I attended two lectures this week, very different both in style and substance; both equally fascinating, even though one was from the old world and one from the new-and that is something that appeals to the ancient heart and the modern mind.
Ulrich Beck on living in a 'world risk' society and its implications (political, institutional, cultural).
The Socratic position: I know that I do not know, which is still to posit something, still to bring uncertainty back within the folds of reason (the Greek distrust of the irrational emerges again; against beauty , proportion, the kosmos and harmony, the infinite haunts the Greek imagination). How to control risk, how to avoid being subject to the whims of fate?
One can resign oneself to it (this is our share in all that happens, this is what the 'gods' apportion) or, going beyond this, we can recognise that it is our very fragility that is precious, that the good life is something that can be lost at the drop of a hat, a fatal wrong turning... Or one can try and eliminate possibilities, tragic possibilities, by narrowing one's horizons, winnowing out all that is trivial, absurd, or ambiguous from one's life. And one thinks of all sorts of political and cultural mechanisms that can be set into motion for this purpose. In a simple life less can go wrong. Another option is to neutralize chaos by incorporating it into the natural order of being that repeats itself at regular intervals: the myth of eternal return; but perhaps there is a third and more innovative way: instead of being subject to chance we should make our own history, since if it is the case that we can only truly know what we ourselves make (Vico), then we don't have to renounce all attempts at knowing. If we can normalize probabilities, predict risk, then the irruption of the unforseeable becomes less problematic, it becomes a "known unknown".
But modern risk is something quite different: we simply don't know what we don't know and therefore face 'unknown unknowns'; our political and social institutions cannot cope with the unanticpated risks that technology and science throw up. Unforseebale consequences escape us, slip across the border into the shadows; it is almost as if there's a failure of language, an inability to even imagine how we would be able to picture such a non-event and a permanent state of indecison about which words we could possibly use to describe such a phenomenon ex ante. The more we deny the very existence of such phantom-like events the more they come back to plague us, the more real they become.
A global risk society is swathed in ironies; billions of dollars are spent on security, on patrolling international borders when, out of the blue, there's an attack from 'within'. Rationality, and the categories of thought that it depends on: the past, experience, etc can no longer be used to explain or predict what might happen. The old logic simply breaks down. The uncanny finds a home.
Risk, as ambivalence, ambiguity, is the fundamental way of being in late modernity. Liquid modernity or the carnival generates an endless stream of images. Is that something that we should resign ourselves to, embrace, or is it a spur to political action? If the image is a fleeting one, one that refers only to our sensibilities or its own tangled web of signs, can there even be a political response? Without the sense of immortality and transcendence, might not cultural and political authority be meaningless?
Is risk and ambivalence a way of avoiding definition, identity, a refusal of system?Can there be any going back to the world of certainties-God, Reason, Society-or does a late civilisation, one defined by its historical consciousness and flux, find itself unable to return its repressed origins? There is no going back to 'cosmos' and, as Raymond Williams poignantly reminds us, the nostalgia for 'place' is fraught with difficulties...
But this clammering for home is deep rooted and does not disappear so quickly, nor is it displaced so readily: the search for a centre of gravity is merely reborn in other forms. The past is never dead; it isn't even really past.
The 'global' element of risk is that we now have to negotiate with the distant 'other'; exchange, communication, is now conducted with strangers whereas in previous generations our sense of self was constructed in strict opposition to the alien, the sheer 'otherness' of the other, as well as by our own shared continuities of memory, history, and our shared attributes (communities of religion, ethnicity, language-sameness, homogeneity- are the bedrock of modern citizenship and not abstract 'man'. There's a growing sense in europe that we're too diverse, that the stranger in our midst has not, can not, be assimilated..to live cheek-by-jowl with the stranger, the immigrant, the non-citizen par excellence, the very paragon of what might be called 'Man', has only moved what was exterior to the centre. It hasn't erased, but only problematised the relation between exterior and interior)
Modern risk is not a natural, but a manufactured risk, something that is produced, a totally random by-product of our actions in nature that set off a whole series of chain reactions and processes. One questions whether these risks are not 'luxury risks', manufactued-in the other sense of the word- a form of subjective impressions that are weaved together by the media and by the political establishment.
Artifice as a method of political control. Unable to bind citizens and communities to a vision of 'the good society', the power of nightmares and 'fear' come into their own; in a society that lacks the cohesion of religious or cultural identity, one that is jeopardized by irrational outbursts of the crowd, mass society, one increasingly devoid of authority and legitamacy, the question arises: might it not be better to soothe souls (the therapeutic state), order chaos, by introducing pain and pleasure, fantasies and fear , as the central motivations of human nature?A politics of the circus, the spectacular, shines in the ruins of all past attempts to found politics. One must give up on the attempt to 'found' politics at all: justice-as-fairness- doesn't seek deep roots, metaphysical or otherwise. This signals, perhaps, a return to the mysterious will of the sovereign and not to a rationally ordered vision. Pain and pleasure are, after all, it is argued, the only 'natural' things we have in common-not our intellect or reason, and most definitely not our spiritual natures-and if this is so, then a politics established on what eludes our consciousness, namely blood and soil, can never be far behind...
For the west are there really that many great risks compared to the vagaries of fortune that one can expect in Africa or Asia, say? Might it not be the case that the more pragmatic, mundane, monochrome, our world becomes the more we seek risk? Terrorist threats are overplayed, avian flu...but also our taste for gambling, for recklessness, daring feats and adventure; all these suggest that the whole of society aspires to the condition of musicality, the fleetingness of the moment that stands in no relation to the past or the future..pure temporality or sovereign becoming. Jazz and improvisation are the quintessential markers of our identity in the risk age.
To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive - unmechanical, unpredictable. The more regimented and rational our lives become, the more we exclude the miraculous , the wonderful, the transcendent, from the world, and the more we discover need to create our on myths of the unknown, our own mysteries and risks.
Risk is not the same thing as catastrophe; it is the anticipation of catastrophe, a permanent state of virtuality, of becoming. When a risk actually materialises it ceases to be a risk. Risks are kept alive in the nebulous world of possibility and cannot be dissociated from their symbolic forms.
But where does the risk society originate from? Without God or a divine order humans are thrown back on themselves and are responsible for their decisions and their outcomes. Risk presupposes the absence of the divine and is , therefore, closely connected to the process of secularization. How to explain disasters or evil in a world that is made solely by man? Risk is ultimately a sign of our freedom. But it is what Augustine would call a lonely freedom. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Man sets forth on the open seas of unpredictability but, like the Narrenschiff , is condemned never to arive.
But reactions and counter-movements set in. The science of risk begins with the need to calculate insurance premiums for merchants. What is more, the dream of security, of utopian islands in that sea, stays with us. The perfect, gem-like ideal world where all relations are arranged in sublime geometric precision is also a prison, a panopticon....
But if change and randomness are inevitable-the one thing we can be sure of is that we are not sure of anything- then how do political institutions function? The only model for action is precaution, pre-emption. Our knowledge is uncertain and we have no basis to form a probability of what might happen (Keynes, 1937). But, then, why and how should society concern itself with establishing political rules for what it does not, can not , know?
Not via risk calulation which is based on experience or science. Hume: that the sun has risen every day so far in human history is no guarantee that it will tomorrow; the links in causality are tenuous or, if they are not, our knowledge of them certainly is! Instead, the only way of coming to terms with this new type of risk is by relying on imagination, fiction, fear, and suspicion.
Another dimension of this risk is that individuals ust now cope with uncertainty in their own way since the scientists and the politicians fail to hold our trust: they do not necessarily have a better idea of the risks that we face, and they are not in a privileged position in terms of information regarding the lieklihood of any risk and so it is fair to say: your guess is as good as mine. Individuals have to form their own assessment of the risks and this undermines political authority. The tragic irony: the more we elevate experts to the status of sooth-sayers, the less we believe what they have to tell us. In a post-democratic society, can the state reproduce power and order? If it does so, by providing more securityat the expense of liberty, how does it differ from the totalitarian solution? In an uncertain world, political forms are constantly shifting. All is flux.
How was it possible to dethrone the doctrine of necessity, the bourgeois certainities of the old world?How do we get to the strange idea that nature is at root irreducibly stochastic and why do we still doubt that contingency, chance, is an adequate measure of our being (Freud)?
Laplace, 1795: given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it...an intelligence sufficiently vast..nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.
The mechanical self-despite its opening up the possibility of meaningless repetition- is something that man has looked to as a model of precision and predictability, a dazzling monument to our desire to carve out order from the unformed. Efficiency, speed, power, the release of dynamic energies. What the human hand creates is what the human heart desired...
Shechenko, 1913, The world has been transformed into a single, monstrous, fantastic, perpetually-moving machine, into a single non-animal.., We like some kind of ideally maunufactured mechanical man, have grown used to living, getting up, going to bed, eating and working by the clock-and the sense of rhythm and mechanical harmony, reflected in the whole of our life, cannot but help be reflected in our thinking and in our spiritual life.
Against such a style of thinking chance can only be the intersecting of causal lines that we are at present dimly aware of. But this troubles us. What of free will? Only by positing a radical dualism is the self saved from mechanism: the res extensa is subject to mechanical laws and that includes the body-as-machine, but: (bichart), It is impossible to forsee, predict or calculate anything with regard to their phenomena (organic life). The lawless heart comes to prominence as the bourgeois uncertainties are undermined, as the solid stage of modernity draws to a close.
The free self dreams of unlegislated truth and trawls the 19th century for the gothic, mystery,melancholy, fear, anything beyond the iron cage of certainties, 'satanic mills'. In it she finds traces of those voluptuous moments when space opens up before her presence and an unmediated experience manifests itself. The unqualified delirium of 'the new', the utterly random event that shatters illusions of permanence. In the next century this feeling will morph into the rebellion against the rigidities of the old world, against ordinariness and mediocrity. Spontaneity, vitalism, Dada, as a way of combatting false moralities, and the hierarchies of the static world sink with the belle epoque. From now on one must be an artist of the floating world. In Zurich-a good place for nothingness-manifestos are drawn up: one must destroy librarires, culture and memory; the way of freedom lies in knowing only what one knows by heart; jazz, childhood, innocence, african prmitivism, are the viable options for an age that finds itself at the end of history. For a late civilisation, a world-weary culture, the appeal of thanatos looms large. One must renounce desire (Buddhism, as Nietzsche predicted, would be in line with such sympathies).
The subject is teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism; and if this mechanization with or without purpose, this universal depletion of meaning, should come to fulfilment, then the future void may prove equal to all the death anxieties of late antiquity and all the medieval anxieties about hell.
"Happenings" and collages made by the laws of chance, hedonism or inwardness were the only way to escape a world that after the trenches was increasingly unreal in its material splendour, its deathly destruction. If the machine, technology, had been used to tear up the past, to generate ever dizzying vistas of fragmented reality then perhaps, it was argued, the only way forward was to yield to the realisation that there was only one sensation followed by another.
"Resist much, obey little," urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.
But chance had made her way into our thinking many years ago and it was as if a number of hidden undecurrents suddenly came to the surface of our awareness before becoming a flood. With Descartes' second turning inwards we could never be sure if the real world was anything but the trick of a devious mind. The modern world originates in radical doubt and the return to subjectivity; under such conditions there could be no 'givens', no absolute that acts as a guarantor of the truth. The necessity of mechanical instruments to perceive reality only strengthened this mentalitie. The telescope, that Goethe- perhaps with some wisdom- rejected, was a sure sign of this. From now on we could never be sure if we would encounter anything but our own thoughts or the products of our own mind...the world of risk is a world of immanence.
At the level of ideas this is how chance makes its first appearance although it will soon become an idea that comes to dominate all other ways of seeing the world. From here it is only a short step to imagine that nature itself is a fundamentally random process, throwing up different forms that then, equally strangely, slip back into oblivion. Life is devoid of any teleological meaning, a process that is unending and unlimited-like capitalism itself- and always likely to meander or explode into unchartered territories.
Although the introduction of risk into the world is something that is often feared, might it not be something that is also keenly desired-and not just because it is an expression of our freedom? The introduction of life and labour into the political realm, the unnatural growth of the natural (arendt) is wished for because it gives man a project that can never be realised. Life, in its radical openness and incompleteness, its radical chanciness, is the only version of infinity that entices us. Our games of chance, 'play', are perhaps nothing more significant than the thoughts of bored chimps.
But only 'perhaps'. More than anything, risk is our desire for areas of life that we simply cannot know. It is as if western man, with his hypertrophied mind, is tired of the compulsion to know. But how can civilised man live without knowing...
(Citations from J. Jones, Wild Ones and Mike Davis, Flames of New York)
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
A.I.
What would it be like to see the passing splendour of the world with the eyes of an angel, without concern for its trials and tribulations, where though the rise and fall of whole species flash before one in an instant, yet one's heart doesn't sink? There are no judgements, no values, just the simple bearing witness to events, pared down to their most fundamental components (the whole story is in the fragment and the fragment is in the whole); the simple recording of an infinite series of changes in a logical fashion; to have the spectacle of all that has ever happened, all that ever will happen, laid out in front of one's eyes like some richly woven tapestry.
The sudden illumination of a beautiful face or the witnessing of the death of a star are looked upon with the same equanamity. The sigh of a love-torn heart is not so different from the gentle rustling of leaves in the spring. The permanence of crystalline matter is replicated in the art and politics of men. An equation governs the movement of the planets and certain proportions, 'notes', are to be found in the universe as well as in the sadness of a song. The wavering light, the uneasiness in the poet's heart. Everything is something else. Every image flows into another and a thousand generations pass to produce the all too ordinary face that stands before you. But, he who sees Ratio sees only himself....sees only the geometry of his soul.
As Lull's thinking machine knew: all sentences, all meaning, could be derived from the combination of a finite number of words. All stories are a repitition of the seven basic plots. The world itself is a metaphor. A horse is a car without wheels, a man a chance agglomeration of matter that is interchangeable with the environment...a thinking reed. The angel looks at the hordes that attack Rome and knows they follow the same patterns as other migratory animals.
What we picture, what we wish for in our innermost heart , is what we become.
