"All I'm armed with is research"

I read that on someone's application. Their research statement. If I don't do research I will stop being. I kid thee not. In the teaching statement there are choice quotes by Hubbard, Einstein and Gandhi (cue vomit). Still, after looking at the other 18 robots that applied this one still has something left of a human sensibility..ah, almost became a bit nostalgic there for that old-world word: the human.

The robots: technically brilliant, you're sure. But so what? Really, it's that simple. Trust me, R-ko.

The life of the mind! I've never seen a greater collection of sorry losers. It is never asked whether thought delights the mind, or how this terrible hypertrophy of technical 'knowing' and pseudo-scientific intelligence can be brought back to the most basic and fundamental question: how can I be a good person, how do we lead good lives? Still think that what we learn from our parents and from religion outshines this baloney produced by the university. By some orders of degree.

I've also become somewhat irritated by bookish people. Not just the book club type of adolescents. But book people in general. The type who think that they must swoon over Proust or Penelope Fitzgerald or whoever it may be (art as a substitute for religion?). The 'divine' Ms Fitzgerald. Everyone's got to believe in something so don't knock it. But their addiction to books, the fascination with other people's lives, the desire to not live oneself or find one's own way but instead be absorbed by the details of a fictitious character. 

Over the holidays you met a grown woman (yes, I know, it is hard to believe) who traveled all the way down to London from that forgotten country, the north of England, just to see the studios where some of the Harry Potter films were shot. She was almost bouncing in her seat when she explained to me what this meant..no, do you really understand what this means? Why her husband, a mellow looking maulvi, indulges her is one of those mysteries that are best left unexplained.  

[Writers] gave their blood to phantoms, and they incited their readers to do the 
same: to waste their lives by burying themselves in the lives of others, 
with the aggravating circumstance that these others were neither heroes 
nor saints and, besides, never existed. These remarks can be applied to the 
whole of that universe of dreams which is called "culture": flooded by 
literary opium, siren songs, vampirizing and — to say the least — useless 
production, people live on the fringe of the natural world and its 
exigencies, and consequently on the fringe — or at the antipodes — of the 
"one thing needful." The 19th century — with its garrulous and 
irresponsible novelists, its "poetes maudits ," its creators of pernicious 
operas, its unhappy artists, in short, with all of its superfluous idolatries 

and all of its blind alleys leading to despair — was bound to crash against   a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity; thus the First World War .

Harsh stuff, Frithjof, but, yes, I can see where you're coming from.

Take the oil

It is written, in the period of the kali yuga what was hidden will be revealed.

(From Guenon, The Crisis of the Modern World)

A world of exposure and surface appearances (because there isn't anything deeper).

Okay, this is from just this month: 
1. Moody's 'settlement' $864m
2. Deutsche Bank $630 m 
3. BT accounting scandal
4. Rolls Royce, 671 m (sterling).

Now, what was that story again: I've got some wheat, you've got some butter: let's trade.
Are the wheels, then, coming off? I mean, putting to one side the looming environmental crisis (in the UK over 50% of the wildlife has been destroyed over the last 50 years (Moth Snowstorm); for other startling figures see The Sixth Extinction. All of this is before climate change has really kicked in. It is, rather, population growth, urbanization, intensive farming and the growth of middle class lifestyles).

Putting to one side the very serious issues of escalating mental health problems.

What, then? If Pabst and Milbank are to be trusted, there's a crisis of liberalism: liberal democracy and the liberal economic system that is so bound to it. 

~
Yasser: "When does the world end, then?"
Me: It already has, we're just living in the afterglow.
Yasser: "But when?"
Me: Why should I tell you? So that you can make a killing?

Abundance

"A society of performance is replacing a society of discipline"
--Z. Bauman.

"A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul, for men's temporal peace and not their eternal safety; as if God had ordained Kings for no other purpose than to fat up men's souls like hogs and to see that they have their mash.
--Richard Hooker.

