The Tree of Life

Every tree can vary from year to year.

A Comice pear may take many weeks to ripen in store, but it is at its peak for only a day. Perfection in the Grieve is almost as transient.

But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times.

The fact that two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean they do not share a same mechanism of need, a same set of deeper rules [words to ponder if you're still hooked to Shia/Sunni distinctions].

Ordinary experience is made up of a complexity of strands, past memories and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history, hopelessly beyond science's powers to analyse.

All the richness of our personal experience derives from our synthetic and 'confused' consciousness [Thomas Browne here: "we live in distinguished, diverse and divided worlds"..there is always a 'wild', ec-centric element].

A way of knowing and experiencing and enjoying outside the major modes of science [and the academy].

[Only the scientist, the idol worshiper or the philosopher tries to escape the 'green chaos' of now and fix reality in immutable categories. Rosenzweig: Wonder!]

Possessing or wanting to gain too much knowledge can produce ignorance.

--words by John Fowles, The Tree.

A few small notes for Celia

I imagine Transtromer looking down at the world from a height. Not a great height (he still sees the human) but from a height nevertheless (like some minor 'god'). There he is, looking quietly out at the world from his top floor apartment, insulated from the passing of time, Schubert playing in the background, the notes emerging mysteriously...

Ted Hughes in the Bestiary is something of a different order, a different species; a lost Shaman, immersing himself in the very first elements of the world, mingling with the animal-soul to name it.

Robert Walser. Seelig's Walks with. 

Love the informal, personal tone of the writing here. A bit like the way a private journal is not supposed to see the light of the day and cuts you off from the hurly-burly of the world. At one point Walser says,

one cannot always walk in the light. 

And there is this pervading sense of the importance of letting nature run its course running throughout the book. Perhaps this explains Walser's 'greyness', his 'neutrality', his desire to be as small as a Chinaman, as soft as ash. I don't know why, but Walser always reminds me of Argon from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table. He himself is one of the 

quiet, inconspicuous characters that keeps humanity together. 

that he talks about.

is it not lovely that in our existence so much remains strange and unknown..

He praises Keller's Green Henry quite a lot but not much otherwise. I'm sure anton has read it. Roxana too, perhaps.

“Indeed,” Walser writes about ash, “if one goes into this apparently uninteresting subject in any depth there is quite a lot to be said about it which is not at all uninteresting; if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it possible to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. Could anything be more compliant and more tolerant? Hardly. Ash has no notion of character and is further from any kind of wood than dejection is from exhilaration. Where there is ash there is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash, and you will barely notice that you have stepped on anything.

By chance-was it chance?- I stumbled across the book at readings a few days ago but put it back on the shelf in favour of James C. Scott's Against the Grain. 

By chance-was it that? -I watched an hour of Into Great Silence. A slow but strangely compelling film. 

~~~

Thought for the day. How strange we are, and how strange we are to ourselves. What is this estrangement we carry with us and glimpse in the early morning light?

The sheer variety is breathtaking. There was a Hitler and there was a Bach (why contrast evil with beauty and not the good?). In each human language there were hundreds of ways of describing and thinking about 'looking'. And then there were myriad languages, more spoken than read, each giving its own inflection to different ways in which to look: gaze, glance, stare...

And what of the ways of not looking? Who sees my face today and is it lovingly?

{M wanted to see D lovingly, not accurately}

And K?

I look for you; look out for you, look with you...

~~~

The sheer abundance of life, whittled to the bone.  

~~~

A line from Augustine, cited in Oliver O'Donovan's Common Objects of Love, that struck you as being immensely beautiful: 

My weight is my love, by which I am drawn in whichever direction I go

~~~

The annual book fair was immensely disappointing. Too many books and pamphlets on Islam. A slight glimmer of hope in that a copy of Braudel was found but I don't have the time for such luxuries. In any case, it would have to wait in queue behind Pocock's Machiavellian Moment (still not finished) and Ronald Blythe's delightful Akenfield.

~~~

Well, how have you been C? What a pleasant surprise to hear from you!! Where have you been all this time? 

Interiors

and

~~~

There is neither the east nor the west; only the centre.
Not even that, perhaps, for what remains is a nostalgia for the inside.

Rings and Books

Rings and books is a wonderful (and short) essay. Will write some notes tomorrow. Did remind me of old England, a particular sensibility that is wrapped up in the language itself.

Todorov. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

An invisible bird flies over,
but casts a quick shadow.

What is the body? The shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains 
the entire universe..

Do you think that i know what I'm doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it's writing,
or the ball can guess where it's going next.

