Will the Real Adam Smith Stand Up!

'There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving. Fortune never exerted more cruelly her empire over mankind, than when she subjected those nations of heroes to the refuse of the jails of Europe, to wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor of those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.'

--Adam Smith, TMS.

Stirring stuff. Came across these lines in Stephen Darwall's fascinating article on smith and liberalism. If I ever get the time I'd try and develop a course on Smith. so, first things first: this summer: finish TMS and Griswold's excellent book, then move on to Raphael's and Vivienne Brown's. 

'But though he is, no doubt, principally accountable to God; in the order of time, he must necessarily conceive himself as accountable to his fellow-creatures, before he can form any idea of the Deity'.
---TMS

In the order of time. That's a nice way of putting it. Not Sufism or an "inner" freedom; not an impersonal view or utilitarianism either. A kind of attentiveness, a kind attentiveness. But not always...

The individual is not always in pursuit of the individual.
--Iris M.

Very unromantic, I know, but cut me some slack.

Why is 'regards' a way of saying goodbye?

~~~

The counter revolution: just in case you're reading, Nikki, cinnamon rolls are the way of the future :-) You heard it here first, on the black sun. Donts be going saying you are the first when you aints.

the words we can't say any more

 The strange case of the disappearance of words, or the meaning of words.

The frontiers of the unsayable. Isn't it remarkable that we have a word for, and an idea of, a frontier? What we cannot or should not say is also, it has to be said, outlined in what we do not say.

There are so many words for the behaviour of light that have dropped out of usage. What kind of failure is that (of nerve)? What, precisely, is lost here? Can we name it?Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, shimmer, sparkle, shine...
(after M. Robinson).

Why 'gl', you may ask.

The gaze: Ivan Illich..

gaze, glance, glaze..

"It has become difficult to evoke this mastery of gaze, or to understand educated gaze as a virtue: modern man has difficulty grasping that there can be a good and a bad use of the eyes."

Everything must be made visible, become part of the show, the commodity in the shop-window that one can reject or accept; everything must be said, revealed, exposed, torn out of secrecy, privacy. What, today, is the relevance of the peep-show? 

The hatred for the Red Man stemmed, in part, from his refusal to talk.

To talk of the hijab in any way other than it being a sign of backwardness is to face ridicule in certain circles. Sometimes you do get a holier-than-thou attitude with girls who wear the hijab, but on the whole your experience amongst students has been this: a normal, quiet and unfussed confidence. To not draw attention to oneself..this seems to go against large parts of what it means to live in modern society.  Of course there are class issues here and, equally importantly, the imposition of "modesty" on women by men. But when all is said and done, there is something to be said-maybe not for the hijab per se-but for a withdrawal from the relentless gaze and for the need to cultivate a 'hesitant gaze'.
...

'Nice' isn't what it used to be. It is now one of the plainest and most boring words in the language. But things are not always what they seem and it has such an interesting history. But if people change, if God withdraws, can you cling on to a word? If the soul does not speak your name any more, does it not still sigh in its absence?

Moral Saints

One of the great civilizing forces in any society is the ability not talk ill of the dead and, more generally, to let things go, to not have the final word-but I can't help myself in this case. There was a kind of ruthless fanaticism about Thatcher that probably sprang from her class origins. This is a pretty common experience: those who suddenly make it into the higher circles (of politics, religion, or whatever)often exhibit a zeal to prove that they've moved beyond being defined by their roots. To be one of the gang, nay, even better, to be the pack leader...

'Her legacy is of public division, private selfishness and a cult of greed, which together shackle far more of the human spirit than they ever set free.'
---The Guardian.

~~~

In an interview A. Part revealed that he had come up against a dead end. What to do in such moments, what resources can one turn to? In our own lives I suspect it is memory of love or of loved ones, the sense of peace that one found in a particular place; for others still it is a matter of hope or, if their faith is stronger, patiently waiting for grace to weave its way into our lives...Part says that he met a sweeper who told him:

you must love every note.

I think this could be lived by a saint or realized in the intense concentration of an artist, but it does seem too extreme or far-fetched for most of us. 

~~~

A friend is writing a biography of one of Pakistan's leading businessmen. The man has seen it all, from pre-partition days to meeting world leaders and then, eventually, setting up the university where I currently work. As my friend interviews him he says with some pride that he has never wasted a moment in his life. To me that sounds as if he's wasted his life. 

~~~

'In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen, and enough to rot upon the ground.'

A life dedicated to one's own narrowly defined self-interests appears, to most of us, to be an impoverished or shallow one. But, equally, the moral life doesn't appeal much to us either. It's not that it just comes across as unrealistic-who could live such a life-but, rather, that we're ambivalent as to the worthiness of such a life-who would want to live such a life? A life of constant sacrifice, of not attending to one's own material interests and well-being or of consistently giving precedence to the perspective of others over one's own, does strike us, I think, as strangely odd. 

