, that the quality of experience is itself diminished. If time is linear then there's always the possibility newness, unchartered territory (and capitalism needs such 'spaces', thrives on discontinuities and the destruction of the past)but time is also always running out, slipping out of our hands,never to be regained or recovered. 

~~~

Illich has to be one of the most original thinkers (as oppposed to an academic or 'intellectual'). Who else could write about deschooling society, the relation between university and text, medical ethics, a sort of history of needs, the energy crisis, the gaze in the age of show, the commons of silence? 

When did 'speed' become so important? Turner, Marinetti? What makes 'speed' possible? Firstly, the narrowing down of experience to one dimension. Secondly, the positing of a single, uniform and calculable and comparable notion of speed. Time-and not just labour time-becomes abstract, "standard" and universal. The notion that time can be uncoupled from lived experience, the belief that duration is orthogonal to the depth of one's experiences or the nature or quality of the 'objects' with which one engages in time results in a dry, mechanical and mathematical view of time. The rhythms of daily life, of the seasons, come to count for less and less.

One must rush through everything, tot up the counters as soon as possible, keep things flowing, in circulation.     

Blessings of the Sun

Fuchs found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"What is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it sings."

'It is sometimes to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness an frugality of life in the Midi which includes a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone...Sunlight reflected from red tile floors on to whitewashed walls..and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled , hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it....Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear...'

---Stella Bowen.

~~~

The old sun on our backs, a life in the open, out of the cloister, away from the cramped, stifled and pointless conversations, the crabbed existence of dreary drab afternoons, the mind vacant of any lasting thoughts, churning out anxieties for a halfpenny.

The old sun, its ancient pathways, the timeless within the turnings. The sun's light: 'tight and loose': fidelity to the centre; the dream of periphery. Like a pagan you look to the sun, and all falls away. No chain of being, no thought of the same sub-atomic processes working in both of us, but the simple fact that a life under the sun erodes our names. My hands are burned, my face has darkened. The north survives in the small mirror but leaves my eyes... 

'In a kind of weightless, swinging realm'

Bob drew my attention to a Time of Gifts (still unread!). A fab. article today draws comparisons with Laurie Lee's A Walk...

Strange that you're drawn so much to travel writers when you remain so rooted and fixed in your ways (and all that stuff about the greatest journeys taking place in the mind...well...)

Today you asked little r: will you be like Van G or Gaugin. Will you paint  what you see around you or will you paint what is in your head. 

"I will paint what I see"

Good for you, little one!

"And then I will keep it in my mind"

Is 'and' the most important word in the English language?

~~~

When it comes to language you still have MDF's Debts of Honour in reserve. Something to save for when the light becomes too strong and you've run out of escape hatches... 

In terms of 'travel writers' Byron's Road to Oxiana has some sublime passages but for some odd reason comes across as superficial or at least light weight. M. Asad's Road to Mecca remains a classic-at least up until the point in which he becomes a Muslim. Chatwin, of course, but more for his open, inquisitive mind-which seems to have been attracted to everything- rather than for his descriptions. Thesiger for his old fashioned refusals and lovely black and white photographs.

