fictions

Fictions are often a  good thing. Liberal democracy is based on the "fiction" that everyone is equal at some fundamental level, or at least we should treat eachother "as if" this were the case. Whether we are equal or not "in reality" is hardly the point.

'Men who were naturally sociable would not need to contract together in order to form society, and would not rationalize society in contractarian terms...Contract as the foundation of all society is required only by men who are not inherently sociable'

Also, our 'natural' inclination to "truck and barter" (truck means trick, btw) leads to the formation of society/the public order. But hang on, is there actually any record of barter or is this another one of the economists' theoretical constructs...the 'as if' world?

To think of relations as a contract has its obvious advantages: a certain distancing from the self, and a greater potential for inter-actions; but, on the other hand, the claims to universality that it makes often go side by side with a depersonalization or 'disembedding' of relations. What, exactly, is meant by 'I-We'?  

the oasis

Lawyers are a strange breed. But then again, so are academics. In fact, everyone not like you is simply weird or messed up in the head.

One step forward, a thousand steps back; read one article or book and realize you have so many more to read (you blame the kuffar technology for this). Of course, it's all a strategy to avoid reality or doing any real work (like collecting one's thoughts and actually putting them down into a coherent form instead of this spluttering nonsense).

So, busy yourself in a bit of gossip: a faculty member was off campus and contacted (via one of his student spies on campus). He was told that two students were at it in the bushes. So, Saturday night, he drives for one hour back to campus, because he feels he has to uphold the "core values" of the university. He searches for them with a torch and stops a couple that just happened to be walking hand in hand around that area. As it turns out, they were the wrong couple. As usual, this descends into an 'us and them' type of shoddy discussion: the self-styled religious vs the self-styled liberals.  And you thought university would be a refuge from the crazies!

~~~

A few lines from 'The Poverty of Clio':

'Changes in the form of religion take place as rational decisions determined by comparisons of benefits and costs...In societies that allow plural religions to compete with each other, religious entrepreneurs adjust product characteristics to match different sets of demands and, in the process, sometimes create alternative forms of religion.'

You have to wonder at the sheer stupidity of some academics (one hesitates to use the word 'intellectuals' in the same sentence).

You send the book to your colleagues. Of course, it's naive of you to expect it to generate any discussion. A book?! What's that, for Christ's sake! 