It is not clear that the pursuit of self-interest, meaning and an ethical life can always be reconciled, even if they do, in places, overlap with one another. 

Peak moments: why do fiction and films have such a hold on us? Could it be that nothing happens and then, suddenly, in a turn of phrase something clicks, some order comes into play, and there's a brief condensed moment of understanding? Is it that our own lives are much more like that than the image of any sustained attention to various areas of our lives? Not everything can be said or known, large parts of our lives go on without fitting into any pattern, without coming to the surface, as it were. I do not know who I am. That is the problem,of course, but it doesn't follow that knowing isn't replete with its own difficulties and problems. 

...

Off the map

There is no true country on the map, there is no true map.

'A youth or maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention, or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude they shall be happy together.'

~~~

There is some part of us that imagines happiness or truth or reality lies elsewhere;always one step around the corner, never here, a dim memory of the future. Would we still be recognizably human if there wasn't a sense that our lives are lived in shadows, and if something didn't snag at our hearts or touch us as from afar, as in a dream?

Of course, there is also something disturbing about capitalism's ability to tap into our restlessness, to hold up the promise of unending accumulation. As economists like Frank Knight clearly saw, the market isn't about just satisfying given desires; it's really also about innovation and the creation of the unlimited.

~~~

You have strayed for so long now that it may be hard to find your way back. The eyes and hands have made their deals, settlements; your voice strains to retain what notes of truth it knew. A life of wandering means that nothing that surrounds you is a reflection of you. You sometimes think to yourself that your thoughts are like an old, neglected radio station, the ghost songs whose outer shell is barely remembered...

Reading Burnside in the brilliant burning white light: the shadow of your  hands cutting deeply into the words, the blank light against the individual patterns of loss...

the dwelling place inherent in the spine...

