Night & Day

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The day looks like night; the night like day.

Turn all the lights right down. Stand in the still moment of darkness. Even the crows can't be heard. 

Don't read the newspaper, don't watch the television. The only rectangles that interest you are books. 

You make it through the morning, spending a few hours in oblivion, reading something that is both fascinating and irrelevant. Now the afternoon... 

The way back

And when we're gone, who will ask, when no-one asked when we were here. 

The light fades, autumn returns. Many years have passed. Sometimes, in the stillness, it appears as if a moment is carrying with it many, many years. These years have no weight yet they seem to fill the space of your life. It's not that they're remembered or stretched out in front of you like a map that you could read; rather it's as if I've entered that time again and they take me in again for some unbidden reason that remains a mystery. And then, just as suddenly as time was breached it flows again. A bird chirps, there is the clanking of teacups in an adjacent room. I look at myself in the untrustworthy mirror again. Am I dreaming?

The Handke Question: "You can stick your corpses up your arse."

I 've got very little to say on this. My instinctive reaction was: "I don't give a fig about his politics". I think that was rash.

So, the defence goes: since you haven't read any of his books can you comment? Fair point: I cannot comment about the books or what they say about his worldview/politics..what if the books consistently (or not) demonstrate views that would make a mockery of the claim that he's a particular kind of nasty nationalist or the kind of person who would support that kind of nationalism?

Defence no. 2 Even his private or public views are abhorrent -which remains to be shown since all you've got are newspaper snippets and hearsay- his work itself stands out, is admirable, exceptional etc. and he/it should be judged on those grounds alone: play the ball, not the man.

Again, I'm torn here. I'd love to read Repetition. It sounds like just the kind of book I'd like. On the other hand, isn't there something to the notion of what Frithjof Schuon calls 'integral intelligence'? Someone can be hugely intelligent or even profound in some senses and a complete idiot in another sense? Isn't that just the fragmentation of the self in modernity and something that is actually conducive to liberalism's battle against totalitarianism or a narrow determination of human possibilities? 

So, for a moment let's take for granted that his political views are, to say the least, weird. So what? I dunno. Can one look at Freud's paintings in the same way once you've read that he (allegedly) said that a woman has only truly submitted once she's been sodomized? And then there's the slippery slope argument: how far do you go? What if a writer/artist/musician has been racist/misogynist etc.? Can art ever be "pure" or, to put it another way, is there a danger of politicizing everything? And then: whose politics?

Over the last few days there's been a lot of vitriolic reaction to Handke being awarded the Nobel. On the other hand, there seems to have been a lot of intellectual somersaulting trying to make sense of his statements..did he really say the Bosnians were "staging"  atrocities? And what exactly did he mean when he said he stands with Milosevic. What did he mean, if he said it, that "all sides" do wrong? "You can stick your corpses.." Really? Is that linguistic integrity?

I don't know if there's a coming down on one side or the other. One would hope that one could still recognize someone's work as being profound or even brilliant but at the same time be deeply uneasy about their political views. 

I'm suspicious of people who are not suspicious. 

Does that mean that those people who don't express any kind of  unease are naive? Or is there something darker to it? 

Books, etc.

The book I am currently reading

I’m always reading 5 or 6 books simultaneously. At the moment: Simic's Book on Joseph Cornell, the collected poems of Ken Irby, Mounier’s Personalism, J.Aldred’s Licence to be Bad: How economics corrupted us, Derek Jarman's Chroma, a book on R. Spaemann ( forget the name but an excellent introduction) and struggling through Spaemann’s own dense but rewarding Happiness and Benevolence. Just finished Rowan Williams’ superb Being Human.

The book that changed my life

I think books only change our lives imperceptibly ( at least they do for me). I love books but I’m also a Puritan of sorts so very conscious of Goethe’s ‘ only read as much as you can live’(not that I've read him)..ultimately that means remembering that a book is only a book. Nothing compared to love and life. The tree of knowledge..the tree...

The book I wish I’d written

 I’d say Gilead. I don’t wish I’d written anything else though because that’s like saying I wish I wasn’t me (that sounds narcissistic but I hope you know what I mean?). But Gilead for the wisdom, for the quietness in the soul that could let someone write like that. Dunno. Maybe something by Robert Walser. I wish I could write like Peter Brown with his profound and imaginative sympathy.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

 None. My writing is crap and that’s down to me.

The book I think is most under/overrated

Alfred Hayes is hugely underrated. Yourcenar’s Hadrian seems to be only known in small circles but is superb. She gets the tone just right. Pitch-perfect.

