4 o'clock blues

Mr Sammler did feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed-severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth century. As the traffic poured...
--Bellow.

Michael said to me, as he scoffed down his second slice of cake after dinner, "You're becoming destabilized by too much reading". There was some truth to that, but it really is too much fragmented reading that is the problem; more than that it is the belief, what is now a plainly obvious false belief, that reading is the solution.  

He must have started drinking by four o'clock in the afternoon. Vodka, gin. Hard stuff. The lights were out, a game of chess abandoned, he just sat there in the cold with his woolly hat on, looking out into the dusk. By the time you met him he was sloshed, his mind stuck in a groove as he endlessly repeated the same old one-track thought: 'In my grandfather's time...' Nothing could be more boring than a lone drunk. He's thirty-five and washed out for no apparent reason-except perhaps boredom (if that's a reason).

We don't know who the students are. Yes, but there is a deeper problem: we don't know who we are. The idea that teachers know that much more than students, I mean really know, is, I think, something of a fallacy. Yes, read more; yes, know more tricks and techniques. But in terms of what they've seen of the world, in terms of what they've learned from their experiences-if they've had any- they're remarkably similar (which is what accounts for the childishness of academics).   

First and Last Things

The main elements-stresses, sorrows, pleasures, challenges-in our lives do not change.
--R. Hoggart.

Or do not change that much. This is still the tent of scattered stars that love made, is it not? This old story, of joy and sorrow, is old, not only yours. The wounds we think ours alone have scarred others before us (though there's no solace in that). There is no need to insist upon it. If someone wants to maintain that faith is a story, then that's fine. There are no proofs here, no philosophical arguments. Get over it. Reason without faith can circle around itself and, quite evidently, lead to barbarism (Goya: "The sleep of reason..."). Instrumental reason that knows nothing of first things, final ends, can and has served bureaucracies that sent people to the gas chambers.

To talk of faith seriously in these times is, it is claimed, to border on contempt-a contempt of the most obvious of realities: that religion is a handmaiden (or perhaps even inextricably bound with) the most atrocious violence and nihilism in the modern world. 

'The sense of constant unfinishedness' might, for some, point to despair and meaningless; for others it might necessitate the belief in progress and a striving for human perfection. I like to think, though, that it points to the divine. Ahad and 'm', as the Muslims would say. 

The pattern of our belief composes our sense of the self.

For centuries now we have believed the polar opposite. The self, if it can be said to exist in any enduring sense, is a moving tissue of desires and fragmentary self-awareness, a mirage or phantom, as insubstantial as the morning mist that is dispelled as soon as the sun rises. the unreality of the self mirrors the unreality of the world. I don't know if that's Buddhist...

But what pattern the self has is composed of its material desires. When you look at the commodities around you, the material possessions you've surrounded yourself with, you're supposed to say: that's me! And in a sense, a depleted one, that's quite true. Men and women cannot live without images. What image or picture (Iris M) of the self do we have of ourselves today? What image do we grow into (are allowed to grow into)? 

The radical nature of religion: to reject false images. To negate the idols of the day. But that can never be enough since it is, sure enough, often accompanied with a zeal and a fanatical spirit devoid of all humility and charity. What, then, do we turn to? Which qibla? 

Who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?
--Solzhenitsyn 

Perhaps more reasonably, and less dramatically we may aim to tame those aspects of the self we find disagreeable. Does opposition, resistance to the world have to be so one-sided? (Render unto Caesar..?). 

We are surrounded by vast areas of self-deceit. In many ways we haven't really grown up, preferring denial and childish outbursts to an understanding of what we really are. Who, today, can bear to look themselves in the mirror? Under what light?

The moral courage not to be swayed by the opinions of others, the dominant way of thinking. A certain amount of obstinacy is required to stand against the times. 

Time and the self

To theorize is to place oneself outside of time. The instinct or impulse is a deep one. To arrest the flow with our constructions, physical or mental. Or the desire for eternal youth or the sense of the loss of an irretrievable golden age. A painting, a photograph, to capture the moment, still life.

And yet, and yet, we live in time; time lives through us. Perhaps not just in time but...

There is something absolutely heart-breaking when you lose a student (as we did this week). A twenty-one year old young woman from leukemia. 