You have lost a book; in it was a poem you could never find. A poem about a deep ocean and a whale down in its cold murky depths; the whale knows a song, whose form is ancient, repeated from time out of mind, a song of being in the world and lost, this pattern that is like her breathing: the song, the moments, the stars, all carried along since before Adam. The Great Whale, who cannot find his name with God. John Riley, I think.

~~~





    

Adam's Lament

In the Muslim tradition, or what you know of it, there isn't much on Adam's lament. Is this partly because there is no Fall as such (or, rather, because the Fall is pardoned)?  Which is not to say that there isn't a deep- rooted sense of separation (from the Garden, the Beloved) and a sense of terrible loss. But that loss is supposed to be an opening up of possibilities.

Yet still from Eden springs the root

As clean as on the starting day.

Time takes the foliage and the fruit

And burns the archetypal leaf

To shapes of terror and of grief

Scattered along the winter way.

But famished field and blackened tree

Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity

Bloom in these darkened fields alone.

What had Eden ever to say

Of hope and faith and pity and love

Until was buried all its day

And memory found its treasure trove?

Strange blessings never in Paradise

Fall from these beclouded skies.

---Edwin Muir

The real lament-must ask A'zeb on this-is that by Iblis (the devil).  In some traditions he is known as the 'true lover' and his unwillingness to bow down before Adam is turned on its head and said to express his true devotion to 'the One'. 

But anyway, there is also this scene where Iblis warns God not to send Man down to earth because he will create havoc, bloodshed, mayhem. Later on (or somewhere else) it is said that Man (and most likely, man, methinks) can be worse than 'the beasts'. You can't but help think that there's a lot of truth in that...

Of course, to modern minds talk of the devil and such isn't really on. Fine. But one can hardly deny the presence of evil.  What else can one call the Holocaust? But also on a more day-to-day basis: the terrible sexual crimes committed against women and children. 

Saddam Hussein once said God made a mistake by creating Persians and flies. At times, when you think of the sickness in man's heart-from fundamentalists to those who talk about human lives as 'collateral damage'-you can't but help wonder if God doesn't lament creating such creatures...

(Music to follow..if I can find it. Bear with me, folks)

Spring Break

Spring break in London was always a moment of panic, a time when you suddenly realized that winter was over and exams were just around the corner..another year about to be wasted. Back in the land of the pure, the break is a time of quiet reflection, a time to catch one's breath, do some reading, spend more time with family, and in general not take time too seriously...drift a little while or, rather, drift at your own pace, as the world floats by, humming Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay...

Have you ever considered any other freedoms?
---Brando.

Someone commenting in the Independent wrote this:

'I thought it was a brilliant film in its deconstruction of the "party" genre by presenting us with a grim reality that spring break is built on loneliness, a violent drug trade, predatory male violence, and delusions of grandeur.' 

A particular notion of the self in the social sciences has come to dominate: disengaged, disembedded, free from the constraints of tradition, religion, society state and family. The individual is always someone who breaks free from the shackles (is the ultimate individual the outlaw, the renegade, the misunderstood genius who stands outside society's norms and who is 'before his time'?).

Of course, this view of what constitutes a deep sense of the individual, one free from the mechanical following of imposed norms, rules, is itself part of a tradition. One strand of religious thought has always suggested that 'exile' and 'exodus' are the natural (or at least the highest) expression of our humanity: the rebel with a Cause. Neither Greek nor Jew, neither of the east nor the west. But is that the same as being without any orientation whatsoever? 

Romanticism and late capitalism are strange bedfellows but is there a shared idea of the free-floating self who creates his own identity, and who heroically casts off the bonds to find, discover his or her "true self"?  The restless self, the self as 'a project', disdainful of all that is merely 'given'. All that is solid melts into air (why do you think of Caspar Friedrich when you say that?).

Haven't seen the film and doubt I will, but what struck you was the notion that there could be, paradoxically, a ritual that is supposed to initiate you into some version of freedom. 

'To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilizing old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.'
---J. Franzen.

There were these lines by Schuon on the Red Man, in his beautiful book, The Feathered Sun, about how the loss of character is a terrible Fall. Orientation: a sense of "up", a sense of "down" (Milosz).

Rowan Williams's fab. lecture: here

The Lost Horizon

Earlier, fff asked what is the time horizon we need to stay within the bounds of a human perspective. Gai Eaton, who I was fortunate enough to meet at the Regent's Park Mosque, wrote some wonderful lines on this in his book, King of the Castle (perhaps the most accessible book by a 'perennialist')...

'Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books, their thoughts or their private fantasies.
The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of being trapped without hope of escape.

A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia, entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of assimilation are inevitably weakened and certain numbness sets in; nothing is fully savoured and nothing is properly understood...

Outside of works of art which embody something beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us. '

But is there another kind of horizon we should be talking about? Is Bach possible without some pull to the transcendent (gosh, that does make it sound vague!). A religious person would say that it is not just any old evasion of the self (negation) but an attachment to, affirmation of, a reality that is the ultimate source of value/Truth, namely: God. If there is no 'north' in the 'north of the future' does life collapse into meaninglessness? Not quite the question of: 'is anything permitted?' but, rather, what can we create if we do not have a notion of a Creator (question begging word 'notion' is, of course) ?

I think, to the extent we are modern, we balk at such language and connections. We'd like to believe that despite all the dross there is something wonderful and beautiful in our ordinary lives. 

'I saw there was nothing to learn in the deep north..you get enlightenment where you are'
---E. Bond

But we look on suspicion with anything associated with 'greatness' or the timeless, partly because we want to live just in time (or the world) and perhaps partly because this perspective of order or a bigger picture into which we fit, from which we make sense of our lives-a framework, to use Charles Taylor's word-opens us up to the possibility of paternalism. 'Order' has often been associated with being ordered. The paramount value of freedom, autonomy, sits uneasily with a substantive idea of 'the good' (or value). What we make of our lives is really what it's about. And so, the modern genius must be thought of as rebelling against society, conventions or expressing his or her true self. 

Stokowski has this line which I like a lot. Music is a not just a set of black notes on a piece of paper. Religion cannot be just a text. Without human subjectivity meeting that reality (it is pointless to ask about first movers here) then what is there? Barenboim: the human hand, a sense of 'verticality' meeting the 'horizontality' of the keyboard. 

Again, what happens if there is a loss of this horizon, the notion of verticality? 

Now, question me an answer...

Fakin' it...4' 33"

Another pertinent example is the American composer John Cage. With a singular skill for self-promotion, yet no prior evidence of musical competence, Cage made his reputation with his celebrated piece 4’33”(1952) — a happening in which a pianist in concert dress sits silently at the piano for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. On the strength of this and a few similar pranks, Cage presented himself as an original composer, ‘putting in question’ the entire tradition of Western concert music. 
---Roger Scruton.

Now, Scurton is a bit of a bore (an old fart is perhaps a more accurate description) but play the ball, not the man here...

'They trade in 'originality,' 'transgression' and  'breaking new paths'. But these terms are cliches, as are the things they are used to praise. Hence the flight from cliche ends in cliche.' 

Amis: The War against Cliche?

At the Tate (yes, there is a Tate Britain but no-one really goes there any more, unless they're into Blake)...you're bemused to see on a large screen what appears to be nothing but a grainy black and white flickering image of a man with nothing on, jumping up and down. And people stand around it, gawping, ever-so slightly amused (because, obviously, there is nothing shocking here, and to be shocked wouldn't be the right response anyway). This really is a case of the little boy and the emperor with no clothes, you think to yourself. At best, you will be told in fake American accent, "it's a joke, dude, lighten up". Another stunt that really fails because one can see far more interesting stunts outside the gallery. But if you want to get 'bums on seats' , if the primary objective is to compete with all the other media (and make a bit of money on the side as well), then hey, presto!