The book that changed my mind

M. Robinson’s The Givenness of Things. Up until then I’d lazily gone along with the assumption that Puritanism was anti- culture. Peter Brown's exhilarating Augustine of Hippo changed my idea of what a biography could be and Chesterton's brilliant Orthodoxy changed my opinion of the man.

The last book that made me cry

No book has made me cry but I had to narrow my eyes to keep the joy in whilst reading Denise Levertov’s beautiful poems about faith, ageing and mortality. Breathtaking. Evening Train.

The last book that made me laugh

Spike, of course! Milligan. Laugh out loud funny. Dario Fo is also funny.

The book I couldn’t finish

I. McEwan’s Children Act. I read up to the last five pages and decided not to complete it just to spite the bastard. An anti- religious book written by a joker who hasn’t got a clue what religion is.

Not enough time so I end up abandoning lots of books.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Not ashamed because I don’t read for other people or to maintain an image of being ‘a reader’. That's  just another way of internalising the elitism of the self- righteous. Then again, I do feel that I have to read King Lear at some point since my sister reads it every year.

My earliest reading memory

Didn’t read much at all as a child. So earliest memory is really browsing the books on my sister’s book shelves and the thrill of picking out whatever interested me. Hesse’s Siddhartha..Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The world suddenly opened up.

My comfort read

I suppose I’m always returning to K. Clark’s Civilisation and Gai Eaton’s King of the Castle. The latter is a great book about choice and responsibility in the modern world. What do we really mean by liberty? The book that introduced me to Arendt, F. Schuon and G. Thibon..so that's saying something!

The book I give as a gift

I’m always giving books to my friends or trying to impress on them some writer or the other. I think it would have to be Muhammad Asad’s Road to Mecca, a brilliant autobiography of one man’s spiritual quest. Up there with Exupery in terms of the style of writing. Marred by his negative views of Shiaism.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

Well, I still feel I haven’t written the book I want to. Let’s see. Inshallah.

The wave

It was on the inside
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple,
About to be whole.

--H. Dunmore.

You make a single wave. It moves away from your hands and extended arms, slowly and gently curling away from you, held in your eye's gaze for a few seconds more..and then it becomes indistinct, not even a murmur, rejoins the still water. 

What would it be to think only of the moment from the perspective of the moment? To be in it as it unfurls itself.

You see an attractive woman reading a book, lost. On the opposite side of her is a small tree whose every leaf shimmers in resplendent beauty. Not easy to know at what to marvel at.

The morning silence. An espresso. Try to make some notes. Mounier's incredible Personalism up next- not that you know 'what's next'. 

Last evening, before your run, you witnessed the last dregs of the day ebbing away, the last few notes of the day finding their equilibrium. The mysterious light just hanging there, on a few trees, the tops of buildings, already darkened, already suggesting infinite distances.

You noticed the ground for some reason. While you run you try not to think of any negative thoughts-and just let them flow away from you. You notice the earth beneath your feet, wrinkled, dusty and soft in places and hard in others. 

While you run there's something in the air, or maybe it's the quality of the fading light, that reminds you of some former time. How many thousands of years do we carry with us? What was my face like then? So many of those years washed away, but sometimes a wave returns your way...  

  

The Chicago Boys

It can be said that Mi [Man i] loves Fj [Female J] if her welfare enters his utility function, and perhaps also if Mi values emotional and physical contact with Fj. Clearly, Mi can benefit from a match with Fj, because he could then have a more favorable effect on her welfare - and thereby on his own utility - and because the commodities measuring 'contact' with Fj can be produced more cheaply when they are matched than when Mi has to seek an 'illicit' relationship with Fj."

--G. Becker.

[The "commodity" measuring contact being children].

Here's another cracker from the man:

“In the early stages of my work on crime, I was puzzled by why theft is socially harmful since it appears merely to redistribute resources, usually from wealthier to poorer individuals. I resolved the puzzle (Becker [1968, fn. 3] by recognizing that criminals spend on weapons and on the value of the time in planning and carrying out their crimes, and that such spending is socially unproductive – it is what is now called “rent-seeking..” 

 "From the perspective of capital, what most of us see as tremendous 

ethical and even existential problems literally don’t count." 

A kind of silence

There are many kinds of silence. Which holds me now?

I spend a lot of time in silence. Reading by the window, sipping my coffee or tea, looking out at the trees, the runners, the kids playing in their carefree way on the swings though it will abruptly end one day; a man digging a hole, a colleague returning from the gym. 

There are flashes of insight; something deep is remembered. I can't pull it all together. There is no 'together'.   

At times I do wonder. Wouldn't say that I'm gripped by panic but there is a sense of a constraint, a closing off. Silent words. Time is passing sentence on me.