~~~

The lawyer. Far too jovial for my liking. A plush velvet lampshade, tilted at an angle; the door constructed at an angle so he could see people outside his office. "This is a very weak case". Our hearts soar. "It won't be solved even in fifty years." All round general relief. Then he adds: "InshAllah". Hmm. It's a strange fact, but in the land of the pure when someone utters those words you automatically suspect something isn't quite right.

~~~

Anyway, must somehow find an oasis in this desert. Books are not the thing, or only a temporary ladder of escape at best. Perhaps a picture, an image, to distract one. A quick fix, a 'high' to blot it all out. The sudden demise of the black sun, totally unscripted...  
 

  

black sun

But how did it begin?

With fragments of sentences, books half read, people half imagined, which is to say: with reflections and traces, and memories and a chaste heart. To travel, and leave everything behind, to grow in lightness (Calvino), only to realize that you haven't moved an inch, as in all the best traveling. 

At Penarth pier, as a young boy, you look down through the planks to the sea; the movement of the world, the slow rocking against the fragile creation of human hands. Old people shuffle past you, from another world, death on their purple lips. It seems like this moment is forever: memory is the stillness of the soul in the world. Snow clears, the frost bites back from the windowpanes, seasons turn and wisdom escapes you. This series of attachments hidden, like an underground stream, the fabric of our lives woven from far too many various threads to have any coherence.

'In the evenings especially, when the candles have been lit, a hypochondriac sadness, without object, like a blood-red tone over everything.'

"Have you had your mid-life crisis yet," a friend asked.

No, not yet. Why, what does it look like, and what colour is it? 

A crisis requires too much energy, but if it comes then it will come. May the Lord give us strength [he says, quickly looking for his religious hat]. 

Yesterday at __'s birthday party. A room of poets and writers and artists. Suicide contemplated to end the boredom. Except quiche and cinnamon rolls served by old Emmanuel kept these thoughts at bay. Even little r was quiet, saw through the fakery, and busied herself by stuffing her mouth with potato chips with great sense of purpose, a renewed sense of life's charms.    

so to speak

 'The result of my life was, so to speak, nothing.'

The storm in your eyes, the white lightning behind them that flashes out, burning, reducing all to red; the heart that is opened, brought to speak of/on its own; the recollection of bright days as the rain falls obliquely on cold windowpanes. Memories held closely to oneself, the fist clenched. The rain falling, the loosening of your hair, the glare of lights in the darkening, the rain, full of longing, dissolving what was left of you. 

Typhoon. Such a strange history. A word well-traveled. Mixed ancestry. How nature loves to cross boundaries whilst humans erect barriers, create distinctions. The great clearing, the open ground, breaking newly, your brow fresh, radiant; the miscellaneous bastardization of our lives, the mingling of thoughts and blood, when the time is right, when time, finding itself, slots into place, and the rain falls darkly no more. Then, with flowers on your lips and winter in your heart we will, so to speak, kiss.

why are some countries poor and others rich?

An interesting review/summary of the new book by

Acemoglu

Meanwhile, for my money, probably the best journalist writing today:

"Just as privatised medicine leads to the over-treatment of the rich and under-treatment of the poor, private schools over-educate the rich. This leads to many of them being educated beyond their intelligence."
---Zoe Williams.

Two questions: what is the appropriate distributive principle (priority to the least well-off, Utilitarianism, etc., etc) and what is the relevant 'evaluative space' (what, exactly, is meant by 'well-off' and how does this relate to other things we value, such a freedom, efficiency, fairness...)?

Acemoglu et al produce some interesting work but ultimately you have to ask yourself if there isn't something odd about explaining history through "origins" (or initial conditions: path dependence). Furthermore, one has to wonder if a great distortion to our understanding doesn't follow from the manner in which economists both try to fit historical events into their framework of rational choice theory and from their desire to reduce the set of human motivations down to the bare minimum, as if to say: the springs of action can be narrowed down to one fundamental, tightly wound coil. 
 

the devil was in the details

the changing year, the animal longing still on us; 

the changing year, and the animal longing.

This day, of all days, makes you hark for the Bright Feast; as the years collect the moments of our lost lives, the desert of the heart in a pagan year remains unbroken. 

The grain of wood in the woods is unknown; so, too, your heart. This strangeness, deeply familiar. The accumulation of details, of intuitions and imaginings, even as understanding escapes you, lacks Form. the world, the bright face, the resplendent image, the idols of your heart, brought to the surface, only to die. Lord, what is this longing but a type of blindness?

God knows, it's just the devil...

