Transformations

These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

(Transformations, Hardy... for a blue star, Marh)

Marh was the first person to write a comment on my blog. Two months later she passed away. A bright kid, aged 17. May her soul rest in peace. Koss, from Lahore.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within
Like jewelry from a grave.


But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight...
The spangled sea below wants me to fall
It is hard as diamonds, it wants to destroy all.

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
through ninety dark degrees;the bureau lies on the wall
and thoughts that were recumbent in the day
rise as the others fall,
stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.
(E.B)

~~~~~~

The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
(E.B.)

~~~~~~

Alone beside the sea
like a mind alone in the universe,
her reason like man's
the sum of it how to get a meal.

A mind restless seeking,
a more restless flesh returned,
unrest and sleep without a gleam,
music delirium, and an hour of rapture

The hour of rapture is the clear hour
that comes from the darkened blind brain,
horizon-breaking to the sight,
a smile of fair weather in the illusion.

On the bare stones of the shore,
gazing at the slipperiness of the sea,
listening to the sea's swallowing
and brine rubbing on the stones.

Alone in the vastness of the univesre,
though her inaccessible kin are many,
and bursting on her from the gloom
the onset of the bright blue god.

I am with you, alone,
gazing at the coldness of the level kyle,
listening to the surge on a stoney shore
breaking on the bare flagstones of the world.

What is my thought above the heron's?
the loveliness of the moon and the restless sea
food, and sleep, and dream,
brain, and flesh, and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season coming without stint,
without sorrow but with one delight,
the straight, unbending laws of heron.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the gliter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.
--The Heron, Sorley Maclean

~~~~~~~~~

The Choice

I walked with my reason
out beside the sea,
We were together but it was
keeping a little distance from me.

Then it turned saying:
is it true you heard
that your beautiful white love
is getting married early on monday?

I checked the heart that was rising
in my torn swift breast
and I said: most likely;
why should I lie about it?

How should I think that I should grab
the radiant golden star,
that I would catch it and put it
prudently in my pocket?

I did not take a cross's death
in the hard extremityof Spain
and how then should I expect
the one new prize of fate?

I followed only a way
that was small, low, mean, dry, lukewarm,
and how then should I meet
the thunderbolt of love?

But if I had the choice again
and stood on the headland
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart.
---Sorley Maclean