The angel sees without the complications of a body, without the gestures of a culture; if he has a language , it is mathematics. All thought is pure, the clear reflection of everything in the mirror of his pure soul. This is the ancient dream: to know, to see with the eye of God, sub specie aeternitatis. A smooth immanent world that is never interrrupted by miracles or anomalies. Gradually, the earth yields all of her secrets. Only one remains, though he delights us not: the strange hybrid creature that thinks but is finite.
The mechanical turk is able to calculate all possible 'moves', all theoretical outcomes, and lives in a black and white world of perfect foresight where the only unpredictable thing is who is what colour, and that is determined by chance. Otherwise the universe is governed by necessity, ' the veil of god'. Once the rules and the properties, the characteristics, of all of the elements of the system (the players) are understood it is a mere formality for the Turk to work out all possible games and to play out his life accordingly in his spotless mind.
But still something perplexes the Turk. He has heard the poet talk of a blue flower and this is an absurdity beyond his comprehension. Man must build a machine that can question itself.
"When will I be human?" asks the robot. But in the very questioning, the desire to be something that he wasn't, something that he knew in his heart of hearts would never be an option-not for him at least-in this,wasn't there a sign that he was already human, all too human in fact?To despair over the road not taken or the road that one is denied. He sat there, transfixed by the statue of the blue angel, an image that he had searched for for so long. And now,2,000 years pass and still there is no answer to his prayers, only longing and hoping. Maybe this, he thinks to himself, is what it was to be human: to wait for something out of the blue.
But what is this 'thing' that he waits to become? Not to be first among many, for there have already been many before him, but to be unique, utterly distinct , so that he can be loved in the proper way. And at last the boy finds that day, that instant from the past when he's momentarily recognised for what he really is, when he is allowed to bring the past back for a day.
Humans search for the witness to their own being. Are we only sustained by the memory of love, or the desire for being loved?And when that day passes, receding into the shadowy land of what was, and when he finally understands that the moment has passed, as it invariably must, and can never be truly recovered, then what? Is the acceptance of life as finitude, transience, and fragility, the limitof humanity or is there also a reaching out to transcend the ephemeral?Aren't all utopias, all forward dreaming, and the need to repeat just that? But perhaps this submersion into the permanent is a betrayal of sorts-would we be human without the tragic?
And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that we are what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if onlywe would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.
(From the film, A.I.)
The sudden illumination of a beautiful face or the witnessing of the death of a star are looked upon with the same equanamity. The sigh of a love-torn heart is not so different from the gentle rustling of leaves in the spring. The permanence of crystalline matter is replicated in the art and politics of men. An equation governs the movement of the planets and certain proportions, 'notes', are to be found in the universe as well as in the sadness of a song. The wavering light, the uneasiness in the poet's heart. Everything is something else. Every image flows into another and a thousand generations pass to produce the all too ordinary face that stands before you. But, he who sees Ratio sees only himself....sees only the geometry of his soul.
As Lull's thinking machine knew: all sentences, all meaning, could be derived from the combination of a finite number of words. All stories are a repitition of the seven basic plots. The world itself is a metaphor. A horse is a car without wheels, a man a chance agglomeration of matter that is interchangeable with the environment...a thinking reed. The angel looks at the hordes that attack Rome and knows they follow the same patterns as other migratory animals.
What we picture, what we wish for in our innermost heart , is what we become.
The angel sees without the complications of a body, without the gestures of a culture; if he has a language , it is mathematics. All thought is pure, the clear reflection of everything in the mirror of his pure soul. This is the ancient dream: to know, to see with the eye of God, sub specie aeternitatis. A smooth immanent world that is never interrrupted by miracles or anomalies. Gradually, the earth yields all of her secrets. Only one remains, though he delights us not: the strange hybrid creature that thinks but is finite.
The mechanical turk is able to calculate all possible 'moves', all theoretical outcomes, and lives in a black and white world of perfect foresight where the only unpredictable thing is who is what colour, and that is determined by chance. Otherwise the universe is governed by necessity, ' the veil of god'. Once the rules and the properties, the characteristics, of all of the elements of the system (the players) are understood it is a mere formality for the Turk to work out all possible games and to play out his life accordingly in his spotless mind.
But still something perplexes the Turk. He has heard the poet talk of a blue flower and this is an absurdity beyond his comprehension. Man must build a machine that can question itself.
"When will I be human?" asks the robot. But in the very questioning, the desire to be something that he wasn't, something that he knew in his heart of hearts would never be an option-not for him at least-in this,wasn't there a sign that he was already human, all too human in fact?To despair over the road not taken or the road that one is denied. He sat there, transfixed by the statue of the blue angel, an image that he had searched for for so long. And now,2,000 years pass and still there is no answer to his prayers, only longing and hoping. Maybe this, he thinks to himself, is what it was to be human: to wait for something out of the blue.
But what is this 'thing' that he waits to become? Not to be first among many, for there have already been many before him, but to be unique, utterly distinct , so that he can be loved in the proper way. And at last the boy finds that day, that instant from the past when he's momentarily recognised for what he really is, when he is allowed to bring the past back for a day.
Humans search for the witness to their own being. Are we only sustained by the memory of love, or the desire for being loved?And when that day passes, receding into the shadowy land of what was, and when he finally understands that the moment has passed, as it invariably must, and can never be truly recovered, then what? Is the acceptance of life as finitude, transience, and fragility, the limitof humanity or is there also a reaching out to transcend the ephemeral?Aren't all utopias, all forward dreaming, and the need to repeat just that? But perhaps this submersion into the permanent is a betrayal of sorts-would we be human without the tragic?
And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that we are what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if onlywe would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.
(From the film, A.I.)
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Geneve
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
Geneva is an amlgam of the worst features of the old world along with those of the new; crass american commercialism and german insularity.
-----Ali Q
Why are they so unsure of themselves?
---Hagira
There is something pensive, melancholy, almost self-obsessed in their downcast eyes. Everywhere we go we are greeted with the formulaic and wooden "bonjour" but there is never eye contact, never an openness to the other. The nervous sideways glances, the erratic, furtive gestures suggest a form of neurosis; it is as if their bodies have become dissociated from their minds. There is something terrible and strange about the soul of the land-locked Central Europeans. They look out at the world, if at all, with Durer's eyes. Only the sea and a sense of humour has saved their cousins, the English, from such a claustrophobic inwardness. Beneath that placid temperament, the seemingly unruffled exterior, it is easy to imagine the repression of instincts, the fastidious observance of routine, the meticulous attention to detail and exactness (watchmakers), a fanatical, theocratic zeal for order and regimentation, the compelling need to take account of all the intricacies of a life (banking, accounting).
Those implacable faces-thick set, heavy-boned, the square jaws: Polish peasants with fur coats. The city seemed to be petrified into a rigid mould of 80's style and fashion. In every person there co-exists plural selves but here the disjunction between them seemed more acute. Mostly, only one possibility emerges to the fore as personality comes to be clearly delineated against the other, shadowy phantom existence. These other selves, exiles, discarded ancestral forms, are like so many broken lines that never form a pattern. But in this case, the radical alter ego has not been canceled out and lives just under the surface, always likely to re-emerge under certain strains and pressures.
There are 'communities of will' and 'communities of obedience' but in those who are of mixed descent, in whose essential nature is a compond of miscellaneous elements, both temperaments survive as they compete with one another.
The great paradox: the more an individual is uprooted, the more he escapes from 'natural' constraints, the more he craves order, repetition, rituals and the more he becomes entwined in the manacles of his own mind and its products. He veers from one extreme to the other: authority and anarchy, restraint and freedom; Luther, like the German soul, wants to escape legalistic Judaism, 'laws', rules and return to psalmic Judaism...to hear the truth, not see it, to be lost in the One but at the same time be superman. A double life, the tension between being and nothingness. This will culminate in the erasing of the very presence of the people who have made the greatest moves to the truth.
Even the prostitutes look sad here
Never before have I seen such dullness in so many faces; is it from boredom or opulence or something else? The faces of the poor are always expressive, always etched with a story but here my first impressions were of so much hidden suffering, of quiet desperation (Thoreau). The Scream. The woman strains to talk to us, but then realises that she has been too open, too casual and so abruptly brings her sentences to a close. Everywhere is the same: grey upon grey, endless and relentless buildings devoid of any charm or human warmth, of any scale of the human. Bleak beyond belief. The Lebanese immigrants, ghostly and forlorn, shuffle through the city with hunched shoulders, as if marked by the sign of servitude and dejection. They glide by, dreaming of warmer climes.
The divide in Europe is only too evident-the rich, expansive, rounded, unselfconscious, sun-lit Mediterranean world for whom beauty is truth and, on the other hand, the northern spirit whose God is bare, imageless, whose life is always derived from the elemental: tree-spirits, the sea, the bracing wind, the wilderness, the lone voice. The gothic cathedral recreates the forest (Spengler); her music is either profoundly elegaic or a pure, soaring expression of the will-revolutionary, demonic, earth-shattering..a flight of fancy into the realms of imagination perhaps, but always a music that expresses the will, not the intellect.
How to live? What would a city built on the principles of Calvin look like? Geneve, five hundred years of rigorous introspection, of tranquility and peace, a veil of snow and silence, of discipline and sobriety. The birth of psychological man. At Lake Geneve: Rousseau: I feel , therefore I am (not, I think...). The sparse, stark interior of the cathedrals-nothing must be allowed to grow here, no image can be the focus of devotion, around which a whole world might congeal. The cathedral as a cave, a refuge for hollow men in a late civilisation; the exterior world is cut off by these modern-day Manichaeans, life is held in abeyance. One must focus on the one thing needful: to deepen the spiritual life one must narrow it.
Geneve, a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police...excommunicating drunkards, dancers [the list goes on]. The first attempt at establishing the Panopticon; Genve, an experiment to convert the secular world to one cell-like monastery. But only a theocratic state can make any inroads. By a strange transmutation, the attempt is taken up by the state, by political forces. If the church cannot become a state then the state must become a church. But as it does so, the ideal becomes not a spirtual body but an efficient machine. But all this reveals a fundamental division in the psyche, a division that will manifest itself as the cultural contradiction of capitalism.
For it is will-will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent rapt adoration or straining in violent energy , but always will-which is the essence of Puritanism , and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in the tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.
This corresponds to the conservative, authoritarian phase of capitalism when the state represents total power, solidity, and the idealized image of the individual is that of a grave, stern , conservative spirit, given to punctuality in matters of labour, practicality in public dealings, efficiency, rational clculation, constancy in prayer and deep but simple , reverential piety: ‘sober exaltation’. In this scheme of things, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are diversions, unnecessary and, ultimately, superficial; an ugly excrescence. But within this soul, and opposed to this sober prudence, is a ‘divine recklessness’, the desire to affirm an individual existence, to break free from constraints, tradition, societal norms, anything that is ‘given’: liquid modernity, the endless play of forms (culture), the destruction, devouring, of limits, the melting away of all that is solid. This strand is the root of the secular liberty as well as the Romantic lonely individual faced with a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness ..a wilderness to be subdued beneath solitary stars , the sea behind , the untamed desert ahead.
Fraternity, solidarity must be sacrificed to autonomy. The roots of utilitarianism can be found in puritanism and something of this twin legacy is transferred to america: the conservative, hell-fire nation mixed with the hegemonic ideas of freedom to contract and property.
There is no other way of explaining how a philosophy that is supremely indifferent to the world could end up in this narcotic of gold, how the iron will, the 'practical ascetic', could sanction such garish worldliness.
(quotes from R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)
Between stars-on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places
Geneva is an amlgam of the worst features of the old world along with those of the new; crass american commercialism and german insularity.
-----Ali Q
Why are they so unsure of themselves?
---Hagira
There is something pensive, melancholy, almost self-obsessed in their downcast eyes. Everywhere we go we are greeted with the formulaic and wooden "bonjour" but there is never eye contact, never an openness to the other. The nervous sideways glances, the erratic, furtive gestures suggest a form of neurosis; it is as if their bodies have become dissociated from their minds. There is something terrible and strange about the soul of the land-locked Central Europeans. They look out at the world, if at all, with Durer's eyes. Only the sea and a sense of humour has saved their cousins, the English, from such a claustrophobic inwardness. Beneath that placid temperament, the seemingly unruffled exterior, it is easy to imagine the repression of instincts, the fastidious observance of routine, the meticulous attention to detail and exactness (watchmakers), a fanatical, theocratic zeal for order and regimentation, the compelling need to take account of all the intricacies of a life (banking, accounting).
Those implacable faces-thick set, heavy-boned, the square jaws: Polish peasants with fur coats. The city seemed to be petrified into a rigid mould of 80's style and fashion. In every person there co-exists plural selves but here the disjunction between them seemed more acute. Mostly, only one possibility emerges to the fore as personality comes to be clearly delineated against the other, shadowy phantom existence. These other selves, exiles, discarded ancestral forms, are like so many broken lines that never form a pattern. But in this case, the radical alter ego has not been canceled out and lives just under the surface, always likely to re-emerge under certain strains and pressures.
There are 'communities of will' and 'communities of obedience' but in those who are of mixed descent, in whose essential nature is a compond of miscellaneous elements, both temperaments survive as they compete with one another.
The great paradox: the more an individual is uprooted, the more he escapes from 'natural' constraints, the more he craves order, repetition, rituals and the more he becomes entwined in the manacles of his own mind and its products. He veers from one extreme to the other: authority and anarchy, restraint and freedom; Luther, like the German soul, wants to escape legalistic Judaism, 'laws', rules and return to psalmic Judaism...to hear the truth, not see it, to be lost in the One but at the same time be superman. A double life, the tension between being and nothingness. This will culminate in the erasing of the very presence of the people who have made the greatest moves to the truth.
Even the prostitutes look sad here
Never before have I seen such dullness in so many faces; is it from boredom or opulence or something else? The faces of the poor are always expressive, always etched with a story but here my first impressions were of so much hidden suffering, of quiet desperation (Thoreau). The Scream. The woman strains to talk to us, but then realises that she has been too open, too casual and so abruptly brings her sentences to a close. Everywhere is the same: grey upon grey, endless and relentless buildings devoid of any charm or human warmth, of any scale of the human. Bleak beyond belief. The Lebanese immigrants, ghostly and forlorn, shuffle through the city with hunched shoulders, as if marked by the sign of servitude and dejection. They glide by, dreaming of warmer climes.