'It was the time of summer when wounds heal slowly,

Beautiful the world, and beautiful my desires.'

Summer, Spring, Autumn,

the times of our lives, full, and full of longing.

Summer, Spring and Autumn, the seasons of hell.

Winter, when time stood still for us. & north was a star high above the world, the high desire, the darkness of the soul gathering the moments of love that were apportioned to it. and in the night, these words were true. Second-order desires are not a forgetting, but a deepening.Our circles, broken by the hand of fate. hold on, b fades, soars...  

21st.

'Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.'
---G. Monbiot.

The disturbing thing is just how many people sincerely want to believe there's depravity, moral decadence, a falling away from some prime, pristine point in time; the origins, free from the plurality and complexity of the world, a time when everything was in it's place, neatly ordered, recognized. Maybe it's deep rooted, that kind of nostalgia? But you can't help wondering if it finds more fertile ground at particular junctures in history, or-at the personal level-when one is of a certain age? If there's one thing worse than an old fogey it's a young fogey! 

Atomisation, angst, anxiety, and alienation. You don't really buy any of that (except in small doses) and those who pedal it, shovel it out to the students, are an odd breed indeed. Over here it's very much: Tradition, the 'golden age of Islam',our culture of honour and respect (for women, the environment, elders etc., etc) Except, of course, no-one's ever actually, you know, seen it.

So, today, the unfashionable thought that, you know what, things are actually a lot better than they've been; the untimely thought that the Enlightenment (without the fanaticism bit) is actually not half bad (Calvino's baron). The shocking news that market societies have their virtues (and not just their vices). When all is said and done, who would like to go back (assuming such a thing were possible)? Minorities, women, gays and lesbians, peasants? I somehow doubt it. The old (Republican) virtues, the old religious moralities were, it seems to me, reserved for the few-and sod the rest!

21 st century enlightenment:

...  

How red left me speechless

There was this line from Miro...

There was this line from Miro, that went something like...I choose a direction, and when I'm done with it, I go in a completely different direction. I love that.

A particularly acute reader pointed out, with regard to my last rambling post, that it was quite ironic for me, of all people, to be writing about pluralism when I am, in reality, actually unaccepting of differences.

You wonder about this blog and your writing here over the years. Your varied musical tastes (from post-punk to Jordi Savall), the change in your reading habits towards more poetry and fiction, the move to ethics & economics, your fascination with crows, the 'Red Man', the sublime art you've got to see over the years and commented upon, your mistrust of, and indifference to, politics as well as your hatred for fundamentalism...all that, despite the odd rant here and there, and...

Well, of course it could be that all those things are only in one's mind and what really counts is how you live, how you interact with other people: experience is not a set of fleeting impressions or a few stray words; isn't there a fundamental narrowness here? Here, I think the reader is on safer ground. But even then, is that really true?

... 

second thoughts, 'second spaces': 

But what is so surprising? After all, some of the most brutal men to have ever lived on this planet undoubtedly had "fine feelings" when it came to art, music, etc. (i.e the Nazis); and haven't there been poets, writers, and artists who have espoused anti-semitic or racist or fascist views (Ezra Pound)? Closer to home, you see academics who are, supposedly, fantastically well-read and yet, at the end of the day, they're still major league assholes; and what of the self-styled 'religious' who have often, far too often, promoted or supported bigotry, hatred, repression and violence? 

What (or who), then, is a liberal? Perhaps we should put our deep passions to one side after all. The disturbing possibility that poetry or philosophy may not, in the final analysis, be intimately related to goodness. Are there particular features or characteristics of a person, then? If pushed, I'd be inclined to think: maybe. Maybe the ability to find second spaces, to give others (and yourself) second chances, cut them some slack (everyone's got some crookedness somewhere); one should not think everyone else is illiberal. 

One of the great things about this place-despite, or maybe because of, its barbarity-is the desire to get on, to forget. In may ways, at the day-to-day level, there's a certain ease about 'the east', a reluctance to be too confrontational or antagonistic (is this related to a lack of individualism?) For all my love of West, North, there's still something to be said for East; the South, however, continues to piss me off!   

the first word

A depressing line from a publisher:

“We always say, ‘How about a little novella that we can sell for 99 cents?’ ”

In an age of verbal hyperinflation, is this so surprising? Every desire is but one click away from being gratified, instantly 'downloadable'. The free flow of capital producing the free flow of information.

