A certain amount of confusion and incomprehension is to be expected. If you inhabit a monotheistic worldview then mythological perspectives are almost certainly bound to strike one as odd, mystifying. Over the weekend you heard a number of people saying, "Hinduism..is that really a religion..does come across as wildly at odds with any sensible approach to divine matters". I didn't want to argue with that. What would be the point. We have no entry point into another's faith (this is not simply a question of scriptures and languages but of a mentality (or, more accurately, mentalities) that is shaped by a monotheistic outlook.

Of course, that is a gross exaggeration for in reality it seems to me that monotheism is never anything but a rare phenomenon. It is either distorted beyond recognition by the zealots (think: Taleban and ISIS and how infinitely distant they are from a genuine religious sensibility); or it is mixed up with ideas, attachments, and styles of thinking that are more to do with the local culture (land and language, one might say). 

So, we often look to the religions of the east and their "strangeness" as a way of reaffirming our own "pure" approach to religion. So, our lack of understanding is not simply the result of a natural (providential?) barrier, as if to say: after all, no human being can inhabit every possible perspective; it is, rather, that in addition the barrier is a psychological and political limit we construct. 

But if language and thought do not get us across the barrier then what does? To get across does not necessarily mean inhabiting the other 'realm' but it can, at the very least, be a recognition that there is some kind of inexplicable mystery across the border and that one's own position or understanding is not a sealed-off space, as it were. A certain amount of undermining, confusion and incomprehension is to be expected. Don't take one's unbelief too seriously; but do not ignore it either.

Bob would be able to say something about this image. My vague intuition is this: compassion, at the highest state of being, is universal. Nothing goes unnoticed. There is a looking back, not a looking after the self (in the final analysis is the latter only a delusion anyway?). The self is a barrier. Look and look out. The gestures of the hands. What do they mean?  

"Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously."
--K. Barth.

~~

Haven't read Achebe but did come across this:

“Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.” Achebe often used this proverb in discussing his work, and he explained its significance once in an interview: “It means there is no one way to anything….If there is one God, fine, there will be others as well…. If there is one point of view, fine. There will be a second point of view.”

world-ending fire

This is the world that we have set on fire.

This is the promised burning, darkening
Our light of hope and putting out the sun,
Blighting the leaf, the stream--and blessed are
The dead who died before this time began.

Blessed the dead who have escaped in time
The twisted metal and the fractured stone,
The technobodies of the hopeless cure.
Now, to the living, only grief has shown

The little yellow of the violet,
Risen again out of the dead year's leaves,
And grief alone is measure of the love
That only lives in rising out of graves.

--Wendell Berry.

"This supposed economy has no plan for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition."

This is the anti-economy where there is no question of intrinsic usefulness, no thought of 'final ends' or human needs. Instead there is only blind desire, "wanton preferences", and formal rationality. "Just do it". Or "go with the flow". A system that generates the wasteful, the useless, and the unnecessary. It is never asked-and can never be asked-whether the ramifications of production and consumption (and our lifestyles that are inextricably bound to them) are morally, ecologically or spiritually uplifting or whether they lead to boredom, frustration and anxiety. 

I step back, and look forward.

A form of conservatism, a retreat of sorts, but with one's eyes firmly on what is moving towards you (the opposite of Benjamin's 'angel'). The Benedict Option?  

Oy, Tolstoy! Clear off, mate. Brexit means fucking Brexit!

There's something quite sad about seeing a small island race becoming, well, ..er..a small island race. At critical junctures maybe some trait, characteristic or sensibility that has for large periods of time been hidden suddenly rises to the surface. So, even though under normal circumstances it isn't a dominant feature of an individual's or a society's make-up, at points of transition it rears its head. Hasn't there been something petty and mean-spirited brewing for the last thirty odd years of the neoliberal experiment? Is it something more permanent?