And here we are, with our illusions of independence and invulnerability. Rational man, oblivious of the frailty of the body, blissfully unaware of the fact that he needs other people to converse with. Time as a space that opens up the possibility of fulfillment but also a series of erasures. The slowing down, the forgetfulness, the hesitations and stumbling. Our backs curve, as if we were withdrawing from the world, trying to protect ourselves (as a child does when he sleeps). This ancient process down in our bones...the old drift of the world taking us with it. Drift..drift, there are no anchors (Bronk). For the love of God.

I see it now-the world is swiftly passing. 

Technological changes mean that knowledge can be stored; the sayings and experiences of an old man, embodied in old speech patterns, gestures, shapes of the body, become ever-more redundant. But more than that: because technology and the world has changed so much it's not clear if the old man's experiences matter that much. What can they explain to us, after all? They speak, if at all, from a bygone era whose sensibilities and assumptions do not resonate with ours. Fundamental human truths? In a relativistic age, really? 

Do we think old people can provide us with security, reassurance, understanding. We have the state and its insurance mechanisms for that. Knowledge, blanket and assets provided. Sign here. 

Also, we don't want to be reminded of our dependency on care. In a time that promotes not just youth but the independent self old age is nothing but a terrible restriction on our mobility and freedom. To be alive is to be able to get up and go. We think we can live forever or, alternatively, that the self is nothing but a series of fragmentary episodes, without any enduring identity or sense of continuity. Time doesn't lead to any deepening of the self any more, which is another reason why old age is useless, another reason why you have a seventy-year old President who is basically still a teenager, another reason why many of your friends feel the need to marry (or have a fling with) much younger women.

Your mind is getting slower; you'd like to believe that you're growing in wisdom but if truth be told the mere passage of time does not automatically confer on you a greater sense of awareness or understanding. Less light gets to you, your reaction time has faltered. You can fail to recognize people (not without humorous and pleasant consequences..like the way you hugged a woman who you thought was an old friend only to realize it was someone completely different!). 

What to hold on to, when to let go? Your thought can get stuck in a groove for longer, sleep patterns are more disturbed than usual (in London you slept in pitch darkness, with perfect calmness, like a horse that's been flogged to death).  

Mc University

I think there are three or four versions of the university and these can be distinguished in terms of their ultimate goals and purposes. So, the university has at various times aimed to promote pure research (from the late 19th c. onward); it has been animated by the deeply humanistic impulse to foster cultural understanding and individual awareness (sometimes this has been about the appearance of culture, as in the production of the gentleman who is supposed to administer the empire or his-and it is usually men we're talking about here-personal assets); it has been about civic engagement, making better citizens. There is the older, religiously-inspired goal of hooking up academic scholarship with religious functions (the training of the clergy). The disinterested pursuit of truth may have resulted in religion and thought eventually going their own ways (K. Minogue). 

In recent times there's been another transformation and it is determined by the imperatives of the 'knowledge economy'. The neo-liberal university is useful to the extent that it can help people get better jobs, promote economically useful research and boost economic growth. Attending this development has been the growth of a business mentality, accounting and management practices, a pathetic show of accountability and a transfer of power to administrators and bureaucrats. As the last bastion of resistance to capitalism, it was obvious the university had to be worked over. And the teachers were not just passive witnesses to this change but in some sense active participants in it. Gamesmanship and one-upmanship, pettiness and political maneuvering taken to the next level. 

~~

Science as the only mode of knowledge and experience. Other, older forms of experience must be denigrated as either useless or untrue. The practical experience of doctors, judges, nurses, teachers doesn't really count. An individual's own personal experience cannot be a source of knowledge, a way of knowing(far too crude and unsystematic). The whole body of inherited and transmitted knowledge that is the arts: poetry, music, paining cannot be allowed to count (mere aesthetics and therefore irrational, unverifiable). Tradition and religion, too, are mere remnants of faulty ways of approaching reality. No, it's scientific analysis or it's nothing.   

Each human life has its own propensity to illumination.
---J.B.

I think we forget that. Either there is no such thing as illumination; or what little there is is reserved for us alone.

It takes the heart time to catch up; it takes the heart time to learn what it always knew. You don't set much store by intelligence these days, having seen through vast swathes of your own idiocy. And the most pompous and ridiculous show of ignorance that one invariably finds at the university. The research university, with its fixations and pedantry, its killing of wonder in the name of general facts, causality, theoretical sophistication and useless refinement. 