~~~~~~~~~

"...big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dark. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveled on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the sea to lose themselves in it. After a journey of thousands of kilometers over what seemed to be an immense island, shielded by the moving waters to the North and to the South by the congealed waves of the sands, passing scarcely any faster above this nameless country than had empires and peoples over the millennia, their momentum was wearing out and some already were melting into occasional large raindrops"

~~~~~~~

Photo courtesy of Roxana

Past, Present

One is not a number.

Pieri din mintea mea!
Revino-mi în inimă!

The eyes did not fail.
They believed, even from a distance.
It was the heart that was unfaithful,
fluttering like a tattered banner in the wind.
To be lost in the soul of the sea ,
or bound by your green vision.
Why lament?
My heart has fallen like a star.
Then it was fire. Now it is stone.
---b

There was time when there were many of us, and we lived side by side. And we understood that Man, too, was a political animal . But more than this: our thought was the thought of the land. We roamed there freely, sometimes without a thought or care in the world, like clouds in the blue yonder.

Late thoughts were in our blood, stirring, darkly. At other times the grey would inherit the black and become silent, like the starless night. We mourned the loss of love, quietly, like a blue flame, and at other times danced, inspired by the the starlit heavens.

Like the ages of Man, dark, bronze, silver, gold...we grow in lightness. How many lives go into makiing a life? But time passes, the ancestors no longer visible and I, the last in the line, am without an inheritance. Memory fades, words fail me. Fire turns to stone. We look in dark mirrors and ask Who knows who I am?

For nomads the notion of past and future is perhaps subservient to the experience of elsewhere. Something that has gone, or is awaited, is hidden elsewhere in another place. For both hunters and hunted hiding well is the precondition for survival. Life depends upon finding cover. Everything hides. What has vanished has gone into hiding. An absence - as after the departure of the dead - is felt as a loss but not as an abandonment. The dead are hiding elsewhere.

One is not a number amongst numbers. Didn't your Anselm say as much? One is not a number. It is a way of being, of being -then, as it is now- together, alone.

Pieri din mintea mea!
Revino-mi în inimă!


(Quotations: Roxana, Bellow, J.Berger, Bulleh Shah..dark, bronze, silver, gold)

london

The Good and the Bad Uses of Mathematics

The world that people had thought themselves living in-a world rich with colour and sound..speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals -was consigned now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead-a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.
----E.A. Burtt

'..because mathematics is powerful it will always become an object of fetishism,..propositions congealed in the form of 'theorems' are not more than logical conclusions from assumed hypotheses, but create the illusion of being scientific discoveries. Mathematical economists construct a mountain as it were from these sorts of quasi-scientific pieces, and worship as gods those who have contributed to making the mountain a high one.

However beautiful or however elegant the whole system may be, those who devote themselves to a learning which is useless are inevitably just playing at a pastime, and it is likely that before long its learning comes to a standstill.
---M.Morishima

'The master economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions..He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher-to some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. he must study the present in light of the past for the purpose of the future.'
--Keynes.

I don't think this applies just to economics. I know some computer science people who are fantastically clever in their own fields but major league donkeys in all other regards. What's the point if you can't talk like a human being to other human beings? (Wish I had Said's 'Representations' with me now). A frog at the bottom of a well may use impeccable logic but still have a very narrow view of the world.

In a discussion with M last week on his game theory paper:

Yeah, sure, but trust can be looked at in many different ways.

M: Aren't you a scientist though?

A what?!

M: Er..I mean, a social scientist?

But M, why should we limit our thinking that way? If we believe in pluralism, in freedom, then we should also believe in freedom of thought?

M: Isn't that irrational?

In some case, perhaps it is not rational. But it seems to me that the attempt must be made to think of freedom and reason together.

I dunno, I get the feeling that some people go to university and are brainwashed, or at least dazzled by contemporary thought. The more complex, the better. How else would you show intelligence? So, you've learnt a few tricks. It ain't that big a deal. You know a few fancy words but what, exactly, are you saying?

Northern Elegy

Like Norsemen, guarding the past.

On the central line today: a very old woman sits opposite me and starts mumbling something to herself-except the words don't come out. She's very nervous and her disorientation is such that she doesn't seem to understand whether we are moving to, or away from, Liverpool Street, where she will make her way-somehow- to the Ipswich train. Her face is deeply creased and she wears a beret, like me. There's something suspicious about people who don't wear hats and there's something of a common sympathy between mad hatters. She sits at an angle to the universe. She is more bone than flesh. She slouches into her seat and crosses her legs in an old world fashion, every gesture speaks of a different world and, what amounts to the same thing, a different time..which is why, perhaps, she starts to talk to me.

She lets her walking cane slip from her hands to the ground...the old fox! And she has seen Churchill, the local MP from these parts many a year ago, "standing as close to me as I am to you now." But there is no time for that now..all that remains are fragments of a life. She leaves and clutches on to her stick with even more determination.

Notes From Agamben's Melancholy Angel:

The quotation in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and ready to rob him of his convictions.
---Walter Benjamin.