~~~

The origins of Islam.

As long as Islam has been about there has always been the claim that, well, actually it's just a copy, a heresy of sorts, borrowing from (take your pick): Gnosticism, Byzantium, Iraq, Judaism, Christian mystics and so on. 

This question of borrowing is an odd one. For who could deny that any "idea" or religion takes on the shape and language of the culture and society it finds itself in? But the criticism cuts deeper than institutional forms etc. It is, rather, to point out that if we could trace out the origins we'd see, clearly see, it was all concocted, that the religion "itself" (if we can make such a distinction) is somehow a corrupted version of the "true" faith. 

My problem with that is, firstly, why is there a need to show that one's position is the only true one? This is far more interesting, in my opinion. Against a view that there can only be, and has only been, one "true" revelation it is not surprising that everything else must appear to be in some sense derivative. Secondly, it seems like a futile thing to aim for. I mean, religions have been around for centuries, thousands of years. The question, therefore, is not simply why should you want to change someone else's views but, rather, can you. This is one reason missionaries grate on your nerves so much. 

The difficulty for a certain type of Muslim (perhaps the majority) and for some people of other faiths, is that Islam is so pluralistic. One of the central claims it makes is that it is not new! It is, or so the claim goes, just the last in a series of revelations. If muslims are supposed to "compete" with people of other faiths in good acts then they're also supposed to recognize that some of those other people are "righteous" (a momentous word)and what distinguishes people is not their class, religious orientation ('kiblah') per se but their "intentions" and their "acts". 

Islam is “at its best” when it grounds the formation of a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity.

--Zizek. 

Perhaps. For a certain type of radicalism or zealous puritanism can also follow from that...If Islam emphasizes balance and moderation above all else, then it's city & desert, home and homelessness...

In any case, this bores you. More interesting than that is the dialogue (internal and external) between faith and modernity. What interests you more is the notion that the 'religious spirit' is not only found in other religions (this is almost a matter of doctrine in Islam, in my understanding) but that it survives and flourishes even without the institutional forms associated with religion.    

ج

These spaces, these absences, the silences between your words: so familiar. This much we share? Each birth, each death, separation.

'I was kept from harm by a word found in nobody's heart.' A word no-one will ever write. In a book, you find a stray hair, and forget the words.

Say[...
You
[
[
[
[
broken..[gold] burnt
heart]
soul
[Kh]

To say it briefly: 

You have broken, burnt,xxx carried off, robbed my

xxxxxxxxxheart,xx patience, rest,xxxx soul,

Kh:

For me the first letter of my soul is the tip of the curl

which looks like the ringlet of ج

Flying Lizard ($)

Thinking of dem Arabs again, and wondering if anything general can be extrapolated from my thoughts on them. Yes, and I think it's this:

Unless I'm reduced to abject poverty I'd still say that money isn't that important; that it can't buy an education or character or friendship or love or meaning in life. In fact, it can't do much at all when you think about it! Can't bring back the dead, can't hold time at bay, can't produce creativity at will, and can't answer any of the fundamental questions.

'Why worry that we are moving towards a society in which everything is up for sale? For two reasons: one is about inequality; the other is about corruption. In a society where everything is for sale, life is harder for those of modest means. The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters. But also, putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. Paying children to read books might get them to read more, but it might also teach them to regard reading as a chore rather than a source of intrinsic satisfaction. Sometimes, market values crowd out non-market values worth caring about.'

---M.J. Sandel. 

His online Tanner lecture is well-worth a read as well. 

more reflections in/on my juvenile state

Juvenile delinquency, first recorded in 1816. The term, first used in 1817. Which comes first: the word or the act? Since you're stuck in your books and haven't got a clue about what's happening around you in the so-called real world, you should hastily add: doesn't Hacking write about this somewhere? Normalization. The old Foucauldian theme.

Years back, my old boss wrote me a rather nasty e-mail: "you have no right to call me by my first name, your parents haven't brought you up well; you are a juvenile delinquent..blah, blah, blah." Which made me quite happy, really, winding the old bugger up like that. As luck would have it, he was kicked out of this place two weeks later for 'amending' his son's examination grades/transcripts. And for two whole months after that incident I had a kind of cult status around here, as if to say: don't say anything to this guy, because he's in league with the spirits and he'll put a curse on you or the evil eye or...

Of course, I continue to be outspoken about lots of things but mostly my star has waned. It was just one of those freakish things and those in power continue to think of me, perhaps somewhat sympathetically, as a childish clown. Which, again, is fine since when fate is on my side again I will take great relish in seeing them trashed and, to be honest, you wouldn't have it any other way: when the child was a child...