The divide in Europe is only too evident-the rich, expansive, rounded, unselfconscious, sun-lit Mediterranean world for whom beauty is truth and, on the other hand, the northern spirit whose God is bare, imageless, whose life is always derived from the elemental: tree-spirits, the sea, the bracing wind, the wilderness, the lone voice. The gothic cathedral recreates the forest (Spengler); her music is either profoundly elegaic or a pure, soaring expression of the will-revolutionary, demonic, earth-shattering..a flight of fancy into the realms of imagination perhaps, but always a music that expresses the will, not the intellect.
How to live? What would a city built on the principles of Calvin look like? Geneve, five hundred years of rigorous introspection, of tranquility and peace, a veil of snow and silence, of discipline and sobriety. The birth of psychological man. At Lake Geneve: Rousseau: I feel , therefore I am (not, I think...). The sparse, stark interior of the cathedrals-nothing must be allowed to grow here, no image can be the focus of devotion, around which a whole world might congeal. The cathedral as a cave, a refuge for hollow men in a late civilisation; the exterior world is cut off by these modern-day Manichaeans, life is held in abeyance. One must focus on the one thing needful: to deepen the spiritual life one must narrow it.
Geneve, a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police...excommunicating drunkards, dancers [the list goes on]. The first attempt at establishing the Panopticon; Genve, an experiment to convert the secular world to one cell-like monastery. But only a theocratic state can make any inroads. By a strange transmutation, the attempt is taken up by the state, by political forces. If the church cannot become a state then the state must become a church. But as it does so, the ideal becomes not a spirtual body but an efficient machine. But all this reveals a fundamental division in the psyche, a division that will manifest itself as the cultural contradiction of capitalism.
For it is will-will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent rapt adoration or straining in violent energy , but always will-which is the essence of Puritanism , and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in the tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized.
This corresponds to the conservative, authoritarian phase of capitalism when the state represents total power, solidity, and the idealized image of the individual is that of a grave, stern , conservative spirit, given to punctuality in matters of labour, practicality in public dealings, efficiency, rational clculation, constancy in prayer and deep but simple , reverential piety: ‘sober exaltation’. In this scheme of things, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are diversions, unnecessary and, ultimately, superficial; an ugly excrescence. But within this soul, and opposed to this sober prudence, is a ‘divine recklessness’, the desire to affirm an individual existence, to break free from constraints, tradition, societal norms, anything that is ‘given’: liquid modernity, the endless play of forms (culture), the destruction, devouring, of limits, the melting away of all that is solid. This strand is the root of the secular liberty as well as the Romantic lonely individual faced with a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness ..a wilderness to be subdued beneath solitary stars , the sea behind , the untamed desert ahead.
Fraternity, solidarity must be sacrificed to autonomy. The roots of utilitarianism can be found in puritanism and something of this twin legacy is transferred to america: the conservative, hell-fire nation mixed with the hegemonic ideas of freedom to contract and property.
There is no other way of explaining how a philosophy that is supremely indifferent to the world could end up in this narcotic of gold, how the iron will, the 'practical ascetic', could sanction such garish worldliness.
(quotes from R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Evening Land
"Was I the only one who wasn't serious"
------from Wings of Desire
I have spent the whole day lying down, looking at the sky and the great tree out of my window. The desire for escape has not dimmed. The stark morning light, the slow moving winter earth, the northern religion would not exist without them...they are the religion, her inner music. To see the world through the latticework of the tree's branches, the outstretched hands, the thousand-aborted prayers that testify every year to the void in one's heart, to the receding of the sun's light, power, and dominion.
The sky is a rich, deep blue but imageless. Clear, crisp and free. The leaves are frozen into the ground, like so many fossils covered with icicles. Everything is grinding to a halt; the Roding turns self-consciously, darkly, brooding. There is only a murmur of laughter, the faintest of hopes in her movements now. The long grass has congealed into a deathly brown mass and continues to live on only as a memory does.
Winter hollows everything out, reducing us to the elemental, taking us to the time before time. By mid-day the sky has become a fragile, pale blue, devoid of any concern with the proceedings of time. She begins to fill with the whitest clouds, infinitely distant and secretive, already suggesting other worlds. Like delicate porcelain or the notes of a piano, her beauty lies in the thin-ness of her existence, the deep knowledge that between sublime appearances and nothingness there is only a line, the line of a horizon.
The shadows lengthen, become darker. Waves of purple-black clouds descend as the birds follow their pre-ordained paths. Winter lights go on but are not any more artificial than the other spectacles that have passed. They only suggest the existence of other lives, histories that are not ours.
My thoughts turn to friends who have fallen. They have grown sane in their old age. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it not I who thought the world trivial, unworthy of attention?
Those who busy themselves in and with the serious matters of the world are the true ascetics-they care not for the earth or her treasures. And the irony of it all: those who desire nothing but to leave this place of frozen possibilities, a life that never ceases to throw up tragedy, farce, that is always too short, always painful...it is that same life, with all of its limitations, that we love more than ever, clinging onto every moment, hoarding every experience even as they slip away through our outstretched hands.
Had we the choice again we would take the privilege of seeing the coming and passing of a single day (even if it is empty of meaning) ; we would, like the trees, not decline the terrible responsibility of bearing witness- to both God's presence and His absence; far better that than to settle for the endless affirmation of reality. ..to be free and bound, earth and sky.
------from Wings of Desire
I have spent the whole day lying down, looking at the sky and the great tree out of my window. The desire for escape has not dimmed. The stark morning light, the slow moving winter earth, the northern religion would not exist without them...they are the religion, her inner music. To see the world through the latticework of the tree's branches, the outstretched hands, the thousand-aborted prayers that testify every year to the void in one's heart, to the receding of the sun's light, power, and dominion.
The sky is a rich, deep blue but imageless. Clear, crisp and free. The leaves are frozen into the ground, like so many fossils covered with icicles. Everything is grinding to a halt; the Roding turns self-consciously, darkly, brooding. There is only a murmur of laughter, the faintest of hopes in her movements now. The long grass has congealed into a deathly brown mass and continues to live on only as a memory does.
Winter hollows everything out, reducing us to the elemental, taking us to the time before time. By mid-day the sky has become a fragile, pale blue, devoid of any concern with the proceedings of time. She begins to fill with the whitest clouds, infinitely distant and secretive, already suggesting other worlds. Like delicate porcelain or the notes of a piano, her beauty lies in the thin-ness of her existence, the deep knowledge that between sublime appearances and nothingness there is only a line, the line of a horizon.
The shadows lengthen, become darker. Waves of purple-black clouds descend as the birds follow their pre-ordained paths. Winter lights go on but are not any more artificial than the other spectacles that have passed. They only suggest the existence of other lives, histories that are not ours.
My thoughts turn to friends who have fallen. They have grown sane in their old age. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Was it not I who thought the world trivial, unworthy of attention?
Those who busy themselves in and with the serious matters of the world are the true ascetics-they care not for the earth or her treasures. And the irony of it all: those who desire nothing but to leave this place of frozen possibilities, a life that never ceases to throw up tragedy, farce, that is always too short, always painful...it is that same life, with all of its limitations, that we love more than ever, clinging onto every moment, hoarding every experience even as they slip away through our outstretched hands.
Had we the choice again we would take the privilege of seeing the coming and passing of a single day (even if it is empty of meaning) ; we would, like the trees, not decline the terrible responsibility of bearing witness- to both God's presence and His absence; far better that than to settle for the endless affirmation of reality. ..to be free and bound, earth and sky.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Repetition and Ritual
"There is no delusion of total command over Nature, just constant ecological adaptation. The city is an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic Mediterranean environment. ‘Things are allowed to remain in a halfway real condition, and delight is taken in the way things come to their own equilibrium and completion.’... In the ‘Americanized big city’, by contrast, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity ( Unheimlich). Indeed ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately.’ "
Are we destined to repeat the words and thoughts of others? Is thought itself just an articulation of our animal instincts, of biology? There is no such thing as 'inner experience' nor an understanding that isn't incarnate, mediated by the body as well as by bodies (the community).
Is the self generated by the body, a mirror image that resists contingency and the dissolution of time? The Double, our true self, exists on the other side of this mirror. But if the mind is essentially related to the organic how can it ever know this, how can it ever stand outside the stream (of consciousness)?
"An animal legacy that the coldness of the mind would like to dissolve"
But if all truth is immanent then why the dream to get outside of ourselves, for abstraction and objectivity? Does life generate its own transcendence? If we want to learn things 'off by heart' we also want to know them with a thought that isn't encumbered by memory or cluttered by the body's sensations and impressions. A perfect thinking machine. An eye that doesn't blink.
What is the demon that compels us to repeat, to return to the familiar, to 'home'? Psychologically, perhaps it is the desire to re-create in the shadow of an original absence. Political and social utopias in this sense are nothing but the infantile dreams of a perfect state, of authority. But before this and without necessarily making the claim for biological continuity: " In their migrations over thousands of kilometers, birds and fish are thought to be seeking the land of their origin, which is the inertia of matter, the state prior to life".
Is this a difference in degree or kind? In all of nature there is the great flux between movement and settlement; 'freedom' and 'security' are a philosophical prolongation of a fundamental tendency that runs throughout nature. The organic foreshadows the human possibility.
Nomadic and sedentary cultures are but late additions, dim reflections of the originary categories, Space and Time. The world is an instant and a series of events, Being and Becoming. But does this imply a closed universe that repeats itself or is there a Real frontier that leads onto the open, the unrepeatable?
But why do we return to that first place? Why are we so enchanted by origins, the untainted beginning? Not just for security, food, or economic reasons-but that too. We return to the city of the dead to commune with the spirits. Pilgrimages to holy places, to shrines, to springs, are deeply embedded in our consciousness. The fixed markers in a shape-shifting world that inspire reverence and awe, a place where the spirit 'dwells'. There is always a sacred space and a profane space. Repetition fixes boundaries. If Time is the Space between me and You then it must be annulled, spatialized as eternal return.
Before the first civilisations we are inclined to return to the cave, to the ritual centre, because we are mesmerized by the cave drawings, the representations of the other world and our ability to re-produce a depiction of the gateway. Art as power, a magical, hypnotic, transforming power.
We return again and again to that clearing in search of the loved one. We retrace our steps, like the hunter, only to realise that it is we who are being hunted. But 'to search', love must first be lost. Only the broken-hearted can yearn, can mourn. All our games of lost and found, hide and seek are but variations of this theme.
Death; art; religion; love. These, our oldest stories, we fondly repeat to ourselves.
The ancient world was held spellbound to the 'origin' and the 'centre'; the ontological thirst meant that we must always re-enact those primal gestures, walk in the footsteps of the First Man, circle and dance around the timeless space. In the sea of time we must return again and again to the stable world of forms, to the rituals that are handed down in the illud tempus. We map the stars and imagine a perfect order; the theatre and the observatory predate the city.
" A faded scrap of Oriental fabric: in it survives the mythic heritage, the ability to see a certain gesture as an exemplar, the sense of a destiny linked to a form."
How does culture begin? With our ability to name the world, to repeat a thing, conjure it up with a word. An act of substitution. But the world of signs and omens must remain opaque for us to establish our independent of world of meanings, to free the psyche of mysterious significances and correspondences. Nature throws up the human possibility. Are we just a word in its language? We must have the first and the last word. The great edifice of the medieval construction collapses under the weight of its excess of meaning. From now on the mind wants to be alone.
Everything moves in a circle, the most perfect form. At first there can be no real history; the model for history is nature, the ideal for the traditional civilisation is the unchanging rhythms, harmonics of the heavens. Forms of government must change according to some sort of cyclical law (monarchy, aristocracy, then democracy) or society must fluctuate between city and desert (Ibn Khaldun), virtue and decadence; or, in another version: poverty, labour, wealth, luxury. The great question for all civilisations is how to negotiate the conflicting aims of a slow moving traditional society with the need for new expressions of its essence: how to reconcile continuity with the forward dreaming impulses? All political tradition must be , essentially, conservative. Rome depends on the inaugural moment, the founding fathers, so that even if one cannot repeat history one should always be able to refer back to some sort of pole star, polis.
At the individual level the constant strain of etiquette, the high end of ritual; to say words in the right order (if not, death , in the Aboriginal system of things), to repeat the same gestures at the appropriate moment, the set phrase. Courtesy, the matching of inward attention to outward actions seems , to our modern ears, as entirely superficial. We must avoid cliches at all costs if we are to live up to the ideal of authenticity.
To recognize difference as an aspect of ourselves. Repetition is a way of recognizing something, someone: a pattern. Our survival depended on it. But what do we seek: identity or difference? Do we aim to recreate that first pattern that bewitched us, or find it in a different mode, tenor- a new configuration of the old? The familiar is distinguished from the strange, the dangerous, the uncanny and we clutch onto it, like a rosary bead, chanting words for protection. A ritual is a way of remembering as well as forgetting , for managing our fears; it is a mechanism for pre-empting anarchy, chaos, pollution.
"Why are you throwing this corn around?
To keep the tigers away.
But there are no tigers here
It must be working then! "
The bourgeois’ hat flies off his pointed head /Trains fall off bridges
--------Mike Davis, The Flames of New YorkAre we destined to repeat the words and thoughts of others? Is thought itself just an articulation of our animal instincts, of biology? There is no such thing as 'inner experience' nor an understanding that isn't incarnate, mediated by the body as well as by bodies (the community).
Is the self generated by the body, a mirror image that resists contingency and the dissolution of time? The Double, our true self, exists on the other side of this mirror. But if the mind is essentially related to the organic how can it ever know this, how can it ever stand outside the stream (of consciousness)?