The modern form of power is the ability to expel, to draw something away from its context. Globalisation itself is a process of deterritorialization and abstraction. This is another word for progress. Power is an alienating force. To quote is to destroy that whose authority exists by is situation in the history of culture.The collector "quotes" the object out of context as well; he thereby destroys the order in which it finds value and meaning [and that is established by tradition].

To free something from usefulness is to impart authenticity to the object, an authenticity that derives, in the final analysis, from the fact that it represents its alienation value. The collector is like the revolutionary in that the new can only emerge from the destruction of the old, from the forgetting of the past.

The destruction of the transmissibility of the past, of culture, the rupture , the shock that is called modernity, has to be sustained and repeated by art. The last possibility of meaning resides in us telling a story of the end of meaning. But what happens when the shock of the new becomes the norm, when it fails to shock us any more?

The breaking of tradition does not at all mean the devaluation or the loss of the past; it is, rather, only now that the past reveals itself with a weight it never had before. Now the past, like culture, can be accumulated, devoured. Culture vulture.

However, he loses the possibility of drawing from this heritage the criteria of his actions and his welfare and thus the only concrete place in which he is able , by asking about his origins and his destiny, to found the present as the relationship between past and future. [see Hananh Arendt: Between Past and Future; Globalisation as the destruction of "place" : Raymond Williams]

Accumulated culture, culture as a spectacle, is not a living tradition but, rather, something that is undecipherable, a "monstrous archive" (Google, Libraries). It is a past in which he can no longer ground himself and so to talk of the alienated and rootless modern is both precise and telling.

Klee's Angel of History:

Propelled to the future (by a force beyond his control) , facing the past that accumulates, that resembles a pile of debris.

A culture that is losing its transmissibility has lost the sole guarantee of its truth and becomes threatened by the incessant accumulation of its nonsense, now relies on art for its guarantees.

Is it a surprise that so much of modern art is rubbish-literally speaking? Culture must become aesthetic pleasure-a mere matter of taste- and this enjoyment is only possible through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of its poetic capacity to open its space to man's action and knowledge.

Kafka: man is unable to recover his space, his bearings...travelers in a train ..in a tunnel , and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen , and the lights of the end so very small, that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, it is not even certain whether it is the beginning or the end of the tunnel.

Valentine's Park

The creation of a single soul is like the creation of a universe.
Q: 31:?

I repeat myself. Walking back home: the sky is calm and serene but also dull and monotonous, the warm evening air is still; I have the weird feeling that this walk back home would have felt better had I decided in the morning to go to the seaside and not to town. And for a moment it feels as if that other journey-the one not taken-is more real than the one actually undertaken.

I pass a car and note that the side of it has been badly scratched. A meaningless event-and the observation even more so. I settle down to watch a film and the first scene is of a person looking at the scratch on the side of his car. Of course, there is something in us that looks for such co-incidences, hidden correspondences between isolated events..Freud would say it is a remnant of primitive thinking. Perhaps. But , then, all poetry and a significant part of mysticism depends on such primitive thinking in the form of metaphors: only connect. Perhaps it is modern thought, with its desire to tear us away from nature, from 'the given', that is the anomaly?

How many lives go up to make a life? None seem to get off the ground ...maybe this is why they repeat themselves? I've had this thought before. I open the front door and am almost paralysed by the light which brings forth a stream of thoughts..it is as if a hundred summer days are condensed into that moment: the long Sunday afternoons of childhood where nothing happened or the 4 0'clock suicide hour in Lahore where the world stops turning...I pick up a book, at random, and read the words: memory is the intersection of mind and matter.

And all along I recall that a thought-or rather a sentence- had been lodged in my mind, long before I left the house, like an unfinished dream: The whole of summer was rolled into one of his shots.

The day before-or was it the day after-I had visited Valentine's Park. On the way there I had been reading Badiou, and he makes a lot of 1937 as a turning point in history-as if there are a few moments on which everything hinges. A slight displacement either way and we would have entered another universe, our whole destiny would have been radically different. The fragility of time: a moment takes us to or away from the beloved. And I remember an old black&white film from childhood where a man searches for a woman who he's fallen in love with but never talked to. It just so happens that they always cross paths-or nearly do, for although they are always in the same places they always seem to just miss each other by a few seconds..as one enters a room , the other leaves it. It is as if they have to repeat these actions ad infinitum until fate perfectly reconciles their individual destinies (as a quirk of fate, I never did watch the end of the film to see how it ended!).

But isn't each moment this hinge, this turning point? At the park something catches my eye. There is a solitary tree with a faded golden plaque on it: I read the numbers incredulously: 1937.

The park itself is unremarkable-except for a remote, older corner of it. It is as if this part of the park was more ancient and everything had been built around it, a world within a world. It had not only survived all the changes, but like an old tree, endured beyond all sadness. One could pause to think: how many promises were made under these trees, how many hearts broken? Here people had met and held hands and laughed together. How mysteriously ordinary it all seemed. Here the branches of the trees stoop to touch the water. The water is black and to peer into it is to look at another world lying beyond a black mirror. Each thing in the world-ourselves included- has its other life and we only momentarily catch a glimpse of it...

Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence of bronze,
only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
--Denise Levertov

(with thanks to Roxana for the photo..if you can see it!)

Moondance

Well, its a marvelous night for a moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
beneath the cover of october skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I'm trying to please to the calling
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low
And all the night's magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush.

---van Morrison

Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed-- You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak, And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress: I but a shadow--you a radiance fair! Know you what such a moment holds for me? If ever I were eloquent. . .
---Rostand

Winter moon,with your pale shadows in the long grass.
Stone of light, mortal god
that speaks to the poet
Inspiring him with Love.
You, who in yourself are nothing,
and never fully yourself.
You, who stands alone in circular thoughts,
whose cold gaze is the destiny of the sea
Perchance you know something of my soul?

---b.

Walking home last evening, the sky bluer than ever, crows having made their way home, nestling up in the darkening shadows, I heard the familiar laughter of the workmen behind the corrugated fence, listening to their music (probably old Kishore) as I listened to mine (Bach). They sit around a fire, on their haunches, gulping down large swigs of milky tea. These are the poor working people that make up the majority of this country; sometimes crude, sometimes elegant (let us not talk, like the fundamentalists, in terms of class and let us put any romantic nostalgia for a 'people of the land' to one side).

Then I see a seven year-old hijabi walk up to the fence and say, in her miss holier-than-thou way: you should stop listening to music, why don't you go and pray.

Of course, you might find that funny or just irrelevant but it strikes me as indicative of how far this place has regressed over the years (this is where I usually start foaming at the mouth and launch into a vitriolic attack on the wahabis and the fucking Saudis, General Z... but what's the point).

I stare her down and then roll my eyes to the skies. And then I notice the moon through the leaves of a beautiful tree, shimmering magically, waiting for me to witness her splendour. No, despite the stupidity, the world is still the world, mysterious in all its illusionary qualities, its very fragility.

The workmen stop their chatter for a moment. And then I hear them laugh some more. I could swear they turned the music up ever so slightly. No. Human ways survive. This music that is on the verge of disappearing is always disappearing, always reminding one of heartache and exaltation. Stop. Listen. Time passes. Lahore is Lahore, and tonight we will dance beneath the moon, my love.

Trust

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

Anton recently wrote on trust and language (I couldn't understand what she said but I trust it was wise and wonderfully humane). We trust all the time and so I'm a bit suspicious of people who talk about the 'crisis' of language-as if words are only empty words, never getting us to the thing-in-itself, or who harp on about authenticity or the 'real self', as if we could not, should not, trust what other people say. I give you my word. Who says that nowadays?

Well, you might say, we only have degrees of trust (granted, but trust can only be tentative, can only be associated with vulnerability and the lack of guarantees if you think about it). But we don't trust others, you say: expert advice must be treated cautiously-what do they know: teachers, doctors, environmentalists; politicians (dodgy dossiers) and civil servants are, ultimately, only concerned about their own narrow self-interest (and libertarians will add: that is what human beings are like, or that is what human nature is). Why should I trust my brother?
No, only fear and punishment or the State, the law can give me security. Or I trust if it's in my own interest to do so or it only makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. Confession: I don't trust people who want to explain everything under the sun in terms of evolution).

Human beings are scoundrels, cheats, willing to renege on contracts, agreements, commitments all the time. In fact, they thrive on the very possibility that some people are trusting. Give them an inch..

And so we're led to a spiral of mistrust and mutual suspicion. If 'goods' are scarce and rivalrous are we led down the path of disastrous conflict (Girard or Foucault: Society Must be Defended). And if the 'rational' thing to do is to cheat the other then what use morality. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. If that's all philosophy has to teach us then we had better give up thinking. 'My Mercy takes precedence over my wrath' it says in the Qur'an and 'the good' precedes evil...evil exists only as a limitation of the good.

What about love and sympathy (must get back to Smith here), then? Well, you say, they aren't universal: you only love your 'own'. England has no eternal friends or eternal enemies, only eternal interests! In fact, your partiality here actually makes things worse. Us or them said the great natural philosopher. My tribe or yours. Immigrants, Blacks, Jews, Shias*, Punjabis..there's something not quite right about them. Women? How could you forget! Ah, yes..the snake..can they really be trusted. Where's the trust in this relationship? Er..now that you ask...

You look for a sign so that we can trust. How we need to. But didn't the search for it make you a lesser person? Isn't it just there? Or does it have to be nurtured?

It's not about our distrust of our knowledge of the world (I reach out for my tea and trust that by the time my hand gets there it will still be there). Perhaps that radical doubt is the defining aspect of modernity (Hannah). Perhaps we live in a 'risk society'. But what we've got here is something else: a fundamental mistrust in the world as the world, a sort of second gnosticism. Can we once again live without the calculating hand, without the manipulating hand?

*joke: an eminent Shia is on his death bed and tells his best friend that he wants to convert and become a Sunni. The family and friends are utterly distraught. "But why?"
"Well", he replied, "if I'm going to hell I want one of those bastards to suffer"

