It's amazing how far you can get with a bit of cut & paste. I'm not sure if there's an original sentence in the whole damned thing, but I did manage an okay job at stitching the whole thing together. Like a clerk, or Pessoa looking out onto the street from the high windows in his top story office, I sat and wrote, not knowing much about anything real.

How many millions of words are written each day? You begin to wonder if the difference between academic and non-academic really matters in the end. Everyone pontificating on the dire state of the world, on capitalism, or something. What have you added here? A thing without beauty.

You read statements such as, "Even if reason removed God from the picture, human spirituality remained intact" and you ask yourself, "says who?" You can say what you want, and everything has been said. Here's another one: "Human being isn't static." Well, maybe it is. I don't know. It seems pretty static for a lot of us. 

~~~

Today in the frail morning light I saw a single crow serenely sipping from the only puddle in the entire field. As I walked on, another older bird, greying with age, held its wings closely to itself, ready to die, you suspect. The sun has entered a phase of decline, following an arc that it knows well. All things under the sun are moments in its life. Nothing new under the sun. Right now the brilliance of the human mind doesn't move me that much.

       

    

B

'Blue is the colour of the light that doesn't reach us. The blue notes that after all this time still sound true.  

Random stuff

I'm sorry to say it, but most men are idiots. This has dawned on me quite gradually. I'm not just thinking about the evil that some commit (from war to sexual harassment and abuse). That would constitute something more than being 'idiotic' and not reflective of most men. It's really that we-men-rarely grow out of our 15-year-old selves. I see a lot of young men, kids really, around me at the university. And what I notice is really just a straining of the ego, the desire to be noticed at all costs. Perhaps arseholes is a better word than idiots? All the fake masculinity, the bravado and noise.The insecurity is outstanding. 

Perhaps we shouldn't look at this in essentialist terms but think about the process of 'infantilization' that has occurred under late capitalism: choice without responsibility. The absolute need to do away with complexity, messiness (does that ultimately entail some form of violence?).

And so the 15 year-old self carries on to middle age. Hoodies, games, sulking, porn and withdrawal. Monologues or a lack of words. A disproportionate interest in property, money, status, sports, political chatter (as opposed to actual political discourse). These are the only things that can be taken seriously. The inflated sense of your own importance because deep down there's the lurking suspicion that no-one's listening to you, giving you your due. 

A fake kind of competitiveness at work, a crass kind of one up-manship. Endless office politics and gossip. At home, drink or drugs to take you away from your self. And still the belief persists that you're at the centre of the world. Mid-life crises, existential angst. If it's books, then they're about mid-life crises and existential angst. Jordan Peterson, angry white dudes, emotional retardation, and the inescapable feeling that the world's going to hell in a handcart. Nostalgia for an age of innocence, now lost. If it's religion then its conservatism- as long as this only applies to personal morals or "modern culture"-and not to the impact of the economic system.           

The Road to Nowhere

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5  degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough.

--Elizabeth Kolbert.

Prediction: In about ten years time all the discussions about post-modernism, transgender rights, the integration of Muslims into western society etc., etc. are going to seem to be strangely irrelevant. Even the eternal questions around the 'end of the novel' and the rise of the robots will, I'd hazard to guess, seem almost quaint from the standpoint of the 2030s. Instead: Fire, drought, flooding.

Elizabeth Rush:

'A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story. Noah and his biblical flood, a tale likely descended from the even older story of Utnapishtim in the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” but there is also Da Yu and the flood that supposedly inspired China’s imperial feats of hydraulic engineering, Brahma and Manu, and, perhaps oldest of all, the 10,000-year-old tales of certain indigenous peoples of Australia, who sing of homelands lost beneath the rising waves at the end of the last ice age. '

--NYT.

   

Children once existed solely to inherit a man's genes, his moral code and his name. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea; it became the norm. That's all gone now. There's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him. By the time he grows up, the rules I live by will be meaningless; the world will be completely different. If a man accepts this then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into this world now is meaningless.'

--M. Houellebcq.

The unbinding of humanity from God lies at the heart of the historical narrative the reader encounters in Houellebecq’s work: lacking a set of moral principles legitimated by a higher power and unable to find meaningful answers to existential questions, human beings descend into selfishness and narcissism and can only stymie their mortal terror by recourse to the carnal distractions of sexuality.
--Louis Betty.

For Tom, wherever you are

The land is harsh and there is no time, my friend. The winter light returns today, fragile and gentle. Like it has so many other days, for thousands of years. Even before our calculating machines the birds could intuit it. When the very last one of us goes there'll be nothing left to tell. Walk in step, find your pace for this winter dance even when your heart's not in it.  

I'm brought back to myself. Time has darkened my hands. A mirror holds the reflection of someone else now. A gaze, these rituals of the sun remain, somewhere remembered, on the inner wrist of time perhaps? The words, the sentences etched on the page. Ceravolo still abandoned (if you're wondering). There he was, Blake on the steps of a church, going up (maybe down). He turned his body; something caught his eye. What, he didn't want to say. The poetry of silence, fingers on lips. I'll wait till the sun comes round next year. Rest in peace.         

Slow thinking

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the 'decision' lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be 'cultivated'.  

Rinku

And this one, which is also exquisite. Reminds me of a bright Saturday morning in winter, London:

'Change nothing so that everything stays the same'

In all the cities of the world, it is the same..The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be a useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves and robots.

--Ionesco, quoted in Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.

