The vanishing point

All of a sudden, I understood that the people coming across the sea were not people in the plural, but in the singular. This I understood because I myself have children. I saw their deaths in his death. The image thereby penetrated my defenses, broke through the murmur and appeared to me as what it was: an image of reality. The boy was real, and his death was a real death. 
--The New Yorker.

{Photos of some of the people killed in Paris}

You wonder if anything would change if we saw the faces, heard the stories, of the people killed by all those bombs dropping from that vanishing point in the sky.

The Quarterly University

An article in the Guardian that was both interesting and thoroughly depressing at the same time. The growth in adjunct and "contingent faculty," casual employment.

Mary O'Hara:

"Many academics in Britain are angry at what they say are exploitative, insecure contracts with deteriorating pay and terms, including zero-hours contracts". 

The Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism exacts a heavy price. Of course, there's a need to put this in some context: thirty years of neoliberalism but also, you feel, the deeper and wider political and cultural currents that aim to measure, quantify and monetize all that lies outside the realm of the economy. It's not just that education and knowledge must be made into capital, servant to the master of endless accumulation and restless aspirations; it's not just that you have to become a small capitalist yourself and "invest" in improving your own productivity and job market skills, sacrificing any notion of current contentment for a future that either never arrives or, if it does, isn't what it was cracked up to be. No, it's that the changes are bound up with, and dependent on, a whole mentality and language that you have to "buy" into if you want to be "successful". 'Think, but don't think too much'should be the guiding philosophy of universities today. 

Temporary contracts and instant gratification stem form one and the same root, are thrown up by the same underlying processes, consumer and producer being different aspects of the same kind of subjectivity, and subject to the same kind of institutional control. Flexible labour, disruptive technologies. Move with the times or be sunk by the movement of the times. Surfing, that's what it's ultimately all about (why does that line make you sound like Gaddis from Agape?)

If only everyone had an ocean across the US-A..

~

Burrawoy hits the nail on the head with an incredibly perceptive essay. Commodification or regulation as the only paradigms available. And how they interact with one another-through instrumental rationality-is the key, you suspect. 

Add to this austerity mode of being ("value for money") MOOCS and the current fad for reducing everything to technological screen solutions, then you've got the perfect recipe for more downsizing. Capital must be allowed to flow and any institution or way of thinking that hinders that process-which is what critical inquiry does-has to be broken. Broken and then fixed by capital.

I read something the other day but still find it hard to believe. Did the Japanese Education Ministry actually say that? Close down the social sciences, since what is needed is knowledge that keeps the economy going. Really?

Against Dryness (II)

Another attempt to (loosely) tie the threads together.

Small-scale, the local-as opposed to grandiose schemes, notions of perfect order. Utopian longing for the ideal form, to step out of time vs the acceptance of life here, as it is. The desire for perfection a kind of disease that brings forth nightmares (Goya).

Again. Walser. Side-step the whole thing. Neither 'Yes' nor 'No'. It's not a question.

James C. Scott:

"Visual order is not working order"

"The quasi-religious faith in geometric order".

Laziness and slowness as an antidote to modern life (a Kashmiri manifesto..no, manifesto implies far too much work!).

Harp on about freedom all you like but when it comes to the management of our lives by the state and the market, by impersonal, global forces, bureaucracies and "experts" then the old regimes have got nothing on the modern west.

"Excellent Sheep"..at Harvard, Yale, most universities. 

"Irish Democracy": small acts of refusal. I prefer not to. 

Excellent Sheep: if you say "For king and country" then you've already bought into the fabrications of citizen and consumer. 

An old punk Iranian once told me: the difference between us and the west is that we know we're sheep.

The haphazard, by chance, is another kind of order, unplanned and resilient. It is a central belief that there is a kind of order that is beyond our capacity to understand. Trust in the unseen has led to dogmatism and fatalism, but not only those.

"Deliberate imperfection"..Kyoto. 

Abstraction and the theoretical approach, ironically, never lasts. Rosenzweig, again. 

CGI:

"What really moves us in art [and in life]: the vital sign of the human hand, in all its broken and just-unsteady grace.." 

--Adam Gopnik.

The broken circle of our lives. "Ruins," another Mir might say of the fine balance. Rabbi: No heart is as whole as a broken one.

'The cultic animal'

'Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment,..