There was this line from Thesiger, 'the tougher the conditions, the better the man'. And woman, of course. Paraphrased, of course. From your own relative level of comfort this seems deeply appealing. But I don't think that it's just nostalgia or a false craving for a situation that you, personally, would never be able to endure. What resonates with a lot of people is the artificiality of our wants and desires. Actually, perhaps it doesn't resonate at all and that's precisely the problem? Could it be that in reality we're all quite content either fattened up or dreaming of that state of satiation?

And yet there is always the nagging feeling that the small-scale utopia of limited wants, self-imposed austerity, a republic of needs (Rousseau) allows us to concentrate on the fundamental things in life. Live within yourself, within your means. Don't get ahead of yourself. The heart should follow the foot, the sufis would say.

To modern ears this will, no doubt, sound like a harking back to 'the good ol' days' or, worse, a justification for turning the clock back-if such a thing were possible-to a Talebanesque state of affairs. To those who are liberal minded (or, more accurately, self-proclaimed liberals) it will come across as a clamouring for a return to more conservative times when everyone knew their place (racial purity, class and gender hierarchies), dim-witted small-mindedness (as opposed to the open-mindedness of the cosmopolitan). Isn't Trump, for example, simply a manifestation of a similar longing, a similar distrust of metropolitan elites?

There's a grave danger of relating everything to that great buffoon. But you can see the general point: an end to multiculturalism and a return to simpler times, the undifferentiated conditions of small-town or rural life. 

What is missed in all this? That there's an anarchic possibility in the small-scale option; that a life lived in a particular place, with specific attachments, independent of the state, untouched by the frenzy of the media and market deceptions, is not necessarily a claustrophobic one. In fact, quite the opposite: if there is joy in austerity (Aquinas?) then it can open out to something else, wider vistas. And in contrast, it is restless desire for more and more commodities, 'experiences', that is stifling...a slave of one's desires? Hell hath no limits. The notion that we could possess happiness, time, as if we owned them, had a right to them instead of recognizing them for what they are, pure gifts, is one of the deepest sources of our contemporary illusions.

Abundance, in a different sense -and perhaps one could call it a Qur'anic sense- would mean something quite else: there is enough for everyone right now. Abundance is not a utopian fantasy but a present possibility that is warped by capitalism and the capitalistic mentality. Not only does the system produce inequalities that generate genuine scarcity; it also forces us to think of scarcity exclusively in terms of commodities (Iliich). Furthermore, by setting up the notions of "mine" and "thine" (exclusive property rights) it helps drown out the idea of a common good and the substantive notion of the person that is connected to it. 

K

Towards the end of this stunning album it's as if Cave is singing himself back into the world after going through hell.

Diversity

Mainstream economic models have sacrificed too much realism at the altar of mathematical purity. Their various simplifying assumptions have served aesthetic rather than practical ends. As a profession, economics has become too much of a methodological monoculture. And that lack of intellectual diversity cost the profession dear when the single crop failed spectacularly during the crisis. This monoculture, it is argued, has also narrowed the economics curriculum in universities. This has generated an ever greater focus on the mathematical gymnastics of optimising models and too little focus on the everyday aerobics of how the economy functions. Accompanying this has been neglect of disciplines that abut and illuminate economics: economic history, moral philosophy, money and banking, radical uncertainty, non-rational expectations. In short, neglect of the very things that makes economics interesting and economies important. [xv]

Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, Nov. 2016


Today’s professional economists, by contrast, have studied almost nothing but economics. They don’t even read the classics of their own discipline. Economic history comes, if at all, from data sets. Philosophy, which could teach them about the limits of the economic method, is a closed book. Mathematics, demanding and seductive, has monopolized their mental horizons. The economists are the idiots savants of our time.

Robert Skidelsky

Nov. 2016

"When I open my wallet
to show my papers
pay money
or check the time
of a train
I look at your face

The flower`s pollen
is older than the mountains
Aravis is young
as mountains go

The flower`s ovules
will be seeding still
when Aravisthen aged
is no more than a hill.

The flower in the heart`s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

--- John Berger.

R.I.P.

The mountains appear to be solid, are really flowing and will one day float straight out of here ( an old Qur'anic theme). Nothing really lasts. Capstones shift. Even power, which to the untrained eye, seems to be stable, immovable, will fall away and crumble. Which is why resistance and hope must go on.