~~~

Espresso. Wholewheat bread with 'malai' and blackcurrant jam. Grapefruit: bitter at last! Everything has its time. Wait for the kids to wake up. It's Autumn but you wouldn't know it. It's Fall and my heart is still whole. Drift, drift..

~~~

In our late-capitalist consumerist dynamic we are bombarded by new products all the time, but this constant change is becoming increasingly monotonous. When constant self-revolutionizing can maintain the system, those who refuse to change anything are effectively the agents of true change: a change in the very principle of change.

--Zizek. 

~ ~ ~

Chesterton: in all this whirl of change "the factory remains" which I take to mean: with all these changing ideas, opinions, and fashions the basic structures of dominance remains in place; and materialism produces its own monotony. We commit the oldest of sins in the newest of ways.  

A Time to Keep Silence?

A glorious early morning. No-one is around and the light is frail, perfect, the sun and earth having found an equilibrium. You sit outside on a bench like an old man, a young man, and read whatever takes your fancy. What utter freedom: warmth of old sun on your hands, old words from fingertip to eye.

Tea. Custard cream biscuits. Harry Frankfurt's Reasons of Love- which I'm unsure of right now. Love is a mode of care. What do we care about? For Frankfurt the fact that we care at all seems more important than what we care about. Can we, then, ask: what ought I to care about?  

Care is like a second-order desire/preference, a way of evaluating our primary wants/desires according to whether we identify with them or not. But-and this is where I start to become unsure- we love what we love. Love itself gives us the reason to do something (love/care is something that moves us and is essentially volitional, not cognitive or affective). I do not, for example, love someone or something because I know it/her is of value. I'm simply drawn to the beloved because that's the type of creatures we are. Is that biological argument? 

There is no independent reason here that allows me to evaluate the thing or person prior to me loving it/her. Love creates its own reasons.

All of this is, of course, deeply appealing. I do not love my children because they have specific characteristics which I think makes them worthy of my love. Is one ever worthy of love, of being loved?

On the other hand, if love has nothing to do with the characteristics of the beloved or the particular objects - and they are always particular, not derivative of some universal 'value'- then might I not care for anything? I care for this old handkerchief. It means a great deal to me because I love it. What, ultimately, is the difference from such an attitude and the economist's 'taste model' which maintains that because something is desirable it is good. Perhaps we have moved beyond even that: the desire, the freedom to desire, is the real thing of importance (not the object of one's desire).

So, it would seem, we are not drawn to the beautiful or the good (or specific instances of them), as if to say that those things were, by their very nature desirable. Does everything start in the subject, then? Hmm.

More lemon custard biscuits. Close the book. Two chapatis and bitter gourd. Sleep like a log for one hour under the fan. Drift, drift...The desire for sleep, said Knulp, overcomes all other desires. 