And the fate of all those zillions of messages and images, in their casual brightness, was to be equalized, to pour forth in an overwhelming glut.. 

The very act of collaging is a city act—the compacting, side by side, of a swarm of different images which, like people in a city, have little or no common history: the essence of the act of collaging is that the things should have no prior relationship to one another; all they have in common is their presence in the same work of art, just as what all city dwellers have in common is their presence in the same city.'

The bawling pressure of its images—rocket, eagle, crowd, street signs, oranges, box, insect, crowds—creates an open-ended inventory of modern life, a series without a final term, the lyrical outpourings of a mind satiated by what was quick, daily, and real. Its subject is glut.'

--Robert Hughes.

~

Anyone who has lived in a big city and been drawn to city life will immediately realize the appeal of those words by Robert Hughes (whose Barcelona and Shock of the New are hugely interesting. His t.v. programmes are also excellent (though the one on Goya was a complete dud).

And the appeal lies precisely in the 'fragmentarines' of city life, the ability to avoid the imposing narratives of religion, village, tradition and the family. Also: there's a hint of something radical about the equality of strangers, something exhilarating about the final victory of nominalism over metaphysics. 'A series without a final term' is a nomadic thought. Finally, to love without a sense of belonging or even a need for belonging: sovereign becoming. Half of modernity is, of course, this relation to the contingent, the fleeting..this desire for escape from 'boxes' (Houdini), to not be named, to fall in love with the person sitting next to you on the tube. 

To put on any other hat is to given in to conservatism, the religious sensibility or, worse, nostalgia for some long-lost unity in your life when there is in fact only bewilderment.

No-one can deny-in so far as they are alive to the times they live in- that there is something liberating about the return to daily, ordinary life..to the notion that there is something spiritual here, right now, right here. 

But I want to question that because all the hype about the transitory, the ridiculous appropriation of the idea of nomadism, is itself a product of a late capitalist mentality. In fact, it might be said that religious fundamentalism is itself the other, bastard half, of that mentality and that the two are profoundly intertwined. Instead of talking about the 'essence' of religious fundamentalism why no talk about it as a historical phenomenon? Nostalgia and tribal belonging, narratives of national and cultural identity are not merely a response to the temporality of modernity; they are its vital 'other'!

The relative stability of family life, gender subservience, 'social capital' and a culture of restraint are all aspects of a life that stands 'outside' of capitalist relations and from which value can be extracted, accumulated (up to a point). Without limits, border controls, the game is over. That 'standing outside' is not mysticism but a mystique constructed by capitalism. 

{Aside: one example that is relevant today: the 'wild man' Ishmael, outside the centrality of history, beyond the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the perfect foil to the reasonableness and gaiety of modern man..of course, at other times, the accusation was precisely the opposite: Muslims and their religion were too worldly, too obsessed, like the Jews, with the law instead of the purity of the heart}. 

We no longer can think of what we hold in common without being labeled reactionary. That's been the remarkable success story of neoliberalism over the last forty years. The equality we esteem is, when you think about it, really the formal equality of the market (that this rests on deep substantive inequalities is nobody's business).

But why the cult of the fragment and not just the fragment? If one thinks about that word then you begin to wonder whether the cult is something that has been cultivated, produced, manufactured. 'Cult' suggests a technique of management: the organization of the image as an endless, flickering and disrupting glow. Quickness, lightness (Calvino) is the story. The end of the story is the story.  

Glut suggests superfluity. We live in an age of excess, which means redundancy as well. There are too many Muslims, too many religious people, too many immigrants and yet there are no more borders! In the old days we could simply expel them, like lepers or mad people, to beyond the city limits. 

It's not just that world has lost its balance-and the impending ecological crisis is surely an indicator of that; it's that the lack of balance is something to be celebrated. Surrounded by a glut of things, things that ultimately bore us to death, the only response is to cheer on the production of more junk, collect it all and represent it, make a cult of it.

Life, Illich once wrote, has become an idol.  

the closing of the western mind

{Photograph courtesy of Tom}

Reading some of the comments in the Guardian after Paris you do wonder if some people will jump on the barbaric acts of that night to promote their own cause, be it the perpetuation of anti-immigration or anti-Muslim hatred. 