~~~

I don't know about Cage, but academia is full of fakes, people who are as 'thick as swans' (to paraphrase Kenneth Clark). It's not just the narrow scale of their 'research' (the lives of gay Danish dwarves from 1873-77); it's not just their methodology and overemphasis on 'theory', 'models' and assumptions. It really boils down to the way in which language is used (language itself being just a 'game'). 

You know someone, a former student, who when asked the simplest of questions will churn out all the big names with bits of their theories but what is spewed out ends up sounding like a horrible mish-mash of jargon and twaddle. This person is known, perhaps rather unfairly, as 'Hegel-Foucault'.  If you stopped him and said, hang on, what are you actually saying I think he'd start stammering. The time has come to speak in plain English. You wonder if there isn't something particularly European about this kind of fakeness...a bit like the 'art' films where someone stirring a cup of coffee is supposed to 'reveal' the deep metaphysical crisis of 'discourse' about 'the subject' and 'the other'.  Maybe the English are just too superficial to cultivate that kind of fakeness? (Iris M put it more kindly: the English don't like theory).

~~~

The shock of the new:

Maybe you should get some Rieff after all. But anyway, the late Robert Hughes's endlessly fascinating book does throw up this question: what if the new doesn't shock any more? The problem with that idea of newness and creativity is that you are constantly searching to tweak things (in academia it's really just a question of new wine in a very old bottle) or forever trying to 'push the boundaries'. What results, though, is very often just boredom and banality. If one can only get a 'fix' by escaping from what is known and familiar then is one led to search for extremes, for things, experiences and places that are more and more exotic (Sontag). What is there, in terms of violent and pornographic images, that cannot be found on the internet? 

~~~

Casals says that a day didn't go by when he didn't play the cello. How can someone play the same music for so many years and still find something there- in the music and in himself?

Here is a lovely post by Bob on Casals.

Spirited Away

Not really one for television any more and my last foray into Japanese stuff didn't work out (Ugetsu: dodgy print; and the awful, awful Dersu by Kurosawa). But Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle were fab. Which reminds me: must go back to the The Master of Go book Roxana recommended.

Yesterday little r got it into her head to sprinkle talcum powder over everyone; she ended up with most of it on herself and looked like a little ghost running about the house. It's simply impossible to get anything of her once her mind is made up. The other day there were five of us chasing her around the house, trying to get the broom from her. Two people gave up, out of breath; one nearly fell over a chair. I just looked her in the eye when she paused to catch her breath and started laughing. Love the obstinate spirit!

the deep future

Marek Kohn has an interesting piece in aeon.

The rapid flux. Who could deny it-and how! Is fantasy and unreality the only way of facing reality? Regression. All change-and mind the gap! The shape-shifter's world. Blessed is the person who hears the thunder and doesn't think of home (Basho, more or less). That line back in Solaris: there's no going back to the cosmos, no order in the soul. This lack of a substantive or determinate idea of the good is what keeps us going though, isn't it?

Ceaseless change. What previous generations took for the solid structure underpinning our lives and loves cannot be said to hold any more, is some kind of illusion that one can no longer honestly accept. There's no going back. Heraclitus, and all that jazz. Solidity, stability, ceremony, rituals, the fixed markers in our lives lionized by tradition and a slow-moving mindset (perhaps itself a product of a slow-moving life).

From work, to marriage; from habitat to identity; and from technology to knowledge. What, today, endures...what can be allowed to endure. Even the question presupposes that 'today' should be our centre of gravity, as it were. The book, the university, the knowing hand, the wisdom of experience to be replaced by the flickering image before you, the fragmentary and discontinuous, youth (yes, did you suspected that this was at the heart of it?).

I wonder what the older generation in Qatar, Dubai, etc. feel about the rapid changes, the sudden elimination of desert and falcon for skyscraper and prostitution?

So, here's the question: is part of the valuing of things to do with their continuity? (Scheffler's question). What kind of time-horizon do we need to be human? Is the very concept of the human dependent on a fundamental capacity to take a step out of time, a step back from our desires and thus evaluate them? What happens when we lose this horizon, the big picture?

Some might say that an important component of the climate change problem is to do with our inability or reluctance to acknowledge the interests of future generations. This sin't just about weak ties, but a lack of imaginative capacities. Who, today, writes or works or lives with the idea that their actions have any long-lasting repercussions? (Hans Jonas's brilliant essay on immortality here). This is related to Avner Offer's point: as we grow richer are we losing the ability to think of anything but our immediate pleasures (with consequences for savings and work decisions)? The moment. The now. Sovereign becoming...

Is there something irremediably lost when we destroy a landscape, or lose a language, a way of living, or an animal species?

What is the average lifespan of a modern building? This isn't just about Borders or some familiar place closing down, though it really is, I guess. Six years in Japan?