What lasts for longer is invisible...the spirit, love, friendship. The force- and it isn't a mechanical force- lives through us. By that, he means, we do not possess it. It comes our way, if we're lucky, if we're receptive to it. 

What is the flower in the heart?

Who is the flower...

Our own lives, our own heart, as hard as stone or as ancient as the golden pollen. A receptacle for the appearance of an image, a face. Mine or yours?

Stranded

"The mind and the world jointly determine the mind and the world."

Now that the mind is in retreat, faltering, stumbling at every juncture, the world stumbles, is out of joint.

It was as if the fish suddenly got scared. Of what?

The contract between the word and the world is strained. the future tense has been drained of meaning. We live, when all is said and done. We live, when all is said and done, in a 24/7 world. 

~~~
Is the only permanence now the constant flow of unjoined moments, the perception of a stream of moments, strung together loosely?

In the brilliant early morning light one can detect a hint-more than a hint-of spring in the air. It is never this clear this time of the year. A few labourers, some waist down in a ditch, work with such dedication they would, you imagine, carry on working even if the whole world around them collapsed. Shovels, spades, pick-axes, hammers. Next to them an elegant gardener, wearing a thin jumper, sits on his haunches and vigorously turns over the soil in a garden bed with a small trowel. The tool seems to be a mere extension of his forearm. The soil is thick, full, wondrously dark in colour and texture. 

What are they all preparing for? 

~~~
Ongietan sceal gleaw hælehu gæstlic bið 
·onne ealre ·isse worulde wela  weste stondeð ...

In his own world

I
In his own world.

And not too bad off. Just the way it is. 

for a long time 
and chance had been toying with them

Winter notes: He was in his own world. Always was, from childhood, which he never really left. For others, every beginning was also an ending. 

I suppose you think this is about you. 

He wants to and does not want to sleep. Zeus! The cells in the body stay startled, dazed-awake, through the early hours, and the floating grey half-light, as if covered by a shroud, or lost in gentle summer shadows, ready for some recollection to march into their territory. 

He was all flesh and blood for a few minutes, singing, shining, silver-back in the dark; and then he was all mind. 

Drift, drift, sail away from here. There are socks on the floor, frozen into shape. The mirror is still and lonely. On the table a large and bright golden bowl with packets of medicine in it.

In the morning he saw the moon, a large and pale ball, aloof, fragile, ephemeral, more beautiful than the green and blue world below it. The moon was a door, the memory of a fire, a houri. 

A child somewhere (and therefore everywhere) asks: "Who broke it?". Does he ever grow out of that sense of brokenness?

"I'm quite happy in the world I'm in," he said. "There is no need to disturb me".

She texts him and says, "You are angry. Are you an angry person?"

He says, calmly, trying to deflect all attention from himself, "Look at my words."

Last Acts

"You ain't no Mother Teresa, motherfucker," said the Russian ambassador.

"We didn't start the fire; it was always burning," said Mother Teresa. She secretly wished Billy Joel and not Dylan would have got the damned Nobel.

"You're just a bit of white trash," he continued.

"Uptown Girl..I've never had a backstreet guy", said the ambassador. 

