Without title..still thinking of one.

Look carefully. A pathway in the grass, its faint outlines just visible. How old and ancient it looks in the bright sunshine! Or is it in the process of being formed, my very steps and footmarks adding to its definition? Now, at this very moment there is no answer, only a question mark. Who walked here before and what was spoken; who comes after and what is remembered? (Here was a unique soul, just like everyone else.)

The first day of Spring. The warmth on our backs, the eyes narrowing to make out faces in the distance. Winter fades, warm clothes are placed back in the closet. Open summer days lie ahead. But perhaps all that is an illusion? You remember summer days past and think fondly of the dark days of winter ahead.

When memory is of the future, then we shall talk about love.

~~~

"To live without questions."

"There is no direction from which He could not come and from which He had to come; there is no block of wood in which he may not take up His dwelling, and no psalm of David that always reaches his ear."

--Rosenzweig.

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’. If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at. This is in a way the reverse of Hampshire’s picture, where our efforts are supposed to be directed to increasing our freedom by conceptualizing as many different possibilities of action as possible: having as many goods as possible in the shop. The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’ 

---Iris M.

Some people are thinking about the end of Europe.

“There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water."
--Eagleton.

Across the lines

The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression, change for the sake of change, now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation."

and:

That frenzied sensibility of pure experience, life on the edge, immediate gratification, and total freedom from moral restraint which the Beats first propounded back in those heady days..an official style of the consumer society.

and:

It is capitalism..that is “the bull in the china shop of human history. The market economy, now global in scale, is by its nature corrosive of all established hierarchies and certainties….”[D. Rieff]. 

That's Thomas Frank from way back in 1993 (The Baffler (online)). Remarkably prescient.

Tarentino

The sheer pleasure of stumbling across a writer you'd never heard of. I don't think he's published much and I couldn't find a picture of him - and that all adds to the charm (a bit like finding Breece). But it's not just the 'stumbling' bit that is of interest; ultimately it's the thought and the clarity of writing itself. I don't know who Francis Slade is -and perhaps I have no need to know. But the thought..that's well worth trying to become acquainted with. Here are some parts of his ontological priority of ends (whence the picture above). Heady stuff. 

What happens when end is reduced to purpose and consequence becomes visible in the films of Quentin Tarentino, which picture a "world" in which there are only the purposes of human beings, a "world without ends." In such a world there cannot be any congruity or incongruity of purposes with ends. There being no ends by which purposes can be measured. all purposes are in themselves incommensurate and incongruous with one other. This is a world in which everything is violent. because there is no natural way for anything to move. But a world in which everything is violent means that violence becomes ordinary, the usual, the way things are. The violent displaces and becomes "the natural." Nietzsche observed that "[o]nce you know that there are no ends, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of ends (zweck) that the word 'accident' has meaning."The violence shocks because we are not nihilists, because we are still measuring what people do in these films by a world in which there are ends, not just human purposes. Tarentino says he doesn't take violence seriously and finds it funny. "To me. violence is a totally aesthetic subject." Commenting on these films Michael Wood says: 

"[T]he violence mainly suggests that everyone and everything is out of control. that no rules apply and chaos is come again. What interests Tarentino is not violence ... but fiasco. The sense that life is a mess even in fiction. And then into this mess he introduces not order but style and a peculiar kind of innocence."

A world of purposes only is a world of cross-purposes, the definition of fiasco. What is intended in the portrayal of such a world is not, of course, a "classic form.'' The manifestation of an order, "things held together in a living way with the sense of life going on," but the manifestation of an author. Style, then, not order. Where there are only the purposes of human beings. there are no actions to imitate; there are events to be strung together, not stories to be told. Life must be a string of events strung together "anyhow." Just how must depend upon the postures assumed by the author. Works such as these films reveal-and are intended to reveal-the sensibility of their creators, in this instance "a peculiar kind of innocence." A "peculiar kind of innocence" for there is no place for dismay that what is done wrecks havoc. In such a world that is a "natural" result of anything anyone does. A world of fiasco is a world in which guilt is impossible, because guilt requires responsibility for actions, and there are actions only if purposes are measured by ends. Wood remarks that in Tarentino's films:

"A desperate ordinariness might inhabit the most extreme of circumstances." The ordinariness is human purpose desperate when detached from ends, because detached from ends there are no "reasons" other than our purposes for doing anything. Wood continues: 

"There is also the sense that if you can't get a plausible reason for behaving the way you want to, an implausible one will have to do." Reason reduced to purpose produces the most extreme of circumstances. 

Macbeth inhabits a world in which he acknowledges only human purposes, a world in which he must ceaselessly strive to become the master of consequences. When the achievements of great ambition fall apart, his life seems to him, as all lives seem to him, "a tale told by an idiot. full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth cannot tell the story of his own life. But Shakespeare could and we understand Macbeth's life because we see it within the context of the whole which human life is as apprehended by Shakespeare. The screenplays of Tarentino are and are intended precisely to be "tales full of sound and fury signifying nothing"-but without paying the price of having to regard himself as an idiot. Pulp Fiction and True Romance, the titles he chose for two of his films, suggest that Tarentino believes that he can maintain a distance between himself and the tales that he tells. "Pulp fiction" and "true romance" do not describe Tarentino's view of his own films, but the character and status he attributes to the stories human beings tell in the effort to understand and give substance to their lives. which these films expose (supposedly) as "pulp fiction" and "true romance." Tarentino, self-indulgently, ridicules all purposes except his own. But if there are no ends, what privileges the purposes of the artist? 

In forgiveness, I allow the other to distance himself from his nature, from the way he is. In the moment of forgiveness, the other ceases to be a liar, so to speak. But it takes permission from outside of himself. This, I think, is the essence of forgiveness. When people say they can’t forgive themselves for something, that is nonsense. A person cannot forgive himself at all, for anything. That is arrogance. To be dependent on forgiveness—that is what is decisive. And in Christianity it is the alpha and omega. Forgiveness is at the very beginning. Much is forgiven because Jesus has loved  much. The Gospel of John effects a reversal of sorts and places forgiveness at the beginning. 

--Robert Spaemann.