"An animal legacy that the coldness of the mind would like to dissolve"
But if all truth is immanent then why the dream to get outside of ourselves, for abstraction and objectivity? Does life generate its own transcendence? If we want to learn things 'off by heart' we also want to know them with a thought that isn't encumbered by memory or cluttered by the body's sensations and impressions. A perfect thinking machine. An eye that doesn't blink.
What is the demon that compels us to repeat, to return to the familiar, to 'home'? Psychologically, perhaps it is the desire to re-create in the shadow of an original absence. Political and social utopias in this sense are nothing but the infantile dreams of a perfect state, of authority. But before this and without necessarily making the claim for biological continuity: " In their migrations over thousands of kilometers, birds and fish are thought to be seeking the land of their origin, which is the inertia of matter, the state prior to life".
Is this a difference in degree or kind? In all of nature there is the great flux between movement and settlement; 'freedom' and 'security' are a philosophical prolongation of a fundamental tendency that runs throughout nature. The organic foreshadows the human possibility.
Nomadic and sedentary cultures are but late additions, dim reflections of the originary categories, Space and Time. The world is an instant and a series of events, Being and Becoming. But does this imply a closed universe that repeats itself or is there a Real frontier that leads onto the open, the unrepeatable?
But why do we return to that first place? Why are we so enchanted by origins, the untainted beginning? Not just for security, food, or economic reasons-but that too. We return to the city of the dead to commune with the spirits. Pilgrimages to holy places, to shrines, to springs, are deeply embedded in our consciousness. The fixed markers in a shape-shifting world that inspire reverence and awe, a place where the spirit 'dwells'. There is always a sacred space and a profane space. Repetition fixes boundaries. If Time is the Space between me and You then it must be annulled, spatialized as eternal return.
Before the first civilisations we are inclined to return to the cave, to the ritual centre, because we are mesmerized by the cave drawings, the representations of the other world and our ability to re-produce a depiction of the gateway. Art as power, a magical, hypnotic, transforming power.
We return again and again to that clearing in search of the loved one. We retrace our steps, like the hunter, only to realise that it is we who are being hunted. But 'to search', love must first be lost. Only the broken-hearted can yearn, can mourn. All our games of lost and found, hide and seek are but variations of this theme.
Death; art; religion; love. These, our oldest stories, we fondly repeat to ourselves.
The ancient world was held spellbound to the 'origin' and the 'centre'; the ontological thirst meant that we must always re-enact those primal gestures, walk in the footsteps of the First Man, circle and dance around the timeless space. In the sea of time we must return again and again to the stable world of forms, to the rituals that are handed down in the illud tempus. We map the stars and imagine a perfect order; the theatre and the observatory predate the city.
" A faded scrap of Oriental fabric: in it survives the mythic heritage, the ability to see a certain gesture as an exemplar, the sense of a destiny linked to a form."
The first man looks to the heavens and tries to imitate its perfectly ordered symmetry here on earth (Egypt, the sublime example)..." as it is in heaven so shall it be on earth." Order, regularity, cleanliness, musicality and harmony are all intimately connected to the compulsion to repeat. Tyranny has ancient roots.
Must I say it again: since Darwin the old dualism of mind and matter has broken down but we cannot go back to the mythical world, the muddy centre either. Nature must be isolated as pure extension, so much dead matter. But the nihilistic conclusion of this is that we too are dead matter: thanatos and modern pessimism.How does culture begin? With our ability to name the world, to repeat a thing, conjure it up with a word. An act of substitution. But the world of signs and omens must remain opaque for us to establish our independent of world of meanings, to free the psyche of mysterious significances and correspondences. Nature throws up the human possibility. Are we just a word in its language? We must have the first and the last word. The great edifice of the medieval construction collapses under the weight of its excess of meaning. From now on the mind wants to be alone.
Everything moves in a circle, the most perfect form. At first there can be no real history; the model for history is nature, the ideal for the traditional civilisation is the unchanging rhythms, harmonics of the heavens. Forms of government must change according to some sort of cyclical law (monarchy, aristocracy, then democracy) or society must fluctuate between city and desert (Ibn Khaldun), virtue and decadence; or, in another version: poverty, labour, wealth, luxury. The great question for all civilisations is how to negotiate the conflicting aims of a slow moving traditional society with the need for new expressions of its essence: how to reconcile continuity with the forward dreaming impulses? All political tradition must be , essentially, conservative. Rome depends on the inaugural moment, the founding fathers, so that even if one cannot repeat history one should always be able to refer back to some sort of pole star, polis.
At the individual level the constant strain of etiquette, the high end of ritual; to say words in the right order (if not, death , in the Aboriginal system of things), to repeat the same gestures at the appropriate moment, the set phrase. Courtesy, the matching of inward attention to outward actions seems , to our modern ears, as entirely superficial. We must avoid cliches at all costs if we are to live up to the ideal of authenticity.
To recognize difference as an aspect of ourselves. Repetition is a way of recognizing something, someone: a pattern. Our survival depended on it. But what do we seek: identity or difference? Do we aim to recreate that first pattern that bewitched us, or find it in a different mode, tenor- a new configuration of the old? The familiar is distinguished from the strange, the dangerous, the uncanny and we clutch onto it, like a rosary bead, chanting words for protection. A ritual is a way of remembering as well as forgetting , for managing our fears; it is a mechanism for pre-empting anarchy, chaos, pollution.
"Why are you throwing this corn around?
To keep the tigers away.
But there are no tigers here
It must be working then! "
This 'throwing' becomes a comforting ritual in itself, devoid of any intrinsic connection to the problem. It averts our attention from it but at the same time reminds us that we are scared. The ritual is a middle path between an overcoming, raw sensation-pure chance- and complete amnesia.
" Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated and becomes part of the ceremony."
Our taste for ritual has not dissipated but merely been transformed, repeated in other forms. The experiment in the temple of science cannot allow for miracles, or for outcomes that are not the result of causal laws lest the irrational irrupts into our ordered lives. We live under the sign of the Same. The Japanese tea ceremony, ritual prayer: highly stylized actions, formulaic offerings are now but empty showings. But ritual has not died, it is merely reborn in the strangest of places. We only differ from our ancestors in that we disavow any possibility of being subject to the bounds of ritual: our rituals have only become more opaque, not less ubiquitous. Can there be understanding without memory? Can there be a shared common world without the repeating of the same meaningful gestures? Is truth, as Hume suggested, but the association of ideas? (the mind recoils at the notion that it is based on such shallow foundations). Each individual now lives in the illusion that he is free from ceremony, habits of mind, and he repeats this like a secret mantra; it is institutionalized, organized, repeated until we have internalized it: love is hate, war is peace, and we're all free.
Each town is the same as the other. Subtopia. We are caught between either a lonely , incommunicable freedom or a deadening, horizontal sameness and totality...the flatlands of the spirit wear us down. Life has become mechanical: been there, done that.
Re-ligion, re-demption, re-surrection: all of these are a 'second coming', a homecoming, when what we seek is an exodus; a gathering, a re-binding, a re-membering, when what we want is forgetfulness, a new world at every instant.
I run on
ruffling the periphery,
the treadmill's outer wheel,
declining centre
or any loss of it
Or, as the Allama once pointed out: finitude isn't a misfortune. Sometimes (but only sometimes) want to die but once.
(citations: Roberto Calasso, Mumford, Kafka, Ammons)
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
The Happy Pessimist
I'm H.A.P.P.Y., I know I am, I'm sure I am.
Surely it is a mistake to suppose that happiness is the central and not just a central aspect of human nature? In fact, might it not be suggested that the concept is introduced at a particular historical juncture and with specific political motives and that it has, therefore, less to do with our nature than one at first might suspect? The insertion of life into the political realm is a decisive move; the concern for life, pleasure and pain and its calculus, the efficient management of growth, the 'standard of living', the discipline of the body, the normalizing of the population and the setting up of pleasure industries, utopian fantasy islands: all follow the rubric of biopolitics. But this, it might be suggested, is but the late flourish of a clever animal. Only we recognize that we are needy animals and are defined by what we lack.
Nietzsche’s wry comment: "happiness: only the Englishman seeks that" would indicate that happiness is not the universal, over-arching principle that it is made out to be. Furthermore, to believe that the motivation for pursuing 'meaning', art, beauty, or knowledge is our happiness is fundamentally wrong- even though these things may lead to it or accompany it. Are we really governed by this single motivating factor or might there be other things like duty, love, and compassion that move us to act? I think that one has to admit the obvious charm and benefits of reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut principle or common currency that apparently does away with conflict (as well as tragedy)-but one does so at significant detriment to our perception of ourselves. This one-dimensional, hollow man is travesty of all the best that we can imagine and even though the mind loves being absorbed by one thing it also needs to know the world in depth . A concept may lead to easier calculations or it may allow things to be more readily objectified in monetary terms, but that does not in-itself mean that it offers a surer method of evaluation.
It seems quite strange to make an argument for happiness from nature or evolution(as if our natures are such that we seek happiness because of its survival value) when others have thought of our natural purpose in quite different terms: namely, the good life that depends on the virtues or the perfection of the soul: indeed, happiness is only one such notion of the common good and to say, therefore, that we must start from man's nature "as it is" means starting with the assumption-and it is only an assumption-that the bourgeois, non-metaphysical individual is the best model we have and that he represents the true version of human nature. That this is a self-evident truth is surely contestable, to say the least. Can we now envisage a politics that stands outside the web of life, can we move back from the language of the markets to the language of justice, virtue, and does that depend on possessing a transcendental perspective?
Even within the utilitarian framework there are still some awkward questions: what about entrenched preferences (a happy slave or an extremely poor person may convince himself that he is happy with the help of religious consolations and notions of kismet and how many desperate housewives are there that adapt to a life of low expectations?) And what about the happiness that results from the fulfilment of frivolous desires (incidentally, weren’t such vain desires and the concern for status the motor of economic growth according to Adam Smith?) With regards the latter set of issues, it might be argued that we should distinguish between temporary and permanent happiness but most economists would suggest that temporary happiness, a quick fix, is merely a case of informational problems (in the sense that we do not realise that that happiness turns sour in the long run) or an irrational pursuit, the failure of the rational calculator to see and latch on to a happiness that doesn't fade. But does the recognition of this imply a move to human nature, not “as it is” but as it should be, an ideal self? If so, then happiness, on its own, is an inadequate guiding principle.
The problem is that we want a moral principle that can deal with such questions but that at the same time is sensitive to the charge of paternalism (who, for example, has the authority to oppose our democratic choices or, in another expression of this, what the market determines; indeed, why not ditch the classics or education altogether if in doing so one makes the greatest number happy?) The over-arching idea of happiness is really just a problematic version of universalism: as if to say that the existence of other values, other ‘forms of life,’ only indicate a deficiency with respect to the new (and universal) standard of happiness. Those in the developing countries must, according to this logic, be first made aware of how unhappy they are before they can enjoy the right to pursue a life of happiness.
There are equally troubling questions with the approach: its neglect of freedom. For example, would an educated person who'chooses' not to read have the same level of happiness as a person who is illiterate? Many would think that the former, with its greater range of opportunities, offers a better way of living. So, we either accept freedom as another source of value or we reduce it to a means to our utilitarian end. Of course, we are warned of the dangers of thinking of everything simply in terms of as a means to an end but if this is so the question remains: why then persist with happiness as the only end to which evolution moves? Might not freedom be explained in this way as well, so that nature evolves along degrees of freedom?
On what grounds, for example, should society prevent a change or, say, a fair process of exchange that leads to a small minority becoming significantly better off at the expense of a lot of people becoming only slightly worse off or, in a variant of this, on what basis would society rule out an increase in utility of large sections of society at the expense of seeing a few members having their fundamental rights infringed upon or their utility dropping to extremely low levels? If on a theory of rights are we, then, to move away from the utilitarian framework? To put it more starkly: can we invoke a moral theory that doesn't talk about intentions or sacrifice or restraint or any actions that go beyond our own happiness. One can only talk about these things tautologically: we accept limitations because we choose to do so, because doing so makes us happier. It is the point at which explanation can go no further.
The central problem with this analysis is that it just doesn't take on board the whole gamut of human motivations and ends (this being, of course, the familiar complaint that homo economicus is a very 'thin'concept) ; for example, religion, civic virtues or the pursuit of knowledge are not simply or exclusively about enhancing one's happiness or forwarding our self-interest. Perhaps the pessimistic Romantics would have had a thing or two to say about happiness and its embodiment of a 'sun-and-wheat-consciousness' (Lawrence) and wouldn’t the Freudians say that this constant search for perfect happiness is a form of neurosis? Deep down we have the sneaking suspicion that a life singularly devoted to happiness is a shallow and trivial one.
But is it perfection, bliss, stillness that we really seek? Would we be happy by having attained our heart's desire? There is the bonum honestum, accompanied by an interior joy, and the bonum delectabile, which is a pleasure that becomes an end in itself. Happiness, in this sense, is a shadow of desire for the garden, a utopian longing for the end of longing, the desire for a land of plenty where we are not defined by what we lack.
If we accept that there are certain things that are of intrinsic importance-and this is a concept that economics has banished a long time ago-then we are already well on the way of thinking about human motivations and ends in a more pluralistic (and more complicated) way. This would be a radical departure for economics because for centuries we’ve been brought up with the idea that something is valued because it is desired, that desires can make pushpin as good as poetry (Bentham), and that our subjective experiences are not to be snuffed at. Is the content, soothed animal the best picture, the truest depiction, we have of ourselves?
In the end, might it not be the case that our fixation with the idea of man as a 'constantly moving happiness machine' has in part-and quite tragically-led us to being so unhappy? Coming on the back of a century devoted to the happiness of the self, the American dream, the American pastoral, perhaps we could do worse than turn to Philip Roth for his descriptions of how perfect, happy lives unravel. We are left wondering how much loneliness, depression and indifference lies behind the shiny surfaces of the happy life. And the disturbing possibility that, as one of Roth’s characters says, “it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self…”
Perhaps there is more.