And yet, it seems deep down the desire to preserve what we value-and not just for ourselves-becomes stronger in direct proportion to both the possibility that it will be erased from memory or existence and to our shorter time horizons. This could be, of course, just a result of the fact that there are more and more things added to the list of great works of art, music, literature with every passing generation. But maybe there's something else going on here. Does it stem from a primal fear that actually, no matter how much we store things up, they may not mean that much to future generations?

The way that is away is not a way

It took us a whole day driving up there but eventually, after a few stutters and false starts, we got to Kalam, Swat. Three days of quiet: these were the days before Blackberry, online books, wi-fi, facebook and other irritants. Simple living: basic food, a roof over our heads and bare furniture. This was it. The real deal. No relatives, no politics, no thoughts of the state of the world. Via negativa? 

After three days Ubo said: sod this! I don't think I can take any more of this quiet. We've seen nature. All very beautiful and all that but now what?!

There was this line from Glenn Gould's radio programme that I liked a lot: you cannot find holiness in the city.  Was that the line? Or was it: you cannot find holiness apart from the city, in isolation? To talk of 'holiness' already leads in the wrong direction...

there are these nice thoughts by Thomas Merton, someone who Bob on the overgrown path constantly points us to...

'There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.'

Yes.

John Burnside continues, citing Emerson:

'we require such solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the streets and in palaces...it is not the circumstances of seeing more or fewer people but the readiness of sympathy that imports.'

Of course, blogland is a strange place to be writing about solitude, 'aloneness'. 

Is there a point at which you are at the right distance from the world, a place from which you can look at it from the right angle? Not too close to be drowned in it or drawn to it; but not too distant to lose oneself in one own's trivial and petty thoughts or anxieties? If there is a false inwardness then there is also a false worldliness. Degrees of freedom. 

I think, with time...who thinks with time? I think, with time, I am less sure of what I want to say about religion. Very little, actually, except to spite the atheists now and then. 

Truth...interrupted

In the quiet in the land you hear only your own voice.

It takes maybe twenty, thirty years to live out a life of meaning, to work it out. An apple-pie existence is okay, but if you look beyond to the specifics and further, you might ask yourself: is there anything else, or how does your life reflect something greater, wider than the narrow arc of time and space that has been allotted to you?

There is something both fascinating and daunting about the idea of a simple life, one consecrated to the memory of a way of life that is centuries old. As if the passage of time itself could confer a trace of the timeless onto some daily act, as if by repeating the same words and gestures over time one would suddenly alight on some kind of deeper truth. The mind not scattered by distractions, hand and heart in sync., a voice that finally speaks with clarity, without reference to writers...

In the desert hours you remember the colours, the centrality of green. What kind of life is a withdrawal from life?

Archaic green colours time. Passing centuries are evergreen...Green colours the earth in tranquility, ebbs and flows with the seasons. It is the hope of Resurrection. We feel that green has more shades than any other colour. 

---Derek Jarman.

the black, black sun

Janelle Monae Feat. Big Boi - Tightrope from Fred Romano on Vimeo

Growing up amongst white people you could never admit that white people could be cool (and for the most part, they weren't...this was the time, folks, when racism was still very much a "normal" part of the conversation). Of course, it takes a while for some to realize that coolness doesn't have anything to do with colour or religion or gender or sexual preference.

But to think with my left foot: I doubt whether in the strange netherland that is suburbia there is much appreciation of the possibility that strangers-blacks, muslims, women-can offer much in terms of "high" culture. Even if you listen to pop, you're probably conditioned to think classical represents the pinnacle.

I guess this is why I find David Goodhart infuriating (his new book has just been published). I had run in with him some years back.  Not worth recounting, really, but it did seem then (as it does now) that there is something slightly nasty lurking below the surface, and it's something that reminded me of views I heard in my childhood, views that originated in a fear of the stranger who lives amongst us. Old England, the trauma of it going (Larkinesque?): the language, the customs, the openness, all to be trampled on by people who don't really 'get it'.

But is that the real story? Somehow doubt it myself (which is not to deny the difficulty any host country would face with a sudden change in its population-especially if the newcomers come from rural/semi-urban backgrounds). But what is missed out on is the fact that the newcomers do adapt, do come to like the place they live in (by and large). At least after one generation things are radically different, even if the second generation harks back to a mythical land/time that no longer exists and never really did anyway.

Secondly, the immigration debate is really a red herring. The more fundamental changes happening in culture, work, the way we live stem from globalisation and the nature of the modern economy. If in late capitalism everything is in flux, from religious belief, to family structures, work and identity then it's pretty bad form to scapegoat immigrants for the loss of the sense of 'place'. And post-modernism has nothing to do with asylum seekers!