~~~

Religion comes in all shapes and sizes (and colours). It's amazing to think of that, of how the spirit takes on different forms over time. You wonder what the old paleolithic religion might have been (without symbols, rituals, texts). Ecstasy and sobriety. The old song of sorrow and joy with us from the beginning? 

James C. Scott's Against the Grain really is quite fascinating (if read with Zerzan). Domestication of: crops, animals, women and, in the process, men themselves become domesticated (slaves of their desires?). Surplus. Therefore: war, violence, property, hierarchy, religious rituals to shore up order, administration and management, texts to stabilize the wandering spirit (is that why poetry is banned?)..the fist stirrings of the bio-political, the techno-social management of life..the social machine, the Great Beast (Weil?).  

The good ol' days

What will historians make of it all? The shambolic escapades, the shenanigans of the elites, the squalid aspirations and the hate-filled anxieties of the working classes. The low key resentments that seethe with every passing failure, that stifle any generosity of spirit. They  will look back in sadness at the precise moment when the fires raged uncontrollably and the ground beneath us froze. Brexit will then seem like a shoddy little episode in the wider history of a set of warring tribes that once populate the north-western frontier. It will merit a footnote but nothing else in the history that is written with immense detachment- if we continue to write, that is. 

Some will have looked back with nostalgia- it will be posited or imagined- as if they were sipping warm beer in the shade-filled artificial gardens, their turned backs slowly warmed by the low sun. With that thousand-year look on their face the old-timers will be telling the young ones: there is nothing new under the sun. And perhaps it was true after all, since their facial gestures will make them not seem so strange, not so different after all from their distant ancestors, the first peoples who sat around the hearth telling each other fresh stories. 

There will be no looking back in anger, only in wonderment. At how these people had amassed great wealth, piled up vast quantities of gold and then plastic and then trash- enamoured as they were by glitter; first by things that were everlasting, and then in the late days by things that had only a fragmentary existence. This collecting and gathering, they estimate, to have continued right until the end, without desperation, almost a deranged kind of innocence. The blurry statistics were there before them, that is for sure, but they must have passed before the eyes of the weary generation like what they called "flash photography" or ticker-tape news.

How these people were riveted fast to their delusions. In one of their newspapers, one historian discovered, the demise was even foretold since:


'A backward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain  Seedy appeal, is that all it is now?'


And that was England gone. The old ways, enshrined in religious custom had gone first. A buckling and loosening of historical imagination. And soon it would go down further, right into the marrow, the bindings and inter-weavings that had kept people close to one another; the desire to laugh together, to exchange stories, to congregate and celebrate life here on earth.

That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.             

The good old days

Found this at the book fair for rs 200. Then had a superb meal at my old friend's restaurant. Things were capped by this:

Remember the old line that told of old things, the way they were. Somehow words fail, but the light returns. The way light steeles into peares or plums. Totally unscripted but the moment known or anticipated. 