" Psychoanalytically, any form of life will tend to generate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life". In that sense, true happiness is achieved by not achieving it, by being a happy pessimist. "Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days". Capitalism and consumerism would never have such a hold on us unless it held up the possibility of endless expansion, of unlimitedness itself (Marx would say that the growth of productive forces allows for a breaking out of the ghetto, the limited but narrow perfection of the ancients for the unlimited, multi-faceted, alienated individual); insofar as we are modern we must reject the Greeks and the closed medieval world; infinity can no longer be located along a vertical axis, as it were.
And so, the best thing about being human is that have the ability not to be human, to step outside te natural necessities from which the animals derive satisfaction, happiness. This is what Hannah called the unnatural growth of the natural. Ours is a troubled happiness, something that we want to and do not want to name, to find and to lose. "Only mortals pursue ends that come to an end, we dream of a deathless activity."
Modern happiness is, therefore, a discourse on how to escape the ordinary, finitude. It is not an attempt, contrary to first appearances, to weigh ourselves down with so many goods and trinkets but, rather, a desire for lightness. But there is a lightness that comes from profundity, and a lightness of being that is unbearable. By detaching our pleasures from 'the good' , from the world, we have thought that we could be free to find our own infinites. The moderns, in their inwardness, are the true ascetics! One only needs to reflect on how many of our freedoms have turned to obsessions, compulsive behaviours, to realise that maybe, just maybe, we are not as sure as to whether we really know what happiness is any more.
(citations from J. Lear and Goethe)
Surely it is a mistake to suppose that happiness is the central and not just a central aspect of human nature? In fact, might it not be suggested that the concept is introduced at a particular historical juncture and with specific political motives and that it has, therefore, less to do with our nature than one at first might suspect? The insertion of life into the political realm is a decisive move; the concern for life, pleasure and pain and its calculus, the efficient management of growth, the 'standard of living', the discipline of the body, the normalizing of the population and the setting up of pleasure industries, utopian fantasy islands: all follow the rubric of biopolitics. But this, it might be suggested, is but the late flourish of a clever animal. Only we recognize that we are needy animals and are defined by what we lack.
Nietzsche’s wry comment: "happiness: only the Englishman seeks that" would indicate that happiness is not the universal, over-arching principle that it is made out to be. Furthermore, to believe that the motivation for pursuing 'meaning', art, beauty, or knowledge is our happiness is fundamentally wrong- even though these things may lead to it or accompany it. Are we really governed by this single motivating factor or might there be other things like duty, love, and compassion that move us to act? I think that one has to admit the obvious charm and benefits of reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut principle or common currency that apparently does away with conflict (as well as tragedy)-but one does so at significant detriment to our perception of ourselves. This one-dimensional, hollow man is travesty of all the best that we can imagine and even though the mind loves being absorbed by one thing it also needs to know the world in depth . A concept may lead to easier calculations or it may allow things to be more readily objectified in monetary terms, but that does not in-itself mean that it offers a surer method of evaluation.
It seems quite strange to make an argument for happiness from nature or evolution(as if our natures are such that we seek happiness because of its survival value) when others have thought of our natural purpose in quite different terms: namely, the good life that depends on the virtues or the perfection of the soul: indeed, happiness is only one such notion of the common good and to say, therefore, that we must start from man's nature "as it is" means starting with the assumption-and it is only an assumption-that the bourgeois, non-metaphysical individual is the best model we have and that he represents the true version of human nature. That this is a self-evident truth is surely contestable, to say the least. Can we now envisage a politics that stands outside the web of life, can we move back from the language of the markets to the language of justice, virtue, and does that depend on possessing a transcendental perspective?
Even within the utilitarian framework there are still some awkward questions: what about entrenched preferences (a happy slave or an extremely poor person may convince himself that he is happy with the help of religious consolations and notions of kismet and how many desperate housewives are there that adapt to a life of low expectations?) And what about the happiness that results from the fulfilment of frivolous desires (incidentally, weren’t such vain desires and the concern for status the motor of economic growth according to Adam Smith?) With regards the latter set of issues, it might be argued that we should distinguish between temporary and permanent happiness but most economists would suggest that temporary happiness, a quick fix, is merely a case of informational problems (in the sense that we do not realise that that happiness turns sour in the long run) or an irrational pursuit, the failure of the rational calculator to see and latch on to a happiness that doesn't fade. But does the recognition of this imply a move to human nature, not “as it is” but as it should be, an ideal self? If so, then happiness, on its own, is an inadequate guiding principle.
The problem is that we want a moral principle that can deal with such questions but that at the same time is sensitive to the charge of paternalism (who, for example, has the authority to oppose our democratic choices or, in another expression of this, what the market determines; indeed, why not ditch the classics or education altogether if in doing so one makes the greatest number happy?) The over-arching idea of happiness is really just a problematic version of universalism: as if to say that the existence of other values, other ‘forms of life,’ only indicate a deficiency with respect to the new (and universal) standard of happiness. Those in the developing countries must, according to this logic, be first made aware of how unhappy they are before they can enjoy the right to pursue a life of happiness.
There are equally troubling questions with the approach: its neglect of freedom. For example, would an educated person who'chooses' not to read have the same level of happiness as a person who is illiterate? Many would think that the former, with its greater range of opportunities, offers a better way of living. So, we either accept freedom as another source of value or we reduce it to a means to our utilitarian end. Of course, we are warned of the dangers of thinking of everything simply in terms of as a means to an end but if this is so the question remains: why then persist with happiness as the only end to which evolution moves? Might not freedom be explained in this way as well, so that nature evolves along degrees of freedom?
On what grounds, for example, should society prevent a change or, say, a fair process of exchange that leads to a small minority becoming significantly better off at the expense of a lot of people becoming only slightly worse off or, in a variant of this, on what basis would society rule out an increase in utility of large sections of society at the expense of seeing a few members having their fundamental rights infringed upon or their utility dropping to extremely low levels? If on a theory of rights are we, then, to move away from the utilitarian framework? To put it more starkly: can we invoke a moral theory that doesn't talk about intentions or sacrifice or restraint or any actions that go beyond our own happiness. One can only talk about these things tautologically: we accept limitations because we choose to do so, because doing so makes us happier. It is the point at which explanation can go no further.
The central problem with this analysis is that it just doesn't take on board the whole gamut of human motivations and ends (this being, of course, the familiar complaint that homo economicus is a very 'thin'concept) ; for example, religion, civic virtues or the pursuit of knowledge are not simply or exclusively about enhancing one's happiness or forwarding our self-interest. Perhaps the pessimistic Romantics would have had a thing or two to say about happiness and its embodiment of a 'sun-and-wheat-consciousness' (Lawrence) and wouldn’t the Freudians say that this constant search for perfect happiness is a form of neurosis? Deep down we have the sneaking suspicion that a life singularly devoted to happiness is a shallow and trivial one.
But is it perfection, bliss, stillness that we really seek? Would we be happy by having attained our heart's desire? There is the bonum honestum, accompanied by an interior joy, and the bonum delectabile, which is a pleasure that becomes an end in itself. Happiness, in this sense, is a shadow of desire for the garden, a utopian longing for the end of longing, the desire for a land of plenty where we are not defined by what we lack.
If we accept that there are certain things that are of intrinsic importance-and this is a concept that economics has banished a long time ago-then we are already well on the way of thinking about human motivations and ends in a more pluralistic (and more complicated) way. This would be a radical departure for economics because for centuries we’ve been brought up with the idea that something is valued because it is desired, that desires can make pushpin as good as poetry (Bentham), and that our subjective experiences are not to be snuffed at. Is the content, soothed animal the best picture, the truest depiction, we have of ourselves?
In the end, might it not be the case that our fixation with the idea of man as a 'constantly moving happiness machine' has in part-and quite tragically-led us to being so unhappy? Coming on the back of a century devoted to the happiness of the self, the American dream, the American pastoral, perhaps we could do worse than turn to Philip Roth for his descriptions of how perfect, happy lives unravel. We are left wondering how much loneliness, depression and indifference lies behind the shiny surfaces of the happy life. And the disturbing possibility that, as one of Roth’s characters says, “it was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self…”
Perhaps there is more.
" Psychoanalytically, any form of life will tend to generate a fantasy of what it is to get outside that life". In that sense, true happiness is achieved by not achieving it, by being a happy pessimist. "Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days". Capitalism and consumerism would never have such a hold on us unless it held up the possibility of endless expansion, of unlimitedness itself (Marx would say that the growth of productive forces allows for a breaking out of the ghetto, the limited but narrow perfection of the ancients for the unlimited, multi-faceted, alienated individual); insofar as we are modern we must reject the Greeks and the closed medieval world; infinity can no longer be located along a vertical axis, as it were.
And so, the best thing about being human is that have the ability not to be human, to step outside te natural necessities from which the animals derive satisfaction, happiness. This is what Hannah called the unnatural growth of the natural. Ours is a troubled happiness, something that we want to and do not want to name, to find and to lose. "Only mortals pursue ends that come to an end, we dream of a deathless activity."
Modern happiness is, therefore, a discourse on how to escape the ordinary, finitude. It is not an attempt, contrary to first appearances, to weigh ourselves down with so many goods and trinkets but, rather, a desire for lightness. But there is a lightness that comes from profundity, and a lightness of being that is unbearable. By detaching our pleasures from 'the good' , from the world, we have thought that we could be free to find our own infinites. The moderns, in their inwardness, are the true ascetics! One only needs to reflect on how many of our freedoms have turned to obsessions, compulsive behaviours, to realise that maybe, just maybe, we are not as sure as to whether we really know what happiness is any more.
(citations from J. Lear and Goethe)
Sunday, December 04, 2005
Suburban Blues
I only have to look up and the world 'is'.
I look up and I am.
-----from Wings of Desire
I have only to formulate a 'clear and distinct' idea of something and it is; this is the immanence of the world, there are no gaps between thought and world and, therefore, between time and space. Everything is a sign of something else and nothing I say has not been thought before. The world is a moment and a series of events.
Suburbia is the perfectly enclosed world that was once a dream. Like a multi-faceted crystal it is always one with itself. All the lives that are lived there are interchangeable..there are only a number of basic storylines which a mysterious card shifter shuffles with. It is a world of finite possibilities that are played out again and again, ad nauseam, a home in which one can finally lose oneself, submerge oneself into indistinctness and live a life entirely on the surface: home is where the heart is, but where is the heart?
We thought of a heaven of equality and have arrived there. Through infinite repetition and sameness we have canceled out chance, sheltered ourselves from the horror of contingency. Matisse painted the same picture fifteen times, searching for some subtle gradation of meaning, and a ritual is repeated for a thousand years-is there any difference?; the warm glow of the crowd, creature comforts, the ceremonial animal re-affirms that he lives in the same endless circles as the rest of nature. Except that we are condemned to be aware of this fact, to have imagined otherwise. But even then, we remain unconvinced that this might not just be another case of deja vu.
The sudden blotting out of a life can be imagined, pictured..war would be unthinkable if this were not true. But whereas the meaning of the void can be a subject of 'art', the quiet desperation that is the lack of meaning cannot; the slow fading away into insignificance, the running down of a life, the closing of the doors of potentiality and possibilities can only be conceived of as a happy, bourgeois suburban life.
The prisoners of chance
have built their home
In a field below the wood
And are at peace
Somewhere there is an afterlife
of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfillment.
But to "look up" at the world is not to think it in a geometric spirit; to see the world is to be distanced from it, at the very same time as one feels its presence, as on the very first day; to see is the very affirmation of our freedom to imagine a past and an open future, to be aware of transcendence and immanence. "To look" is neither an action nor a timeless thought. And reality is neither objectively given nor a world created by subjective desires.
One must sing with Goethe:
Now one may hear it still
even from afar
Words reach their goal
though sound and music fade
Is it still not the tent of scattered stars
the light transfigured world,
that love has made?
I look up and I am.
-----from Wings of Desire
I have only to formulate a 'clear and distinct' idea of something and it is; this is the immanence of the world, there are no gaps between thought and world and, therefore, between time and space. Everything is a sign of something else and nothing I say has not been thought before. The world is a moment and a series of events.
Suburbia is the perfectly enclosed world that was once a dream. Like a multi-faceted crystal it is always one with itself. All the lives that are lived there are interchangeable..there are only a number of basic storylines which a mysterious card shifter shuffles with. It is a world of finite possibilities that are played out again and again, ad nauseam, a home in which one can finally lose oneself, submerge oneself into indistinctness and live a life entirely on the surface: home is where the heart is, but where is the heart?
We thought of a heaven of equality and have arrived there. Through infinite repetition and sameness we have canceled out chance, sheltered ourselves from the horror of contingency. Matisse painted the same picture fifteen times, searching for some subtle gradation of meaning, and a ritual is repeated for a thousand years-is there any difference?; the warm glow of the crowd, creature comforts, the ceremonial animal re-affirms that he lives in the same endless circles as the rest of nature. Except that we are condemned to be aware of this fact, to have imagined otherwise. But even then, we remain unconvinced that this might not just be another case of deja vu.
The sudden blotting out of a life can be imagined, pictured..war would be unthinkable if this were not true. But whereas the meaning of the void can be a subject of 'art', the quiet desperation that is the lack of meaning cannot; the slow fading away into insignificance, the running down of a life, the closing of the doors of potentiality and possibilities can only be conceived of as a happy, bourgeois suburban life.
The prisoners of chance
have built their home
In a field below the wood
And are at peace
Somewhere there is an afterlife
of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing
Somewhere in the heaven
Of lost futures
The lives we might have led
Have found their own fulfillment.
But to "look up" at the world is not to think it in a geometric spirit; to see the world is to be distanced from it, at the very same time as one feels its presence, as on the very first day; to see is the very affirmation of our freedom to imagine a past and an open future, to be aware of transcendence and immanence. "To look" is neither an action nor a timeless thought. And reality is neither objectively given nor a world created by subjective desires.
One must sing with Goethe:
Now one may hear it still
even from afar
Words reach their goal
though sound and music fade
Is it still not the tent of scattered stars
the light transfigured world,
that love has made?
(quotes from the East-West Diwan and Derek Mahon)
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Winter Sun
Listening to the cricket on the radio. One can hear the call to prayers in the background and picture the lengthening shadows on the field, the slow dullness of the day in a semi-urban town, the sun fading all the time and the people clasp their hands, wondering if they will be remembered, or if they too are destined to fade, like Icarus.