Nick Cohen, a nasty piece of work, banging the drums. "We may never be able to feel as free in Paris again." No arguments; pure rhetoric. Feel ? Really? Of course, life does go on in these great cities (New York, Paris, London). People are more resilient and more decent that either Cohen or the nihilists believe.

Gopnik, too, with his platitudes and fuzzy silliness. And there will be more malicious voices from the rabble and from those with influence to follow, people like Hirsi Ali, and other idiots on the far side of the pond.

What you never hear in the press-unsurprisingly-is how so many of these lunatics were supported by the West's allies (Qatar, Saudi, and Pakistan). 

"Crime against humanity". I think this phrase is bandied about without really thinking it through. Is the death of 80,000 Kashmiris a crime against humanity? Is the killing of 2,000 Palestinians (including an estimated 500 children) a crime? Obviously not!

Now, I think it's quite right to say that the 'eastern mind' -or what's left it-is closed and has been for a long time (if such generalisations mean anything). But after the gas chambers, the killing fields, the Trenches, the camps, prisons, dark sites, mass rapes and institutionalized torture is there much point talking about any kind of 'mind'-western or otherwise? 

Scruton has some lovely things to say in his green book but you wonder: he writes about Islam with such confidence. I wonder if he actually knows Arabic. 

~

There must be an end to monotheism, an end to religion, an end to prayer. In short, be like us and then you can bomb other people to smithereens without having to invoke God's name!  

Thoba! The arrogance of the self-styled religious is matched by the arrogance of the self-sty;ed non-religious.

I find it reassuring returning to the more reasonable voices of England (Russell, M.D. Foot, Hoggart).

From the latter's First & Last Things:

Traveling through the mountains of Afghanistan, twenty-five years ago, I remember how "our illiterate Muslim driver wound down the car window so as to allow a wasp to escape unharmed, saying as it made away: "Go with God"...yet still."

Hoggart, an agnostic, seems to have no desire to speak up for or against religion. And why should he?! It's so presumptuous to believe that one can know what is in the hearts of other people, that one can judge whole traditions (let alone the saints and the prophets!).

There is something to be said for this style of thinking. A mind that remains open, flexible and alert, always willing to rethink things in the light of new possibilities. In times of social unrest-or maybe it's just the result of ageing-there is the opposite temptation: to speak with surety, to presume one knows what's best.

You understand why Walser will never be a writer for the times we live in.  

Lost time

We stand, in wonder, and look at the time that has been lost, with empty hands.

~
'The unlimited cannot be attained by organization.'

---Rosenzweig.

What is given, is accepted, with empty hands.

~

What would it mean if that one hour on Sunday morning, the one hour of aimlessness and detachment, was carried over into the week, gave it order?

The small impulse to look around, without the need to grasp at anything. The small pictures we carry with us that we can still hold up to the light. Most questions have ceased to be important, or questions, even. Things grow and decay; the old way of being passes like an evening shadow in the long grass. This, too, is a way, you think. 

'She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way'

Each blue morning you think: someone grows a little, someone else is diminished; some star is on the rise, as someone else, in some distant land, trips and stumbles. There are other stars, at least one.  

If each person's soul is an aspect of revelation, then what of the blank spaces between the words?

`

In the old country we moved into a house with many layers of the past still only half-buried. Great rattling windows and creaking floorboards, the house alive in the silent, small hours of the morning. Old 78s in a dark, dank room under the stairs, crackling voices from a bygone era filling the stunned room. The dark cellar in which we kept cartons of malt vinegar. How did we end up here, of all places? Why this town, where all those who lived there lived as if they had already disappeared or knew someone who had? The old people visiting each other, as if on a last visit, some last rite, as if to say, "yes, now we understand" or "forgive us". November, a time of forgiveness, said the poet. 

Stop. Listen. Look both ways. 

Old Mr Baldwin, born before the War, in thick brown tweeds, a childless teetotaller with boiled sweets in his deep coat pocket for spoiled nephews and nieces. He would sit there, alert, blind to the world, resting both hands on a wooden cane as he listened to stories from a country even older than his, knowing something of what it meant to be stranded.

The Sunday papers sprawled on the floor. You sit arranging silver emblems in your scrapbook as you wait for the roast beef and mint sauce to be done. 