The cold air lifts, and something else drifts into our lives. There is warmth filtering through the glass, held in the body. The earth becomes gentler by the hour. There is a glint of an opening, like the first word she speaks. 

via Pli

k

Well, if you haven't gone to Bob's wonderful blog (link: "a music box" on my main page, what on earth have you been doing?!)  

Not all things musical but an outstanding source of the weird and the wonderful. What strikes one about his blog is just how open he is to differences (I'd say the mysterious). Anyway, here's another of his recommendations.

The social

For some reason everything coming my way is related to the social- or, more particularly, to the decline of social democracy: Jacobs, Rogan, Collier and now Tomasello. 

Underlying the crises of social democracy in the 20th c. (of which neoliberalism is simply an extended modern version) is the tension between the individual and the social (or what Gellner would call: atomism and holism). The political manifestation of this tension was, of course, liberal, free-market regimes on the one hand and totalitarian or collective states on the other. Social democracy being a kind of compromise solution (as long as prosperity lasted and as long as societies weren't too diverse). But it really was, in hindsight, a papering over of the fundamental question. And to believe that the state rather than solidarity, fairness and fraternity (as expressed at the institutional level (firms, trade unions, say)) could solve the social problem was, perhaps, problematic from the outset.

So, what of the social is left-apart from, it might be said,a  dim recollection of older instincts and habits? Rogan says, rightly in my opinion, that there's no going back to the older metaphysical perspectives and languages. Reciprocity may have worked in small-scale societies and when society was underwritten by religious scripts, but after so many years of self-interest, avarice and with the emergence of large-scale institutions is there really any going back? Society is much more bureaucratic and impersonal. Markets deal with the needs of strangers.

In some sense, you get the feeling that Adam Smith was grappling with this all along. What can bind people in a commercial society? And so the idea of sympathy comes to the fore (since religion is too divisive). But, as we've seen, unless it's expressed in particular forms it's hard to rely on moral sentiments alone. Which leaves us where? the near-absolute dominance of a shallow kind of individualism?              

In the time that remains

The story of the world in a year, the story of a life in a year (the last book you bought is one you will never read but since anton recommended it and since she is always the person to turn to in such matters you bought it anyway: Anniversaries).

What can be told, without what went on before, and what goes on after. The silence after is nothing like the silence before. 

I liked the cover of the book and it seems to dovetail with Rogan's book, The Moral Economists. There's a collapse on the cards, one can sense it: the smouldering smoke, the powder dust that has fallen on people's faces, the signs erased, the grimaces on people's implacable faces. Even if you could name it, so what? The question is: what can you do about it? How to begin again? I think this will be the question for us when climate change steps up a gear and grabs us by the collars. What resources, institutional, physical, and above all internal resources are available to us to stave off disaster? Not education and not religion, probably. Few will inhabit and breathe poetry; music will point us there but little else. What chance of reconstruction, then? Or is there a kind of Benedict option, a withdrawal and a waiting of it out? Turn your back to the future? Or, worse, give over to the forces which you name as fate and enjoy your two moments in the sun?

Do you trust in the continuation of the good life?

What a story it's been, what a ride!   

   

morality and the university

The victory of specialized scholarly methods over scholarship.

Twentieth-century universities separated the education of the mind from that of the soul.

Within the classroom, universities and colleges increasingly understood their role in moral education as one of developing liberal moral agents—that is, helping young people develop capacities (critical thinking, reflection, understanding, self-awareness) they would need to function as self-aware citizens and make moral decisions on their own. 

More:

Specialized scholarship, and thus the university, offered no answers to life’s ultimate questions. Wissenschaft (scholarship), he famously wrote, was “meaningless” because it could not answer the most basic questions: “What should we do” and “How should we live.

--Chad Wellmon, Melancholy Mandarins.

Crisis

To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that … it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.

--W.H.Auden.

Interesting book on Tawney, E.P. and Polanyi. The idea that they were responding to a social crisis, trying to steer a middle path between market individualism and state collectivism/totalitarianism, a conflict or crisis that would devour so many in the 20th c.  Underlying it all, you suspect, the attempt to recover the notion that we are, at heart, social beings. And for Tawney, it appears, this was connected to the (Christian) idea of personhood. But that idea couldn't float in our secular times and so the moral and spiritual critiques of capitalism turned to economic ones (distribution) or environmental ones (climate change a constraint on growth).