Anyone who knows Lahore in winter will recognize this:
December brown set in about three...These were the shortest days. The afternoon light no sooner came in than it was on its way out. It was cold, too. Brittle scales began to show on the street puddles, a crystalline bitterness setting in. Where the light withdrew, the yellow-brown of the stucco was pocked with mild blue. On the open porches over the way-bottles, wet rags hung out to dry frozen at the points, and vine twigs. The glory of the day carried things easily when the sun shone; but when the sun passed, things seemed abandoned, they became dissociated, and you had to find a way to take them up yourself."
----Dean's December, Saul Bellow
Anyone who knows Lahore in winter will recognize this:
December brown set in about three...These were the shortest days. The afternoon light no sooner came in than it was on its way out. It was cold, too. Brittle scales began to show on the street puddles, a crystalline bitterness setting in. Where the light withdrew, the yellow-brown of the stucco was pocked with mild blue. On the open porches over the way-bottles, wet rags hung out to dry frozen at the points, and vine twigs. The glory of the day carried things easily when the sun shone; but when the sun passed, things seemed abandoned, they became dissociated, and you had to find a way to take them up yourself."
----Dean's December, Saul Bellow
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Sea, the Sea
But he (Melville, M] was over the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships. There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human:the human of the living humus. About the real blue-eyed person there is something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice , air , space, but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are people of the old world: 'Allzu menschlich'. Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract...like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. He cannot belong to humanity. Cannot
The great Northern cycle of which he is the returning unit has almost completed its round. The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again, home into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the elements. And all the vast sun-and-wheat-consciousness of his day he plunges back into the deeps, burying the flame in the deep, self-conscious and deliberate. A blue flax and sea-poppies fall into the waters and give back their created sun-stuff to the dissolution of the flood.
So they go down to the sea, the sea-born people. The Vikings are wandering again. Homes are broken up. Cross the seas, cross the seas, urges the heart. Leave love and home. Leave love and home. Love and home are deadly illusion...the crucifixion into humanity is over. Let us go back to the fierce, uncanny elements, corrosive vast sea. Or Fire.
M was a northener, sea-born..we are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.
There is something wild about a soul that has grown in the shadows of a forest, forever enchanted by mystery and wonder and phantasmogorical beings. The modern temper will avoid this question:we must fashion ourselves, write our own scripts on the blank slate; to believe that our identity is constituted from elements, from a time and space that lie outside our jurisdiction haunts us as some sort of primitive remnant of a mystical correspondence, the horror of determinsim: Freud's unheimlich. To extricate ourselves from the web of meaning, medieval symbolism where one thing stands for another, and see pure extension, a landscape shorn of memory. To rid ourselves of the music which is at once harmony and an inexpressible silence; a particular note that resonates with our innermost apprehension, that evokes a flood of memories or sounds us out, makes us feel blue. Once we were amphibious, half-fallen angels, now only transgression and metamorphosis offers a way out of a land-locked reality.
But that troubling intuition has stayed with us no matter how hard we try to remember to forget it, and sometimes with disastrous consequences: blood and soil. The huge expanses of the Russian landscape, the vast tracts of sea, both deserts of a kind, have these played no role in forming consciousness? Is there a particular style of soul that is mirrored by a type of space, the contours of one mapping out the other? Not just a figure of speech, an inherited sense of humour, the drawl of a consonant that passes from one generation to another, but the very quickening of being, the piercing gaze of the stranger, the very conception of power itself, they exist in wyrd and disparate universes, each of whose internal logic is shaped by a unique geography, a metaphysics of space.
A people without surplus will have a different idea of power and co-ercion and political organization. Of property. Tribal egalitarianism that parcels out what is sparse versus feudal hierarchy. And work: is the Protestant ethic, competitiveness, the forging of national identity, and violence a dim reflection of a lack of space, an intensity of life that turns in ever more rapid circles, a mind that needs to spiral out of its circumference of understanding? Not an eel that plummets the immense, murky depths, a "nun of water", patient, alone, at the "bottom of the nothing pool", existing like the "empty spiral of stars", but a whale who with a chaste heart and a great upward surge, desires nothing but the shattering of his prison and who dreams of open skies, emerging on the other side of the mirror that has weighed him down in his own image. Like us, his true other places do not exist in maps or charts but are the whale-lines that are analogous to the Aboriginal dream songs.
And religion? There is a desert theology that delights in wandering, in not finding 'home'; whose pleasure is in elliptical phrases and the ritual breaking-up of fixed patterns of thought, an imageless, restless void in which idols appear scattered in a broken circle. Nomadic 'thought' is
music and poetry; it is understanding without possession. The Protestant search for the truth or the Catholic possession of it. The theoretical cathedrals, the classical, bounded world of perfection for whom the sea and infinity are irrationality, madness, is something that must be institutionalized, bottled up. A people that lives in Space, Guenon would say, compensates itself with an art that is fundamentally related to time; the city, which lives in time, 'stabilizes' itself with painting, architecture, monumentality, space. The more fleeting life becomes, the lighter it becomes, the greater the need to weigh it down, to tame chance and nature.
In all this there are hidden ancestries, ancient lineages and borrowings: each one is also multiple, heterogeneous.
There is an affinity between the mountain-soul, the Romantic with his 'yearning that makes the heart grow deeper' and the wandering , semitic, restless bard and nomad. Even as the unexplored world shrinks the desert places within, the great terra incognita, grows. The wilderness, the unformed, fires the northern imagination; his religion despairs at the frozen music that is the world, so he must burn: a baptism of fire. (The curious similarities between early (Celtic) Christian art and aniconic Islam).
The world isn't what it seems. The Pacific Ocean holds the dream of immemorial centuries. It is the great blue vast twighlight of the vastest of all evenings:perhaps of the most wonderful of all dawns.
To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another.
For the northern spirit everything is a great play of forms, a dance. Never trust a god that doesn't dance. The rapid change of seasons, the drama of constantly having to re-invent oneself, politics as theatre (Aristotle)..the world is a stage (in both senses of the word), to live the truth ; in this lies the secret creativity of the west, the pact to immerse oneself in time. "Man is nothing, time is everything" said the alchemist Marx.
The northern soul accepts a life without solace; the cold hard gaze is that of the merchant, the adventurer who sets out to discover the world and its strangeness and one that learns how to calculate. The hypertrophy of the mind: rationality, dialectics, are the new and endless games that can from now on occupy his mind. Like the woodsman who is the European future, the merchants of light are detached from all place, locality, and solidarity. The modern zeitgeist is not worldliness but inwardness.
The human heart gets into a frenzy at last, in its desire to dehumanise itself.
To sink to the level of the beast, pure animality...a bundle of sensations,to feel alive (to feel the beauty of the stars and not just see them: Coleridge). Only by seeking out what is radically other can we see ourselves. But also to be distant from the world, the inanimate, is to assert one's freedom from nature's cyclomania. But this longing for a lost innocence, the golden age and arcadia are recognized as a disease of late civilisation. It is thanatos. The noble savage, primitive masks, dissonance, unpredictability, spontaneity, whirl past in the show. Consumed or stored like some great exotic ware from strange lands. Knowledge and books are but things amongst things and therefore fragile, brittle. Behind the veneer of civilisation lurks the process that will devour all. And unable to imagine goodness we will this; our will, not our intelligence, is the emblem of the spark in this gnostic universe. The lure of the abyss beckons. Modern man wants to outstare nothingness, to laugh at his own absurdity.
"Only the Englishman seeks happiness". A philosophy that seeks its own destruction, a hunger for a good that can never yield satisfaction, rest: that is what is aimed for. It is the gold-lust of the barbarian or, the absolute inverse -at a different level- of the desire for 70,000 veils, the endless affirmations and negations of the waves as they strike the shore, the quest for infinite space, to be rid, once and for all, of mirrors. But even an image, infinitely distant from its object, shares some likeness. One is an overflowing of being, the other a desperate craving for being.
But finding Home and Mother he must escape; but on escaping he must sigh for Paradise. He was born for purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.
Indecision is the order of the day and we stand marked, perhaps, by the fatality of being unable to escape from oneself. We searched for vast open spaces, to lose and find ourselves, for unknown tracts in the other. The centre doesn't hold, seek radiality was the call. All truth is on the boundaries. But now: melancholic and riddled with doubt. Heisenberg: the great fear is that in man's explorations he will encounter only his own mind. Nature has been humanized and the centre has become the periphery. There is only life at the edge.
It is not the sea that is chaos, flux, vagueness, uncreate; the earth itself is but a flicker in the eye of eternity. The mountains are melting , everything is perishing..it always has, it always will. The mentality of the sea-farers has conquered us all. Nothing remains. We stand exposed, flat, like a vast landscape under the eye of the sun. Only in death will a few stones be able to slip back into the blue sea, unknown, as the Psalm says.
"Everything you know is put in suspension. To be exposed to the sea-world is to experience something else, something unexpected, something not quite sure.The coast is an enlarging of everything we are: what we know to be true, what we actually feel on the skin. It is a place where you leave mud, hedges, grass, and stability behind. It can be both liberating and disturbing...the sea is a form of strangenessfor which we have a deep affection. It is the realm of possibility...It is possible, I think, to trace quite a lot of our national identity to this strange, liberating sea-edge to our lives..because there is some race memory in us of leaving and coming here by sea in the first place...there is a sense, which there could not be in a country locked into the long, continuous stretches of a contintental plain, that we cannot be quite sure of how things are: always to hand are other ways of being....Perhaps it is because there is so much here that is strange to us that we have, as a nation, nurtured over many years a profoundly liberal, careful, and untheoretical frame of mind. Because of the sea, because of that mysterious margin, we are not quite sure of who we are or how things should be. The sea creates a need for contingency, for an elasticity in the way we think, and the way we arrange our affairs. Is there a sea-conscioussness in the deep English traditions of toleration and liberty? You could make a case that the habit of religious freedom, of political diversity, of an inventive and even a dreamy imaginative life, of a non-systematic constitution
habitually done are all thought patterns of a people who live on an island.
Three qualities of Englishness:The first reflects the open-mindedness , the friendly aspect of who we are: conversation, clubbability; hospitality;curiosity; familiarity; informality and liberty. In these attributes you can find the unclosed parts of our character, an availability to experience and the validity of other realities. It is an acceptance of an open , rugged edge to an island life. Second comes the opposite, a closed response to that openness , the British withdrawl from newness and strangeness, our shared and solemn understanding that the sea is a threat and that the shore itself is a place in decay: melancholy; separateness;domesticity, taciturnity; domesticity; reserve; xenophobia;exclusiveness; eccentricity and silence. Those are the qualities in which we pull back from the world, that understand that things are not fixed, that draw on the long tradition of sea melancholy, that grasp 'that stateof barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation emerged' (Auden)...this is the sea of the great Anglo-Saxon sea poems where, as the sea-farer laments,
'all I ever heard along the ice way
was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty
whooper and curlew calls and ..gull
We love that too: the beauty of the surf's 'long withdrawing roar'(Arnold), the sublime sadness of the sea, the sea of Shakespeare's 'like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end'..the fire-red sky and sea in Turner's paintings surely conscious in its echo of the end of a Viking warship, burning at sea, as a memorial to the men who lived and fought in her...not merely the open, liberal alertness to what the sea can give you, nor the eternal note of sadness but a stage beyond that, a sort of purposeful physicality; gravity; order; practicality; candour; decency; fair play;and propriety...strikingly, they might all be seen as necessary qualities of survival at sea, the constituents of good seamanship...the foundationson which a coherent life at sea must rest.
The pattern of sea-significance carries on to more recent pre-history. The great megalith culture had no equivalent in the heartland of Europe..the response to the power and drama of a coastal landscape...they seem to reflect in their architecture the natural architecture of cliff and cave.Stonehenge, whose blue stones were brought by sea from the sea-surveying mountains of the Preslis in west Wales, may itself be a form of ritual re-creation of a place thick with sea power deep in the agricultural heartland of southern England. Only the inhabitants of these islands needed, at their great power centres, thier artificial cliffs and their ritual shores.
(Quotations from D.H.Lawrence and Adam Nicolson)
The great Northern cycle of which he is the returning unit has almost completed its round. The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again, home into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the elements. And all the vast sun-and-wheat-consciousness of his day he plunges back into the deeps, burying the flame in the deep, self-conscious and deliberate. A blue flax and sea-poppies fall into the waters and give back their created sun-stuff to the dissolution of the flood.
So they go down to the sea, the sea-born people. The Vikings are wandering again. Homes are broken up. Cross the seas, cross the seas, urges the heart. Leave love and home. Leave love and home. Love and home are deadly illusion...the crucifixion into humanity is over. Let us go back to the fierce, uncanny elements, corrosive vast sea. Or Fire.
M was a northener, sea-born..we are most of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.
There is something wild about a soul that has grown in the shadows of a forest, forever enchanted by mystery and wonder and phantasmogorical beings. The modern temper will avoid this question:we must fashion ourselves, write our own scripts on the blank slate; to believe that our identity is constituted from elements, from a time and space that lie outside our jurisdiction haunts us as some sort of primitive remnant of a mystical correspondence, the horror of determinsim: Freud's unheimlich. To extricate ourselves from the web of meaning, medieval symbolism where one thing stands for another, and see pure extension, a landscape shorn of memory. To rid ourselves of the music which is at once harmony and an inexpressible silence; a particular note that resonates with our innermost apprehension, that evokes a flood of memories or sounds us out, makes us feel blue. Once we were amphibious, half-fallen angels, now only transgression and metamorphosis offers a way out of a land-locked reality.
But that troubling intuition has stayed with us no matter how hard we try to remember to forget it, and sometimes with disastrous consequences: blood and soil. The huge expanses of the Russian landscape, the vast tracts of sea, both deserts of a kind, have these played no role in forming consciousness? Is there a particular style of soul that is mirrored by a type of space, the contours of one mapping out the other? Not just a figure of speech, an inherited sense of humour, the drawl of a consonant that passes from one generation to another, but the very quickening of being, the piercing gaze of the stranger, the very conception of power itself, they exist in wyrd and disparate universes, each of whose internal logic is shaped by a unique geography, a metaphysics of space.