This fascination with progress, with the acquisition and possession of greater and greater knowledge (little of which can produce beauty, or be integrated into a life lived well). Add to it, one grain at a time. But what do you have at the end of it all? That isn't a mathematical puzzle but an ethical one.

What counts can be counted. And only what can be counted counts. The bottom dollar is all the context you need. 

The loss of the world

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from? Originally?

Thought is timeless, doesn't belong anywhere. Where were you when you were thinking? Nowhere. Who were you? Nobody in particular. I'm thinking, in my own room, in a stove, cramped up. The universal condition of 'man'?

Reason, scientific procedures..a universal way of understanding reality, relegating all the other, time-worn ways to the false, to untruth. As if we could know by forgetting who we are. As if our minds were a vast and continuous continent and not a series of loosely connected islands. In the heartlands our souls are copied out in a huge ledger by a bureaucratic hand. 

With scientific thought and inventions we live in one world and one world only. If something holds it holds everywhere. I stand on a column and survey it all with perfect objectivity, a view from nowhere. With a calm spirit I note down there: two dogs fighting over a bone.

Other factors are at work in modernity, pushing us to ever-greater abstraction and 'placelessness': religion, with its universal 'brotherhood' (neither Greek nor Jew) knows of no holy land. The spirit knows no such distinctions and the local gods are in disrepute. 

The capitalist system is at heart a system that devours local attachments and bonds. Within the nexus of market exchange nothing of permanent value subsists and everything is interchangeable, a substitute for something else. 'Intrinsic worth' is an anathema. Capitalism is the exchange of represented (or abstract) values. And global capitalism just furthers that process of alienation. 

The same city centre, the same airports and, ultimately, the same mental attitudes. Place, as the locus of a distinct history, the flourishing of unique individual perspectives and collective representations, is replaced, through mechanical repetition, by "space" and abstract flows, by the undoing of real communication in favour of the exchange of equivalents.

So, in thought and in practice, the rootless, the vagabond, is held in high-esteem. Which is not surprising. This is not about investing dignity in an abstract individual (with his universal rights) but in clearing the ground so that capital can flow. 

If there are islands there are bridges. But in the land-locked homeland of our contemporary lives there is only a drab sameness. It is precisely under those circumstances that a false individuality is cultivated ("express yourself") and a false reverence for blood and soil propagated. 

At another level this symptom is expressed in a different way: the withdrawal of the man and woman of culture into their own personal aesthetic experiences; high-minded, standing above the fray, immune to the petty temptations of a shallow culture that has nothing to offer but enticements, allurements and distractions. Culture as a form of therapy, a way of disengaging from the sordid world of politics. After all, only the individual counts, says the poet (oblivious of the fact that his own sensibility has been worked upon by the capitalistic spirit). 

So, if the riff-raff are led into a self-absorbed world of spectacles and digital confusion they're not so different from the educated bourgeois, duped by their academic specialisms and cultivated sensibility of indifference. Both share in the inability to think beyond themselves. This shows up in the abuse of the language: 'the political' is now replaced, everywhere, by 'the politicized', the world can only be conceived of as 'worldliness'. One thinks of himself as rising above the world; the other sinks below it. But both are eminently products, not that they know it, of the hollowing out of the world. 

This withdrawal from the world, the loss of a sense of place, the inability to utter the word 'we'..all this in the name of a private pleasure (whether it is a 'higher' pleasure or not is to miss the point). The disappearance of the public world is effected by the proliferation of images, idle chatter, trivialities and gossip. Common sense becomes as rare as the old medieval notion of the common good in a therapeutic culture. 

With the loss of the world the space of appearances and interactions is replaced by the body and its desires (the new body politic) or by an identity politics, or the amplification of fear, personal grievances. Under such circumstances what scope is there for the development of obligations to other people and to, in fact, the continuity of the world so that future generations may participate in it?

And then there's the personal confession, the growth in widow(er)-memoirs where someone's intense suffering must be brought to light, form part of a "meditation". The loss of a brother, a mother,...it's either that or: the world is going to hell in a handcart so let's have fun, it's the only sane response after all.   