Then there's Alan Jacobs's book (just acquired) on the response of Maritain, Auden and Weil to the nihilism of the second world war and technology.

Earlier, there was Keynes and the social welfare consensus to patch up the ravages the economic system inflicted on people in the Great Depression.

Now, it would appear that we're living through another crisis (or the same prolonged one), a new dark age perhaps. And what is the response? Well, there's been a tremendous amount of soul searching but part of the problem is that there aren't really any public intellectuals who could hold the public's attention in our fragmented, distracted times. Part of the problem, though, is that there are so many different voices raising the alarm. Maybe Piketty has got some people thinking. Dunno. 

As always, the issue is a complex one with many different dimensions to it. What, Tawney would ask, is at the root of the problem? Maybe that's the question that's not being asked? Yes, lots of writing on anxiety and fear; on the looming climate catastrophe; on the dangers of technology and the internet; on the crisis of education, the crisis of masculinity; the end of the book, the end of creativity; the spreading of neoliberalism's tentacles into the very fabric of our social being (human capital, social capital, cultural capital); the threat to democracy by the 1%; and the rise of the far-right and populists in so many countries.

How liberalism failed. When and how capitalism failed. Economic oligarchy and the impossibility of democracy. The sixth extinction kind of thing. Artificial intelligence and the end of the specifically human ways of interacting, speaking; the loss of a sense of place; the demise of civility and conversation.  

Are these all just the same unresolved conflicts being played out in our century? It's hard to not think that that's the case.        

Same old, same old.

No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again.

--Stegner, Paris Review.

Images and truth

At dusk, Santiago looks like Lahore.

Finnis(hed)?

The knives are out. Not many, but some students at Oxford want to out him unless he outs himself. Are his views about homosexuality reprehensible? And mass immigration? I don't know and these aren't issues that I really think about too much to be honest. I really don't care what other people do in their own bedrooms and I find it hard to believe that homosexuals can't be good people, involved in loving relationships.

I did read two chapters of his book, Natural Law, and I find him to be an outstanding thinker. Even if he wasn't, even if he was just a plain old thinker, does he have the right to express his views or should he be silenced because they are discriminatory?

Well, from what I understand of the sound and the fury (which isn't much, admittedly) I think it's outrageous that he's being asked to leave by these students. What other views should be silenced or effectively banned? A Christian who (privately) thinks Muslims are heretics or an atheist who teaches that religion is merely a construct, an illusion..what about them? And what does one do about the uncomfortable fact -I think it's a fact- that most people of a religious persuasion (Christians, Jews, and Muslims, say) think that homosexuality is morally wrong? Should they be barred from teaching as well? 

I don't know where this could go. All sorts of people have all sorts of (abhorrent) views. What might we end up with? You can think what you like as long as you only loosely or vaguely believe it and as long as it doesn't hurt me (personally, emotionally)? You must (the irony here!) sign up to the idea that everything is a construct and be willing to give up what you formerly believed/thought..nothing is sacred, everything is up for analysis, ridicule, rigorous questioning; there is no such thing as human nature or essences; there is only sovereign becoming, radical doubt. You have to accept that! Confess, damn you! Well, you can doubt doubt itself but then if you want to then please get out of academia (some might say). That orthodoxy (and economic orthodoxy, more particularly) can't really be questioned (sorry Newman, sorry Macintyre, take your feckin' Aristotle and your curs-ed religion and shove them up your *!^*). 

Should Marxists be allowed to teach economics? Why are only academics who subscribe to the tenets and methodology of neo-classical economics allowed to teach? I think the Finnis controversy is going to run and run. It will move beyond him or even this specific issue. Maybe trans. discussions will be next. Let's see.    

So, two questions, as I see it;

One, a question of academic freedom. Two, is that view of homosexuality reprehensible, backward, medieval? Of course, just because a view has been widely held by large swathes of humanity doesn't in itself make that view correct. But it does make me wonder. Are the rights of religious groups/individuals to express their views legitimate (or only legitimate if they correspond to liberal standards)? 'Liberal standards' here seems to me to suggest particular views rather than a process of inquiry.    

Broken Britain

If the deal doesn't go through- which is, I suspect, what some who want to impose yet more 'austerity' on the country really want- then things will only get worse. 

I've seen a lot more homeless people about in Woodford. One man, youngish, can hardly speak, he;s in such a bad state. Tears just well up in his eyes. Just saw a middle aged man, slumped to the floor, his legs askance, as he sang into a traffic cone (as if he was some kind of aboriginal). Absolutely tragic to witness.

Around Bank a solid looking man stumbles on to the train, as if he's been pushed. He speaks with a wonderfully rounded intonation, full of confidence and old-world solidity, the words ringing off his lips; he still retains his Mancunian accent and the looks of man who has years of practical intelligence behind him. Not a banker, that's too abstract. The man who had pushed him has a narrow face and sports an old, used black thick coat. He hisses and foams at the mouth, shaking his fist at the northerner (who laughs at him and then mocks him). The rat-like man then starts shaking his fists at God (this is almost a caricature). Some people try to quietly move away from him. The hissing and swearing and cursing goes on, like a poor silent movie. The northerner (who looks a bit Kashmiri, now that I think of it) turns to his wife (who, in her leopard-skin top is obviously above all these shenanigans) and mutters something in German. 

I'd just got back into Laurus. In fact, there's a peace and simplicity and gentleness to it that makes me want to forget about the so-called real world altogether. I lift my eyes to look at the German-Kashmiri-northerner and feel like telling him, "Give it a rest, mate, he's obviously not right", but I fear the other one will hear me and turn on me. Like everyone else in the carriage, I don't even bother rolling my eyes. "You pratt," he says, as he gets off with his wife/mistress/partner. Unfortunately, unbeknown to them, the rat-man also gets off at the same station.

~~~

S's wife was punched outside her home (next to mine) by two east Europeans. He looked at me exasperated the next day and said, "You know what, Karl, something's broken. I don't know what it is, but there's something not right. I was going to spout off something about us not being in sync with the cosmos, or how the Qur'an talks about the "scattering" at the end of days then think to myself, I'll only come across as mad. If I said that back in the land of the pure they'd just look at me and say, "Well, yeah, like what took you so long to get top that conclusion?" Keep quiet and cut the tree. It doesn't budge and the three of us expend huge amounts of energy to uproot the bugger. I wanted to say, in an old and wise Russian accent (or maybe Jewish): "Every living wants to cling to the earth with the last ounce of its resolve." Totally superfluous and uncalled for, so I let it go.

Yes, I do manage to purchase Sharov and Kempowski. I even find the shop without thinking, my instincts back to normal. Space, that I can deal with. Time: now that's the problem!

At a certain age

At a certain age you look back on your life, your work, and ask, what has it all been about? Perhaps you reassess the fundamental assumptions in your life (the things you held to be true without questioning them), the way you look at life, or what you think is important. I don't know. Maybe a lot of people don't- or can't: the sheer weight of the past incapacitates us. Creatures of habit, it takes a tremendous effort to stay open to the world as we grow older. 

It's interesting to note the economists who, after working for their whole professional lives as bread and butter economists, suddenly and almost miraculously pontificate about how economics is brilliant and useful and rigorous but... And that 'but' usually means; it needs to become a more humanistic discipline, incorporate ethics or the insights of other disciplines. It needs to be more historically informed, less abstract, more mathematical and complex, less certain, more contextualized (add what you will). The point is; these 'moves' are rarely ever made during their professional careers. 

Tirole, a Nobel-prize winning economist, writes in the FT (Jan. 10th, 2019) about how economics needs to become more "multi-disciplinary". One hears that kind of language quite a lot in academia but I'm not sure what it actually means. Here are some examples (from Tirole's article): 

"Researchers there publish papers on issues such as the ethics of self-driving cars, age-related diseases, biases in judges’ decision-making and co-operation in indigenous communities in the Amazon. "

Well, yes. I suppose that gives us some indication of how seriously Toulouse takes "multi-disciplinarity" ! 

How can economics enter into a dialogue with other subjects when it is some committed to methodological individualism? It would have to jettison its whole outlook. That is simply not possible as long as it sits firmly embedded within liberalism and capitalism. A radical critique of economics would require a fundamental metaphysical reconstruction of the individual; it would need to understand our relation to other people and nature and objects of beauty in a different way; it would have to understand time and desire in a different way; and it would have to reconsider what is meant by 'science'.

I don't think Tirole or others like him are really being that reflective. At a certain age there's a tendency to try and justify-perhaps against your better instincts- all that you've sowed. Economists are in a bind and it's one they've sleepwalked into. In fact, they've helped perpetuate delusions, distortions to the idea of what it is to truly be a human being. And those false ideas have had, and continue to have, profound implications for the way in which we live. At a certain age, I suggest, one has to be honest with oneself and take responsibility.

All for Nothing.

No-one knows what they really look like, or what they sound like. I told my students this term that they come across as idiots. And that that's to be expected. I said so many stupid things in my twenties, now that I look back. I suppose when I'm sixty I'll look back to now and think: what a plonker!

Early morning. The taxi driver is probably Arab (maybe Syrian). You meet so many different people and don't have an ear for these kinds of things so everyone sounds sort of Greek-ish. A small and sprightly woman gets in the front. Full of bluster, throwing her arms up in the air, her unkempt hair flowing in all directions. She turns to me with a surprising old face, deeply creased but the features also weirdly young. That throws me a bit. "' Morning." And that's the last I speak to anyone for the next hour. She's the practical kind; world-weary. Seen it all. East Ender par excellence. She strikes up a conversation with the driver and it goes on and on for at least fifteen minutes. Navigation systems, the state of the roads, etc. I can't imagine anything more boring.

As we approach the hospital her thoughts turn elsewhere. People are already up and working in the big banks (or maybe they're just finishing up from the night before?). "Look at all these people, running to and fro. For what?" the driver is unimpressed so she continues: " It doesn't matter in the end. We all get ill. I wish I'd known that earlier. But didn't have time. All we need is a beach and the sun and a quiet life." The driver, who is obviously trying to make something of his life disagrees. "I guess it's the journey, not the destination". At this stage in the proceedings I couldn't give- to use a delicate Americanism-a rat's ass about either of them. 

¬¬¬

Later in the day there's a mad rush to find two books. I lose my bearings -which is unlike me (in London). Hop onto a 15 bus and then quickly get off. What a state I'm in! I imagine someone on the top deck looking down and wondering what is going on. I see myself running down Charing Cross, almost out of breath, trying to hold on to my hat with one hand..and the tears, the tears are streaming down my eyes for no reason at all. I'm just the fool playing his role in a moving stage set. Before I know it I'm close to Temple when I should be at Piccadilly. Completely thrown. Leave it. Sidestep the whole curs-ed thing and let that train of events brush by you. 

Anyway, started Laurus (at the third attempt). My mind is much calmer now and so I'm on it. I've placed an order for a book on Bulgakov (texts selected by Rowan Williams). The books, in case you wanted to know -I'm sure the excitement was getting too much for you, Roxana and fff- All for Nothing and Sharov's The Rehearsals. 

One more visit (probably to Roti King, with the boys) and then I'm out of here, down to the deep south-east, hoping there will be sun and a lot of forgetfulness and triviality. Nothing like returning to being a superfluous person. 

Gosh, there were some very attractive female doctors around. The big 5- O approached and went, and still those dreamy eyes and still those hands without grace. Instead, I dream of an age when Terry's chocolate orange was as good as it was in the old days, as if some kind of normality could be reclaimed. How many more acts in this play. [b exits quietly for lunch]    

The old East

Time and disease have hollowed everyone out. A young woman escorts her tall, weak father back home, her arm in his. How old is that scene? At the hospital there are Greeks, Chinese, Africans, desis..

Near Wick Lane, the old, mystical east. West Ham supporters flow out of a pub, some in their t-shirts braving the cold. The only forms of religion to survive are these old-worn rituals of belonging. There is a lot of brutal, soulless, utilitarian architecture here. Stalinist. Whole rows of streets are covered in graffiti. On the car radio 'Vienna' from the 1980s is playing; the hours of your life have stalled around this moment. Around the corner an abandoned church; the upper part is burnt out, adding to the darkness within; the window must have blown out years ago. On the wall are painted the words 'HORROR!' in large black print. I'd like to roam the streets here and make a film. Call it 'East Germany' or something. The look on people's faces isn't so different from the buildings.

Near Stratford some of the lights in the high rises are going on. From a distance there's a kind of beauty to it, like a floating spaceship..if you look at it sideways. What strange galaxy is this?

A few of the patients (English) are reading (newspapers, books and what looks like a film script). One of the women takes a red pen and works vigorously on the text. She's lost some of her hair and has a large gap between her teeth. Professionalism is what she's all about, down to the bone. Another English patient comes in, an old and frail woman with a square face. Her son is dressed identically to me (down to the hat and scarf). Colin floats in. Hard to imagine a Colin who is a threat to anyone. You'll never find a murderer called 'Colin'. You try to pick out a word, a tone of voice. Only a few northern notes survive in this harsh winter...what can you recognize in these times?

With great age, Ahmad said, there is time for forgiveness. Did he mean time for God to forgive us or for us to forgive one another?

Robert Bly's afterword to Transtromer's selected poems is wonderful. Pure extravagance but I bought these translations even though I've got the collected poems. It seems that Bly gives him more space, more room, leaves the door a bit further open. 

With Transstromer there's always a sense that you've got an extra quarter of an hour. Note to self: get Andreas Schiff's version of Schubert.