~~~

Rowan Williams's Augustine -only just started-is a profound book.

R.W. on Merton: the desire to be unknown, to be transparent to God. When we are silent then God 'reads' us. One of my favourite books in recent years-recommended by the remarkable anton- was Paradiso. Aware of things beyond your understanding. The best books read you.         

.

Onward and Upward ?

"Above the skies, he looks around and tells us what he can see, or rather what he can not see: Boga Nyet!: There is no God! Below him are the toppling towers and domes of churches and mosques, left behind and condemned to imminent collapse by the soaring achievements of Soviet science. The old religions are withering away. Reason and research have raised humanity to a new idea of heaven – we can now all join Gagarin in an achievable paradise, empty of divine beings, and full instead of starry promise."
--The Guardian.

Levinas sees it differently. This is a moment of claustrophobia, nihilism. There is no escape, no transcendental dimension to our lives and therefore no more "height". From now on we're all flat-earthers.

"To take this seriously, we may hear in it a
very important assertion: the new condition
of existence in the weightlessness of a
space 'without place1 is still experienced
by the first man sent there as a here, as
the same, without genuine otherness. The
marvels of technology do not open up the
beyond where science, their mother, was
born. In spite of all these movements,
there is no outside here! What immanence!
What a wretched infinite! "

--Levinas.

And Arendt (1958) writes about the incredible paradox: just as we come to see ourselves only as finite creatures, inextricably earth-bound, we come to hate the earth (our greatest dreams are to escape from it). But also [she doesn't say this, or use the word 'hate'] our hatred is expressed in environmental destruction. Maybe this also explains the hatred for peasants or anything that is related to the land? (Lesley Chamberlain's Motherland' is excellent on this).

~~~

Dear C, 

Apologies for the very late reply. Yes, the book is out. Rumour has it that 3 copies have been sold!  

London, May 17th -August 3rd

Black Sun

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

--T.N. Coates.

Black & Green

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying

--Denise.

The task of learning is to be at home in the distance within which we live.'

'One learns to keep house with the means, energy and time available.'

--Gadamer.

As time goes by...

As time goes by I never stop wondering: who were you, fish? But, a sigh is but a sigh...

'The human heart sometimes follows the hand'.

I liked this Sufi saying for many reasons. The idea that we don't always know beforehand; that we're not in control but in the midst of wonder. And if it simply follows, what then of free will?!

Of course, the hand is also 'the self-revealing gesture of the soul (K. Clark). But to talk of beginning and end, or of causality, is to miss the point...the 'point' that is in-between...

Or: we act now, moved by habits of the heart which reason does not and can never fully know. What we know is not distinguishable from *how* we know. What is an education but an awareness of this unknowingness?

We see through a glass darkly, dimly perceiving something before we comprehend it (faith opening up paths and directions before reason..'fides et ratio'). What is 'and' here?

And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.

Robin Robertson.

Sketches

The Tree of Life

Every tree can vary from year to year.

A Comice pear may take many weeks to ripen in store, but it is at its peak for only a day. Perfection in the Grieve is almost as transient.

But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times.

The fact that two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean they do not share a same mechanism of need, a same set of deeper rules [words to ponder if you're still hooked to Shia/Sunni distinctions].

Ordinary experience is made up of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse.

All the richness of our personal experience derives from our synthetic and 'confused' consciousness [Thomas Browne here: "we live in distinguished, diverse and divided worlds"..there is always a 'wild', ec-centric element].

A way of knowing and experiencing and enjoying outside the major modes of science [and the academy].

[Only the scientist, the idol worshiper or the philosopher tries to escape the 'green chaos' of now and fix reality in immutable categories. Rosenzweig: Wonder!]

Possessing or wanting to gain too much knowledge can produce ignorance.

--words by John Fowles, The Tree.

A few small notes for Celia

I imagine Transtromer looking down at the world from a height. Not a great height (he still sees the human) but from a height nevertheless (like some minor 'god'). There he is, looking quietly out at the world from his top floor apartment, insulated from the passing of time, Schubert playing in the background, the notes emerging mysteriously...

Ted Hughes in the Bestiary is something of a different order, a different species; a lost Shaman, immersing himself in the very first elements of the world, mingling with the animal-soul to name it.

Robert Walser. Seelig's Walks with. 

Love the informal, personal tone of the writing here. A bit like the way a private journal is not supposed to see the light of the day and cuts you off from the hurly-burly of the world. At one point Walser says,

one cannot always walk in the light. 

And there is this pervading sense of the importance of letting nature run its course running throughout the book. Perhaps this explains Walser's 'greyness', his 'neutrality', his desire to be as small as a Chinaman, as soft as ash. I don't know why, but Walser always reminds me of Argon from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. He himself is one of the 

quiet, inconspicuous characters that keeps humanity together. 

that he talks about.

is it not lovely that in our existence so much remains strange and unknown..

He praises Keller's Green Henry quite a lot but not much otherwise. I'm sure anton has read it. Roxana too, perhaps.

“Indeed,” Walser writes about ash, “if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that you have stepped on anything.

By chance-was it chance?- I stumbled across the book at readings a few days ago but put it back on the shelf in favour of James C. Scott's Against the Grain. 

By chance-was it that? -I watched an hour of Into Great Silence. A slow but strangely compelling film. 