An old refrain

I

I, The rain fell
& was met by the sweet earth one more time. My head spins. I sit under a tree. I'm on the edge of the field, looking back on my life. There I am, I'm on hold, on love, body and soul apart.

What would you know? That would change anything. Find the blank page again, full, so full of open ways to you.  

The thing was then. How much time has passed through us? How many years of forgetting? Say it, whisper it to me now. If there are words, then open your silver box and share them with us. 

As I walk all I see around me is tears, the old human story, playing itself out without an audience in time's dark corner. But our love, our love, the constant gaze through the mist of the morning, this morning, the music of spring returns..a leaf falls and rests on the open page of my book. And something enters my heart again. 

Find your step among the ruins. She is all decked up and ready to go, but with winter's silent shadows like kajol always under her eyes. That's just the way it is, this ancient song handed down. And all this is just a reflection of some other, distant light. There is fresh ground and all the old footprints are wiped away, sink back down.

From the dictionary we find the verb qalaba to mean: to turn around, turn about, turn upward, upturn; to turn, turn over; to turn face up or face down; to turn inside out or outside in; to turn upside down; to tip, to tilt over, topple over; to invert, reverse; to overturn, upset, topple; to capsize; to roll over; to subvert, overthrow; to change, alter, turn, transform, convert, transmute; to transpose; to exchange.
---Shaykh Haeri

"All I'm armed with is research"

I read that on someone's application. Their research statement. If I don't do research I will stop being. I kid thee not. In the teaching statement there are choice quotes by Hubbard, Einstein and Gandhi (cue vomit). Still, after looking at the other 18 robots that applied this one still has something left of a human sensibility..ah, almost became a bit nostalgic there for that old-world word: the human.

The robots: technically brilliant, you're sure. But so what? Really, it's that simple. Trust me, R-ko.

The life of the mind! I've never seen a greater collection of sorry losers. It is never asked whether thought delights the mind, or how this terrible hypertrophy of technical 'knowing' and pseudo-scientific intelligence can be brought back to the most basic and fundamental question: how can I be a good person, how do we lead good lives? Still think that what we learn from our parents and from religion outshines this baloney produced by the university. By some orders of degree.

I've also become somewhat irritated by bookish people. Not just the book club type of adolescents. But book people in general. The type who think that they must swoon over Proust or Penelope Fitzgerald or whoever it may be (art as a substitute for religion?). The 'divine' Ms Fitzgerald. Everyone's got to believe in something so don't knock it. But their addiction to books, the fascination with other people's lives, the desire to not live oneself or find one's own way but instead be absorbed by the details of a fictitious character. 

Over the holidays you met a grown woman (yes, I know, it is hard to believe) who traveled all the way down to London from that forgotten country, the north of England, just to see the studios where some of the Harry Potter films were shot. She was almost bouncing in her seat when she explained to me what this meant..no, do you really understand what this means? Why her husband, a mellow looking maulvi, indulges her is one of those mysteries that are best left unexplained.  

[Writers] gave their blood to phantoms, and they incited their readers to do the 
same: to waste their lives by burying themselves in the lives of others, 
with the aggravating circumstance that these others were neither heroes 
nor saints and, besides, never existed. These remarks can be applied to the 
whole of that universe of dreams which is called "culture": flooded by 
literary opium, siren songs, vampirizing and — to say the least — useless 
production, people live on the fringe of the natural world and its 
exigencies, and consequently on the fringe — or at the antipodes — of the 
"one thing needful." The 19th century — with its garrulous and 
irresponsible novelists, its "poetes maudits ," its creators of pernicious 
operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries 

and all of its blind alleys leading to despair — was bound to crash against   a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity; thus the First World War .

Harsh stuff, Frithjof, but, yes, I can see where you're coming from.

Take the oil

It is written, in the period of the kali yuga what was hidden will be revealed.

(From Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World)

A world of exposure and surface appearances (because there isn't anything deeper).

Okay, this is from just this month: 
1. Moody's 'settlement' $864m
2. Deutsche Bank $630 m 
3. BT accounting scandal
4. Rolls Royce, 671 m (sterling).

Now, what was that story again: I've got some wheat, you've got some butter: let's trade.
Are the wheels, then, coming off? I mean, putting to one side the looming environmental crisis (in the UK over 50% of the wildlife has been destroyed over the last 50 years (Moth Snowstorm); for other startling figures see The Sixth Extinction. All of this is before climate change has really kicked in. It is, rather, population growth, urbanization, intensive farming and the growth of middle class lifestyles).