~~~

To walk is to think a little, to be prepared to get lost (in fact, to will it). To sit in a room filled with books is as one-sided as sitting on a beach in Rio (you suspect). The world is always either too much with us or not with us enough. Is there a pleasure that knows nothing of itself, a weightlessness that retains a sense of verticality?   


~~~

'A thousand years of village life come to an end...'

I wonder if a way of life really truly ever comes to an end. I suspect it does, though elements of it survive in a word, a phrase, a pause, some distinctive gesture fashioned through the centuries. The land, the stars, the seasons that roll on by, timelessly, weightlessly, above us, through us. 

A sudden nostalgia for the broadsheets, a slower pace of life encapsulated by the dreary, stretched hours of a Sunday morning. It is not true that we now live without rituals and repetition..it's just that these instincts/needs get displaced onto trivial, mundane things and routines.

Summer is the forgetfulness of time, the great beach on which we find ourselves stranded, blinded. The longest day of the year, like memory's peaks in the distance. Solstice, the turning of the heart, the shortest and frailest of shadows, reminds me of a name I once knew...    

My face, for the world to see

There is no preparing for the unforeseeable, the unpredictable; it's just part and parcel of life. And yet there's no acceptance in that "just" as well. There is no preparing for what is inevitable either.

One of the disadvantages of not belonging anywhere is there is no continuity to time. Instead, one is transported-perhaps jolted is a better word-by the sudden reappearance of a familiar sound, a particular slant of the light, to another place, another time, another life...

Foyles has had a face lift and shifted two doors down. From a dense, medieval cloister with piles of books heaped up haphazardly on the floor to a generic 90's hip place selling moleskin notebooks and weak latte. And now, with its open plan, bright light, light wood furnishing it comes across as less of a bookshop and more as a sort of post-modern lounge. It has its charms, sure, but the face isn't the same...

The poetry section is considerably weaker. What immediately strikes you, apart from the fewer number of people in the store, is the poor lay out and selection of poetry books. Why focus on Kipling and Leonard Cohen? 

Of course, whenever you enter such a place-and, in general, when you come back to London, you are reminded of how much you miss out on (and have missed out on). I suppose this sense of a world of possibilities slipping away can become oppressive at times. In the same way, if you see an attractive woman ...

And, of course, this is madness. The inability to accept one's station, one's limited potential, is itself a feature of our times, if not of time itself. It's not the many lives we could have had but the single life that wasn't lived fully. By wanting to 'have it all' we end up having nothing. Perhaps your puritan roots will always feel there's a shadow thrown around all desires. Or, to put it another way, when it comes down to religion your heart is not quite in it. You flick through Merton looking for a wisdom without religion. Which is to say: foolishly. The desire for understanding is suspect if it doesn't break through the image.

~~~

Limited funds, space and time. So, the choice of books will have to be thought through carefully. Again, derivative, second-order questions and perspectives plague you. You imagine a book without footnotes. And, more radically, occasionally suffer from Mir's syndrome (Dyer) hoping to do without them altogether. 

~~~

You walk in the peak hour against the stream of humanity. Every face seems preoccupied and distracted and it leaves its mark.Or it could be me. It's only when you hear the calm, measured voices on the radio do you feel relieved.    

on the other side of the bridge...

Neither East nor West; neither Greek nor Jew...

You never thought you'd make it out of the heat and bright, all-encompassing light. You followed a shadow (in your heart). 

You stand back and observe the distances...observe that you're not really here either (and maybe never were). Still, when you walk along the familiar streets you do have the sense that all this is a dream, a profoundly familiar dream...

The seasons roll by. All the rolling of the die. The gods' warm hands in the clouds, yours in your pockets, dumbfounded, dazzled by the strangeness of your feelings, your lack of orientation (something beyond the jet lag).

There are moments when you feel truly blessed, surrounded by so many kids. Most of the time you're just trying to catch your breath, find a small place of silence and shade in which to be alone with yourself. I suppose there's always been this notion of thought only being possible when one separates oneself. To think is to die a little. The little is important...

On the 275 you observe an oldish man with terrible skin and a crooked leg limps and hobbles his way to a seat near mine. He carries an open black bag. He crouches over a book, James Patterson's Cat and Mouse and puts on some burgundy spectacles, transforming himself into a latter-day monk. He is utterly absorbed by the book, chapter 28. Alone, a survivor of the times, secluding himself from the harshness of the light, or having to answer any questions. He places his forehead down on the back of his hand (in which he carries a walking stick). It's all gone wrong but he can't tell where or why.This is it. Keep your breath pure. He wears stylish black Nike trainers ("daps"..a bit of South Wales there, for you). On second thoughts, this man is not what he first appears to be. In this second space of hesitation one sees that he carries some nobility with him-despite his awful choice in literature-which you think might be a ruse anyway. He speaks in a muffled way, chin down, his voice broken, words stumbling out of his mouth. On both sides of the bridge human beings remain incomprehensible...

At Barking a thin and short old Indian man looks deeply, intently into a freezer containing Diamond Seafood Shrimps. For a moment I think he's going to dive in. A bargain, perhaps. Or perhaps he remembers a moment from his childhood, when his Bengali father would take him to the sea and they would peer over the boat, looking together in the same direction as wave after wave broke, splintered and re-formed-as they've always done from time out of mind. 

The East European women are all very thin. there's a glint of attractiveness behind the harshness of their lives. London is like some great resting place for travelers of all sorts. Only the Paks who came here in what seems an age ago still harbour secret thoughts of going back, of being unsettled. In many ways Muslims continue to be 'edge people', the non-jew non-jews.