The maturity of adults bores you stiff. Always fumbling, always antagonizing and agonizing, calculating and plotting. More unlikely to hit on the truth or see themselves clearly or understand the difference between means and ends. Always pontificating, thinking they-and only they-have figured things out. Khair...

~~~

'I count on this. Not on perfect understanding, which is Cartesian, but on approximate understanding which is Jewish.'

'I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the middle of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.'

'Novelists are wrong to...speak "the last word." It is better that the novelist should trust his own sense of life. Less ambitious. More likely to tell the truth.'

---Saul Bellow.

what is a liberal?

'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 
---Thomas Merton.

I think this is true. But isn't there a concomitant responsibility to find oneself standing against the times one lives in, to not belong? Doesn't one need time, 'place', history for something that is not of time to emerge? This double image seems to be the root of it: to be named and not to be named; the wild man of the forests, the city-dweller; the northern light that isolates, the southern that enfolds, brings within its own circle of understanding. Protestantism & Catholicism, desert and city, order & chaos, the tree of knowledge..


One finds oneself in the world; one finds oneself lost in the world. 


~~~


Atomism vs holism. Really must get down to reading Gellner. Who am I? What am I? Only God can answer that. (Hannah).


Would you not that things had been different, that you had not been allotted this particular arc of history-or at least not gone along with it all the along (Remains of the Day), instead of side-stepping out of the way, veering off to God knows where? That other song, that hums in you, whose tune you know, but whose words you've forgotten, that image that you who hold within you like a relic, worn down by the hand's devotions?

Summertime approaches, the lost hours of summer widening into stillness, the earth steaming, windows open in the evening, sucking in cool air. Even the black sun's heart grows light, losing its former radiance. 


Appiah: brilliant stylist. 
...What is a liberal?
Answer: a kaffirOnly joking.

Perhaps a question that is not wholly without use or importance given that it offers an opportunity to set out a sort of list of desirable attributes that you aspire to.

Firstly, a liberal is someone who doesn't think too much about what is useful or useless. Uselessness is useful for denting the shallow instrumentality, productivity, and functionality that casts its web over our lives. Russell's 'useless knowledge', for example. But that doesn't mean that she has wanton preferences either. There is a balance between the reasons to value something and the freedom to value it. The old question: does desire come before the good?

Secondly, the liberal doesn't care too much about first or second. Everything can trump something else. Sometimes happiness, sometimes darkness; sometimes utility, sometimes rights. Life is not a system, and we are not just calculating machines. Sen, again: evaluation is not calculation. Doesn't care too much, doesn't think too much. That is not the same as 'doesn't think', but nor is it the same as 'only thinks'.

Nabs, that great follower of Russell, or the follower of the great Russell-which means that he doesn't need to be a follower any more, points me to:

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion

The liberal, is only semi-aware that she is a liberal and doesn't set too much store by such categories. Doesn't rule out conservatism or a whole hotch-potch of ideas. Taste, and see.

A liberal does not simply have liberal ideas but actually attempts to live by them. Can let things go, knows when to bite his tongue, even though it hurts!

the recurrence of beginnings

There is no redemption of time, but time is found again and again, and ceases to be time.

~~~

Little r looked up and, disappointed, asked: "but there's no man in the moon!" And: "why is the moon following us?" Some prisons, I suspect, are so deep that one cannot see the prisoners. 

~~~

She is the flower as real as in paradise as fallen, a child's first touching of petals, as real as the dance of light in her eyes that is the same as the dance of light in the world right now. 


~~~


the red room, where i can see you, have you. where my heart is true. wherein i speak the necessary word, surrounded by your silence; pure, the sound and thing, the thing in itself, bell-shaped, formed to perfection, full, resounding light; the bewildered heart becalmed, brought to stillness, the still point of the heart, that turns in eternity...


the mind clear, the ancient lost last look on your face finally making sense. the remembrance of all the days and hours. you give up on distinctions, are yourself when another. you float right into me, hollowed out for you, the strawness of straw glinting in fulfillment. 

what brings you here again? a word said in passing, if only in passing, the faint hint of hearing yourself speak on foreign lips, the possibility of impossibles, the imposter crouching on the edge of his seat,waiting, observing. Light that has no other place to go/burns in the mind years waiting/to dance again.

~~~

'Heads of lovers below the hill
show above the hill, their bodies
together in green unseen' 

what will bring you here again?