Putting to one side the very serious issues of escalating mental health problems.

What, then? If Pabst and Milbank are to be trusted, there's a crisis of liberalism: liberal democracy and the liberal economic system that is so bound to it. 

~
Yasser: "When does the world end, then?"
Me: It already has, we're just living in the afterglow.
Yasser: "But when?"
Me: Why should I tell you? So that you can make a killing?

Abundance

"A society of performance is replacing a society of discipline"
--Z. Bauman.

"A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men's temporal peace and not their eternal safety; as if God had ordained Kings for no other purpose than to fat up men's souls like hogs and to see that they have their mash.
--Richard Hooker.

There was this line from Thesiger, 'the tougher the conditions, the better the man'. And woman, of course. Paraphrased, of course. From your own relative level of comfort this seems deeply appealing. But I don't think that it's just nostalgia or a false craving for a situation that you, personally, would never be able to endure. What resonates with a lot of people is the artificiality of our wants and desires. Actually, perhaps it doesn't resonate at all and that's precisely the problem? Could it be that in reality we're all quite content either fattened up or dreaming of that state of satiation?

And yet there is always the nagging feeling that the small-scale utopia of limited wants, self-imposed austerity, a republic of needs (Rousseau) allows us to concentrate on the fundamental things in life. Live within yourself, within your means. Don't get ahead of yourself. The heart should follow the foot, the sufis would say.

To modern ears this will, no doubt, sound like a harking back to 'the good ol' days' or, worse, a justification for turning the clock back-if such a thing were possible-to a Talebanesque state of affairs. To those who are liberal minded (or, more accurately, self-proclaimed liberals) it will come across as a clamouring for a return to more conservative times when everyone knew their place (racial purity, class and gender hierarchies), dim-witted small-mindedness (as opposed to the open-mindedness of the cosmopolitan). Isn't Trump, for example, simply a manifestation of a similar longing, a similar distrust of metropolitan elites?

There's a grave danger of relating everything to that great buffoon. But you can see the general point: an end to multiculturalism and a return to simpler times, the undifferentiated conditions of small-town or rural life. 

What is missed in all this? That there's an anarchic possibility in the small-scale option; that a life lived in a particular place, with specific attachments, independent of the state, untouched by the frenzy of the media and market deceptions, is not necessarily a claustrophobic one. In fact, quite the opposite: if there is joy in austerity (Aquinas?) then it can open out to something else, wider vistas. And in contrast, it is restless desire for more and more commodities, 'experiences', that is stifling...a slave of one's desires? Hell hath no limits. The notion that we could possess happiness, time, as if we owned them, had a right to them instead of recognizing them for what they are, pure gifts, is one of the deepest sources of our contemporary illusions.

Abundance, in a different sense -and perhaps one could call it a Qur'anic sense- would mean something quite else: there is enough for everyone right now. Abundance is not a utopian fantasy but a present possibility that is warped by capitalism and the capitalistic mentality. Not only does the system produce inequalities that generate genuine scarcity; it also forces us to think of scarcity exclusively in terms of commodities (Iliich). Furthermore, by setting up the notions of "mine" and "thine" (exclusive property rights) it helps drown out the idea of a common good and the substantive notion of the person that is connected to it. 

K

Towards the end of this stunning album it's as if Cave is singing himself back into the world after going through hell.

Diversity

Mainstream economic models have sacrificed too much realism at the altar of mathematical purity. Their various simplifying assumptions have served aesthetic rather than practical ends. As a profession, economics has become too much of a methodological monoculture. And that lack of intellectual diversity cost the profession dear when the single crop failed spectacularly during the crisis. This monoculture, it is argued, has also narrowed the economics curriculum in universities. This has generated an ever greater focus on the mathematical gymnastics of optimising models and too little focus on the everyday aerobics of how the economy functions. Accompanying this has been neglect of disciplines that abut and illuminate economics: economic history, moral philosophy, money and banking, radical uncertainty, non-rational expectations. In short, neglect of the very things that makes economics interesting and economies important. [xv]

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Nov. 2016


Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

Robert Skidelsky

Nov. 2016

"When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time
of a train
I look at your face

The flower`s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go

The flower`s ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravisthen aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart`s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

--- John Berger.