And on faded tapestries, the chill certain sunlight from those childhood hours'. What you write today, is that also not another kind of arrangement of silver, one that has inherited the black? The room filled with warmth, the unplayed piano-apart from 'Once in Royal David's City'- to one side, simply forgotten. The hands, always lacking skill. The slanting rain pelting the rag-and-bone man for the last time, the coal smoke, the crumbing fires. This flame-like image..brief, brief our hearts..and then it is gone.

{words borrowed and mangled from Rilke}

Mir's dust has settled at a distance from her.

And the heart-what of it? What blind shape today?

The sword falls, Mir, and still you stare at her.

~

At a heated meeting yesterday evening. All sorts of accusations.."cultural imperialist".."you've insulted me" etc., etc. You sat and listened, unable to stop yourself smirking..at one stage nearly bursting out in laughter. Just a moment before everyone had somberly been making the point that the university should be about tolerance and pluralism. 

Later on, after the banging on tables and the refusals to speak someone said to me: if you want recognition, acclaim, then you must write, must publish. There is some truth in that. That, after all, is the game you're involved in. But it did make me think: recognition, by who and for what?

Who, exactly, do we want as a witness to our being? We want the gaze of an idol to fall on us, a reassuring false presence, a substitution of word and image, for we lack the strength for anything else.

It was love's strength that brought me to her land


~
There are no words, there are no bridges. No, there are words, there are bridges, but none this hour.

~

The betrayal of religion by the anti-religious is boring (Charlie). The castigation of the mullah and shaikh, the rich and the powerful, by a Muslim is a form of loyalty. 

'His [the shaikh's] heart lunges and grasps: the most openness he can manage is lust'

That we lunge, that we grasp..and for what? 

Purity and danger

The happy face of nomadism is all the French gone to London to be bankers. The wretched face is the poor Roma in their camps.

--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker.

Really like Gopnik, but reading some of his journalistic writing (rather than the books) has, over the last year or so, made we wonder if he isn't really a pompous ass. I think it started with Charlie Hebdo...

There is this disconcerting line, for example:

"This made him [Glucksmann] susceptible at the time of the Iraq war, to a sometimes unrealistic view of the purity of American intentions". 

Now, I have no idea whether that is a fair and accurate characterization or not, but let's say it is. How can someone who is apparently so engaged in political affairs-and I speak as someone who is not- really believe a country (in this case a superpower that has backed all kinds of atrocious regimes) having "pure intentions". It's hard to know if such extravagant sentiments are really Glucksmann's or simply a sloppy bit of thinking by Gopnik himself. 

What makes it all the more difficult to comprehend is that Gopnik says that Glucksmann was essentially concerned about "the rights of Man," the individual, rather than the collective. Why, then, think that a nation could have pure intentions?

But, no, the idea that we must be on our guard against ideal solutions (something that resonates with the last post) is true. But here's the rub: "Be against the bad because you can never be confident of the good" has taken on a sinister tone in our times.

It isn't too far wrong to say that lacking a positive (and shared) conception of the good it is easier to fall back on the idea that hatred and fear can somehow unite the body politic. And for that to be a possibility "we" require a scapegoat, the impure one who must be driven to the city gates and sacrificed. It's as if we've never really overcome our tribal instincts or way of thinking (Walker: "us against them"). Expel the beast, or else we will have to admit that he was in us, all along.

And so it is. Migrants, refugees, losers, scum, dropouts, welfare scroungers, single parents, black people, Muslims..the 'marginal man' reminds us (?..who is "us"?) of the norm. I can't tell you what I'm for, but I can sure as hell tell you what and who I'm against.

To be sure of something in this day and age. Yes, that's what its' really about. 

"Be against the bad" isn't enough and is subject to political and media manipulation. Something that has passed right over Gopnik's head. 

~
There's often something intriguing about someone who swims against the tide. This line from Tim Parks on Ferrante caught my attention:

"And even more I'm astonished that other people are not irritated by this lazy writing". Also takes down Knausgaard and Stephen Gorz's Examined Life. Having only read the latter, I think he's got a point. 

Against dryness

Annette Baier, wise as ever: 

The villain "is the rationalist, law-fixated tradition in moral philosophy, which, given freedom from its religious base breeds multiple and in the end frivolous systems.."