The closing of the American/British mind? This goes beyond the narrowing of horizons that results in our attention being caught up in all the trivia and information flotsam that streams in front of us, 24/7. And beyond the shallow, everyday kind of racism that offers an animal-like warmth of petty hatreds to a working class that has lost its bearings. I think it extends further: to a middle class that is enamoured by shopping or private fantasies of drug or alcohol-induced flights from reality; it extends to the self-styled religious folks whose bitterness at the direction the world is taking results in a cheap cynicism and condescension.

~~~

Calasso's The Art of the Publisher:  

k

dark;
grey, wild hunger
[for you]
[..

heart,
where are you now?

Below the surface
of the coal's equations
a small flame,

smudged,
nearly extinguished

The heart has traveled, 
reached the first twist
of her hair;
how much further?

I brought you a mirror from the East:
look at you; think of me!

And now the broken pieces
reflect the sky, floating clouds,
all that is hidden.

Where are you now, heart? 

There are mountains 
in the sea;
oh, deep down
deep down.

---lines by Bronk.

Embed from Getty Images

k

Don't tell my father that I have died.

He doesn't need to know. I promised him I'd never grow old..so at least I've kept that part of the bargain. Say I had to go. And God knows, maybe that's the truth. They say there a million gods but I only ever needed one. There are miles and miles of beautiful land but where am I now? The land's very name is mine; and now I am engraved in the land. A nameless one now. They call us the disappeared but my spirit will never leave here.

For you India is a land of mythology and colour, deep and profound mysteries. Why, then, should you look at my own pale death which tells you nothing? I don't want to speculate on your systems; they never meant much to me anyway.  

You found your way here. I lost track of you. If you saw my face now would you still take a second look? And why do you sit in the shadow of the tree?  

It is cold here. Where's my kangri !

civilisation

Years ago the incredibly perceptive Ivan Illich wrote about the idea of "internalities"; the ideology of "progress" and the preponderance of experts who were responsible for administering and justifying this ideology were not simply reducing our autonomy, our ability to give shape to our own lives, and not 'merely' generating perverse outcomes (externalities, such as pollution); no, both were actually preventing us from achieving the 'goods' that progress was supposed to be delivering in the first place.

In what sense, for example, are we healthier (and here one would have to look at and evaluate the whole distribution, even if one could agree on what constitutes 'health' in the first place). Our ability to move about in our own cities, to move about in a recognizably human way that accounts for the human body and its rhythms and its limitations, is impaired: gated communities, slums, are not 'external' to capitalistic development but central to its story. And our movement is either too quick for us to be attentive to our surroundings or slowed down to a snail's pace by congestion. The freedom to walk or cycle in a city-and what sights do we register on our journeys?- seems, to me, to be in abeyance. 

The rich, those "global citizens" who don't really live in any particular place, will always aim to bypass or transcend the city. They'll find some fast track, or live out their lives in their own fortresses (at One Hyde Park the city-and its food-is brought to you). Late antiquity withdrawal into a life of ..what, precisely? Studied leisure, self-cultivation, hedonism?

the time of the sun

Even the sun has its own time. Even the sun has its moments. 

The light is brilliant by eight o'clock. Beyond that it cannot be contemplated, only felt. The leafless tree is outlined with great clarity, as is its stark shadow on the ground-- the forked shadow almost as real as the tree itself.

~~~

In a small Butler's chocolate dish (which the kid must have swiped) there is some cold oil and a few strands of hair and next to them a dead cockroach that has given up the ghost, almost preserved in the wax-like liquid. Do cockroaches always die on their backs? The hair-my hair- looks more and more like its legs as time passes.  

~~~

But the sweet prairies of anarchy
And the thought that keeps my heart up
That at last, in Death's odder anarchy,
Our patterns will be broken all up.
Though precious we are momentarily, donkey,
I aspire to be broken up.

--Stevie Smith.

The faraway nearby

And now I look for the word 'faraway' and find it everywhere. Or rather I don't look - not trying to jinx it - and it returns.

'There's a word for each leaf and each
wall and
a word for nothing.' 

There'sawordforeachleafandeachwallandawordfornothing.

Larry Eigner, I should have said, from yesterday, in case you were wondering, faithful reader. And what of you, o faithless one?



I have felt it as they've said
there is nothing to say


there is everything to speak of
   but the words are words

when you speak that is a sound
what have you done, when you have spoken 





of nothing





or something i will remember 

Faraway one

~~~

Slow it is
a slow business
to grow a few words 
to say love
----Anselm Hollo

How long it took, the tens of thousands of generations to produce this clumsy hand. And how quickly things unravel! It took all this time to find you. What can seem most certain in life turns out to be as fleeting as a cloud, as short lived as the dance of a gnat. Where are you now? And why do you sigh, my soul? 

~~~

Where is the world in which I dream?