Could I just add, the motivation for writing this was not something I read (though I am borrowing here to give shape to my feelings); no, it was that whilst driving yesterday I saw a rather rotund woman-poor, no doubt, if one judges by the way her clothes were sticking to her sweaty body- quickly make a dash for it. But there she was, smiling away, as proud as could be, tightly holding the hands of her two children. They were the world to her, and she to them. And there they were, as trusting as lambs. And at that moment I was convinced that no matter what theorists say, no matter how terribly ugly and frighteningly sick some people are, the world is still the world, a tent of scattered stars that love has made.

The Red and the Grey

A report today: native red squirrels face extinction at the hands of grey ones, introduced from America in 1876. No-one can quite work out why they cannot live together but scientists say that it may have something to do with the grey ones being more competitive....
The greys are sweeping the south; only in a few places do the reds survive and that too in special reservations...


Wisdom is grey. On the other hand, life and religion are full of colour.

----Wittgenstein


For the Red Indian seems to me much older than Greeks or Hindus or any European or even Egyptian. The Red Indian as a civilised and religious man, civilised beyond taboo and totem, is religious perhaps in the oldest sense, and deepest of the word. That is to say, he is a remnant of the most deeply religious race still living....Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance, so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth's centre, the very reverse of the upflow of the Dionysiac or Christian ecstasy.

There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were still alive but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock...For the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, earth-life, sun-life...This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion ...

Again, something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitter dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses..this old, bronze-resonant man, with his eyes as if glazed in old memory, and his voice issuing in endless plangent monotony from the wide, unfurled mouth...

All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-not ideals and shalt-not moralisms, and shut up fast in her own 'productive' machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce.

--D.H. Lawrence, Selected Essays.



'The North American Indian, says Frithjof Schuon, had no intention of 'fixing' himself on this earth, where things crystallise or petrify in time if they do not evaporate: this explains his aversion to houses, especially stone ones, and also the absence of writing which, from his perspective, would "fix" and "kill" the sacred flow of the spirit ..The red man's sanctuary is everywhere,; and this is also why the earth should remain intact, virgin , and sacred as when it left the Divine Hands'.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.


'First, in the Sioux country , the Army crushed the Sun Dance with armed force. Then the missionaries influenced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to impose regulations not only against the Sun Dance but against all "pagan" ceremonies which, they believed, impeded the progress of the Indians towards Christian civilisation. The Interior Department framed a criminal code forbidding Indian religious practices.'

---Indians of the Americas, John Collier.'...


The white man descended on them. It was a horde in which rapacity and the sterile superstitions of 'progress' had already destroyed the spiritual heritage which had been its won birthright...and there was only a sadness deeper than imagination can hold-sadness of men completely conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe'

---J. Collier , cited in Gai Eaton's King of the Castle.


At the frontier, the death of an Indian...(from Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden)

On the outskirts of a small town an Indian, Jimmy, is attacked by three crazed white youths and his body dumped at the riverside...

"In the spring when the snow melted and the rivers flooded, Jimmy would no doubt be swept away to the river , on currents that carried the logs and rocks and earth of the interior to the Great Slave Lake and beyond towards the arctic ocean...Think of those four minds. The one moving in a country that was his , of which he knew every corner, that he could explain and explore and use and delight in. The other three looking at a "wilderness", with a tough indifference or resolve, somewhere and somehow, to get get some hold of some part of this place and transform it from nothing into something, from mere land into money, from frontier into a ranch or an oil well or something, just something. Think of one mind filled with knowledge of place and the others empty of such knowledge, filled instead with determination and craziness and anger of youth, reinforced by restlessness and nomadism and technologies from elsewhere....this meeting of minds, this murder, could have taken place-has taken place-on all frontiers between settlers and hunter-gatherers.This time, in 1998, in this place, it was Jimmy Field, Dunne-za. He was man who travelled time in dreams and moved on his lands with awe-inspiring skills...the pain of his death contained all deaths, in all places and all times. The bodies of hunter-gatherers continue to be swept under the ice, frozen , dead, towards the oceans."

The Limits of Markets

Okay, I promised I wouldn't talk shop but these libertarians are pissing me off no end, so here goes...

1. Well, for markets to work one requires a lot of things: no externalities, perfect information, no transaction costs and so on.

2. The underlying assumptions of the economic agent in a market are rather restrictive: preferences are given and he is self-interested, rational (the latter itself usually only a narrow concept-that of consistency-and doesn't consider being able to rationally choose ends or weakness of will arkasia). So, other motivations are usually left out (commitments, altruism, duty-all of these things can hardly be accounted for) or considered to be veiled forms of self-interest. And here we're dealing in tautologies. Don't mention Adam Smith. Seriously.

As Mary Douglas says, economics deals with "missing persons" or the needs of strangers.
Identity is not important (class or ethnicity, say) nor is solidarity or positive freedom. Markets deal with solved political problems (Abe Lerner). No wonder libertarians choke when they utter the word 'we'. Thatcher: there is no such thing as society.