The great danger of the theorizing impulse is that when it alights on the wrong 'object' it ends up tarnishing both it and the human gaze. Theoria, as contemplation of a higher order, took its model from religion. But you doubt if it ever meant that contemplation was possible without understanding, without certain virtues (as if to say that thinking, 'right thinking,' was a mere mechanism of the mind or a movement of disembodied consciousness).

Economics, which pretends to be a science, posits an "ideal world" of perfect competition that is not falsifiable since it is based on certain axioms. It does not claim that this is what the real world is actually like, nor does it say anything about the degree to which the real world approximates the ideal; all it claims is that the construct represents the best of all possible worlds. Of course,that's not the end of it because it also has a strong normative basis to it: this is what the world should be like. Policies and institutions are centred around the notion that people behave in a narrowly predictable way within this model of reality. As a result we grow into the picture we form of ourselves. Which is another way of saying that structuring axioms can have real-world effects. 

The word "best" already hints at that normative pull. For example, to say that economic agents act in a rational way is it once a description of action and at the same time a normative claim: people ought to act in this way. Of course, there can be no further questioning here since there is a circularity to reason: why should we act according to (this particular understanding of) reason? Are there limits to language (and thought)?

The perfectly self-enclosed world of economic theory, then, has had pernicious real-world effects ("he who would play the angel ends up playing the beast"). In a similar vein, utilitarianism, as a theory, has favoured a level of abstraction that many people find unreasonable (if followed to its logical conclusion). It fails to take into account the level of concern we have and it misunderstands the relation we have to the welfare or well-being of other people (this is to put to one side the question of whether utility is the right "evaluative space" in the first place, the right way of thinking about goodness). The distinctness of persons is glossed over, as are specific moral obligations and duties. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the horrors of communism and state planning can be thought of as modern forms of utilitarianism. (For a view opposed to state planning, thinking like a state, see Jame C. Scott on anarchism and, of course, the indispensable Ivan Illich).

I've said it before, but haven't really given sufficient thought to it: what is it about women thinkers/philosophers that so appeals to you? Is it, actually, something specifically to do with gender and its influence on a style of thinking? Does it have something to do with 'relationality', conversation? The ideal thinker in the western tradition is a man who has isolated himself-from the world, other people, and thinks alone. (A. Baier again: commons of the mind) 

Iris M:

"We no longer see man against a background of values, realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will.."

We have never had a "Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn".

A brave naked will. It is hard not to read into that a kind of masculine invulnerability, a lack of any sense of 'connectedness' to the world and other people ("Hell is other people"). The romantic, existentialist hero. Me against the world, my mother, my father, time itself..anything and everything. The world as something that must ultimately be dominated, brought under control, is a stance that relies on and justifies an excessive rationalization, quantification and mathematization. 

And this line, for its startling juxtaposition:

"..a picture of the individual as stripped and solitary: a conception which since Hitler.

~

Roxana drew me to a nice article by Monk...

Is there any other form of understanding apart from the scientific? What type of questions-and what type of answers-do music, friendship, love and art propose?

You suspect a kind of Gnosticism in all this: an impenetrable and isolated self, a brief spark of light in the dark universe of matter. Everything else is 'dead' and follows deterministic laws whilst the ego is a pinpoint of freedom. But even that is rapidly vanishing, now thought to be a mere dream, an illusion, devoid of any real stability, an epiphenomenon of the movement of matter.  

baubles and babble

The gazing ball "represents the vastness of the universe and at the same time the intimacy of right here, right now". 

[And both are remarkably empty right here, right now]

'"This experience is about you," says Koons, your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image."

"Everybody enjoyed Titian."

"Everybody's in this dialogue of sharing enjoyment and pleasure." 

Two thousand years of civilisation and this is what it's come down to? The staged provocation doesn't even provoke any more since it's such old hat. At best it will elicit a smile which, despite everything, cannot hide a sense of pity for this imbecile and the culture that reduces everything to "enjoyment" (as the yanks are wont to say: "Enjoy!"). 

Of course, it's not joy but pleasure-and any kind of undistinguished pleasure (pushpin, poetry..it's only a matter of taste, it is said).

If a single line could encapsulate what it means to live in an era of late capitalism it is this: "your desires, your interests, your participation, your relationship with this image." The cult of the self, except like Oakland, when you get there there isn't any there there. There, there.