A people without surplus will have a different idea of power and co-ercion and political organization. Of property. Tribal egalitarianism that parcels out what is sparse versus feudal hierarchy. And work: is the Protestant ethic, competitiveness, the forging of national identity, and violence a dim reflection of a lack of space, an intensity of life that turns in ever more rapid circles, a mind that needs to spiral out of its circumference of understanding? Not an eel that plummets the immense, murky depths, a "nun of water", patient, alone, at the "bottom of the nothing pool", existing like the "empty spiral of stars", but a whale who with a chaste heart and a great upward surge, desires nothing but the shattering of his prison and who dreams of open skies, emerging on the other side of the mirror that has weighed him down in his own image. Like us, his true other places do not exist in maps or charts but are the whale-lines that are analogous to the Aboriginal dream songs.
And religion? There is a desert theology that delights in wandering, in not finding 'home'; whose pleasure is in elliptical phrases and the ritual breaking-up of fixed patterns of thought, an imageless, restless void in which idols appear scattered in a broken circle. Nomadic 'thought' is
music and poetry; it is understanding without possession. The Protestant search for the truth or the Catholic possession of it. The theoretical cathedrals, the classical, bounded world of perfection for whom the sea and infinity are irrationality, madness, is something that must be institutionalized, bottled up. A people that lives in Space, Guenon would say, compensates itself with an art that is fundamentally related to time; the city, which lives in time, 'stabilizes' itself with painting, architecture, monumentality, space. The more fleeting life becomes, the lighter it becomes, the greater the need to weigh it down, to tame chance and nature.
In all this there are hidden ancestries, ancient lineages and borrowings: each one is also multiple, heterogeneous.
There is an affinity between the mountain-soul, the Romantic with his 'yearning that makes the heart grow deeper' and the wandering , semitic, restless bard and nomad. Even as the unexplored world shrinks the desert places within, the great terra incognita, grows. The wilderness, the unformed, fires the northern imagination; his religion despairs at the frozen music that is the world, so he must burn: a baptism of fire. (The curious similarities between early (Celtic) Christian art and aniconic Islam).
The world isn't what it seems. The Pacific Ocean holds the dream of immemorial centuries. It is the great blue vast twighlight of the vastest of all evenings:perhaps of the most wonderful of all dawns.
To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another.
For the northern spirit everything is a great play of forms, a dance. Never trust a god that doesn't dance. The rapid change of seasons, the drama of constantly having to re-invent oneself, politics as theatre (Aristotle)..the world is a stage (in both senses of the word), to live the truth ; in this lies the secret creativity of the west, the pact to immerse oneself in time. "Man is nothing, time is everything" said the alchemist Marx.
The northern soul accepts a life without solace; the cold hard gaze is that of the merchant, the adventurer who sets out to discover the world and its strangeness and one that learns how to calculate. The hypertrophy of the mind: rationality, dialectics, are the new and endless games that can from now on occupy his mind. Like the woodsman who is the European future, the merchants of light are detached from all place, locality, and solidarity. The modern zeitgeist is not worldliness but inwardness.
The human heart gets into a frenzy at last, in its desire to dehumanise itself.
To sink to the level of the beast, pure animality...a bundle of sensations,to feel alive (to feel the beauty of the stars and not just see them: Coleridge). Only by seeking out what is radically other can we see ourselves. But also to be distant from the world, the inanimate, is to assert one's freedom from nature's cyclomania. But this longing for a lost innocence, the golden age and arcadia are recognized as a disease of late civilisation. It is thanatos. The noble savage, primitive masks, dissonance, unpredictability, spontaneity, whirl past in the show. Consumed or stored like some great exotic ware from strange lands. Knowledge and books are but things amongst things and therefore fragile, brittle. Behind the veneer of civilisation lurks the process that will devour all. And unable to imagine goodness we will this; our will, not our intelligence, is the emblem of the spark in this gnostic universe. The lure of the abyss beckons. Modern man wants to outstare nothingness, to laugh at his own absurdity.
"Only the Englishman seeks happiness". A philosophy that seeks its own destruction, a hunger for a good that can never yield satisfaction, rest: that is what is aimed for. It is the gold-lust of the barbarian or, the absolute inverse -at a different level- of the desire for 70,000 veils, the endless affirmations and negations of the waves as they strike the shore, the quest for infinite space, to be rid, once and for all, of mirrors. But even an image, infinitely distant from its object, shares some likeness. One is an overflowing of being, the other a desperate craving for being.
But finding Home and Mother he must escape; but on escaping he must sigh for Paradise. He was born for purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.
Indecision is the order of the day and we stand marked, perhaps, by the fatality of being unable to escape from oneself. We searched for vast open spaces, to lose and find ourselves, for unknown tracts in the other. The centre doesn't hold, seek radiality was the call. All truth is on the boundaries. But now: melancholic and riddled with doubt. Heisenberg: the great fear is that in man's explorations he will encounter only his own mind. Nature has been humanized and the centre has become the periphery. There is only life at the edge.
It is not the sea that is chaos, flux, vagueness, uncreate; the earth itself is but a flicker in the eye of eternity. The mountains are melting , everything is perishing..it always has, it always will. The mentality of the sea-farers has conquered us all. Nothing remains. We stand exposed, flat, like a vast landscape under the eye of the sun. Only in death will a few stones be able to slip back into the blue sea, unknown, as the Psalm says.
"Everything you know is put in suspension. To be exposed to the sea-world is to experience something else, something unexpected, something not quite sure.The coast is an enlarging of everything we are: what we know to be true, what we actually feel on the skin. It is a place where you leave mud, hedges, grass, and stability behind. It can be both liberating and disturbing...the sea is a form of strangenessfor which we have a deep affection. It is the realm of possibility...It is possible, I think, to trace quite a lot of our national identity to this strange, liberating sea-edge to our lives..because there is some race memory in us of leaving and coming here by sea in the first place...there is a sense, which there could not be in a country locked into the long, continuous stretches of a contintental plain, that we cannot be quite sure of how things are: always to hand are other ways of being....Perhaps it is because there is so much here that is strange to us that we have, as a nation, nurtured over many years a profoundly liberal, careful, and untheoretical frame of mind. Because of the sea, because of that mysterious margin, we are not quite sure of who we are or how things should be. The sea creates a need for contingency, for an elasticity in the way we think, and the way we arrange our affairs. Is there a sea-conscioussness in the deep English traditions of toleration and liberty? You could make a case that the habit of religious freedom, of political diversity, of an inventive and even a dreamy imaginative life, of a non-systematic constitution
habitually done are all thought patterns of a people who live on an island.
Three qualities of Englishness:The first reflects the open-mindedness , the friendly aspect of who we are: conversation, clubbability; hospitality;curiosity; familiarity; informality and liberty. In these attributes you can find the unclosed parts of our character, an availability to experience and the validity of other realities. It is an acceptance of an open , rugged edge to an island life. Second comes the opposite, a closed response to that openness , the British withdrawl from newness and strangeness, our shared and solemn understanding that the sea is a threat and that the shore itself is a place in decay: melancholy; separateness;domesticity, taciturnity; domesticity; reserve; xenophobia;exclusiveness; eccentricity and silence. Those are the qualities in which we pull back from the world, that understand that things are not fixed, that draw on the long tradition of sea melancholy, that grasp 'that stateof barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation emerged' (Auden)...this is the sea of the great Anglo-Saxon sea poems where, as the sea-farer laments,
'all I ever heard along the ice way
was sounding sea, the gannet's shanty
whooper and curlew calls and ..gull
We love that too: the beauty of the surf's 'long withdrawing roar'(Arnold), the sublime sadness of the sea, the sea of Shakespeare's 'like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end'..the fire-red sky and sea in Turner's paintings surely conscious in its echo of the end of a Viking warship, burning at sea, as a memorial to the men who lived and fought in her...not merely the open, liberal alertness to what the sea can give you, nor the eternal note of sadness but a stage beyond that, a sort of purposeful physicality; gravity; order; practicality; candour; decency; fair play;and propriety...strikingly, they might all be seen as necessary qualities of survival at sea, the constituents of good seamanship...the foundationson which a coherent life at sea must rest.
The pattern of sea-significance carries on to more recent pre-history. The great megalith culture had no equivalent in the heartland of Europe..the response to the power and drama of a coastal landscape...they seem to reflect in their architecture the natural architecture of cliff and cave.Stonehenge, whose blue stones were brought by sea from the sea-surveying mountains of the Preslis in west Wales, may itself be a form of ritual re-creation of a place thick with sea power deep in the agricultural heartland of southern England. Only the inhabitants of these islands needed, at their great power centres, thier artificial cliffs and their ritual shores.
(Quotations from D.H.Lawrence and Adam Nicolson)
I once called Jonah a gypsy and he misunderstood. But aye, that he is...
Sea Fever
John Masefield
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
-----Courtesy of Jones.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
The Descent of Man
Life in the snake house appears a squandering of forms without style and without plan, where all is possible, and animals and plants and rocks exchange scales, quills, concretions. But among the infinite possible combinations only some-perhaps actually the most incredible-become fixed, resist the flux that undoes them and mixes and reshapes; and immediately each of these forms becomes the centre of a world, separated for ever from the others..and in this finite number of ways of being, each identified in a monstrosity of its own, and necessity, and beauty of its own,lies order, the sole order recongnizable in the world...is theirs a boundless patience or a desperation without end?What are they waiting for, or what have they given up waiting for?In what time are they immersed?In that of the species..or in the slow cooling rays of the sun? The thought of a time outside our experience is intolerable...
----Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino
How to begin, who am I, what am I..the old questions. But origins and the centre do not interest us latecomers anymore; decay and displacement, the Fall and decadence hold us enraptured, spellbound. We want to tell a story that ends all stories.
Do I have to become a shaman to recover my original state, or has the mind strayed too far from nature, escaped her closedness, her cliches, to answer that? And in these times any search for noble origins runs the risk of faltering along the lines of Pascalian pessimism: he who who plays the angel, ends up playing the Beast.
The quiet desperation of not being known, not even a name with God. From where did that first spark of consciousness arise, from within Being itself?How did we break out of the circle?The trees hold all the truth: the goddess of nemos , that stand of trees that enclosed the first temple..the first parliament (thinking in the open), polar symbolism, do we under-stand that, do we rememeber that?Mnemosyne. But the cosmos was only a message from itself to itself. How can one talk of the "desire" to be known?
At first we were tree shrews. Our first two fears have stayed with us:the fear of falling and snakes. Birds: how they hate the snakes. Snakes and ladders is our first and only cosmic game. Birds and snakes haunt our first religious imaginings in Mexico, Hinduism, and the 'ancient battle'; even the bible preserves vestiges of the memory of this ancient mythology: the duplicitous serpent that leads to the Fall (but, also, "be ye as wise as serpents"). The first gods are sky gods.
Then we learnt to swing:"if you ain't got that swing,you ain't got a thing"..brachaition. The other apes didn't make it. Flexibility, readiness, is all even as we grew heavier and moved down the tree. Swing loosens up our being. But that was six million years ago. Still, a straightening torso, outstretched arms, and a clear space in front of our eyes:mind-eye-brain. From now on we could see the lover face-to-face. The world could be objectified, could become a concept. But as we moved down-for what?more food?-others moved back up, resisting, taking flight: cousin Gibbon. Flying through the treetops and even today grace and mastery still wow us. Flights of imagination. We look up at them and are reminded of the oldest dream of man: to escape earth, to become a bird,to grow wings, to be an angel: the trees map our history. Like the birds, who are all sight and sound (love at first sight) we learn of the spirit's animosity to the body. But singing. How they sing. The 'language of the birds' is our first speech. A language we still try to re-call. A medieval chant is nothing but an attempt to achieve weightlessness, even as we grow slower, brainier:the ambiguity of gravitas; the gothic arch, the stained glass windows,a re-drawing, a re-vision of how we once saw the earth. And what of man's best friend?He knows only how to smell, but even he has to be domesticated. We can tolerate the sight of death, but not its stench.
The gibbon moves in small groups of 3 or 4 in vast areas close, apolitical, non-violent with no social complications. An angel, a world of little desire(unlike the others: if you're rich (well-fed) you're promiscuous like the chimps, if you're hardup (like the desert baboons) then you have a harem and if you're desperate then you pair-bind (marry!)). The lack of surplus, the inability of power to radiate out from the centre to the periphery, means that there is no 'king'; every man is his own prophet and this is mirrored in the fiercely independent nomadic and mountain alternative. Property is power. 'Stateless' societies held together loosely by myth and ritual and always in the shadow of exit. The options seem to narrow: to become earth bound and go for bourgeois prosperity (more food) or look up to the aristocratic Gibbons. Dissent or descent. But in truth, nothing is really lost. Aborted selves continue to live on in us, haunting us, inspiring us. The human possibility, because of its centrality, contains all other possibilities at the horizontal level, as it were.
And then the savannah cleared and we took our first fateful step. Our hands were freed up:to symbolize, to hold and carry food, to pray...but also to hold weapons. Ibn Arabi could say that we were fashioned by God's two hands, which is why we bear the imprint of the temporal and the eternal. But from 6.5 to 2.5 million years the chimps (we?) were mainly gatherers, living by the lakes. Were we Eloi then? A marxist utopia, only occasionally hunting. But we were not natural predators and had no fixed pattern of doing so. So, why?The frenzy of the kill, to lose oneself by going 'beserk', our coat of the bears.Dionysus.The lure of madness is like no other, except , perhaps, the intoxication of music, the sea. We have nothing to say about sanity. Discontinuity, the nomadic breaking-up of stable patterns and routine still fascinates us now..art is a broken circle (Iris M); the sublime:incompleteness, music that doesn't come 'home'.
The Eloi have no conception of labour and, therefore, of time. Life is a day, a day that is repeated ad nauseam, without memory. There is no continuity and therefore no need for books. Is this the return to animality in the post-judgement days, a life where consumption and leisure are intertwined and indistiguishable from one another?