~~~

Early morning. The W14 glides by in the opening light, its own lights small and magical in the dispersing gloom. The 275 on the other hand roars and heaves up a hill, going through all the motions. Nearby you see the corpse of a fox (Aquinas says one shouldn't call a dead dog a dog. Why? As if it became an 'it', without a name). 'It' is lying there in the middle of the road, sleeping peacefully, its small head pointing north. 

I don't have the money for The Observer. For the same money I purchased Ronald Blythe's book on old age. 

2018

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.


We carry on as we always have: clueless, bewildered..stumbling through the dark days, imagining things can carry on like this forever...

At this age it is only natural, I suppose, to think that things are falling apart. When life is on an upward trajectory, or when you're young, or when your body is still resilient I doubt anyone gives too much thought to ' endings', failures, missed chances..how a seemingly simple life can go pear shaped...what need is there for reflection when there is life, pure and simple, when there is so much space and time in front of you ( or apparently so)?

At this time of the year there's the annual ritual of naming ' books of the year'. How comforted we are by lists! And schedules, I might add. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the Radio Times, for example. But what is it? The pretence of being wel, read? So much of one's life flitted away in attention to fictional lives, or semi- philosophical reflection ( of which you cannot remember a single word). For example, you're sure you read most of Bernard Williams's Ethics and the limits of philosophy but if anyone asked you to say something about it they'd be met with a deafening silence.

So, the accumulation game continues but the suspicion that we've darkened our minds with books and thoughts for too long only grows with each passing year. Is this really just a higher form of entertainment? A diversion from any really serious engagement with more pressing questions? Of course some novels are serious, but serious about what?

There are an infinite number of books. Don't follow false infinities. Hugh of St. Victor wrote, more or less, nearly 800? years ago. I can read ecstatic get reviews of  ' All for Nothing' but if I do pick anything up it is likely to be something that realises the limits of fiction ( perhaps Rachel Cusk or David Szalay's new book).

There are no more storytellers. Well,  part of you wants to say: Good! Get on with your own story...

Non- fiction fares only slightly better ( for me) since it's also part of culture - machine, the endless expansion of " productivity" and " ideas" that can never be assimilated into one's life; the life of the mind, that much vaunted and slightly ridiculous phrase, is not life ( lest one forget). Not saying that as a disgruntled academic. I'm not really an academic anyway. Besides, there's no time for that...

I don't know what has moved me this year. Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree for sure. Pond was a quirky, original voice. Like her writing but ' moved'? Not so sure. Anyway, not really a year for reading since most of it was preoccupied with writing your own book. And by other things..illnesses of loved ones. Although I still laugh a lot, I think underneath it all there's almost a permanent sadness. God, Tessa Jowell, was right, " The most precious thing is time". There's no two ways about it.

" What gives a life meaning is not only how it is lived, but how it draws to a close."
--- Tessa Jowell.

I know nothing about her politics but I don't need to. What does it matter?

The only book I'm on the lookout for is T.J. Clark's one on Breugel. Someone mentioned Sam Shepard..spy something. Wim Wenders, now that I think of it. Some poetry, perhaps, ' Supernatural Love'. Let's see. Might not venture out. It's impossible not to think: How many lives have you lived? Or, more accurately, how many half lives have you?

The light is mellow today and it actually feels quite warm. A dear uncle dropped in for 5 minutes. So fond of him and his old- world charm. Dementia has set in and so he forgets words regularly now. Soon, I fear, it will be whole sentences. Then what? Faces? Doesn't bear thinking about. Not sure when I'll see him again. Jesus.


Man, I really should try and find my R.S. Thomas. Via negativa. The dark way, the unsaid.

Might pluck up the courage and see Charles ( the famous Jack Robinson). Not sure what I'd say to him anyway. Leslie Chamberlain once asked me to her book launch and I stood frozen like Rita in Educating Rita ( if you know what I mean).

A strange thing this autumn..the apple tree in the park didn't bear any fruit. Waited and waited but there it was, just a small, gnarled tree near the Roding. Everything seems a bit off key these days. Even the lovely Gillian Welch sounded as if she was singing another song under the one she was actually singing.