I suppose in an age when jokers like Trump and Carson can be the main candidates for the greatest democracy money can buy you shouldn't be too surprised. Koons, as someone said, is the Trump of the 'art world'.

Words of wisdom from the main man:

"So we have to be saying, how do we make them [ISIS] look like losers?" And you thought Walker was dumb?

Another perceptive commentator had this to say: "at least the Romans had orgies to distract them from the decline of their civilisation."

~

The Pope says that the church should shun conservatism an fundamentalism as solutions. Right on. But given the way religion has been reduced to an empty shell you don't see many prospects of that happening. And it remains to be seen whether it can engage with science and liberalism without its inner spirit being completely dissipated.

But these lines struck you nevertheless:

"I would like an Italian church that is unsettled, always closer to the abandoned, the forgotten, the imperfect."

~~

What I believe

There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before
That lights no lamps.

--Larkin.

'The fact that this guy is a contender for POTUS makes the whole country look like a bunch of fucking idiots.'

{--an honest appraisal by someone on CiF, The Guardian} 

~

I don't think Larkin is of much help here. Yes, in a general sense I suppose there's something to the widespread demise of the hold of religion on society, the retreating sea of faith, the roar that is no more. It wouldn't be far wrong to say that what remains when the tide is out are old half-buried structures and memories, remnants of an older way of thinking, half-discarded objects, images, forms-all redolent of a style of thinking, a way of being in the world that has for all practical purposes disappeared. The existence of so much fanaticism really just confirms that-more so, you think, than any degree of atheism or agnosticism.  

At a personal level, though, Larkin doesn't speak to you. I suppose a lack of faith, an awareness that we are entering the evening of the mind, might lead to despair, or existential angst-and either can signal the beginning of something new, perhaps a return of sorts (though you doubt it..once a tradition is broken it can never be patched up). Whatever we are must by necessity speak in the language of our times: older modes of thought can never really be retained, except at a terrible cost. 

With Larkin though-and this may just be the effect of the drab voice-there is a kind of resignation to the fact: 'Death is no different withstood than whined at'. That kind of attitude is pointless, as redundant as a scientific study of religious attitudes, as far off the mark as the belief that science or materialism can ever transcend religion. For anyone who takes religion seriously these changes in society reflect at best a 'climate of opinion' that has helped undermine religious ground. But when all is said and done, something remains..

~

There's a lovely chapter by Richard Hoggart on faith and religion. Hoggart sounds like a kindred soul. There's a confidence in the writing that reflects a confidence in thought. But confidence doesn't mean the absence of scepticism, tentativeness, double-takes-far from it! His writing appeals precisely because it is shot through with tangible, sensuous thought. The question of 'belief' ceases to be a question or, rather, a pressing question. I think that's right. There's something Jewish about it (see Putnam's Guide..).

Religion without God. Not, perhaps, in the non-theistic (Buddhist) sense. But a reflection of what is most important to us (friendship, art, love, morality, music..), things that already carry the sense of religion with them, an idea of first things, obligations, deep commitments, an opening up to other realms, the notion of 'second spaces'.

~

You stood at twighlight with the others, shoulder to shoulder. Above, bats darting just above our heads. The ritual prayer at a funeral is strange, quite different from the daily prayers. In effect, there is hardly any movement of the body (but neither is it a 'quiet moment of personal reflection'). It is still a ritual, communal prayer. But we stand there, in a large unused lawn, the evening coming in, almost motionless, almost at one. There is nothing to say. It doesn't fail to impress you that this is a very old ritual. For how many thousands of years have others stood like this? No-one can stand death, or stand against it. A second-hand thought like this makes little difference. But, still, there is something to be said about participating, even if unthinkingly, in a ritual that helps remember another human being. 

If asked I would remain silent; but if pressed I guess I would say: in human beings (not humanity-since that already strikes a false note and is too bombastic). Or some human capacity. Not for truth-is that really important at the end of the day? Not language or thought or tool-making either. The freedom to believe already suggests a sense of distances and absences that underlie and ground all the others.To look for an independent, defining quality is absurd anyway. That is not to say that there isn't an orthodox set of beliefs that one is supposed to affirm but what, really, is affirmation? What do we truly deny, and what do we truly give our assent to? 

Love: I want you to be.

Doesn't everything ultimately revolve around that? Isn't that, in a simple formula, the history of all that is, and has been, best in humankind?