~~~

Thought for the day. How strange we are, and how strange we are to ourselves. What is this estrangement we carry with us and glimpse in the early morning light?

The sheer variety is breathtaking. There was a Hitler and there was a Bach (why contrast evil with beauty and not the good?). In each human language there were hundreds of ways of describing and thinking about 'looking'. And then there were myriad languages, more spoken than read, each giving its own inflection to different ways in which to look: gaze, glance, stare...

And what of the ways of not looking? Who sees my face today and is it lovingly?

{M wanted to see D lovingly, not accurately}

And K?

I look for you; look out for you, look with you...

~~~

The sheer abundance of life, whittled to the bone.  

~~~

A line from Augustine, cited in Oliver O'Donovan's Common Objects of Love, that struck you as being immensely beautiful: 

My weight is my love, by which I am drawn in whichever direction I go

~~~

The annual book fair was immensely disappointing. Too many books and pamphlets on Islam. A slight glimmer of hope in that a copy of Braudel was found but I don't have the time for such luxuries. In any case, it would have to wait in queue behind Pocock's Machiavellian Moment (still not finished) and Ronald Blythe's delightful Akenfield.

~~~

Well, how have you been C? What a pleasant surprise to hear from you!! Where have you been all this time? 

Interiors

and

~~~

There is neither the east nor the west; only the centre.
Not even that, perhaps, for what remains is a nostalgia for the inside.

Rings and Books

Rings and books is a wonderful (and short) essay. Will write some notes tomorrow. Did remind me of old England, a particular sensibility that is wrapped up in the language itself.

Todorov. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

An invisible bird flies over,
but casts a quick shadow.

What is the body? The shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains 
the entire universe..

Do you think that i know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing,
or the ball can guess where it's going next.

--Rumi.

The other Foot

"Human nature is a complex thing, and understanding it will take all the resources of the sciences – natural and social – as well as history. But the significance of those enquiries will lie ultimately in what they can say about the kinds of lives that might be good for us. And to know that, we must ask: who are we? What do we need – for ourselves, and from each other? And what must we be like to get it?"

From a lovely short piece on Philippa Foot (aeon).

This was from an excerpt from Mary Midgley's memoir:

Rings and Books’ focuses on bachelorhood and the concept of adolescence, but her real concern is with the kind of isolation from close community with others that has been a feature of many philosophers’ lives. Such isolation, she suggests, generates philosophy which is egoistic, fantastic and solipsistic – ‘flight from the world’ is typical of adolescence but usually people are forced to, or choose to, return to the world through the close relationships, friendships and community they form with others. In such a context, she suggests, the unreality of adolescent thought might give way to a more practical, imaginative and realistic way of thinking.

Now, there's something I'd really like to think about here: women writers/thinkers...

From a Guardian article, 2005, she writes,

"I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder."