N: N-W

The heat arrives, layer after layer. Search out the few feet of shade left. By 9 o'clock a breaking point has been reached; the sweeper's arms move like a mechanical pendulum. The light holds everything in perfect stillness.

Everything at this time of the year is run down, panting for breath, or some kind of relief from the fierceness of the days. There are smudged footprints on the wall and loose soil scattered on the floor. Doors manage to slimly hang on to their hinges. Mud is splattered on the side of the car. The earth is baked and won't budge an inch. A carton of milk lies abandoned next to a pile of pebbles. When you kick it it moves with a thud, some of its contents spilling on to the grass. Inside, a red toy light gets lost and found as the alternating light and shade from a curtain filters shards of light onto the floor. Our own lives flickering into and out of visibility in an ebb and flow that is as old as time itself.

The house has been turned upside down and inside out. Nothing is worth saving. A postcard, a sad and grey Japanese frog in watercolour, lies on the floor, creased, out of sorts. A model tram from San Francisco, unwatched dvds, unread books- their pages like dry hands.

The term has ended. I don't want to hear about it or talk about it. No looking back. Put on your Puritan hat and recall your sober heart. Love is north by north-west.       

The Transparent Society

The German-Korean philosopher continues to impress.
Made me think of the veil and the western/English fascination with it. Part of that fascination is no doubt down to the grumpiness of middle aged men who feel they have to comment on what women wear and how women wear clothes. But I think a larger part of it is really that it just comes across as mighty odd. I think the English sensibility is quite happy with a bit if difference-as long as you don't stand out and as long as you don't draw attention to yourself. It's a form of tolerance- or at least humility- I suppose. Wearing strange headgear might be passed off as simply coming across as a bit silly. But the covering of the face is way off the scale.

Then there's the question of autonomy. Some people (rightly) claim that this is sometimes a case of the imposition of male ideas of purity and not about women's free choice at all. Perhaps it's also about male fears of sexuality. 



All that can readily be granted. But I wonder if it isn't in part also about the horror of the fact that something remains secretive, hidden, in a world where everything must be exposed, brought out into the light. A world, that is, of bright surfaces and complete transparency. 

That desire for openness is itself not, you think, merely a product of the more fundamental desire to do away with all mystery, superstition. It's got more to do-at least in its current manifestation-with capitalism's need for smooth surface and friction-less places where the movement of capital cannot be interrupted. Show business. Show me the money. 

In a transparent society there can be no distances (including the distances of time). Immediate wants (not even desires). The constantly moving happiness machine. Just go with the flow. Just do it. In a pornographic society there is no desire or eroticism. In fact, there is no Other (whence the narcissism of the modern age).   

The Second Mountain

I've been reading this book by D. Brooks. Does read a bit like pop psychology at times and kinda self-helpishy or new agey at others. But for all the cheesiness I'm actually finding it surprisingly interesting.

"There is trouble in your soul, and it keeps you awake."

The idea is that the first mountain is worldly success, narrow versions of a good life that we simply grow into, unreflectively endorsing the scripts that keep the ego satisfied with itself. Linear progress, individual rationality, stages in life to be ticked off: move on up: freedom, control, and work are the 'big swim to nowhere'.  But really they're just a mask for boredom, or the indifference that stems from not being deeply interested in things (or other people) or the lack of courage to ask the big questions (Augustine: "I have become a question to myself"). 

In other words: Acedia: sluggishness of the soul, indifference, drift. Keep it neutral, keep it light, dude. Keep it anything but real. But out of the corner of your eye you sometimes glimpse the leopard on the high mountain, the second mountain. You know that leopard somehow, you sense you've seen him before or know him or would know him if..And then one day he comes down to you, stands in the open doorway and asks you: who do you really think you are?

Running Boys and Dead Girls

In the title essay of her 1991 collection, Good Boys and Dead Girls, the American novelist Mary Gordon analyses a recurrent trope in American fiction – “the healthy male animal, the running boy”, the male hero whose poignant search for absolute self-determination is celebrated, despite the rising body-count (literal and metaphorical) of women left in his wake. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner and John Updike (in differing but still deadly idioms) all see women as menacing them because women speak of boundedness, connection and continuity. These are the things that stand in the way of the young man struggling to retain innocence – understood, strangely, as boundlessness and the unfettered liberty to keep moving. Much can be forgiven these heroes, it seems, because they are filled with a “virginal desire” that is “beautiful” (Faulkner’s words); the reader is invited to collude with this passionate longing for the unfettered self, and to ignore the cost to other (overwhelmingly female) lives.

--Rowan Williams, The New Statesman.

And that's the problem, really. There's something that's too white, too male, too 1950's sensibility, that has begun to grate on your nerves (not that I can abide the thought of reading anything that is deliberately non-white, non-male..etc. ..the very notion of a genre just another ploy by the market to price discriminate and capture surplus).

But it's the whole angst business, the whole goddamned business of "loss" and, worse, "a meditation on loss". Added to that is the need to be seen to be intelligent, witty, ironical..to find the perfect line (quickly followed by the blurb: the writer's writer who says in a sentence what other writers say or don't say in a whole book. That's just more of the Great American Salesman for you!).

So, it gave you great pleasure when you read Maddie Crum-that can't be her real name, surely?-taking down Updike for writing this awful tosh:

"Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all [..] Funny how the passionate ones are often tight and dry and the slow ones wet. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy's neck."

Again, this just sounds like the modern/American obsession to say the first thing that comes into your head. Realism is equated to sticking close to the tenor of everyday speech and the writer's contribution is to make it sound real, as if those are the words that someone would actually speak. 

Misogyny? Yeah, like, whatever. Deal with it. Get over it and move on. Stop trying to "judge" everything and take it at face value. 

Akenfield

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

Half way through Blythe's wonderful Akenfield. Has got me thinking about work. Much more of our work seems to take place indoors and alone with computers. That means that more often than not we're isolated from other people. It also usually means that a larger part of our work is of the eye/mind and has little feel of the world through our hands. 

Also, what kind of narrative forms around the work we do? It's not that increasingly a lot of it seems meaningless (Graeber: Bullshit Jobs!) but that there's no story accompanying it (in the final analysis these two may be the same thing). Today you work on something; tomorrow it's something else. Nothing accumulates and nothing endures. Another aspect to that lack of continuity is that we never grow into or inherit a profession (which is another way of saying that there isn't really a 'way of life' any more). Instead, isolated moments of consumption..a "constantly moving happiness machine".  

So: time and place. everyone's on the move (or act as if they are) And no-one has any time for anyone else or even for themselves! Nothing can be allowed to grow slowly. Is that why so many of us -men, especially, are so immature? 

The mad rush to get there. But then you realize, there is no there there. There, there. 