Sensing his moment: "Take a chance on me. I'm still free," he replied.

~~~
I heard that, on a day when a car bomb killed three Americans, Paul Bremer's last act as Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to issue laws making it illegal to drive with one hand on the steering wheel or to honk a horn when there was no emergency.

--Eliot Weinberger 

I heard the rebels were just a pack of towel-heads from the desert, the remnants of a remnant that we whipped together. We, boss. I heard the Great Man say: Your enemy's enemy ain't your enemy. I see another axis of evil brewing before ma eyes. I aints got me no shame so I gonna call them out, good and proper.(Boss tell me wez got to fit the Yellowskins in there somehow) 

~
I heard these foreign names mentioned in a pub quiz. Do they mean anything to you: My Lai, Faullujah, Shatila, Hiroshima, Abu Ghraib ? Here's a question you won't hear in the pub..this is a tricky one, I must say. Even I was confounded for a while. How many people have been killed in the DRC? We said in unison: Democratic! And then we laughed. In any case, there's a repeat of the classic sketches from The Two Ronnies on the box tonight. Who's on who's side? It's all so confusing! 

Cities of Salt

It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif [Cities of Salt]..appears to be ..insufficiently westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face..or developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest..There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure-of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstane..which has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle.

--John Updike.

Here's Ghosh's radical point: it is the individualism of the market (and economic theory, I would add) that has made it so hard to think about a solution to the climate change crisis. And the background culture of the arts and literature is similarly geared towards the individual! 

The 'individual moral adventure' sounds like an advertisement for the frontier capitalist. Anyone who doesn't quite buy into this model is automatically consigned to the dustbin of history, relegated to the catch-all category: "the backward".

It's not just that this individual has resolutely stood against nature; it's that he's tried to control, tame, subdue and exploit it. 

Social media and the social sciences. The irony being: there is no social! Only narcissism on the one hand, and methodological individualism on the other. And you can't but help think that this detachment, this "second turning inwards" has helped narrowly define freedom in its modern sense: Freedom from nature; and freedom from the social are then inextricably intertwined with one another. 

Repeat after me:

I am an individual.
I am an individual.
I am an individual. 

Misc.

It is December and still there is no sign of any rain. The fog descends and engulfs us all, hushing the world. Out of nowhere, a red traffic light. By the side, some poor people on bicycles, wrapped in thick brown shawls. The fog is so dense that under a tree it collects into large drops of rain and clatters down on the rooftop; the dark space under the tree now resembling a small tropical island, with leaves strewn all over the floor...

~
On a day spent on the road you look in your rear view mirror, away from the sea of traffic, the river of lights, blues and golds registering a presence in the dusk of our lives. As if, as if looking at another, bright, clear world that has all of a sudden come into focus. The points, the fragments of a life momentarily resolved in a central image. With what eye do you hold such a picture? It is that eye, that gaze, that can never be seen. Who sees me now?   

If one's temperament the whole day long is affected by the quality of your sleep then the presence of a single mosquito at night can affect what you will feel and say and think during the day. Which made me think of just how susceptible the inner workings of the mind are to 'external' events. We assume our inner self is sealed in-a legacy of Descartes?- but the reality is that nature, biding its time, will come back to haunt us.

~
Reading Amitav Ghosh's fascinating The Great Derangement . One point that struck you was this: fiction has great difficulty taking in climate change because its moral imagination was shaped, from the beginning, under conditions in which bourgeois certainties were esteemed. Uncertainty is reduced to calculable risk. Narrative is no longer a sequence of strange events (that category is safely placed in sci-fi or Gothic), tales of the unexpected; instead what you have is a lot of padding, "fillers", the stuff of ordinary life. Is that why literature is comforting?  

~

There is no land in this land. 

To depart, through the chosen mirror. The last sigh on its face, the breath of the other world already there, the flash of burnt lights all around. The sallow flesh, pitiful eyes. Already traveled much, already seen the sights, floated down this very same river as a child and a young man. Where does it go? When I look back something in me shines. There were other times, looking out of the splintered windows. For a day, is that all there was, a final gesture in the slender light? 