R.I.P.

The mountains appear to be solid, are really flowing and will one day float straight out of here ( an old Qur'anic theme). Nothing really lasts. Capstones shift. Even power, which to the untrained eye, seems to be stable, immovable, will fall away and crumble. Which is why resistance and hope must go on.

What lasts for longer is invisible...the spirit, love, friendship. The force- and it isn't a mechanical force- lives through us. By that, he means, we do not possess it. It comes our way, if we're lucky, if we're receptive to it. 

What is the flower in the heart?

Who is the flower...

Our own lives, our own heart, as hard as stone or as ancient as the golden pollen. A receptacle for the appearance of an image, a face. Mine or yours?

Stranded

"The mind and the world jointly determine the mind and the world."

Now that the mind is in retreat, faltering, stumbling at every juncture, the world stumbles, is out of joint.

It was as if the fish suddenly got scared. Of what?

The contract between the word and the world is strained. the future tense has been drained of meaning. We live, when all is said and done. We live, when all is said and done, in a 24/7 world. 

~~~
Is the only permanence now the constant flow of unjoined moments, the perception of a stream of moments, strung together loosely?

In the brilliant early morning light one can detect a hint-more than a hint-of spring in the air. It is never this clear this time of the year. A few labourers, some waist down in a ditch, work with such dedication they would, you imagine, carry on working even if the whole world around them collapsed. Shovels, spades, pick-axes, hammers. Next to them an elegant gardener, wearing a thin jumper, sits on his haunches and vigorously turns over the soil in a garden bed with a small trowel. The tool seems to be a mere extension of his forearm. The soil is thick, full, wondrously dark in colour and texture. 

What are they all preparing for? 

~~~
Ongietan sceal gleaw hælehu gæstlic bið 
·onne ealre ·isse worulde wela  weste stondeð ...

In his own world

I
In his own world.

And not too bad off. Just the way it is. 

for a long time 
and chance had been toying with them

Winter notes: He was in his own world. Always was, from childhood, which he never really left. For others, every beginning was also an ending. 

I suppose you think this is about you. 

He wants to and does not want to sleep. Zeus! The cells in the body stay startled, dazed-awake, through the early hours, and the floating grey half-light, as if covered by a shroud, or lost in gentle summer shadows, ready for some recollection to march into their territory. 

He was all flesh and blood for a few minutes, singing, shining, silver-back in the dark; and then he was all mind. 

Drift, drift, sail away from here. There are socks on the floor, frozen into shape. The mirror is still and lonely. On the table a large and bright golden bowl with packets of medicine in it.

In the morning he saw the moon, a large and pale ball, aloof, fragile, ephemeral, more beautiful than the green and blue world below it. The moon was a door, the memory of a fire, a houri. 

A child somewhere (and therefore everywhere) asks: "Who broke it?". Does he ever grow out of that sense of brokenness?

"I'm quite happy in the world I'm in," he said. "There is no need to disturb me".

She texts him and says, "You are angry. Are you an angry person?"

He says, calmly, trying to deflect all attention from himself, "Look at my words."

Last Acts

"You ain't no Mother Teresa, motherfucker," said the Russian ambassador.

"We didn't start the fire; it was always burning," said Mother Teresa. She secretly wished Billy Joel and not Dylan would have got the damned Nobel.

"You're just a bit of white trash," he continued.

"Uptown Girl..I've never had a backstreet guy", said the ambassador. 