~~~
Will I cease to be
or will I remember
beyond the world
our last meeting together?
will I cease to be,
or will I remember
beyond the world,
our last meeting together?

Will iiiiiii

Will       

Will       

Will       

  i  wwww 

            

Where is the world in which I dream, if not here? And yet, in the dreamworld there is no world, only a remembrance of it. When you meet someone after a long time it is customary to say, "Where in the world have you been"? As if that person had crossed some invisible frontier and has come back disheveled, bringing with them a look, a word, a sentiment from that other place. 

Do we only see our true selves in dreams nowadays?  


~~~

the dark swimmers
their heads in the sun

if time shd stand still

which way does the river go?

The day in the house
each room with its own time
the sun's light enters obliquely and falls 
away
and time is marked by absences
(a pluralist till the end).

Black Lives Matter

Faith

Illness

Zerzan's Running on Emptiness has an interesting few pages on Rothko, abstract Expressionism. They've pointed me back to Dore Ashton's book on Rothko. The idea that a world of images (corporate or otherwise) was an indication of a "spiritual lack"; that what was required was a clean break from reification and representation. Materialism, measurement, the reign of quantity are all a congealing of what is essentially fluid, formless, and uncontained. That the absence of images might in fact be liberating is not something the modern west can countenance. 

In addition there was a small chapter on illness (anxiety, stress, suicide, depression) and how this might-and here one has to be cautious- be partly a result of the lack of meaning or purpose in a society that is hooked to fleeting, trivial, and banal representations/images. The need for an alternative digital or virtual reality because the one that you actually inhabit doesn't open onto anything greater or different from the acquisitive and shallow self. Whence the great proliferation of pornography, drug-induced fantasies and escapism. Or, more plainly: medication to just get through the day. This does strike you (a point obliquely made by Avner Offer in The Challenges of Affluence, namely: as societies become richer and richer there's a corresponding growth in addictions (porn, food, gambling, consumption, drink etc.) which really begs the question: what of the much vaunted freedoms of the market?).

Related to this, perhaps: Is fundamentalism and extremism a response to and/or a symptom of the nihilism of late modernity?  

The Society of the Spectacle

"The US, with Britain in tepid accord, has been bombing unstable Muslim states for 16 years and has delivered nothing but death and anarchy."

--Simon Jenkins, The Guardian.

One might call this "gesture bombing" if it wasn't so obscene. If this is what civilisation really amounts to then I think Zerzan's point is only reinforced.

“There is no doubt that Isis are brutal and that they have committed atrocities against our people. But I don’t see why the bomb was dropped,” said the mayor of Achin, Naweed Shinwari.

~~

“If there was any honor in fighting, a dog should lead us, because who fights better than a dog,” said the father of Mashal Khan (who was lynched by a mob of 400 people for alleged blasphemous remarks). 

Mountain View

Met an old student who now lives in a place called Mountain View (with a name like that I'd expect a lot from the place). Works for some Chinese billionaire, managing his funds (rich people always have "funds" I've noticed). 

Even the sun has its time. 

Not to be televised (II)

Illich, Zerzan:

One becomes a thing in order to master things.

The televisual order, objectification, reification, abstraction and alienation are all related to commodification, the concentration of lived value into frozen forms (images, money, commodity-and at the end of the day are not all three interchangeable?). 

But what if this predates capitalism and if the latter is only highlighting and accentuating tendencies that have already existed for ten thousand years (since the beginning of agriculture, to be precise)? Or maybe even further back: weren't the first cave paintings, after all, a sign that what was once present could only now be re-presented? Culture, art, language are not simply compensations for a lost presence, a necessary illusion; they in some sense preclude our recovery of a direct, unmediated and whole experience of reality. The letter killeth, but the spirit...

Inherent in reification is a sense of loss, then. But also violence and separation. Is it the case, then, that religion, as a system of thought, sets up all kinds of distinctions, introducing the possibility of violence (this is an old theme, going back to Hume? Polytheism is more peaceable).

But what of the God of the desert? Or, as the orthodox tradition has it: God is not a concept.

Never trust a god who doesn't dance.

The primacy of vision and its complicity with abstraction. Do you see what I'm saying? Is it any wonder (is there any wonder?) that the sensual is devalued in favour of the intellectual? Intelligence is really just seeing things correctly, in the right light or order. Taste, once associated with judgement, has become the dumbest and most undifferentiating of our senses (in theory and in practice).

But taste, smell and touch are the senses most associated with love. (Is that true? Don't we fall in love when we see the face of the loved one?).

These wonderful lines from Running on Emptiness really struck me:

It has been said that the Mbuti of southern Africa believe that "by correct fulfillment of the present, the past and the future will take care of themselves."

Zerzan's writing is direct, simple and sometimes startling. His critique of technology and a technology-infatuated society will resonate with some; for most, though, you suspect he'll be accused of "primitivism". 

Illich, the most perceptive of thinkers, has always been a model of what an intellectual might be: committed, engaged, generous, and humane. A far cry from the gamers and schemers in academia. 

He clearly saw how a technological society was crippling people's abilities to organize their own lives. The freedom of the market actually ushered in an ever-growing dependency on commodities and the state. Real autonomy, Illich would argue, depended on first understanding how technology was leading to internalities- technology's failure to deliver the goods (worse: to block and hamper organically developed ways of human flourishing and dwelling). And these commodities had to have their own missionaries, the experts and bureaucrats, to flog them off to the "poor". Everyone has to buy into the dream (so much for freedom, so much for the much vaunted pluralism!).   

Not be televised

'The revolution will not be right back
after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people'. 

The Arab Spring is brought to you by Coca-Cola and in collaboration with.. 

"There are too many immigrants in this country," said the Australian woman, pretending not to be a fascist. "I'm not a racist but..."

"The problem with Islam is that it hasn't had a Reformation," said the bigot (not really knowing very much about Islam or the Reformation). "I'm all for liberalism but..."