~~~

Tony Judt's Memory Chalet is a wonderful gem of a book. As if to say: write down all the small things in your life which go up to make up a life.         

Isis

You never know how things might turn out.Which action will lead to what consequences. But one bit of 'folk wisdom' has it that what doesn't start out well is unlikely to end up well.

The "intelligence" on Iraq, for example. The laughable presentation of cartoons and fables by Colin P at the U.N. Everyone conveniently forgetting that Saddam had been a sand niggah for a while..."our sonofabitch", to paraphrase Kissenger.

So, after all the billions of dollars spent, the loss of human life, the erosion of liberties in the so-called war on terror, and what have you got? A rag-tag group of crazies walking into Iraq's second city as if they were out for an afternoon stroll on Brighton pier. Al-Q may or may not have had much of a presence in Iraq before the war but I think one can safely say that the invasions have led to the growth of fundamentalism (both in the region and in Pakistan). A case of unforeseen consequences? Well, not really. A lot of people at the time said that al-Q was a spent force (intellectually, morally,politically and spiritually bankrupt). And there were wise heads in Jordan saying that these 'operations' would create a thousand bin Ls. Time will tell. But right now, it does look that way.

Disaster and catastrophe are overused words. But you have to wonder.   

To have a centre

Unending free activity in us arises through the free renunciation of the absolute—the only possible absolute that can be given us and that we only find through our inability to attain and know an absolute.
---Novalis (courtesy of anton).

A normal man is one whose tendencies are, if not altogether univocal, at least concordant; that is, sufficiently concordant to serve as a vehicle for that decisive centre which we may call the sense of the Absolute or the love of God...

This type [the pariah], who lacks an axis, is capable of "everything and nothing"; he is a mimic and a born actor, always looking for a substitute for the centre, hence for a psychic homogeneity which necessarily eludes him...

...we live in a world which on the one hand tends to deprive men of their centre , and on the other offers them-in place of the saint and the hero-the cult of the "genius"...

[A genius is interesting and "authentic" to the extent that he or she is a wild card, opposed to bourgeois society and its values. i.e. in some senses: a 19th century genius. Is there a more universal type, one who is normal, balanced, virtuous?]

[A genius, with at least two heredities], lacking a true centre may easily be a psychopath-and this precisely on account of his unbridled subjectivism-whether he be a schizoid artist or a paranoiac politician.

[Whence the strange disjunction between a brilliant work of art and the character and personality of the artist]

JB reports Lucian Freud to have said:

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex.He said unless you've had anal sex with a girl she hasn't really submitted to you."


~~~

[Art for art's sake. As Arendt said (more or less) there is only 'process' now; we pride ourselves on our "truthfulness" rather than any substantive notion of the truth. What counts as a free activity? Can we think of reason independently of purposes, values? i.e. instrumentally or even more "bizarrely" (Sen) in terms of internal consistency?

What matters is the journey itself, the procedures. Departure, not arrival...one must always take leave and never arrive or even hope of arriving. Homecoming of the heart? Forget it. Where's the door? The great paradox (Arendt, again): to think of earth as our only home means we end up hating it, trying to flee it (in fantasies of escape).

Man finds nothing but himself. And he is thoroughly bored by it all. He finds nothing in himself and must, therefore, find it outside of himself. "I wasn't myself," a man says, looking back at his anger/mistakes/bitterness over his life. When are we ourselves, then? What are religion, art, friendship, ethics, love if not the possibility of transcending ourselves, a kind of second space?

Thought finds nothing but itself and is henceforth fixated by questions such as: "what can I know (of myself, of other people)?". 

In economics: exchange divests the world of any "intrinsic value". From now on freedom is a process, an unending process...A space of flows..the triumph of capitalism depends on a culture and mentality which supports and justifies it}.

"Renounce centre" (Asherby). Life on the periphery. Except margins only make sense in relation to a centre.The centre is where, in some sense, nothing happens?: one just is.

~~~

It is humanistic narcissism with its mania for individualistic and unlimited production that is responsible for this ultimately useless profusion of talents and geniuses

[Britain's got talent. Back in the land in the pure almost every child is a genius or a potential genius...which makes you wonder why things have gone so wrong]

A quality is fully legitimate only on condition that in the last analysis it be linked to necessary Being, not to mere contingency, that is, to what is merely possible.

[On the other hand, there is a strain of 'thought' that would have us as nothing but mere flotsam..temporary, accidental, insubstantial beings thrown up by chance. How much of modern thought ad modern experiences works to de-centre us? Darwin, Freud, and the Camps...]

The 19th century-with its garrulous and irresponsible novelists, its creators of pernicious operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries and blind alleys, leading to despair-was bound to crash against a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity, thus the First World War.

(quotations from Frithjof Schuon's 'To Have a Centre')

Guarding the eye in the age of show

Last week a woman was stoned to death outside the Lahore High Court for marrying someone she wanted; at around the same time two teenage cousins in India hanged themselves from a tree after being raped. Honour killing. Of course, no-one wants to make the link between highly sexualized imagery and violence. But even if it doesn't culminate in actual violence it can hardly be denied that it does do violence in some way-to the image of 'Man'...

Iris M and Illich wrote about this a long time ago..about how extreme images dull our minds, our judgement and capacity for ethical behaviour. The range of words we have for different ways of 'looking' (which includes not looking, not hearing, etc.) may be diminishing and that in itself may be a result of the falling away of certain ascetic practices and disciplines: how to look at the world in the proper way, how to look at people from the right angle...

IPL, for instance. In the 'cricket' commentary all subtlety is lost and all that can be muttered are a few cliches ("that's a fantastic shot"). This, itself, is a result of the format of the game which encourages a simple and basic response (power, rather than nuance). And it might be argued that all this is tied into commercial interests. IPL is really just cricket pornography.

Everyone must be made or made over into a spectator. In the 'attention economy' we must remain riveted to the action (even if there really isn't any action, in the proper sense of the word). Which is where the cheerleaders come in. Keep the adrenalin and cash flowing. It's a fantasy world and, we are told, the poor Indian bastard who comes home from a hard day's work just wants and needs to be entertained, to be allowed to enter this make-believe world for a brief moment so that he can forget the grim realities of his life. This is, of course, all really a cynical ploy to keep him a poor bastard for the remaining part of his life.

Who, today, can think of asceticism, sobriety and self-limitation as being enriching? To live in a small place, but to live well."To lower one's gaze" is a constant refrain in the Qur'an. This approach exists within a tradition, a culture and set of norms (individual or social)...and aims to develop an attitude towards things: habitual reflection. Since it is related to not just modesty but balance, equilibrium, it is also surely fundamental to an aesthetic sense: the attentiveness to, and recognition of, beauty. How to weld pleasure to proportionality? What is to be guarded against is the "lustful eye", the greedy eye that desires without limit. "I want it, and I want it now". One click away. The ten thousand songs on your mobile.

the way of the world

The way the world carries on, in a stream of light/time/light, is the world. 