Thirdly, for those who do venture to listen to other types of music, extend their minds to pick up something from other people's culture, to those who are receptive to the wonder of art from distant lands (my moment came at the Met, NY and a statue from the Chola dynasty), or the sublime pleasures of different cuisines; for those who make friends across the borders and are open in a sense that is a lived experience and not dependent on a mythology of 'liberty', to those people such old-world posturing will seem ludicrous.

Goodhart, you think, could never really be a New Yorker or a Londoner. A bastard: yes. But not in the best sense of the word.

The Last Word

The last word sounded like the first word, except tinged with an unexpected sadness.

To have the last word.

...

On the highest point of Cavalry Bridge, you look down and out, to the cosmos of bright lights, constant gold and fine silver, sky blues and sweet purple, flickering uncertain orange. It is as if each is burning in its own time zone, distinct, singular, isolated, blazing against the darkness; at the same time, they seem to merge into a sea that is light and flowing, a sea whose forward movement catches the various lights on its surface like so much flotsam,  as it swells up and down, like a living monster. 

Inside your own car, your little zone, you hear nothing of the traffic, the world outside, but only see these mysterious lights, like unknown beings, merge and separate. And Gorecki, which you turn up to catch the perfect pitch of loneliness. Gosh, you could have been on acid!

No-one knows what the last word is or will be. You might think you do or think you'll say it later, but time doesn't stand still for any of us, doesn't give us that moment to compose our thoughts and words. 

Stokowski is a wise man. Originality is a response to the conditions of life...to appreciate originality one must have an original mind oneself.  The word that crops up again and again in the interview: life. Life, full of contradictions, open to revision.

~~~

The last word between us slipped away like a seal, without anyone ever seeing it.

Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square

yet later they would memorize the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died;
the word for death, perhaps, or meadow grass,

or swimming to the surface of his mind,
that other word they used, when he was young,
for all they knew that nobody remembered.

---John Burnside.

~~~
....

We speak as others have spoken before us. And a sense of language is also a feeling for ways of living that have meant something.
---Rush Rhees.

110-A

'I look in the mirror and see someone who is not myself'

110-A, home and heartache, is no more. Sold it off today. Wearing my pragmatic hat: you know it had to be done. But when did the inevitability of something stop humans wishing it wasn't so, that some other kind of life could continue, behind the mirror's silver? But if truth be told, or at least some of the truth be told, then there's a tangible sense of relief about getting this out of the way, since it's been dragging on for ages...

Getting rid of the guard was a nightmare. I've never seen anyone so crestfallen; one would have thought it was his house. He did his best to fleece me but luckily the cavalry (in the form of the Colonel) was around to help. Some unsavoury talk about "these people" and how they only understand one language (the whip or the rod, I suspect..this isn't a point Wittgenstein quite got round to). Anyway, sod the socialism, the guard had been running a brothel in my absence (yes, I know what you're thinking: why didn't he tell me?!).

The last day, the last hour, try and muster some nostalgia for Christ's sake! One last inspection of the rooms, holding the brief memories of each room, as if one could take with you only one from each. The palm of your hand on the wall (is that what cave art was really about?). The sky greying over. Less than 12 hours before dear, dear Mr. P. dying a few streets away. Alzheimer's is a terrible, terrible way to go...Jesus!

...

Get the deal done and get the hell out of here. The place and the memories are crumbling at an alarming rate. There's no-one around. Not a soul who knew me here. You meet the President of the Society. He is unshaven and has oily hair, a double chin..about your age, give or take. Younger, definitely younger. Bags under his eyes. Just by looking at him you'd  think he was a drunk or a poet. Turns out that he was actually very religious, with a sparkling wit. A real, three-dimensional character who connected with everyone he talked to. My own voice sounded false in front of his. Maybe I was just tired, sleepless from the night before, or maybe I just got a glimpse of my own superficiality. I see someone else, but maybe that is me. There's a confidence one gets from living in the world and from living well. Not quite a deepening but a widening of the soul's capacities. And if wide enough, God knows who will stumble your way... Academia, on the other hand, encourages triviality and narrowness.

I could not sleep last night, suddenly I could write my name...

Sign here. And here. And here. Then blue thumbprints, as if I'd been stunned into ignorance...Mark your loss with smudges of blue. Head north, to the green ice. Or think of a green shade and a book. Still, after all this time I remember more than I forget...remember to say I, to say you.

You feel you've come to some great creaking inner turning point, a solstice of the heart...

The sight at any moment
is as complete as the heart is

Negation and logic keep at bay, though. Find the still point in your hand, your thoughts, the years blowing through you. By what light are we known if not those of our loved ones. Here, at 110-A, I saw no image, no reflection. There is a silence when it comes to the things I know. Whose hand plucks us from the darkness, mirrors our unknowingness...

...

You place your fingers over the black 110-A sign outside for one last time. Actually, it was just 11 since the '0' had dropped away, just leaving a barely recognizable circle of dust on the white wall. Zero, a double absence, then.

There are no more mirrors in 110-A. Oh, I know, others will go up in time and it's wrong of me to not wish the new people all the happiness in the world. You drive by the house-from a distance- 40 minutes later and out of the corner of your eye spot them moving furniture already. Three, four people around the main gate, others inside. Already the business of life continues, things move on. This is the world. This is the bridge. Don't build a house on it the sufis used to say. People come and go. 

Nothing last for ever.
But I will always love you.

the name of Red

Oliver Bullough's book, The Last Man in Russia, looks very interesting. Does Eastern Europe even exist any more? And Russia?

Was in the uncomfortable position yesterday of defending capitalism. Thought the other panelist would be a hard-core religious right-winger who would attack capitalism and its corrosive effect on tradition, values, family life, etc., etc. Turns out he was just a hard-core right winger, the kind that peddles all that baloney about property rights, contracts, etc., etc.

What I managed to say was that market societies come in various shapes (from social democracies to stricter and sometimes authoritarian states). Also: varieties of capitalism. The flaws with the system are legion:  growing inequalities within countries, the decline in social capital, the diminishing of a public spirit ethos, and the inability to deal with the problem of climate change. But I wanted to steer away from the silly categorization of market societies full of roguish, selfish, and materialist individuals. What seems obvious to me is that market societies-at least the good ones-are pretty open places to live in and that they eventually work against the fixed identities of religion, race, gender and maybe even social class mattering that much. Of course, much of that is down to social democracy.

But Charles Taylor is perhaps right to suggest that the market is part of our social imaginary, part of the picture we have of ourselves and of our relations to other people-which we think of  as being well-ordered, peaceable,  and productive. Voluntary transactions between people does go some way-for good and ill-of undermining some overarching notion of 'the good' as defined by the state, family, religion, or tradition. Freedom to choose one's own lifestyle is-the obvious point- valuable in itself. The additional point, made by Sen, is that market economies can also extend people's opportunity freedoms and not just their process freedoms (op. freedoms being the things we have reason to value, the things we can do and be). And this, too, strikes me as important: in terms of the range of fiction, art, music, films, and education now available one can hardly be that critical (range in the sense of the number of good things as well as in terms of the number of people who have access to them). Again, it's not just that market economies make such things possible...Perhaps there's a deeper connection. Is there a proper love of the world, then? Why do you find it so difficult to say: Yes!

~~~

And yet, and yet, your heart sinks ever so slightly when it is so optimistic (this is the black sun, after all!), when it forgets red. And it does feel like something of a betrayal not to be more critical. Is this lack of alienation just a sign of middle age? Is age just a way of accommodating oneself to the world? Or is it some trace of a religious instinct that says: this isn't all there can be, that the Robinson Crusoe theory of how individuals interact does, indeed, represent, or filter through to, parts of society?

All this whizzing about, the 'instant communication' malarkey, facebook and having 2,000 'friends', 10,000 books on your kindle, even more thousand mp3s; all the marketing of classical music as 'cool', 'relaxing', the 'trinkets and baubles' (Smith) floating our way via the South Pacific, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and the nexus with the war machine...you can't look at this with a blind eye. Is there alienation, angst, then? No, I doubt there is. We've gone through that. What there is is the boredom of Sundays, the need for some kind of excess (what does the word 'excess' mean in late capitalism'?), exotica and erotica, and a kind of superficiality that comes about with being surrounded by material goods, the life of the Eloi.

Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Or better still, Augustine (in Ignatieff's Needs of Strangers): does a commercial society lead to a lonely freedom?

Red is a connection. Something that is lost. Soemthing you can't name.

Nostalgia for the Light (Religion without God)

A lovely short film/documentary. Well, at least the imagery in Nostalgia was spectacularly beautiful. Trying to weave the political into it didn't always work...to make people speak about their grief and despair can coarsen it; it can only be shared, ultimately, by other grieving people and can, quite amazingly, tend to the farcical if not handled with care (which means, you think, large areas of silence).

A very interesting article by Dworkin, which you need to read more slowly: Religion without God (in the NYRB).  The lectures are also online. Now, how to tie this up with Putnam's Jewish Philosophy and Dewey's Common Faith-both of which are little gems?

What is meant by a 'religious experience' and what do we mean by the 'transcendent'? I think in modern times there's been a tendency to look for these things in ordinary experience and not some isolated, cordoned off, specific locality, or set of rituals.

'I saw there was nothing to learn in the deep north...you get enlightenment where you are'
---E. Bond.

That wouldn't work without the small e.

If all is holy then does that lead to a diffusion of the notion of holiness itself? Must value always be localised, focused in well-established forms, symbols, places or does the spirit bloweth where it listeth? If the latter, does that lead to a kind of subjectivism where people can even say watching Zidane is a religious experience? (Well, if you've watched the France vs Brazil World Cup quarter-final you might think again).

And then there's this wonderful story, which I think sounds real, since it appeals to our modern sensibilities.

Of course, the mullah will have none of this (partly because he has to sanction what counts and what doesn't).

...lecture. back later.

Black Spain

This is the only Goya I've seen in London. The others, in the Prado, were quite haunting, something that at the time I thought quite an experience but on reflection seem rather silly.

Watching Robert Hughes's awful Crazy like a Genius. His book on Barcelona is fascinating, as is his Shock of the New. Visions of Space is full of intelligent commentary but this programme really fell flat on its face. Dark Spain, Black Spain. Throughout Hughes kept on saying that he feared he wouldn't be able to really know Goya, the person. Well, why make the programme if you're not up to it, not up for it? And is it really the person we want to know anyway? A bit harsh, I know, and it's probably got more to do with my turning away from Goya than anything else. The sleep of reason, monsters, crazies, witches, the devouring of flesh, the satire, the disasters of war...all of that turns me cold nowadays. Give it a rest, bro'.