The weight of beauty in my life; I wanted to escape from all that. Why should my soul be broken by an ideal? Why this pattern of a life and not another? Why one thing above the others?

How to begin? There are so many beginnings. You can look at that how you like, positively or otherwise. I was caught up in its dark energy, the momentum of the image- machine. Right now the dark rain is sweeping in, from way out there. It takes a long time to reach its destination but when it arrives it does so with great haste. You know what I mean?

There's a reckoning about. Whether it comes to fruition or not..who knows? Look inward, anyway. Not trembling, not yet, but a rattling...yeah, that's it. What price do we pay for the choices we make? A fair price? Only a saint could think so.

I wanted to help people but really I wanted to only help myself. And this is where it got me. Detached from myself and from reality. I'm less interested in beauty now. It's damaging and brittle. I grew into a picture and didn't like what I saw. There are too many images in our society. I can't make my mind like my body. To think of the whole person means thinking in a different direction, at an angle to all we've been led to believe. Or else it's a lie. I think there's another way. You don't have to control yourself...and who could anyway! But accept it anyway..there's no perfection here.

I don't know the way forward any more but I know it isn't this. Let's see. Everything takes time. Grace, if it arrives, does so unannounced.

( Some of these words are Grace Woodward's; most of them are mine. i.e. Made up)

You prepare for the hours of silence with scrambled eggs and, uniquely, a square paratha. As luck would have it, I switch with someone and move to the back. Always been the quintessential backbencher, the kind of person no one would remember in 20 years. " yeah, what did happen to K...?"

There is on inflight entertainment; most of the lights don't work. I roam around and eventually find one that, miraculously, does. I love this low key way of traveling. Find the time to read the first chapter of Macintyre's fantastic new book. Read this chapter three times already ( dense, or what!). But this idea that one can always understand things has to be given up. Take what you can. Let it go, it's okay.

A life that goes wrong because, amongst other things, our desires are frustrated, confused, or because they seek the wrong objects, cannot be ordered, be made coherent. What pattern of a life is this? Don't ask me what you already know.

~~~

You land and float through customs and passport control without talking to a single person. On the sombre train, more silence, but this time bitter, cold. There's a terrible harshness to the faces. Why is that? Time of the year? The ravages of materialism? What warmth and light there is is inside.

The old tree, bare and stark, a single dark letter in my life. The next day you see the light has failed here. Up above you see a plane flying wonderfully into its own beams of light. Human life, from a distance, is mysterious. I feel sad for the strangers, for no reason whatsoever. As it passes me I eventually hear it roar.

I stand in reverence, trying to make sense of my life in this brief moment. So much time has passed, R. Do you know what I mean?

~~~

Wellmon is a verbose writer. His book is full of too many details. What can be remembered now?

~~~

It is dark here early. Time is about to turn. You find yourself unprepared for the hours of silence...

Five Years

Kevin Anderson writes really clearly on carbon budgets and the level of mitigation that is required if we're to have a good (more than 66%) chance of avoiding +2 C. 

Here's a graph from the recent Global Carbon Budget (available online). The kind of mitigation in emissions (9% p.a.) are roughly what Anderson concludes as well. That's global reductions, mind you! As of now, I think that's only been 'achieved' during major economic slowdowns (Russia in the 1990s?). 

So, here's the dope. Emissions increased by 2.7% this year. That's despite technological improvements (carbon efficiency). It seems clear that technology is not improving at the necessary speed (that statement is based on the last 100 years of data, not just the last year). Of course, it could be that there's going to be this one spectacular breakthrough that makes a nonsense of the average figures but that's really just like placing a bet on an unlikely event (and what are the stakes here!).

Can we expect more deforestation over the next few years? I think so (given what's just happened in Brazil). Deforestation rates in Brazil were at their highest in a decade (8,000 sq. km lost last year).

The basic point: with urbanization, increases in population, and the growth in income there's a lot of momentum leading us to disaster. Factor in the investments made into extraction (which are unlikely to be reversed) and the political climate (right-wing climate deniers) then it's hard to see how this is going to be slowed down (let alone reversed).

My own view?

After the Camps there wasn't much left to say about humans anyway. That is not to say that the end of our time here is a good thing but just to acknowledge that we have sown destruction on this beautiful planet of ours and that things are coming to a head. No wonder people are obsessed by post-humanity and artificial intelligence/robots.

I think we need to buckle down. A storm is going to come, and things are going to slide.