..Ah, to be alone in Paradise.

3. What do markets have to say about distribution or fairness or equality? Very little under the standard approach. So, once again an impoverished conception. But even the Pareto principle isn't really neutral-and it's not clear that it is very useful in day-to-day evaluations (how many projects or policies lead to no-one being made worse-off?).

4. Where there is no trust there are no contracts.
--Hobbes.

The idea that markets just evolve spontaneously is questioned by Braudel, Polanyi, Platteau. In any case, they require something above them -institutions, culture, law, courts, enforcement mechanisms for them to work. Where the costs of setting up formal mechanisms is too great we would expect informal mechanisms to exist (Avner Greif) .

5. 'the Market'.
Begs the question of whether we can say that the market for corn is the same as labour, credit, insurance markets. In any case, economists have recognized that actual markets work in different ways to the theoretical approach. Labour markets, for instance (see Marsden, Akerlof..even old Pigou claimed that 'non-market' factors can play a role). The point being, a small percentage of actual markets conform to the theoretical picture (20% according to the general equilibrium theorist, Morishima). Harp on all you want about imperfections, but sooner or later you're going to have to realise that the neo-classical paradigm only represents one special case of how markets work.

6. How does a market work?

Why, there's an auctioneer, of course. Who? Not only has this fabled creature never been spotted, it's not clear whether by collecting information he isn't a centralised mechanism! And even here, in the general equilibrium setting, it is not clear if we get to a stable, unique equilibrium.

It is also the case that the world of GET (General Equilibrium Theory) is in fact a dream world, a world which is not totally workable in the context of actual society.
--M.Morishima.

7. Even after all that you will still hear the shallow and mind-numbingly narrow view that everything can be conceived in market terms. Marriage, for instance. Well, you've got buyers and sellers, haven't you? Here one might here an american voice: what's the bottom dollar, show me the money, time is money. Yeah, right. We killed so many people in Iraq but at least my tax money was utilised well. Bang for the buck, so to say.

Same goes with the environment. The poet sees a tree, the libertarian a table or a resource. Why vote?Cost-benefit. No sense of tragedy (Nussbaum) or civic responsibility. Instead, me, myself and I. What is education? Let me get out my calculator.

I dunno, they just sound staggeringly stupid to me. I have even heard one blogger say: if his friend makes a choice to jump out of a window he would feel under no obligation to help him! Their disdain for human values is remarkable. Those on welfare are "losers" (to use another americanism), and if you believe in the welfare state you're a god-damned commie!

Love is the Wine

Love is the wine. By the hand of the wine pourer, the glass is filled. This is the short way. Love could be offered to one by other hands. This is the short way.

---Shaikh Muzaffar Ozak.


Love would never leave us alone.
---Marley


One who is drunk does not see the hand in-between. Does one then not "lose" oneself? When something has slipped through one's fingers-but only when it has-then one might accept that this is what had to be, that that is what was part of one's destiny. World and soul are one. But this seems to me to be reserved for the faithful, as a matter of grace, of what's alloted to you. Or perhaps one can drink to forget and once again there is no disjunction.


But it seems to me that acceptance can also go hand in hand with regret. Even if one says, after the event, this should have indeed been what happened once can still say: what might have been. And in that "might" there is the shadow of "should have". There is no impiety in saying so.

Is that not the quintessence of our humanity?

What is this broken vessel but a dazzling patchwork of mutli-coloured glass, always half-full? And what drink is this that makes us inwardly drunk, outwardly sober, forever thirsty, but still thankful? I remember nothing, I remember everything.

Between the rose and the glass falls the shadow. Between the motion and the act. But the shadow is not a world; it is a floating bridge, a ladder...

Every beautiful form you have seen, every meaningful word you have heard-be not sorrowful all this must be lost; such is not really the case. The Divine Source is immortal and its outflowing gives water without cease; since neither the one nor the other can be stopped wherefore do you lament?...from the first moment when you entered this world of existence, a ladder has been set up before you...

First Impressions, Second Thoughts

Is the first impression everything? How much does a photograph (of yourself, say) reveal and do the particular features suggest a pattern that one finds agreeable or disagreeable, that one instantaneously 'recognizes' (our obsession for routine, our compulsion to repeat is nothing, perhaps, but an attempt to reproduce this first impression)? As Jonah says, at a job interview they either like your face or they don't, you either 'fit' or you don't. Maybe, as in art or caricature, we depend on this ability to pick up certain vibes, to bundle information together. We intuit unity. Perhaps this is no more than a remnant of our survival instincts:http://www.imprint.co.uk/rama/(second lecture)

Thin slicing: our ability to derive the quintessential from a restricted amount of information and from a limited experience, to condense a series of fleeting impressions, distill things down to a few significant traits and tell-tale signs: body-language, speed dating, logos and brands, gut feelings, the bottom line, instinct, love at first sight...

Here's an interesting read that explains, perhaps, why someone like Bush could (miraculously) get elected:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954

On Radio 4 this morning:
Recent MRI research shows that once people have formed their views they very rarely change them...most of the time they justify them or make sense of them by viewing them in a new light: black or white, us or them. Snap judgements that we just know are right. Blink.

A survey conducted by Border's shows that which books we read says something about attractiveness: men reading fiction -especially Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice- indicates an 'imaginative' side; women reading chick lit: desperados; men reading sci-fi: adolescent.