'The space between the trees we enter holds us
the calm, light down into..
the point the afternoon has met us
and we stop, the sound of our feet in the leaves
leaving its echo past the ears

so we have brought our meeting with us
carried as one room of air around us
to the trees
and suddenly stopped into light
they merge, all spaces merge and fall away around us

o enter the splendid city!
where all our meeting lies'

---Kenneth Irby.  


~~~


This beautiful photograph is by Roxana, 'artist of the floating world,' whose art seems to be that of seeming, and opening world unto world.

district circle

It is strange how when you anticipate something or the arrival of someone, you tend to see them in your dreams first. As if you were being drawn outside yourself, only to find what you had always known, loved.

Running, early morning, skies grey but bright and shimmering in places, with a metallic sheen; you notice the flat and dim sunlight on the tiles: how ancient such a scene all is!

A boy and girl walk hand-in-hand to some distant corner, looking for a space. 

You notice brown and black birds fighting with one another. Ignore. A quick memory of last night's dinner (Caesar salad and caked Alaska, if you must), of your colleague who poured his heart out to you: "I'm being pushed into a corner, they're devouring me".

At first, the task at hand: the "unifying" of the body: first upper torso and lower, then the specifics: hands, feet, arms; finding the pace, seeking the moment  it all comes together. Breath, timing, awareness. Shoulders loose, the palm of your hands open; then the world ceases, falls all around you. The zone. The right frame of mind. In sync., means nothing at all, the nothingness of the world. The last lap, tiredness in your heavy legs. The elements shared between red earth and you. A fly at eye-level levels with you, accompanies you for a quarter; you pick up the thin voice of a black bird in the horizon, register its precise notes, as they come to you like a thin line. A bird swoops down before your path, its feathers slick back, streamlined. Your heart expands, ready to receive any Form. Ibn Arabi. Your mind clear at last, imageless, thought broken, the circle line emerges joyfully into the green. A final word on your lips, as you approach the end that was imagined from the beginning: "Fuck!"

Students with guitars singing, their songs on the breeze; the girls all dreamy-eyed at their feet; they've probably been together through the night. Their song, some stuff about revolution or death.

When will these Saudi bastards fuck off?

Many years ago (about a 100) my ancestors left this place for the..er..crummy village that goes by the name of Lahore (via Amritsar). Hmm, not the brightest of sparks, those Mirs!

And now, as in many other places in the so-called 'Muslim world' we apparently have the Arabization of what, from the stories passed down to me, was/is a genuinely syncretic tradition. In fact, form my travels in the spectacularly beautiful Hunza, I'd say there's a lovely, gentle, Buddhist influence in the whole region. Why, o why, did they come down to the plains and mix with the fanatics and the flatlanders?

Hmm. I know someone from Srinagar occasionally pops up here on the black sun. Would love to hear your views on this. Today, my heart is saddened Roxana, anton, dear Celia and Beth and anon, and Bob, when I read this:

'In his sermon he whipped worshippers into a frenzy over Western aggression in Muslim lands, decried the acceptance of Western values among the population, and blasted Palestinians for harming their aspirations toward statehood by “living like Jews.” But he steered clear of the complex affairs of Kashmir, even as he ridiculed Sufi customs.'

---The Boston Review. 


~~~

Red

Blue and black for faithfulness; green for unfaithfulness.

All things seem to be connected today; the green of one's eyes means you are never trusted, the open gold of the hours.

'What colours are there 

in your hair?

I didn't see 

past the red, gone brown

by dark...

the hair, the red

lights of strands'

---Kenneth Irby.

And the blue mourned the loss of the red.

Search out the faint pencil marks by light, the spaces that held us, in silence, in which we fell. Rehearse the lines again, until they're deep in you, like wine's dark mysteries, only to stammer, dazed when the time comes. What word is there for the unseen one, the web without the spider, widowed time under your skin, your breath on the dark glass; what names I give you, like the hand of a criminal, searching out the truth; mythical names and colours, since everything in the world must substitute, bring you closer. The Red room: and the whole world was red.