At other times I feel I'm living a charmed life. Here I am, reading whatever I want, not knowing how things will turn out or how any of this will-if at all- settle into a pattern. What will come of this aimless reading? 

I have always greatly enjoyed people's company and have also loved to joke around-as befits a clown of the very first order. It's not that other people irritate me. No, it's not that at all. Nor am I on any high horse. I'm not any horse at all! But I can't engage in conversations about money or property or even academic ones since I find all of that unreal (not boring or pointless, but vacuous).

My silence is not something that one could call religious in any way. It is not connected to any 'practice' and nor does it deliberately seek some 'end'. It's just the way it is. This blog, too, is a silent space now that I think of it. 

Is it connected to a general slowing down in your life? It seems like a plausible explanation (not that you're overly concerned by such questions because you're not really interested in yourself that way). 

I don't think it's depression either. Sadness? Perhaps that's closer? But then there's nothing new there.

On the whole the overriding sentiment is: let it be. See what happens, what it does to you.              

In-gold

Here Ingold is referring to two kinds of toolkits: the'learner's toolkit' on his computer (which is represented by three icons: a disembodied head with headphones; a mobile phone; and a face with sunglasses) and his own 'toolkit': a pencil, a pair of glasses and a notebook.

"Comparing the two toolkits says much about the difference between the idea of learning, as it is increasingly understood today, and the idea of study I have advanced here. The iconic triptych of headphones, screen and shades paints to my mind a frightening picture of the idealised learner as currently conceived in a state-of-the-art, IT-obsessed educational environment. The learner of the toolkit appears to be an isolated individual, securely locked in and shielded from any sensory contact with the surroundings – from light by shades, from sound by phones (the head has no nose for scent, and being just a head, lacks hands to feel). This individual is completely immobile, but also placeless: indeed the blurb that accompanies the toolkit makes much of the fact that it is accessible on line, anywhere, anytime. But while blind and deaf to others, and to the world, our learner is fed with a continual stream of information, downloaded from remote sources into his head: visually, from the screen of his smart-phone; aurally through the phones that cover his ears. What kind of learning is this, which calls for no productive effort on the part of the learner, nor even for his presence, which replaces the teacher by a programme, which severs head from body, mind from world, and immunises the learner from the potentially corrupting effects of any disturbance from outside by means of a protective shield? In recent decades it has given rise to an entire industry, complete with its legions of providers, brands and watchwords. Biesta calls the industry ‘learnification’, a word whose sheer ugliness reflects his abhorrence of that to which it refers."

To affirm the wonder of pencils! That makes me feel ancient but also realize that I don't care. 

K-punk

k kkkkkk 

Love this little clip...

Capitalist Realism

"Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many - and these are A-level students mind you - will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'. What we are facing here is not just time-honoured teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems.

On this account, 'boring' is not opposed to 'interesting'. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, MTV and fast food, to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension - that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche."

Some very interesting thoughts on burn-out, the future and the conversion of culture into museum pieces (which is reminiscent of Agamben's great essay).

--Mark Fisher.

Well, that's how it is. The book is over, as are slow reading (Haldane) and slow food. Cut to the chase, get to the bottom dollar.

Defeatist? Maybe. It's not a question of pessimism or optimism though. Just about thinking, in a cool and calm fashion: if that's the way it is, then what next? What next for you?  De-linking, withdrawal- as much as possible? Illich's question haunts you: what would it be to live a life that wasn't so structured?

I don't think 12,000 years of neolithic logic can be upturned. If history is cyclical-as the great traditions teach- then isn't there a point where the wheel stops turning? The Kali Yuga? 

Let

Let your self go, man. You been perched up there a long time, bro'
Let England shake, I don't give a damn.
Every white artist that dies is a genius, a lyrical, misunderstood prophet against his age. 

Let go and let equilibrium be restored. 
When night comes it's just me & you.
The prison walls fall.

The black sun shines,
but you can't see it.
Loss holds us in circles
-- broken.

The story of an artist

 Lend me a dime and I'll tell you a story. One you probably know, but I'll throw in some feelings this time.   

The way things are, the way things will be.

C3 B4

 The end of summer..

The end of summer was like no other day. There was no time for farewells, no space to give time to what the heart had stored. The main door was left open, the gate flung back; indecision and haste wrapped around you. The moment which you breeze through without a proper accounting for-as if there ever could be one!

Through the porthole, back to this inner chamber. The light flickers, falters, and then fails. The great summer sun of your days in the open are over. All that remains are eyes that are narrower, less reliable, and hands that have darkened with time.