When all the distances have been measured, explored, down to the n th degree, you find there's one distance that fails the test. It slips out of the book and there is no word for it. It is like a word found in nobody's heart (Celan).

You struggle with the lists, the tying up of things, the settling of (old) scores/chores. You sit in your car having completed your exchanges. A man briskly walks to the bank, thirty minutes late, and adjusts his tie as he extends his neck upwards. For him the day is just starting and you're out of the equation, looking at everyone and everything out of the rear window; already your thoughts narrow down to practicalities, to the avoidance of sentimentality...and your heart is a stranger once again.

There is something utterly plain and mundane about how the world continues without you-and because of that it is also like something that doesn't sound right or something that catches your attention, the way you note out of the corner of your eye a door that is usually permanently closed but now suddenly ajar. And because of the awareness of all that is fantastically simple and familiar, the seamless continuity of other people's lives, you get a rare glimpse of the fascinating and the mysterious. It is like seeing the mirror and not the image.

~~~

In the morning you had noticed with some alarm the vast number of ants (with their death-wish) in the bathroom, eating away at the walls, finding all sorts of angles of attack, making their way through the cracks and thereby extending them. You casually wondered to yourself: left to their own devices how many years would it take for them to gnaw away at this structure? How many generations? You'd caught them at it, seen a part of the process with your own eyes.

Suddenly you had a great desire to be like the main character in The Time Machine and to see the whole building, from its first bright day under the sun to the day when a dark wind blows through the ruins...ruins that suggest no structure and that offer no clue whatsoever as to the function of the building or to the nature of its inhabitants. No future being would wistfully look back and ask herself: was there once a person living in this place who thought like me? At most she might think mechanically, scientifically, about causes-large and small.    

The Inner City

(Pictures are borrowed from the excellent website, 'The London Column')

The oldest of stories; how did it begin? Which movement of the heart, concentrated in a single gesture of my hand, got me here? The oldest of human stories; how did it begin, again? The hidden streets of our lives; now a name, now a cellar. There is a single medieval street that survives amidst all that is strange and new and it is something like an obsolete word in a dictionary, like the oldest human feeling in a stranger's heart, like nothing else... 

Entartete Kunst

We, we are people of dust. There is no more 'we'. We are no more. Did I say we? I...

The structure, the structure is there, more or less, the barest outline of some previous existence, the way my sad smile traces the same sad smile of my ancestors from all those years ago. For some unknown reasons that look was carried in my eyes, down to the bone. They'll find it one day in my DNA but never know...

He loved art more than he loved people. People were trash, dispensable. They fell, were often evicted from history; they were unreliable, were susceptible to disappearances. He loved ideas, he loved ideas more than anything else in the world. 

I do not watch television any more and haven't seen a movie-from start to finish-for a long time now. What's the latest? I have no clue. I live in my room and no-one knows my name or address. I have built myself a hole and live with my testament and my shadows. No record contains me. I think, therefore.

The keeper of the flame, the steward of the trash of the world, the accumulation of false steps, mutations, contagion. That ancient chaos that was there in the heart of the first man, twisted, his eyes glinting with transgression, is here, 360, in this boarded up room that is kept out of the sun's vengeful eye. 

"All I wanted was to live with my pictures".

He keeps them close to him, like so many dark memories. All that is not said or shown becomes more real with the passage of time.He will die and live this way. 

The pictures survived him, like Paul Celan's bottles tossed into the ocean, suddenly returned from oblivion, inevitable tokens of lives lost and reminders of art's endurance. 

The journeys made, the lives lost across the wide ocean. The condemned in their dark chains, the free, thirsty, all at sea. Already, before the mirror my image fades, my hands become heavy. For those without a land must take to the sea...

What shows up? This will make you laugh. A silver dish that could be redeemed for forty pieces of silver, a last act of stealing, to keep your name.

On a morning like this they will find me, a head full of straw. Ah, 'the strawness of straw,' said the poet, this old essence of man.