The floodwaters in the basement, the weeds flowing indoors. The shrines of the world will continue, perhaps, even though the hands have no forgiveness, even though the word will be in no-one's heart. Down the last steps of the world to the hallowed river, asleep, awake, my home a dream.

“Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” 
---Lucretius.

You wake in the small hours and wonder how long you've been sleeping for. You hear voices, children's voices off in the distance, out there,..is this a dream, your own childhood re-emerging from the time when you would play in the dark and run home, down from Victoria Park, past the warm and safe houses, your heart in your mouth, the street lights' downward glow making the world lighter, more artificial. The empty streets with only a faint whiff of salt and vinegar in the air coming from the Cypriot chippy (Steve, who always gave you extra chips, would kill himself a few years later).

The voices, strangled now, almost metallic, coming to you from a great distance, like those of children in a swimming pool, the words mixed with the dappled light, broken like the waves that slap against the side of the pool. Life moves into another life but some shadow of all that was remains, always remains.

Drift

The fair wind failed. The wind dropped. Winds were unfavourable 
straightaway. The favourable wind dropped and they were beset by 
storms so that they made little progress. Then the wind dropped and 
they were beset by winds from the north and fog; for many days they 
did not know where they were sailing. The fair wind failed and they 
wholly lost their reckoning. They did not know from what direction. 
Driven here and there. The fog was so dense that they lost all sense 
of direction and lost their course at sea. There was much fog and the 
winds were light and unfavourable. They drifted far and wide on the 
high sea. Most of those on board completely lost their reckoning. 
The crew had no idea in which direction they were steering. A thick 
fog which did not lift for days. The ship was driven off course to 
land. They were tossed about at sea for a long time and failed to 
reach their destination. We embarked and sailed but a fog so thick 
covered us that we could scarcely see the poop or the prow of the 
boat








Then the wind ddroppe and they were beset by w inds from then 
orth and fog for manyd ays they did not know where they were 
sailing Thef air wind f ailed and they wholly l ost their reck their 
reckoning did not not know from what direction D riven here and 
there The f og was sodense that they l ost all ss ense of dirrrtion and 
l ost thr course at sea There was much fog and the w inds were light 
and unf and unfavourable They driftedf ar and wide on the high sea 
Mo stof those onboard completly l ost l ost l ost their reckoning Th 
ec rew had no idea in which direction they were ststeering A thick 
fo g which d i d n ot l ift for days The sh ip was driven offf course tol 
and They were ossted about astea for a longt ime and f iled tor each 
their destination We mbarkt and sailed but a fog so th but a fog so 
th but a fog so th th th th thik k overed us that we could scarcely see 
the poop or the prow of the boa t 








str  ght w   Th  f  r w nd f  l d Th  w nd dr pp d Th  f v  r bl  
w nd dr pp d  nd th   w r  b s t b st rms s  th t th   m d  
l ttl  pr gr ss Th n th  w nd dr pp d  nd th   w r  b s t by w nds 
fr m the n rth  nd f g f r m ny d ys th y d d n t kn w wh r  th y 
w r  s  l ng Th  f  r w nd f  l d  nd th y wh ll  l st th  r r ck th  r
r ck n ng Th y d d n t kn w fr m wh t d r ct  n D r v n h r   nd 
th r  Th  f g w s s  d ns  th t th y l  st  ll ss  ns  f d rrrt  n  nd 
l  st thr c  rs  t s   Th r  w s m ch f g  nd th  w  nds w r  l ght 
 nd unf  nd  nf v   r bl  They dr ft df  r  nd w d   n th  h gh s  
M  st  f th se   nb  rd c mpl tly l  st l  st l  st th  r r ck n ng Th  
 c r w h d 

n   d    n wh ch d r ct  n th y w r  stst  ring   th ck f  g wh ch d  
d n  t l  ft f r d ys The sh  p 

w s dr ven  fff c  rse t l  nd Th y w r   sst d  b    t  st    f r  
l ngt  me and f  led t r   ch th  r 

ث فاير وعند فيلد

aaaaaaaaaaaaaथे फेअर विंड फैलेड 
aaaaaaaaaaaaaथे फेअर विंड फैलेड
aaaaaaaaaaaaaथे फेअर विंड फैलेड
aaaaaaaaaaaaaथे फेअर विंड फैलेड

We thought of all the generations gone
Like that aaaa migrants, fugitives.

The smell of smoke takes memory by surprise
And we become as children 

the children

उन्थिन्किन्ग

Unthinking,

their shadow lengthened and cast away 

(Nemerov, more and less)

It is the end of November,
and still there is light in the sky. Old time still read off my inner wrist, holds me still. I only have to close my eyes to remember another country with its old stone walls cast in deep shadows. A place of dead languages, an old way of speaking, that I carry with me as I drift into the new year.

The Last Days of Mankind

This picture, via Tom.

If this photograph was in black and white there would be no way of telling how old it is. The gestures of the body are ancient. 

I