--Rumi.

The other Foot

"Human nature is a complex thing, and understanding it will take all the resources of the sciences – natural and social – as well as history. But the significance of those enquiries will lie ultimately in what they can say about the kinds of lives that might be good for us. And to know that, we must ask: who are we? What do we need – for ourselves, and from each other? And what must we be like to get it?"

From a lovely short piece on Philippa Foot (aeon).

This was from an excerpt from Mary Midgley's memoir:

Rings and Books’ focuses on bachelorhood and the concept of adolescence, but her real concern is with the kind of isolation from close community with others that has been a feature of many philosophers’ lives. Such isolation, she suggests, generates philosophy which is egoistic, fantastic and solipsistic – ‘flight from the world’ is typical of adolescence but usually people are forced to, or choose to, return to the world through the close relationships, friendships and community they form with others. In such a context, she suggests, the unreality of adolescent thought might give way to a more practical, imaginative and realistic way of thinking.

Now, there's something I'd really like to think about here: women writers/thinkers...

From a Guardian article, 2005, she writes,

"I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder."

Outlooks

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

--Brecht.

Who is the cause of Sedition?

'The men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen..the lords, and I cannot tell who; men that have no name because they are doers in all things that any gains hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly void of God's fear. Yea, men that live as if there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.'  

--Crowley, 1550.

Munch.
Knausgaard

Political possibilities were opened up or narrowed down by different ways of organizing the flow and concentration of energy, and these possibilities were enhanced or limited by arrangements of people, finance, expertise and violence that were assembled in relationship to the distribution and control of energy. 

--from Carbon Democracy.

~~~

I guess you know just how huge a fan I am of Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree. Breathtakingly good. So good, in fact, that most of what else you listen to just doesn't seem real in comparison. So, it was with great disappointment that I read his recent statement. Ken Loach responded:

"Nick Cave has a choice, either to stand with the oppressed Palestinians or the Israeli state which denies them their human rights. He chooses to stand with the oppressor.”

That, I think, is a fair assessment.

~~~

Something began me and it had no beginning; something will end me and it has no end.

--Carl Sandburg. 

How the mighty (may) have fallen

That he had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned," he told French magazine L’Obs.

--Bernard Godard on Tariq Ramadan.

~~~

I want to stress that these are, at the moment, only accusations and not facts. I'm not usually given to speculation but if true then this is pretty damning and horrific. For the people involved but also-and I'm not sure if it's appropriate to talk about the social ramifications right now- it means the end of one of the moderate voices on Islam in Europe. Of course, if the allegations are true that doesn't really matter. What does is that those in power are exposed. Ramadan may or may not be guilty but it is clear to me that men with money/power can be manipulative.

In a limited sense I've seen it at my university with male colleagues cultivating a 'manly' persona (in some cases having affairs with students. That's been rare but it has happened). I think the more pervasive expression of authority is to have young women hang around you. What a sad, sad state you have to be in if you want to have young women, half your age, look up to you). A more typical Lahori/Punjabi thing is to buy yourself what used to be called 'a keep' in the old days (in short, a mistress or a 'second wife' or a high-end prostitute, basically). And I've seen that, too.  

What is it a sign of? Some deep-rooted, primordial male need to dominate? A need to collect 'trophies'. Of course, I'm suspicious of such ideas. They don't mean that much. What difference does it make if these attitudes developed over the last ten thousand years of agriculture or were there right from the beginning? Or is it more specifically to do with the age we're at (since it does seem to be a particularly middle-aged thing I include myself by saying 'we')?

But back to Ramadan. Not that you've read any of his stuff but he always did come across as suave, gentle, sincere, and liberal-or at least open-minded. My sister even interviewed him for a newspaper a few years ago. Must dig that up.

        

Learning how to think/die

I haven't read Alan Jacobs's book but there was a nice review of it by Chad Wellmon. How to think alone is not really thinking. 

~~~
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a fascinating book (very much in tune, you suspect, with the Dark Mountain Project). A one line summary: we're fucked.

Any book that starts with these lines has me hooked:

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.

--Spinoza, Ethics, IV. 67  

This incredible sense of an ending of the immense beauty, wonder and joy that we once felt for the natural world. 

Grey whale
Now that we are sending you to the End.

The slow world of the whale, existing in another dimension to ours, out of time. None of our clocks are in sync. Time flies. 

How long have the whales been here? Humans, who once, we would like to believe, existed within nature, or at least in a more gentle relationship with her, has finally worked it out; the self-centre narcissistic species has decided how it can go it alone. 