'Then we turn disjointed and uncertain
at even the next word, to make any connection
connects everything'
---K.I. 

Shorten everything, but most of all time; the one moment, hanging like a loose thread...tying us together, linking us, night after night. The redwood in the heart, the Eastward-facing heart. If only.If only time wasn't time. The red-emption, an unraveling, unknotting...

Do not give me scissors, the Sufi said, but a needle; I do not cut, but weave.

_   _    _     _

Riven:

From Middle English riven (“to rive”), of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse rīfa (“to rend, tear apart”), from Proto-Germanic *rīfanan (“to tear, scratch”), from Proto-Indo-European *(e)reip- (“to crumble, tear”). Cognate with Danish rive (“to tear”), Old Frisian rīva (“to tear”), Old English ārǣfan (“to let loose, unwrap”), Old Norse ript (rift, “breach of contract”), Norwegian rive (“to tear”)


Ruffu: 


to repair what is riven.

'the mystery' and the one-handed economist

'The negative way attempts to do justice to God's transcendence, but at the price of making God unknowable. Religious language then perforce becomes expressive , not descriptive, and the relation to God has to be enacted in spirituality because it can no way be enacted in knowledge. A high and orthodox emphasis on the divine transcendence forces me into a non-cognitive philosophy of religion. The "higher" God is, the more inward God is....Alternatively, the world is full of images of God, of hierarchies pointing to God...'

(via Iris M.)

~~~

Another term, another year comes to an end. Don't worry old colleagues, we'll be dead soon, if we're not already so. The highlight of the year: free sushi thanks to dem dere A-rabs (don't get me started on the Gulf Arabs, for Christ's sake!).  But the sushi, at least three distinct tastes (avocado, shrimp, and caviar). Very subtle. (If this doesn't get ol' anon. commenting I don't know what will)

A colleague phones me up to tell me he's got anxiety. Why? Because he hasn't got anxiety any more. I sometimes think, in a former life I must have been a shrink or a Buddhist since I have this amazing ability to sit and quietly listen to other people's problems. not quite sure what that's got to do with Buddhism, but there you go. But would love to have one of those black leather couches the shrinks have and since I'm half Jewish anyway I think I'd be a natural.

In Nuristan (yeah, I know, the name is a joke)there's a rumour that there's a group in town that's even stricter than the Taleban. What's stricter than that, you may ask? (Never forget the Spanish Inquisition! ). Okay, that doesn't really work without the music. Must, must visit Kafiristan before it's too late.

~~~
(My) teaching sucks. Feel like imitating Michael Cain and telling the students to bugger off, sit under a tree or do something useful. All this wasted time with books and the fakery, the feigning of intelligence...

'What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these means promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs ...Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible-time freed, existential youth forever,. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth.

...Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.'

The one handed economist/academic, who has every angle covered, who can argue his way out of every hole, who stammers and stutters before life, the ultimate mystery...

    

Babylon & Byzantium

Rowan Williams: ethics and economics:

'Sandel is describing an alienation of the subject from the body, of the will from the material world. What is lasting and “real” is the abstract ego, independent of its physical nature, its environment, even its actual history. The fundamental model being assumed here is one in which a set of unconditioned wills negotiate control of a passive storehouse of commodities, each of them capable of being reduced to a dematerialised calculus of exchange value. If anything could be called a “world-denying” philosophy, this is it.'

[Sandel's Tanner lecture is online, btw]

~~~
The great Peter Brown, writing in the NYRB:

'Far from retreating into the status of timorous minorities, vigorous Christian and Jewish communities continued to maintain their own traditions largely unmolested.Most surprising of all, we can now suggest that the spread of Islam did not happen overnight. It was not imposed by force on the conquered peoples.' 

Disappointing, I know, if you've get set ideas about violence and Islam; disappointing, too,if you think about just how backward and intolerant lots of Muslims have become. 

This is not about nostalgia or going back, of course. It is, rather, about moving forward, listening and learning, and keeping oneself open. The ancient and the modern way has to be pluralism.