Scheffler writes that the loss of a sense of temporal continuity results in us being less interested in long-term projects. Why bother if the world is nothing but a shape-shifting agglomeration of half-formed images and styles of thinking that are redundant before you can say Jack Robinson? What stands today is pulled down tomorrow. In fact, must be pulled down. And that, perhaps, is all that modern freedom consists in: the ability to negate. 

~~~

‘The old look inward at things we cannot see’.

‘The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints..as well as rhymes and prayers engraved on their sides.’

'Because the ringers put their whole personality into their efforts ‘ they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them’.

A wheelwright says of his work, ‘It was as much in the hand as in the eye. There was a moment when you had to say now ! Then you could breathe again.’

‘ He likes to leave everything just as it was'.

[Throughout the book there is this sense of inheriting and getting into the old ways..an idea of perfection that comes with time].

‘None of us are looking for wonderful changes’..’ If I get out of my routine I’m finished’.

‘The holy time was the harvest’.

Summertime and the living's

The heat and the light have arrived and I search out the shade, the small oases of repose to prevent my skin from burning. That reminds me of a character from the old Batman t.v. series. 

Been reading the endlessly fascinating Against the Grain (alongside Zerzan's latest). A heady mix and they often re-inforce one another...

Permanent settlement comes really late in human history (maybe the last 5% of our time so far on earth). Even then, agriculture doesn't dominate. It's more a continuation of a reliance of lots of different webs of food and a mixture of foraging, hunting, gathering..

Then we get domestication: of animals, other human beings (slaves), women, grains. From then on the wilderness is the dark place of the barbarians. Here is all warmth and light and familiarity and stability: the "domus module

But hang on a sec., why does it take us so long to settle for agriculture (monocultures)? And why this gap of millennia (3 or 4) before we go from settlement to full-fledged domesticated crops? All does seem a bit strange, especially when cultivation involves so much drudgery and not as much nutritional benefit per unit of energy expended.

From 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE world population only increases by 1 million (from 4 to 5). Which means a really low growth rate. why? Climate change, war? Or could it be that living in towns, settlements, cities (the largest of which was inhabited by 25,000-50,000 people) brought with it lots of diseases (contagion between humans and between humans and non-humans)? So, yes, maybe sun-and-wheat consciousness. Sumertime and the living's not so easy. 

This is the beginning of control, productivity, spaces of power, specialization (priests, scribes, labour), the war machine, bureaucratic control, patriarchy. Standing crops, standing army. Since the surplus has to be manged so too does labour. The beginnings of the biopolitical, then. standardization and linearization. Efficiency. But also the time of rituals, of absence and return. The moon and the sun. Fertility 'gods'. What kind of religion, you wonder, existed before the neolithic period?   

Evidence from domesticated livestock over thousands of years suggests that they become tamer, more productive, less ale to respond to the environment, and hornier. It appears that difference between males an females also narrows. They also have poorer nutrition and are more susceptible to disease (because of confinement). With the narrowing down of our diets and our own confinement, does the same happen to us (Scott intriguingly asks). Skull size of domesticated sheep falls by 23% over 10,000 years! Are you kidding me?

Which is to say, we've been profoundly shaped by this shift to agriculture. Maybe that's all coming to end as our attachment to the land wanes (50% of us now live in cities). But the underlying mentality probably hasn't changed that much. So, the question is: why did we stay? Poor nutrition, slavery or drudgery, upsets the idea that people are always drawn to the city. Maybe they were forced to (and prevented from leaving). Can't think of cities without walls.

So, the next thing to think about is how power is re-oriented by settlement. States, interestingly, come to the scene relatively late and are usually fragile. Extractive states, monumentality, state machinery, lists, quantification, representation. The centre must hold. 

Have we ever really escaped from all of that?Why grain states, though? Why not a banana republic?

Interesting..    

Anywhere, any time.

At the end of time, there is no more place.

--Merton.

"The message is that surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioral flows. Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it.”

From the vantage point of surveillance capitalism and its economic imperatives, world, self, and body are reduced to the permanent status of objects as they disappear into the bloodstream of a titanic new conception of markets. His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime."

--Zuboff.

The old field

No-one knew the way to it.
But: There it is!

No-one could speak of it or even know where it was. Like a lost word only your grandfather used to speak. But it was somewhere, sometimes, darkly glimmering in the evening even if no-one could remember.

No-one knew the way to her heart, he thought. Couldn't even tell if those clown's words were for me anyway. Behind them was always that dark glimmering space, somewhere, sometimes, not that you could tell. 

It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine...'

--Transtromer.

Lost Icons

"..I cannot absolve myself; just as I cannot love myself truthfully without another person's love, because I cannot without deceit and corruption love a self abstracted from the vision, involvement and investment of others. If I were able to absolve myself, I should be saying that my acts and their meanings could be-as it were- reclaimed , drawn back out of their life in the lives of others and ordered by my will..."

This is similar, he [Rowan  Williams, Lost Icons]argues, to a "therapeutically-guided introspection", the rhetoric of "self-discovery" popular in North American culture.  But that itself can be a tool for denying a role for the perspective of others  or a way of "retreating into an enclosed frame of reference". 

Gillian Rose's Paradiso on Sunday This remarkable line: Augustine lived a life of brokenness and integrity.  That word 'and' is simply stunning in this context. 

