Often I'm amazed. The light, year after year. The back sun room where children played, where the old world continued somehow. I only need to open my hand and the world I don't know disappears. The cold sunshine, the equality of conditions, a formal sense that out there, beyond, you would always be there.

In the year of nineteen seventy-six the excessive light meant the stout working women with flabby arms brought out their Spanish fans or just breathed deeply under the striped shades. You'd live your whole life out there and never see anything like it again. The old men, reddened faces, their sleeves rolled up even higher revealing burned forearms, pretended as if it was all par for the course-and it was, it all was, since nothing unexpected was ever allowed to happen.  

We flipped beer mats next to the school wall or played marbles in the long hours, rolling them to safety, making equivalences: a "bloodshot" for two "minstrels". The one-off moment of the pitch. And it reverberates down to us even now, and always will, down down, traveling eighty years 
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

Anti-Education

It is tempting to see the Strumpet as a classic example of what it means to be anti-education. To see him squeal in the face of the Pope's comments is a delight, like watching a small kid being called out for being the obnoxious brat that he is. The one thing that can't be tolerated in the modern world is judgement: 

De gustibus non disputandum est.

~
The mis-education of Europe. The 'Rape of Europe,' as the Polish magazine has it, is worth thinking of in light of the rise (again) of the extreme right throughout Europe. One can't but help feel there's something nasty brewing.

Even in polite, supposedly educated circles it is not uncommon to hear the view that the migrants (Refugees? Huh? Is there a difference?) will be the undoing of European civilisation and culture. The fact that Europeans made soap out of other human beings and were involved in a brutal slave trade..no, that cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the dominant and delusional narrative. 

Let there be no discussion of the destruction of culture brought about by industrialization and a mindset that found itself conforming to the machine; no question of the relation between science and culture; and, God forbid, no discussion of how late capitalism with its incessant drive for novelty and disruption, its fixation on eradicating any kind of distinction ("pushpin is as good as poetry" as far as the market is concerned) undermines the very possibility of culture (as understood in the old sense of a transmission of forms that represented a shared symbolic order).

~
The introduction by Reitter and Wellmon to Nietzsche's anti-Education is quite brilliant.

At the heart of it is not simply the question of what the university stands for, or what it ought to. There is the more fundamental question of what the purpose of learning is and if that purpose makes any sense against a background culture which either opposes the importance of learning or, more to the point, refuses to even countenance the possibility that it is a question of any relevance in the first place. Get over it, dude. 

What kind of life is the life of the mind? Is a one-sided life a life in any recognizable way? This is not just about the career academic, the prostitute who is on the game, but also, and even more so, about the highly specialized expert who stands separated from worldly concerns with his or her genuine (or cultivated) disdain for ordinary people and ordinary life.

Is it possible that the university, along with the media machine, only aims to cultivate a false individuality, a commodified individual, a talking head that knows a few big phrases, a few mathematical tricks (Roemer calls this 'mathiness' rather than mathematical skills). To what purpose? That is not the question we have been trained to ask! 

Morishima: The good and the bad use of mathematics. 

The belief (belief!) that formalism, abstraction and detachment offered the only path to truth gets displaced by the more common notion: the model or our way of thinking is internally consistent and sod the truth. The truthfulness of our methods is what counts.

'Culture and knowledge had been uncoupled from values and ethics and subordinated to material gain under a crudely understood earthly happiness.'

The 'drive to knowledge' alone would be just as unhealthy as the hatred of knowledge.  

Gold in the shadows

There is a gold light in certain old paintings

That represents a diffusion of sunlight.

It is like happiness, when we are happy.

It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at once, this light,

              And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross

              Share in its charity equally with the cross.

       2

Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.

With so much to look  forward to he looked back.

We think he sang then, but the song is lost.

At  least he had seen once more the  beloved back.

              I say the song went this way: O prolong

             Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

      3

The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.

One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.

The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.

Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.

              And all that we suffered through having existed

              Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

--Donald Justice

~

What once was is still there, or just about. The threads of time on the sleeves. The sound of the children playing in the yard during the recess, heard in interior corridors, off polished wood, or somewhere. And God, God further away than he's ever been you think, taking a break from it all, for a while, slouched on a doorstep somewhere. 

"Look how the kids grow" someone says. It was only yesterday.  Only the golden light is always itself, even when a faint presence on a frail autumn morning, or when hidden in the Roding's dark. Or when you read a line or see a face and remember something you'd almost forgotten. 

Revolutions

'Democrats of nearly every rank throw money at the people they call “innovators” while telling working-class Americans that little can be done about their ruined lives.'
--Thomas Frank.

There is much discussion about the populism of the right but, of course, with no hint that the established forces will, if they haven't already, be using whatever can muster the spirit in these late days for their own purposes. The very thought that anyone can challenge not just the military-industrial complex but the finance-media one too is, quite frankly, preposterous. 

The old maverick card doesn't wash any more. Old hat. 

Talkin' about a revolution..
Poor people gonna rise up and take what's theirs..

~

'The flower's pollen 
is older than the mountains.'

--J.B.

At least fifteen million years ago, and possibly as many as forty-five million, they landed in the sticky sap of a tree that is now extinct, in a kind of forest that no longer exists on Earth.'
---The New Yorker.

When the forests have been burned
their darkness remains.'
--W.S. Merwin.

~

The revolutions: Our lives move in circles of varying circumference. The smaller, tighter ones of our daily lives; biological and seasonal cycles that link us with older generations, other species, trees, wind, flowers. Cosmic cycles that we chance upon through our instruments or imagine in perfect abstraction or in our colour-soaked myths, linking the moments of our lives to the elements, the stars, all that is vast and invisible at the same time. Even the darkness in the human heart, you half imagine, has its time and place in the ebb and flow of the universe. 

It is amazing to think that what is apparently 'low' or insignificant can survive for so long; and that what is apparently mighty and puffed up falls with a crash, leaving no trace but a line in our storybooks! Kings and powerful men make the mistake of assuming the small pattern of their lives is a mirror of some wider, more universal one. 

How things eventually turn out and who is on what arc, which trajectory, is not something we can fathom.

Thrawn

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'A time comes when the inner life is mostly about memory.'

Do you know when that is, that moment when time is reconfigured, draws focus?

'..recovering a single happy moment from the past, like some random snapshot found between the pages of a book, a single moment of light and specific colour to slide into before the gold of this world goes into shadow.'

And now book and word, image and deed, crumble before your eyes, without shape or inner form. The bewildering galmour of the world in these fragments, in the hands struggling to hold on to what they always knew. When winter comes around again, will you remember? What cast of mind and whither your heart?

the big question

Here's a young writer who I think has got her head screwed on:

'What does a soft drink have to do with literature?..As interest in visual mediums of expression grows at a rampant pace, literature festivals, as one of the few safe havens for writers and the written word, need to remain true to their ethos.'

Hamna Zubair.

She's really too polite but hopefully with time she will learn to trust her instincts (which have obviously been stifled by editorial oversight) and become a lot more scathing of the circuses that are up and running in the land of the pure, what with their prostitutes and their fawning over Indian "celebrities". 

~

Talking of circuses, this has to be the single best line that Trumpet has come up with in the whole campaign:

'The two men even squabbled about Bush's mother. The former Florida governor said proudly, "My mother was the strongest person I know."

Trump's response" "Maybe she should be running." 

Classic.

~

Fragments of a life

I dreamt my own death and the light was calm, serene, easy and simple and gentle. I'd always imagined it just so, the perfect light of late summer, just before Fall and the evening chill.

"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".

He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.

Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.

By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.

~~

'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'

--Macintyre. 

Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was. 

Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.  

Post-capitalism

'It's embarrassing to say this to a generation where individual tuition has become a privilege; where non-examinable knowledge is perceived as a waste of time; where every thesis and dissertation must begin with a mind-numbing rehash of existing knowledge, written to a formula as rigid as that demanded by the Qing-era Chinese civil service. But here goes: the past was better.'

--Paul Mason.

~

I never realised just how radical Macintyre is. Of course, the radicalism originates from a religious perspective since religion, in its best sense, will always stand opposed to worldliness. Which is not to say that a proper perspective should not take in the world; just that one should not be taken or taken in by the world. 

'It is also a time for resisting..as temperately as possible the dominant social, economic, and political order of advanced modernity.'

This, to some ears, will no doubt sound too harsh, and smack of a spirit that is too generalizing, too broad-brushed in its judgement. Well one might ask: is there nothing in the times we live in that is worthy of our attention, that redeems, at least in part, some its flaws?

I think part of 'the Muslim problem'-though its never characterized as such-is that insofar as the religious spirit survives it is never fully at home in a world that has been formed by the Enlightenment. There will always be, I suppose, this nagging sense that for all the progress, for all the advancement that has been achieved (and that is not in question, of course), and for all the wonders of science, something of importance has been irretrievably lost. A way of looking at the world, a way of being in it.

Particular modern notions of rationality, self-interest, individuality and liberty jar with that older outlook or world view. Religion, in that sense, is on the side of poetry and art.