~~~

Miro, on the other hand...

Interesting Times

Two books to look forward to this summer: George Packer's Unwinding and old Hobsbawm's last collection of essays and pieces. Haven't read Packer but G. Dyer has this quote from one of his books:

"The press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in Washington."

Dyer goes on to write, 'reportage, long-form reporting-call it what you will-has left the novel looking superfluous.'

That's a nice idea: zona: how to zone in to the detail but also zone out and see the bigger picture. Also, this desire to 'keep it real' strikes a chord. Experience, life, not art...it seems that large parts of modernity are about just that: the removal of the superfluous, artifice...a return to ordinary living. (By the way, I don't think I can take much more of Cheever's moping around in his journals..it's unhealthy.)

And these lines from a GP article:

'The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems.'

Listening to Aleksandar Hemon on the radio. Radio, of course, being miles better than anything else. Just the voice and ideas and forget the frills. Hemon's happened to be gravelly, old-world Jewish, world-wise, the type that is devoid of any spiritual pretension. Multiplicity as a way of defying definition (Houdini and all that jazz). Only makes sense if you've actually lived all those lives, otherwise it's just fragments, shells. The desire, the need, to tie the loose threads together, to "intuit unity" is always there. Storytellers and their "&.."..a different kind of unity, perhaps?

Edward Said's last book, the one on Freud, was wonderfully subversive of the notion of a fixed identity, of "origins". You might say that such disruptions are very convenient for the culture of late capitalism, which has to tear up any 'rootedness' to keep things flowing (yeah, I know, a bit general). But that's not such a bad thing, you think, especially if the only alternative is a rigorously defined exclusivity based on ethnicity, gender, religion and class.  

What does it take to go to war with someone, to actually hate another person with a vengeance? Is that hatred really a form of self-loathing, a way of escaping from oneself? These are the wrong questions, of course. All that matters is that one does one's best to steer clear from it, and not contribute to the growth of these feelings. Another kind of escape, no doubt, but one that is infinitely preferable. 

~~~

An excerpt from Hobs's book

the dark ones

the dark ones, without inheritance, who slipped by unnoticed by history, exiles in their own country. we had to imagine ourselves back into a culture, a life that wasn't ours and never would be...

Wales, my whore.
---Dylan Thomas(?)

what could be more beautiful than seeing England trounced, trashed, thrashed? Defeat always leads to speechlessness or lyricism but sometimes victory is permitted a word or two. The Palestinians, for example, or the Red Man. If This is Man, then sometimes what you have can prevent you from understanding. The outcasts, the outsiders, the lost and forgotten..all will have their day in the sun when the world is turned upside down. Of that much you're sure, except the sun's light will be black...

~~~

Walking in the sun, in mid-afternoon, your skin burning, your eyes slightly dazed, unfocused. The southern sun reduces the number of words we have for different types of light, it eliminates "glimmer," for example. It has none of the deep clarity of coastal cities, none of the calm intensity of evening blue; none of the desert's monotheistic light that can isolate an object or person. The high afternoon, the sunken hour, the coarseness of our insights, my old voice returns when it thinks of home. Shadows had stained the afternoon, or held it together. There must have been a thousand days like this before. The perfect stillness of a man walking without reason, light glinting off long windows, flowers wilting, children dreaming in the verandas, marriages continuing somehow...

1981, summer cricket in Victoria Park, tennis in the dying days of the season; the grass worn down to a scrub light as hay. T-shirts off, Robinson's, deck chairs in the shade, the end of an era. My star is fading, yours just emerging. An Irish woman looks at me with kind eyes, drunkenly, wondering what I'll be when I'm older. We were beautiful once, said the poet. Of that I'm not so sure.

The wisdom of the East: there is no wisdom and no East.