~~~

I found a poem for _

[you]

Fox. 

Because the past is long right now. And we're always disappearing. Do you remember?
It's in a book, trapped, planning its escape. This isn't it. When I have the time. 

~

I said to D: Your mind is all over the place; if you could just concentrate on one thing you could achieve greatness. D said: There's no time for that, it's over. The moment was there, then it was gone.

So, I said, Your mind has been all over the place; if you just could have concentrated on one thing you could have achieved greatness. The moment was there, then it was gone.

~~

I found Paradiso to be a short but profound book. People often recommend a book by saying "check this out" but, sometimes, a book can check you out! Whereas Fermor, with all his sublimely beautiful prose, writes of religious experience as an outsider looking in, Gillian's book is quite the opposite. 

Her other work you couldn't make head or tail of. But here there's a kind of simplicity, one borne, you suspect, of the pressing need to avoid the dross and get to the heart of matters. This is a short book but in truth it is a long one. Not something that one can honestly say one has 'finished'. There are words and passages that you have to let sink in. I suppose you'll either be instinctively drawn to it or you won't.

For example:

Thou has covered me in my mother's womb.

This Hebrew news holds me and lets me go free, whereas the Greek aspiration to return the soul to its divine source fetters me for aeons in a body cursed and to be abandoned. 

Here there is a deep sense of trust, an acceptance of mystery. I found that line from Psalm 139 moving.

Elsewhere in the book there is reference to the biblical:

All souls are mine.

I don't know what the traditional way of reading this is.In one sense I'd like to believe it is an affirmation of divine unity. What, then, are our souls but distant, faded, November morning mirages? But I'd also like to read it from a radical perspective: basic equality and the lack of distinctions, as if to say: why do we continue to think in terms of privilege, hierarchy, the rich and the poor, the blessed and the damned, Muslim and non-Muslim?

There is a remarkable serenity to the writing (especially when she discusses her cancer) but also a sense of joy, new beginnings (when she describes a Jewish wedding).

On Augustine: to lead a whole life of integrity and brokenness. That was a stunning thought..what would it be like to live a life of brokenness?  

After the storm

~~~~~~~

Is this the way things end? We have lived on the body of the earth and scarred her with our ultraviolence. There was a tremendous silence on the face of the Earth once. You can't but help wonder if it will return to silence soon.  
~~~~~~

Old Friend

Old friend now there is no one alive
who remembers when you were young
it was high summer when I first saw you
in the blaze of day most of my life ago
with the dry grass whispering in your shade
and already you had lived through wars
and echoes of wars around your silence 
through days of parting and seasons of absence
with the house emptying as the years went their way
until it was home to bats and swallows
and still when spring climbed toward summer
you opened once more the curled sleeping fingers
of newborn leaves as though nothing had happened
you and the seasons spoke the same language 
and all these years I have looked through your limbs 
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world.

--W.S. Merwin, Elegy for a Walnut Tree.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Old friend, I saw you in a dream, face to face, my other self. The hidden, brighter life I've lost. Is this the way we see the world now, in dreams? Our face, only recognizable in the night. The soul is not a many-roomed house, but a river in which your dark image flows.

[Fall..
... 
..

why don't you?]]

You left me a black key on a latch..for whose heart? The heart, a wooden block, memory escaping its inner rings. You told me I'd find bridges within myself.  With my old way of being none would lead to you. You brought an axe with you, confident as always. Easier done than said, you imperiously reckoned. You tipped it over with a finger but, just then, the open thing caught you with a single splinter. 

{A single line, a fragment, by Supervielle}

Or, as I remember it, memory escaping the inner rings:

"Was the act of dreaming synonymous with the act of dismantling the block? I don't know how many pieces the block was divided into. The task took all night. Not usually dismantled but rather 'broken away' or 'split open'. Perhaps each piece of the block was unwound like a cloth from her whole body? All I know is that the process proceeded by stages and that each stage meant there was less block left. Eventually there was none. All that was not her made space for her."

---John Berger.