Dynamism, which in youth is a sign of vigour, is often quite the opposite at a later stage of life. Ceaseless flux and restlessness are not necessarily an open-ness to the world-at least not when they're manufactured by an economic system that must keep the juggernaut moving. Bloch was right here: continuous change isn't necessarily the same thing as freedom. The dissipation of forms, the shedding of identity can just as well be signs of decay as they can of growth.  

'The self is nothing, not a substance, but a set of perpetually open possibilities.'

In one succinct line Macintyre has summarized the centrality of existentialism to modern culture (existence precedes essence, the leap of the will) as well as hinted at the dissolution of a substantive notion of the person at the hands of scientific and economic ways of thinking. 

What remains is the abstract, ghost-like creature who, like the American woodsman, has no sense of place, no time or patience. Everything must be sampled, tasted, skimmed through. Attachments, far from being a source of enrichment are either a distraction or an encroachment on the true, inner self (Gnosticism). What is freedom but to be 'free from'?

And in a parallel fashion the freedom of the market mirrors the actions of a man with no qualities. The possibilities are endless, at least in a 'quantitative' sense; in another sense they're just a refashioning of age old tracks that humans have, since time out of mind, traversed.

But the allure of living more than one life, the plurality of the self, is undermined by the thought that what we end up with is not a double life but half a life. 

'The Greatest Party on Earth'

Type in Rio Carnival in google and you'll see how difficult it was to choose this picture. No-wonder the Tableeghis (missionaries) are not allowed to go to Brazil or Argentina unless they're married. 

"[The disappearance of the carnival] testifies to the fact that disorder has irrupted into the entire course of existence and to its having become generalized to such a point that, in reality, we could said to live in a 'sinister, perpetual carnival'."
--Rene Guenon. 

[The point about order and disorder is taken up in more detail by Eliade in The Myth of Eternal Return]

We're so used to thinking-because of our historical experiences- that the main form of domination is exercised in a totalitarian, oppressive and controlling way. Think of the state, religious authority, the family, tradition and one immediately thinks of stable institutions trying to kill off spontaneity, smothering the individual in a desperate attempt to establish or maintain order, continuity, conformity, passivity. 

But what if all that's changed under liquid modernity or late capitalism? What if it's not property but property rights (alienability) that is the thing to concentrate on? (Arendt saw this way back in 1957).

What if power is now exercised in more subtle ways? Sowing confusion and producing spectacles, persuasion and manipulation, rather than brute force, may be more effective ways of exercising control. Unbounded desires, a superficial notion of individuality, the negation of any image of Man, or any possibility that we have a specific telos results in the view-confirmed by science and re-inforced by the silence of religion-that we are nothing but selfish genes, clever animals with infinite desires, hurtling along without any notable direction in a world of contingency and purposelessness. 

A mere speck of life thrown into an unforgiving vast and grey universe. That we are thrown here suggests it is all just a roll of the dice, a game of chance or a blind turn of mechanical forces (Hans Jonas's point).

Techniques of letting go. Civilisation and culture are repression. The wild man, the nomad, the person who has no orientation (Ostad Elahi), no name and no country (the American woodsman)..that is the ideal. This 'constantly moving happiness machine' is there for the taking by the corporations and the dream merchants.

Go with the flow, just do it. Liberation...mindfulness for CEOs, Buddhism in five easy steps, Islam for Dummies, how to discover your true self (in Oakland) for $ 3.99 or your money back, GUARANTEED. Repeat after me: I am an individual, I am an..Je suis.. 

Encyclopedia of the Dead

Do you think, D, that life was somehow a dream..or maybe it was just our lives? It's as if we just floated through life or maybe it was the other way around: everything in the world passed before our eyes in a fleeting moment. I can't get a hold on things. I don't even reach out any more, not sure of the point. Everything can be contained in one room, or maybe even in a suitcase. 

D: There's some anthropological theory, isn't there, about how we could understand a person's life by just looking at a complete record of their transactions?

But isn't that in part the problem? That it's always been ideas, as if they were just another one of those transactions? What about what we gave and took from life?

D: Life?! Dear child, what are you talking about. We died a long time ago, don't you know?

The Ghosts of Motley Hall? Gosh, we're in a charming mood this morning!

D: Dunno about you, kid, but I am. Do you know any tunes?

I know the first four notes of 'Once in Royal David's City' and can play them on that cracked piano. 

D: Then play them in the centre, those keys still work.

~

Betty, do you believe that apart from you, somewhere beyond all the people who only seem to be people, there truly are still some people left, real people?'

--Derek Raymond.