~~~

Notre Dame...

Dim memories but Sainte Chapelle always stood out as the real gem. But so sad to see this happen. Hard not to think that this is a sign of the demise of faith in the west (or at least in France). 

I spy

The dark in the morning light. Something of the night carried over. Look back and tell me what you spy.

I have read Spy of the first person. Not sure that I always understand it. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. Then it's clear, as clear and muddied as my own life. Sometimes. Which is why I like it, I suppose. Just don't ask. You know. 

I remember..I think I remember something of the old time. It all makes perfect sense now. When words are struck out then there's a deeper connection between what remains. Like the dark in a house. That narrow cellar room with its sloping slated floor. It blocked out all the light but was also the dark nerve of the whole house. In that way connected. Through some old memory.

Well, what do you think when you think, she asked. I was thinking, when would you walk into my life. 

And now that I'm here?

There were no more words in his words. He looked at himself/me from a distance. Try and trace the words you wrote in the dark, see what carries over into the day. Look for the word that was found in nobody's heart. Yeah, there was another beginning...

The summer heat drowned the day out, blotched the hours. And then night fell and a cool breeze from another land entered the city gates. So many flowers and leaves lay sprinkled at your feet when you woke up... 

hænep

At the end, he said, No Metaphors! Nothing is like anything else.

Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one.

He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another.

At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arabian proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.

Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.

So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him.

My arms the trees.

--Amy Hempel.

And now I find myself
with nothing
left to say.

The old human gestures, twenty centuries old, are forgotten in  decade. Time, like a bridge, draws to a close. Did you make it in time? 

The last light of the day. You run back with your heart in your mouth, the darkness falling around you in the streets. Everything in the old country lives and breathes in the shade. 

Moral education and the neo-liberal university

K
K
K
K

Antique Sound

Antique Sound

There was an age where you played records
with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive
stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond
which wore down the records and the music receded
but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority
that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind
and I knew where to find those off to the left
of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale
that once had been forest and had grown back
into a scrubby wilderness alive with
an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches
crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons
rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets
the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony
all long gone since to improvement but while
that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out
on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches
picking the thorns and we took back the harvest
and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky
quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.

--- W.S. Merwin.

The world we have lost

In the early morning you awoke to the sound of a large plane flying above. Perhaps too close for comfort. Things are often thrown into sharp distinction in the silent hours. You pictured the sound of it passing over you as if it were a wave. And the birds were startled out of their slumber as well as they started to chirp wildly and this huge shadowed bird flying up above them. 

First one or two, then more and more until it peaked with the wave. All this seemed to be happening in slow motion. As the plane moved out of range the chirping also died down and came to a rest. You imagined a perfect bell curve with the chirping distributed in a smooth pattern.

In the morning you found a dead crow on the ground beneath one of the trees. What had happened to her? 

~~~

L. Daston writes in the Chronicle about great books (not Great Books) that we once read but have supposedly been surpassed by more narrowly focused disciplinary works. The kind of wide-ranging books with huge imaginative sweep written between 1920 and 1980, say. Not popular or general books but not specialized texts either. Instead, what one might call scholarly works (is there a distinction between intellectuals and academics now?)

~~~ 

Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize

-- W.S. Merwin

Water Margin

“I’m going to jump into one of the fires – I have no intention of continuing my life,” says Devi.

In the time that remains

The wheels have come off. Time is out of sync. No terrestrial ebb and flow. Isolated moments without duration = fleetingness = a sense of acceleration. But directionless, therefore 'endless'. The end of time means no time.

We work and then we die. Actually, death doesn't exist. "Afraid that if it did it might cause the robots to stop working for a bit and to start expressing themselves, falling in love, wondering what it all means. --S. Collini (more or less)

The sun returns; the old light warm on your hands. Stand next to tree and listen to the crows. The black and the green. Better than listening to the students! Time moves in spirals: Always the same, always different.

Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it. --Nico Walker. (Walser syndrome: asylum=peace=books)

"Inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship. The comparison [is] to the Venetian Republic, a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed." -- H. Gray

~~~

So, there you go, R, reduced to isolated sentences, fleeting thoughts- precisely the thing you're criticizing! Cut and paste, stitch it together, the way our mam did with the Guy Fawkes man all those years ago, wearing my yellow jacket, carted along in a makeshift trolley before being flung into the flames for reasons beyond him.

Pascal, it is said, stitched the few things worth remembering into his clothes, so that they'd be a living word.

Strange to think that after all of these years I still can't bring myself to thinking much of academia. It really does strike you as the most awful fraud. You're a stowaway on board, waiting for your moment to jump, just before the whole damned thing crashes.

It provides a space, though, and one is grateful (to God, of course. Becket: fidelity to what or who?). I'm in purdah. Safely -one hopes! - left alone for the time being..in the time that remains. So out of touch and out of date that I'm almost a museum piece. Which is good since it saves me all the small talk and from engaging in questions of 'success'.

What is your next 'project'?, a colleague asks

I think less about the future. Not that I ever did. Now where? Nowhere, as before ?

He lit a fire and all there was was smoke in his room.

He left the room, but nobody noticed. It stung his eyes, blinkered him. But there was warmth. The smoke lingered on his clothes for two days and then Spring came all of a sudden.

~~~

Are these posts generate by an algorithm? Question to self.

The Burnout Society

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornamental collection of small glass bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them . They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of color, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the center of the wall.

--Bellow.

Misc.

"But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed."

--Hannah Gray.

“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.

"We do not hear the murmur of God's song, we hear it only when it ceases." -- Hans Carossa via Gadamer

"Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it." --Nico Walker. Walser syndrome: head for the asylum to get the time to read.

Smith

For Smith the possibility of morality depends on reflexivity, inter-subjectivity

and imagination (Brown, 2016). Sympathy, for example, depends on not just

me imagining what you’re feeling in your situation or what I might feel in your

situation; it can also involve a change in person and character so that I imagine

myself as you in your situation. In the latter case I must, to some extent, identify

with the other person to enter his perspective; on the other hand, I can only

reflectively and normatively sympathize with the other and endorse or disapprove

of his feelings/actions if I can maintain the ‘distance’ implied by having my own

perspective. Sympathy in this sense is a bridge which simultaneously allows for

imaginative participation in the life of another while at the same time maintaining

the distance required for judgement. It is hard to see how a preference function

can capture all of these nuances.

In some sense the matter is more complicated since there is no ‘I’ who exists

independently of both the other’s perspective and the sympathetic act. The self

does not exist isolated and fully formed at a particular point in time; instead, any

understanding of who I am depends on an ongoing effort over time to ‘see myself

as you’.

---K.M.

God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping.

--C.K. Chesterton.

In the morning the fields are flooded. The grass is sodden, pools collect leaves and display them on their rippled surface. The rain makes this 'grave old planet shine' once again. A pathway shimmers amid the gloom. Further ahead, fresh garlic and green tomatoes...the peas are so sweet that you eat them raw. 

Nature follows its course without knowing why. The rain, however predictable, always amazing. 

The strawness of straw.

You remember to take a pencil with you. So that you can mark the words in the book on Spaemann.  Two hours of peace, sitting by the window, an espresso..

Before you get there you see a fetching young woman, moving at great speed, her hair tied to one side. You drop the pencil. There are no more words.

~~~

Rosenzweig continues to fascinate, though you're not really reading him, just plucking out sentences from a book. Deal with the demands of the day. Look around, small glances, towards the world, towards yourself but nothing more. Small steps. Don't look for some big truth or something too far away from your own life. At best, you're only on the first lap. Low-level, low key. Which means you're still on it, which is to say a lot. 

Mid-morning is a great time since nothing happens. Find yourself where you are. What do you say? The small space that has been allotted to you can, perhaps, open up if you allow it to..or, if you are granted permission. Apperception of Being is the humanness of the human. 

Denise: The strawness of straw.