Sensing his moment: "Take a chance on me. I'm still free," he replied.

~~~
I heard that, on a day when a car bomb killed three Americans, Paul Bremer's last act as Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to issue laws making it illegal to drive with one hand on the steering wheel or to honk a horn when there was no emergency.

--Eliot Weinberger 

I heard the rebels were just a pack of towel-heads from the desert, the remnants of a remnant that we whipped together. We, boss. I heard the Great Man say: Your enemy's enemy ain't your enemy. I see another axis of evil brewing before ma eyes. I aints got me no shame so I gonna call them out, good and proper.(Boss tell me wez got to fit the Yellowskins in there somehow) 

~
I heard these foreign names mentioned in a pub quiz. Do they mean anything to you: My Lai, Faullujah, Shatila, Hiroshima, Abu Ghraib ? Here's a question you won't hear in the pub..this is a tricky one, I must say. Even I was confounded for a while. How many people have been killed in the DRC? We said in unison: Democratic! And then we laughed. In any case, there's a repeat of the classic sketches from The Two Ronnies on the box tonight. Who's on who's side? It's all so confusing! 

Cities of Salt

It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif [Cities of Salt]..appears to be ..insufficiently westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face..or developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest..There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure-of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstane..which has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle.

--John Updike.

Here's Ghosh's radical point: it is the individualism of the market (and economic theory, I would add) that has made it so hard to think about a solution to the climate change crisis. And the background culture of the arts and literature is similarly geared towards the individual! 

The 'individual moral adventure' sounds like an advertisement for the frontier capitalist. Anyone who doesn't quite buy into this model is automatically consigned to the dustbin of history, relegated to the catch-all category: "the backward".

It's not just that this individual has resolutely stood against nature; it's that he's tried to control, tame, subdue and exploit it. 

Social media and the social sciences. The irony being: there is no social! Only narcissism on the one hand, and methodological individualism on the other. And you can't but help think that this detachment, this "second turning inwards" has helped narrowly define freedom in its modern sense: Freedom from nature; and freedom from the social are then inextricably intertwined with one another. 

Repeat after me:

I am an individual.
I am an individual.
I am an individual. 

Misc.

It is December and still there is no sign of any rain. The fog descends and engulfs us all, hushing the world. Out of nowhere, a red traffic light. By the side, some poor people on bicycles, wrapped in thick brown shawls. The fog is so dense that under a tree it collects into large drops of rain and clatters down on the rooftop; the dark space under the tree now resembling a small tropical island, with leaves strewn all over the floor...

~
On a day spent on the road you look in your rear view mirror, away from the sea of traffic, the river of lights, blues and golds registering a presence in the dusk of our lives. As if, as if looking at another, bright, clear world that has all of a sudden come into focus. The points, the fragments of a life momentarily resolved in a central image. With what eye do you hold such a picture? It is that eye, that gaze, that can never be seen. Who sees me now?   

If one's temperament the whole day long is affected by the quality of your sleep then the presence of a single mosquito at night can affect what you will feel and say and think during the day. Which made me think of just how susceptible the inner workings of the mind are to 'external' events. We assume our inner self is sealed in-a legacy of Descartes?- but the reality is that nature, biding its time, will come back to haunt us.

~
Reading Amitav Ghosh's fascinating The Great Derangement . One point that struck you was this: fiction has great difficulty taking in climate change because its moral imagination was shaped, from the beginning, under conditions in which bourgeois certainties were esteemed. Uncertainty is reduced to calculable risk. Narrative is no longer a sequence of strange events (that category is safely placed in sci-fi or Gothic), tales of the unexpected; instead what you have is a lot of padding, "fillers", the stuff of ordinary life. Is that why literature is comforting?  

~

There is no land in this land. 

To depart, through the chosen mirror. The last sigh on its face, the breath of the other world already there, the flash of burnt lights all around. The sallow flesh, pitiful eyes. Already traveled much, already seen the sights, floated down this very same river as a child and a young man. Where does it go? When I look back something in me shines. There were other times, looking out of the splintered windows. For a day, is that all there was, a final gesture in the slender light? 

The floodwaters in the basement, the weeds flowing indoors. The shrines of the world will continue, perhaps, even though the hands have no forgiveness, even though the word will be in no-one's heart. Down the last steps of the world to the hallowed river, asleep, awake, my home a dream.

“Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” 
---Lucretius.

You wake in the small hours and wonder how long you've been sleeping for. You hear voices, children's voices off in the distance, out there,..is this a dream, your own childhood re-emerging from the time when you would play in the dark and run home, down from Victoria Park, past the warm and safe houses, your heart in your mouth, the street lights' downward glow making the world lighter, more artificial. The empty streets with only a faint whiff of salt and vinegar in the air coming from the Cypriot chippy (Steve, who always gave you extra chips, would kill himself a few years later).

The voices, strangled now, almost metallic, coming to you from a great distance, like those of children in a swimming pool, the words mixed with the dappled light, broken like the waves that slap against the side of the pool. Life moves into another life but some shadow of all that was remains, always remains.