~

You really wanted to like Danilo Kis but three stories in you're still undecided. Certainly some lovely passages but what holds you back is the feeling that there's a fierce intelligence at work there, that an idea can take over and swamp the story telling. No, maybe it's not that. Perhaps there's the uncomfortable thought that lurking just below the surface of the stories is politics (not quite a political agenda but..). That all sounds a bit harsh, I know, but...

~

That night I dreamt I was back in an old part of the town, in the old country. You stopped at what you thought was the public library, but it really resembled a city train station with kiosks, stone walls and lots of people in grey hats and long coats walking past it. there you are, in the shade, the sweltering heat, windows flung open..and you always walk up the wrong flight of stairs. In the offices above the station/library was the loud-mouthed girl from your class, from the school on the hill, all grown up and it was truly amazing to see her. "Where have you been?"

I couldn't tell, after all these years. We return as strangers to our own homes.



~
Was there only ever one room after all? The red one of bewilderment, the white one in which all directions were possible? The dark one, with no lights, except from the passing cars. Your face pressed against the cold window, the tune from Dizzy's 'All these things you are' behind your back, as you wait for the return.

~
[Do you ever see your own face in a dream? Is it the true one? You dreamt of someone's fantastic legs the other day. Really must stop watching Paige].

Faith in an uncertain world

It may be that with nuclear proliferation we have entered a far more radically uncertain world than has ever been witnessed before; the distinct possibility of environmental catastrophe only adds to that sense of foreboding. If one were to look at Syria and the rise of religious extremism in many parts of the "Muslim world" then there are even more grounds for pessimism.

But is that the whole story? Really? Is it still possible to have faith in an uncertain world?

This comes on the back of reading what to me sound like some rather bizarre comments:

1. If you look at Syria it kinda makes you nostalgic for the cold war.
2. Look at the wars, the way black people are being gunned down in America. World War I wasn't this bad.
3. We live in an unprecedented era of disease, war, violence, drought..etc., etc.

Of course, there are some young people who love wallowing in misery and there are a good number of old ones who mistake their personal situation for the actual state of the world.

Blessed is the man who hears the crash of thunder and doesn't think of home.
--Basho.

~

On a cautiously optimistic note, then:

Comparisons. What is the base line? Compared with the extreme violence and barbarity of the 20th century are what we're seeing a real degradation? Is it even possible to imagine a lowering of the standards set by that most vicious of centuries?

So, not is only the negative less negative than in previous times; there have also been significant positive changes.

1. Nutrition levels (Angus Deaton. More on that later). 
2. The number of people who have moved out of poverty over the last 30 to 40 years.
3. Gender equality has increased (despite all the horrific instances of crime and evil). In simple terms of artists, female professionals, female education..
4. Attitudes to race have mellowed (at least in the UK). Also, in America there's no slavery and no segregation (the incarceration of so many black Americans is an obvious rejoinder tot his point). 
5. In many places people are becoming less obsessed by religion. That can only be a good thing. Without state funding a lot of the extremism might still exist but as a pale shadow of what it is now. Even now, because it is a force that is morally, spiritually, and intellectually bankrupt, it is hard to imagine it surviving for much longer.
6. There are tentative steps to democracy in some countries (helped by the demise of the Communists).

"The perplexing fact about lives given over to the satisfaction of ordinary material needs is that they seem capable of generating their own self-validation..The terror of life, for Augustinians, was that it is so inexplicably endurable."

--Ignatieff.

If that is true then the measure of our fallen state is that we are simply not aware of what we lack. We do not comprehend the chasm that has opened up before us and merrily hurtle toward it because movement, no matter to what end or in which direction, is expressive of our will.

We gorge ourselves on pleasures, relinquishing the possibility of joy or composure or repose. Does the word 'excess' still exist in our vocabulary?

There is a tendency to see our situation as unique. We either think that we stand at the culmination of a long drawn-out historical process of an epic struggle against superstition and theological mystification; or we see ourselves as frivolously or seriously living out humankind's last act. 

By some kind of great miracle human intelligence has finally freed itself from thinking about 'other worlds' and can concentrate on the more practical consideration of improving people's lives-even if only incrementally- here on earth, right now. On the other hand, after centuries of war and barbarity that very same intelligence lies in tatters, as does our confidence in any long-term project. There is no poetry after Auschwitz. Itself, that has become a slogan, an empty gesture! 

And so we conclude that it was that very same intelligence that tricked and trapped us when it was life, life all along that what we wanted. Sovereign becoming, and don't tarry to try and make sense of it. Go with the flow, don't tie the fragments together because nothing an be reassembled at this late stage in the day/game. Is it anything but a game or a stage and, if so, what part to play but that of the clown?

"Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space."

--Russell.

It is precisely that way of seeing, thinking, reflecting and remembering that seems unavailable to us today. What resources can we call upon then?

How b got his groove back..

Growing up in what was to all effect an all-white community you always had the sneaking suspicion that white people weren't that cool (part of that was, no doubt, down to the racism you experienced). But part of it was, you'd like to think, that your cousins and the dougal had a stack of LPs that no-one had really heard of and whose sound was, how to say this, soulful, unpretentious, more real than all the other stuff on the radio and television (Otis, B.B., Marvin, Toots, Aretha, Sam & Dave, Marley). 

R.I.P. Maurice White.

2° C

Will Copenhagen be met? Is an increase in average global temperatures of two degrees by 2100 likely, possible, or just pie-in-the-sky? And what are the implications of this figure and of exceeding it.

Kevin Anderson has a fascinating and startling chapter on these questions.

First things first. There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding climate change. That doesn't just mean we have probability distributions over different scenarios. It also means, in the technical sense, that we may simply not know how technologies and production will evolve, how much greenhouse gas will be produced or what its impact on temperatures will be. And the ecological system, beyond a certain increase in temperatures, may react in ways that we cannot currently predict. Will there be "feedback effects", non-linear changes?

But here's the dope.

2° C over pre-industrial levels is actually unlikely and its likely impact has changed from being "dangerous" but "very dangerous".

Average global temperature increases over the last century have been about 2.7° C each year. Average, mind you. Given that land surface and the sea warm up at different rates that means increases in land temperatures is more (perhaps one degree more). Also, NY and the arctic might be hit by much higher increases than other places because this is only an average figure.

If we were to increase at 2.7 that would mean the business-as-usual scenario would give us around 25 years for carbon to increase to 800 ppm ! At 800 we're talking about maybe a 17% chance (Weitzman) of temperature increases of + 6° C. Which, in anyone's books, is disaster.

Of course, there isn't going to business as usual so you need to look at mitigation (though, having said that, carbon dioxide has grown at more than 3.2 % even after the economic slowdown and global material extraction has, over the period of 1980-2009 nearly doubled (an increase of 94%).

Is there time for serious mitigation and which countries are going to have to take the plunge?

Given that Co-2 can stay in the atmosphere for over a 100 years the later we delay things the more difficult stabilisation is going to become. Anderson clearly explains this: in order to reach 2° C there's only a certain amount of Co-2 that can be emitted by 2050. If we made all the cuts in the last years before 2050 (for argument's sake) that would not be the same as if we cut back gradually up to 2050 since Co-2 would have accumulated and it's the stock of it that counts.

For Stern and others for us to have a reasonable chance of not going over 2° C we have to reach peak Co-2 by 2015. Er..

And there's this widespread assumption built into the models that new technologies in the future will help resolve the problem. And if they aren't there, then what happens to the models? 

2° C

There must be some optimal temperature range in which the human body feels just at ease. Lahore, right now and possibly for the next two weeks has hit that zone. The air is warm and mellow, the light is gentle, clear and bright but not without its own sadness.

You sit outside in the sun on a bench and read some Macintyre. Questions, all the questions are as of dust. Answers, too, of no import. You are cast back to the 12 th century momentarily. You look at the brown earth on this wonderful day and nothing tugs at your heart, nothing teases your mind. This patch of earth, the grand sweep of time, time returning with different people in it, the birds, the trees-all nameless-the ancient sun and I, myself, part of this picture..

In the early evening the light catches a large tree, concentrates there, so that it glows brown and red with some mysterious inner fire meeting the intermingling of the breeze and the old day's light. Every leaf is caught in motion. The tree is there, and maybe there for years and years after I am gone but right now it is flowing, flowing.. 

~
It is also the season for fresh turmeric (which looks like ginger) and fresh, raw garlic (which looks like spring onions). One of the great advantages of living in an 'undeveloped' country is that there is less processed food and people generally eat fruit and veg. that is local and in season (though that is, unfortunately, changing with improved cold storage facilities). It also means that finance is less developed and, given the shenanigans and corruption associated with it (LIBOR, FX, etc.), that too is a blessing. 

Since there is a lot of mediocrity I manage to survive. And the universities haven't-as of yet-been worked over by capitalism and the audit culture so there is a lot of lazing around (which suits me just fine). There is no sense of urgency, and so I continue to float at my own speed (rather than drift aimlessly, as I probably would had I been elsewhere).

And yet, and yet, I'm too Jewish by far to think this (or anything) is it. 

'May I run, run, and never find.'

--Shah Latif.