The reptiliean cortex of the brain that has instinctually diffusing mechanisms (play-fighting) gets confused since we now have the neocortex as well. Already,we're double minded. But to stay cool under pressure. Cold blooded. Keats: 'If'. Cool and composed. But why this turn to hunting then?The chimps are the cleverest and therefore easily get bored. Fort da: absence of mother is the womb of invention. To create and detroy forms. We throw of linearity, aiming for radiality or, rather, we preserve it for politcal order and what amounts to the same thing, classification and the law. Curiouser and curioser...and "idle hands...But we weren't pros, like the lion:that takes millions of years."
Different from our normal day-to-day routine, the strangeness of it(later, cultural man would call it a taboo to control it) but for now, rage, the unknown , infinity, is something that bewitches us. The Greeks sink a few mathematicians and build their rational cosmos and even now we enjoy the chase , enjoy the catching and are restless at the thought of keeping what we find. What explains this bloodlust?Chimps poke the dead body if they don't eat it. They hesitate, ponder, reflect. Are these the first intimations of mortality?Stillness in a world of constant change. Is the wonder that the world is flux the root of philosophy? The need to eternalise the moment, the poetic, a way of killing its hold on us, before it kills us? Perhaps the first philosophy starts with death (Rosenzweig:death is the point of all points).
But the neocortx grows and we learn to imagine: politics,play, hunting are our new forms of aggression, new styles of loving(grooming). Already we have the taste for blood, war becomes a ritual for cleansing : the rite of Spring (Stravinsky). War becomes an art, a way of renewing oneself through mutiliation. Why should the blood of another, sacrifice be a path to salvation?But what makes it so exciting is the fact that it was so unscripted, so different from our monotonous gathering and consuming- a way of tearing oneself away from oneself.
By stepping out of nature we de-monstrate the monstrosity and the beauty of the human condition, a range of being that is unsurpassed. But we can never forget that this too is part of the order of Being.
(passages and ideas lifted from Dudley Young's 'Origins of the Sacred')
----Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino
How to begin, who am I, what am I..the old questions. But origins and the centre do not interest us latecomers anymore; decay and displacement, the Fall and decadence hold us enraptured, spellbound. We want to tell a story that ends all stories.
Do I have to become a shaman to recover my original state, or has the mind strayed too far from nature, escaped her closedness, her cliches, to answer that? And in these times any search for noble origins runs the risk of faltering along the lines of Pascalian pessimism: he who who plays the angel, ends up playing the Beast.
The quiet desperation of not being known, not even a name with God. From where did that first spark of consciousness arise, from within Being itself?How did we break out of the circle?The trees hold all the truth: the goddess of nemos , that stand of trees that enclosed the first temple..the first parliament (thinking in the open), polar symbolism, do we under-stand that, do we rememeber that?Mnemosyne. But the cosmos was only a message from itself to itself. How can one talk of the "desire" to be known?
At first we were tree shrews. Our first two fears have stayed with us:the fear of falling and snakes. Birds: how they hate the snakes. Snakes and ladders is our first and only cosmic game. Birds and snakes haunt our first religious imaginings in Mexico, Hinduism, and the 'ancient battle'; even the bible preserves vestiges of the memory of this ancient mythology: the duplicitous serpent that leads to the Fall (but, also, "be ye as wise as serpents"). The first gods are sky gods.
Then we learnt to swing:"if you ain't got that swing,you ain't got a thing"..brachaition. The other apes didn't make it. Flexibility, readiness, is all even as we grew heavier and moved down the tree. Swing loosens up our being. But that was six million years ago. Still, a straightening torso, outstretched arms, and a clear space in front of our eyes:mind-eye-brain. From now on we could see the lover face-to-face. The world could be objectified, could become a concept. But as we moved down-for what?more food?-others moved back up, resisting, taking flight: cousin Gibbon. Flying through the treetops and even today grace and mastery still wow us. Flights of imagination. We look up at them and are reminded of the oldest dream of man: to escape earth, to become a bird,to grow wings, to be an angel: the trees map our history. Like the birds, who are all sight and sound (love at first sight) we learn of the spirit's animosity to the body. But singing. How they sing. The 'language of the birds' is our first speech. A language we still try to re-call. A medieval chant is nothing but an attempt to achieve weightlessness, even as we grow slower, brainier:the ambiguity of gravitas; the gothic arch, the stained glass windows,a re-drawing, a re-vision of how we once saw the earth. And what of man's best friend?He knows only how to smell, but even he has to be domesticated. We can tolerate the sight of death, but not its stench.
The gibbon moves in small groups of 3 or 4 in vast areas close, apolitical, non-violent with no social complications. An angel, a world of little desire(unlike the others: if you're rich (well-fed) you're promiscuous like the chimps, if you're hardup (like the desert baboons) then you have a harem and if you're desperate then you pair-bind (marry!)). The lack of surplus, the inability of power to radiate out from the centre to the periphery, means that there is no 'king'; every man is his own prophet and this is mirrored in the fiercely independent nomadic and mountain alternative. Property is power. 'Stateless' societies held together loosely by myth and ritual and always in the shadow of exit. The options seem to narrow: to become earth bound and go for bourgeois prosperity (more food) or look up to the aristocratic Gibbons. Dissent or descent. But in truth, nothing is really lost. Aborted selves continue to live on in us, haunting us, inspiring us. The human possibility, because of its centrality, contains all other possibilities at the horizontal level, as it were.
And then the savannah cleared and we took our first fateful step. Our hands were freed up:to symbolize, to hold and carry food, to pray...but also to hold weapons. Ibn Arabi could say that we were fashioned by God's two hands, which is why we bear the imprint of the temporal and the eternal. But from 6.5 to 2.5 million years the chimps (we?) were mainly gatherers, living by the lakes. Were we Eloi then? A marxist utopia, only occasionally hunting. But we were not natural predators and had no fixed pattern of doing so. So, why?The frenzy of the kill, to lose oneself by going 'beserk', our coat of the bears.Dionysus.The lure of madness is like no other, except , perhaps, the intoxication of music, the sea. We have nothing to say about sanity. Discontinuity, the nomadic breaking-up of stable patterns and routine still fascinates us now..art is a broken circle (Iris M); the sublime:incompleteness, music that doesn't come 'home'.
The Eloi have no conception of labour and, therefore, of time. Life is a day, a day that is repeated ad nauseam, without memory. There is no continuity and therefore no need for books. Is this the return to animality in the post-judgement days, a life where consumption and leisure are intertwined and indistiguishable from one another?
The reptiliean cortex of the brain that has instinctually diffusing mechanisms (play-fighting) gets confused since we now have the neocortex as well. Already,we're double minded. But to stay cool under pressure. Cold blooded. Keats: 'If'. Cool and composed. But why this turn to hunting then?The chimps are the cleverest and therefore easily get bored. Fort da: absence of mother is the womb of invention. To create and detroy forms. We throw of linearity, aiming for radiality or, rather, we preserve it for politcal order and what amounts to the same thing, classification and the law. Curiouser and curioser...and "idle hands...But we weren't pros, like the lion:that takes millions of years."
Different from our normal day-to-day routine, the strangeness of it(later, cultural man would call it a taboo to control it) but for now, rage, the unknown , infinity, is something that bewitches us. The Greeks sink a few mathematicians and build their rational cosmos and even now we enjoy the chase , enjoy the catching and are restless at the thought of keeping what we find. What explains this bloodlust?Chimps poke the dead body if they don't eat it. They hesitate, ponder, reflect. Are these the first intimations of mortality?Stillness in a world of constant change. Is the wonder that the world is flux the root of philosophy? The need to eternalise the moment, the poetic, a way of killing its hold on us, before it kills us? Perhaps the first philosophy starts with death (Rosenzweig:death is the point of all points).
But the neocortx grows and we learn to imagine: politics,play, hunting are our new forms of aggression, new styles of loving(grooming). Already we have the taste for blood, war becomes a ritual for cleansing : the rite of Spring (Stravinsky). War becomes an art, a way of renewing oneself through mutiliation. Why should the blood of another, sacrifice be a path to salvation?But what makes it so exciting is the fact that it was so unscripted, so different from our monotonous gathering and consuming- a way of tearing oneself away from oneself.
By stepping out of nature we de-monstrate the monstrosity and the beauty of the human condition, a range of being that is unsurpassed. But we can never forget that this too is part of the order of Being.
(passages and ideas lifted from Dudley Young's 'Origins of the Sacred')
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Glastonbury Avenue
One wonders how the central themes of their existence are resolved in such elegant forms, destined to repeat the same pattern, following the lines of some ancient lineage through some dark inner compulsion. No matter how far each diverged from this original plan nothing could be grafted on to this ancient stock of possibilities."------Saul Bellow, The Dean's Decmber
Our Holy Grail: the search to identify, to define oneself, to delimit a destiny, takes place when one is already lost. It is to close the door on certain possibilities of being. Do we choose what we are or do we only try to understand the range of possibilities, keep them open?Is our lack of free choice, our finitude, such a mis-fortune and why is the singualr road such a bitter-sweet one? (Bi-location:the ability to be in two places at once) .
Merlin, my namesake, is a liminal, ambiguous figure. Someone between the stable, illuminated and familiar world of the court and its rituals, the world of the king and ceremony, and the world of nature, the wilderness and contemplation. A trickster, a stranger, who cannot decide between the city and the desert, between love and the mind.
The poet could say:
"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."
I sit here, at five in the morning, still with stars in my head, the last dreams in the fingertips. Outside, the tangled thoughts of the tree, the curled-up being of the snail quietly unfolding itself, the slow falling back of the shadows into hiding, the world "thirsty for wine's deep mysteries". A black bird of no particular description stomps himself to wakefulness and I throw off the last coat of the night's intoxication.
In the morning I pass the squirels, the Kashmiris of the animal world, with their timorous souls, their tree-ascent but the aspiration to become an angel, to escape the world of choice. I see a workman, diligently gathering then sweeping sand from one pile to another;inconsequential one would have thought, until one notices the utter self-absorption on his brow, the deep intelligence that comes from knowing one's place in the world, the steadfastness of his hands, the assuredness of his movements. As if here was someone, in the diamond of the day,who was conscious of the fact that each act means something in the scheme of things, the totality of events and the showings and evasions, the meanderings and tarrying and the flashes of direct revelations that go up to make the world. There is no grace in the movements, no formal eloquence, just a thousand years of English pragmatism concentrated in those square shoulders. All extravagance, all flamboyance has been whittled away by the repetition of the essential.
On the way back, after the deluge, the sun's last rays linger on amidst the lengtheneing, deepening shadows, like some unwanted guest whose time has come. The train cuts through a forest about to enter a dream and the dazzling,fluttering leaves sparkle despite the evening chill, like so many emerald gems that vibrate with the sun's gold. The day's final glint of understanding hangs on them precariously,like dew drops. The earth is expectant.
And then I make my way home, my brisk walk disturbingthe courtship of two pigeons. In itself of no significance, but in a previous age that could have resulted in the unborn pigeon not carrying a message to the northern king,averting the massacre of the innocents, the birth of so many Mozarts. But then, as it is now, each step is still fateful, over- brimming and fraught with consequences that span out,forming numerous causal chains in a far-flung net that catches the most unlikely of collaborators . Had my indecisive feet stepped but the other way the universe would have been remarkably different...perhaps.Infinite futures canceled out at Glastonbury Avenue. One pile of sand grows, and not the other....
Our Holy Grail: the search to identify, to define oneself, to delimit a destiny, takes place when one is already lost. It is to close the door on certain possibilities of being. Do we choose what we are or do we only try to understand the range of possibilities, keep them open?Is our lack of free choice, our finitude, such a mis-fortune and why is the singualr road such a bitter-sweet one? (Bi-location:the ability to be in two places at once) .
Merlin, my namesake, is a liminal, ambiguous figure. Someone between the stable, illuminated and familiar world of the court and its rituals, the world of the king and ceremony, and the world of nature, the wilderness and contemplation. A trickster, a stranger, who cannot decide between the city and the desert, between love and the mind.
The poet could say:
"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."
I sit here, at five in the morning, still with stars in my head, the last dreams in the fingertips. Outside, the tangled thoughts of the tree, the curled-up being of the snail quietly unfolding itself, the slow falling back of the shadows into hiding, the world "thirsty for wine's deep mysteries". A black bird of no particular description stomps himself to wakefulness and I throw off the last coat of the night's intoxication.
In the morning I pass the squirels, the Kashmiris of the animal world, with their timorous souls, their tree-ascent but the aspiration to become an angel, to escape the world of choice. I see a workman, diligently gathering then sweeping sand from one pile to another;inconsequential one would have thought, until one notices the utter self-absorption on his brow, the deep intelligence that comes from knowing one's place in the world, the steadfastness of his hands, the assuredness of his movements. As if here was someone, in the diamond of the day,who was conscious of the fact that each act means something in the scheme of things, the totality of events and the showings and evasions, the meanderings and tarrying and the flashes of direct revelations that go up to make the world. There is no grace in the movements, no formal eloquence, just a thousand years of English pragmatism concentrated in those square shoulders. All extravagance, all flamboyance has been whittled away by the repetition of the essential.
On the way back, after the deluge, the sun's last rays linger on amidst the lengtheneing, deepening shadows, like some unwanted guest whose time has come. The train cuts through a forest about to enter a dream and the dazzling,fluttering leaves sparkle despite the evening chill, like so many emerald gems that vibrate with the sun's gold. The day's final glint of understanding hangs on them precariously,like dew drops. The earth is expectant.
And then I make my way home, my brisk walk disturbingthe courtship of two pigeons. In itself of no significance, but in a previous age that could have resulted in the unborn pigeon not carrying a message to the northern king,averting the massacre of the innocents, the birth of so many Mozarts. But then, as it is now, each step is still fateful, over- brimming and fraught with consequences that span out,forming numerous causal chains in a far-flung net that catches the most unlikely of collaborators . Had my indecisive feet stepped but the other way the universe would have been remarkably different...perhaps.Infinite futures canceled out at Glastonbury Avenue. One pile of sand grows, and not the other....
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