(surveys, science, evolution...is this the same black sun?How unlike you, how unexpected.)

Is there a continuum in the type of thinking represented by a conservative, a fundamentalist and a fanatic? Might it not be that a certain type of profession or a particular line of academic interest is drawn to one style of 'reasoning' rather than the other? For example, it is well known that some philosophers have edged towards a reckless mind, inclined to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. And one can very well imagine accountants , engineers, and economists-who are little more than glorified engineers anyway-being attracted to the first two modes of thought whilst it is less easy to envisage those from the arts or the scientific community having much sympathy with such a rigid outlook. (I've always wondered why so many accountants and computer science people are drawn to the Tablighis)

In a very real sense their temperament is fundamentally at odds with a mind-set that pictures things in terms of narrow binaries. Their thinking exhibits the full range of colours, as it were, dancing lightly through contradictions and anomalies without any great concern. Always open to re-vision and second thoughts, he is disdainful of any final settling of accounts. Like a fox that knows many things-even if superficially- he is a thinker of the late style: a dilettante willing to revisit and disrupt established truths and conventional wisdom. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a specialist who has sacrificed 'imagination' and worldly cunningness to the gods of rigour and truthfulness.

One of the first motivations for 'analysis' is the conviction that there is a problem-a problem that can be broken down into its constituent parts and then abstracted as stylized facts. It is only a small step from this to hold that all problems require technical solutions (It is no-co-incidence that Nazism would be thought of as an 'engineering of souls'). One wonders to what extent radical thinking is the by-product of the combination of 'analysis' and the Utopian striving for perfection. Not to understand the world, but to change it. (I'm reminded of how the 'revolutionary class' was not the "backward" peasants but the proletariat; how the Communists were in love with the machine and technology. Calasso, here.)

Metaphorical thinking, on the other hand, is always tentative even as it forges links between disparate 'objects'. Here, there is no question of perfection or imperfection: only connect! Whilst abstract thinking requires the move to generalisations, poetical thinking can hardly do without particularities. But even to state it in such terms is to set up a false dichotomy. We need to think and feel the stars.

Of course, rational thought is often sober, clear, calm and thankfully distant from its object and poets have been known to side with the forces of fascism; the allure of the mythical and the irrational or 'oceanic feelings' can and have led to untold barbarism. The sleep of reason brings forth nightmares. Herein lies the essential confusion. Is it an excess of reason or the lack of it that leads to madness? Was Nazism the embodiment of the hypertrophy of the mind and a love for lines of clear distinction, 'mechanism' and efficiency or was it the reflection of a tendency of the mind that wants to sink back into chaos and anarchy, primitive and tribal thinking...magical thinking?

Notes from Daniel Barenboim's Reith Lecture:

Improvisation: the first reaction is learned, as is the second. We move from one to two and therefore to the possibility of infinity. We get to the n th reaction and then it inheres in us, takes shape. Then and only then can we improvise. We achieve a conscious naivete, on the spur of the moment. What from the outside looks like pure creativity is, in reality, a deep internalisation of rules, techniques, standards, rituals, and experience. It is not pre-meditated but nor is it a creatio ex nihilo.

The Allama would say that finite thought and intuition are organically related.The spark that bursts into flames does so only after years of patience and sober reflection and then does the bewildered heart have any direction? What use, then, of 'first' or 'second'? Then, in such a moment, there is no Lahori soul, no west or east. There is only love and who is to say where that will take us, to what it will incline us to?

What remains true is the essential human quality of taking a step back from our first impressions (Sen: meta-preferences). That we, mercifully, have masks and can imagine other worlds. The whole world is a metaphor. That, astoundingly, there are second chances, second spaces. (Even libertarians and neo-liberals can regain their humanity).

Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from, say, the sea, a purity of space.
---Er...W. Bronk

Looking for some Emmi but she's not "up" yet. Instead, found this. Hope you like it C. (Turn away from the screen and just listen). First heard this via Ronald Searle on Desert Island Discs.

Once one has been a prisoner one is always a prisoner.

---R. Searle.

But he also said something very interesting..that this song told him that death would be a sort of "release".

The desire for sleep overcame all other desires.

---Herman Hesse.

Crow's Last Song

...[H]e could never have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were-a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence...a breathing without returns to a starting-point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning.

Wlateau's Drapery: Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation-inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand-of tone into tone, of one indeterminate colour into another.

--------Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception

Crow-ness

Black crows..black crows invaded our country, and they pointed to me..

(Steve Reich)

Crow was white. Once. Then she flew too close to the sun and was burnt to the core. All they saw were ashes and dark, dark embers. Perhaps that's all there ever was. Now there is no north north of the future. Just a black sun, aloof and isolated with endless time on her hands, a black star, the essence of crow-ness

"What must it be like to have such darkness in your eye, such bitternes in your heart?", asked the man to the crow.

"You tell me," replied the crow, saddened that she had stooped down to the level of Man.

"But that croaky voice, such ugliness"

"Hush now, for thou art not Majnun"