~~~

   

'An incremental tyranny'

News from a strange planet:

"Israel sunk in incremental tyranny," says former Shin Bet chiefs.

Kendall Jenner is 'very upset'. "Anything offensive is just not her. She means well, always." Pepsi can, incrementally, alter the world of tyranny.

Aung San Suu Kyi claims the violence was partly down to "Muslims killing Muslims." Slowly, incrementally, of course.

Awakenings

One day we’ll look back on it ... the time of the sun
when light fell on the smallest twig
on the old woman the astonished girl
when it washed with colour everything it touched
Followed the galloping horse and eased when he did

that unforgettable time on earth
when if we dropped something it made a noise
and like connoisseurs we took in the world
our ears caught every nuance of air
and we knew our friends by their footsteps

time we walked out to gather flowers or stones
that time we could never catch hold of a cloud

and it’s all our hands can master now.

(“Le regret de la terre”, version by Peter Sirr)

~~~

The rain falls and collects in pools and makes
Our grave old planet shine. 

I love that line by Supervielle.

And this by Anselm Hollo (not read):

Carried by silver and star and reflection.

Sway

I have a friend, I've never seen her,
a vision beheld, the purest dream.
She never pleased me, nor ever
let me down.

Hard to know if I'm asleep or awake

I don't know where she is,
in the mountains or in the plains.

Well, that was it. I don't know 
who I was singing for.

I am the fool on the bridge.
she can have no mercy:
there's nothing left but exile.

I'll go away, somewhere under the sun.

(Lines mangled from Peter Sirr's Sway)

~~~

I stand and watch the rain
Falling in pools which make
Our grave old planet shine;
The clear rain falling, just the same
As that which fell in Homer’s time
And that which dropped in Villon’s day
Falling on mother and on child
As on the passive backs of sheep;
Rain saying all it has to say
Again and yet again, and yet..

Supervielle.