~~~~

"But how did you come to choose this music, crow?"

~

Crow bent her neck and just smiled. "Oh, I don't know. Must there be a reason for everything?!"

~

"I bet it was the cover, you liked the wild expanses, the crystal-clear skies. Am I right?"

~

"Yes, that's it! Never before have I seen such openness. You always did like songs about heaven and hell"

~

"Crow, let us go from here. We can't collect mud and sticks forever and our voices have become harsh living here."

~

And on hearing those words crow suddenly became very, very sad. "Yes, my child, but I will fly on ahead of you. And when you look up and see the blue star you will remember me, and I will be close by, as if I were talking to you as I am now"

~

Crow waited. Patiently. And then with infinite gentleness she unfolded her wings. As she took flight she took one last look back and let out a cry. The world was startled and then the snow brought everything back to silence once again. Old, ancient crow, beloved crow, soared toward the sun and then disappeared.

Solar

Suspended lion face
Spilling at the centre
Of an unfurnished sky
How still you stand,
And how unaided
Single stalkless flower
You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you
Simplified by distance
Into an origin,
Your petalled head of flames
Continuously exploding.
Heat is the echo of your
Gold.

Coined there among
Lonely horizontals
You exist openly.
Our needs hourly
Climb and return like angels.
Unclosing like a hand,
You give for ever.

---Larkin

Late Thoughts

I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart.
Your eyes have grown dull, your tears cloudy,
Your hair is grey.

You don't understand the songs birds sing
Anymore, nor stars, nor summer lightning.
Don't hear it when the women strike
The tambourine; yet you fear the silence.

I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart'...

'You've come to put me in the grave.
Where is your shovel and your spade?
You're carrying just a flute.
I'm not going to blame you.

Sadly, a long time ago
My voice fell mute.

Have my clothes to wear,
Answer my fears with silence,
Let the wind blow
Through your hair, smell of the lilac.
You have come by a hard road
To be lit up by this fire.'

And one went away, ceding
The place to another, wandered,
Like a blind woman reading
An unfamilair narrow path

And still it seemed to her a flame
Was close..
In her hand a tambourine
And she was like a white flag,
And like the light of a beacon.
-----Anna Akhmatova

Danke

Another day, another bomb. It's getting closer.

Given such mindlessness (perhaps 'thoughtlessness' would be better- if it didn't imply casualness) to continue working in the ivory tower, continue living in the 'green zone' seems slightly unreal. Perhaps one should give thanks that one's loved ones and friends were not injured. But this, too, seems out of place. Our first thoughts...how easily we utter these words when so much depends on putting first things first...Should one say that any real thinking depends on another, on not being "full of oneself"?

All one can say, rather pessimistically, is that America, Israel, Pakistan and the terrorists have not learnt that you cannot bomb people out of existence.

Watching the old Sherlock Holmes last night. Holmes, ageless, invincible, unchanging ran the credits. As the song says, our survival, documented in the Bible.



So today I realise one should only give thanks for what one's heart has the capacity for...

Today I received the packages, brown paper ones (my favourite..string would have been perfect) and others lovingly wrapped in golden paper. (How superficial is that, I hear you say! But there are many things to love in the world! )

These come to me from my supply lines from another world, a distant star that I once knew. I do not doubt this other place exists-it overflows with being. This other place is memory, desire. Familiar, unknown. Distant, far. In love what use distinctions?

The books are fab. I'm speechless. Solar generosity said the miserable bastard. Bronk, Sebald, Solnit, Strauss, Ponge. Whether I read them or not they are there, like an assurance, something to block out what some people mistakenly call the real world.

And the music too: Cohen [what's got into you dougal old bean, you were such a happy child:) ]
Richter, Adagios (no Gould, though). As with all gifts, one realises one's own radical insufficiency to accept them with an open hand. One is left wanting (in the right sense of the word).

But perhaps more delightful than anything (is the drawing of distinctions a sign of being ungrateful..nothing could be further from our thoughts!) were the photos of the swami blazing away in her red outfit, C's promise of a coffee at Euston (bagels too, I hope), the Dougal scrawling my name. And now my heart becomes sad; what else is a gift (or art) but a reminder of our separation? You are there, and I am still here...

I look to the Red Man to understand religion. For even when the heart contracts to a point there is still a space that is given to us, that allows us-if only we knew-how to breathe again, and for this we are thankful...

The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me
As the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me
Have carried me away
And move me inwardly with joy.