Nature, in order to survive, must be 'killed' (that sounds like a bad joke from Vietnam but once you see the same destructive impulses at play you'll get where this is coming from). The connection between war and the environment: scorched earth policy. Shock and Awe. 

Nature is now an ecosystem service, valued at around 33 trillion dollars (roughly twice the annual world GDP). So, it's not in our interest to destroy our home (of course, if the benefits outweigh the costs then it is!). But in the process we will kill nature anyway (now priced, and spliced, the subject of speculation, 'investment'..you can be sure the MNCs won't be too far away..follow the money, as the old saying goes). Nature is big business. Instead of the 'free gift' of capitalism its value is now internalized.

And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

The Great Thinning is upon us. The Sixth Extinction. See E. Kolbert and M. McCarthy for the stats. It's horrific. And there's a built-in momentum what with urbanization and the relentless imperative of economic growth that shows no sign of waning. The increase in the numbers of people in the middle class as well as farming practices mean that the chances of limiting this to 2 C are thin (see Kevin Anderson).

~~~

I can't really write about the claims of sexual abuse that seem to be part of the daily news nowadays. Would require some serious reflection and not just a small note like this one. But Tariq Ramadan? Really? 

Well, not too surprising (if true). It's great that these stories are coming out and I'm pretty sure they're just the tip of the iceberg (violence and abuse are probably a lot more widespread than many would like to believe). But I'm a bit jaded when it comes to the question of whether this will fundamentally alter things. As long as the power structures remain in place and as long as there isn't a change in heart expect more of the same: war citizenship. 

In some sense, this is really just a footnote to what was said above: there's a deep sickness in the heart of man (read: heart of men).  





    

Three degrees

k

There is no poetry here, no words or art that might reconcile, bring comfort. No west wind that harbours the thought of spring deep within its cold gaze.

There is only withdrawal, sheltering, a kind of bewilderment, a startled recognition of what our hands have sown. It's too late, the dark forests are dwindling, the Roding runs dry by the hour waiting for the moon to turn, and with it the invisible weight that will reach our shores, leading to a surge and the flooding of the land, with no renewal on what was leased to us.

The brief life we have, only artificially illuminated by electric lights. Myself, a flickering 'I', a blue light in the glass.    

Every grain of soil of known lineage, well connected...

But us, our loves, dust. All our bridges floating now. Turn your face to me in the grey morning. We are shades of one another. This, the only breath we have so let the weight grow in your heart. Think now. Settle your heart. If I could name it, I would. 

Everyone is on the move today. Perhaps they've seen the future, a future with no past. You, with your Jewish hat, are in prime position to find your way back. 

If nothing shines no more then is it only the memory of star that holds you rapt? What brings me this way today? And now, on this dark journey, carried by silver and star and reflection.

In the time that remains, do we seek forgiveness and who would listen? Why, raven, is your tongue so bittersweet?

{words by Anselm Hollo and Ted Hughes}

And then nothing happened

Scruton writes, very interestingly, about the impossibility of mourning. Of 'closure', as the Americans would say. The specific case of Germany and Richard Strauss' Metamorphosen. 

Mourning as a way of accepting-somehow coming to terms with-loss. But what if that's not possible and there's no way, no human way, of making sense of it? And there's no sense, partly, because one is at fault, one is already guilty. How can you get out of yourself, so to speak, so to speak? Obviously we cannot forgive ourselves and only the victims-that much maligned word- truly can. 

There is almost something absurd in the idea that we can forgive ourselves. But in general parlance we do say: "don't go too hard on yourself" (or "don't beat yourself up about it").

Here, though, this is different because of the enormity of what was done. What category of thought or feeling would allow us to move on? Isn't the sign of us wanting to do so simply another aspect of our failing?

Plenty Coups:

At the reservations time has come to a standstill. There's no way of getting around this. Conceptually, he's all at sea. There was no way of preparing himself or his people for the loss of meaning, the loss of even an appropriate way of thinking and feeling about loss.

And then nothing happened.   

~~~

Hiding Behind the Screen. 

Not shyness (or not just that). The inability to encounter the real world. The construction of that inability. On the internet a friend can be discarded at the click of a button. How convenient! If you're not enjoying the conversation or are switched off by it then you can, literally, switch off (and you assume, incorrectly as it turns out, that there are no costs involved).

{This is not about me R, just in case you were wondering}

And, also, you simply 'collect' friends on the net. Tally them up. What do you really know of someone if you haven't seen their face or heard their laughter? And an online friend is just another distraction, another form of entertainment to keep you from being bored to death. Of course, there's the added thrill of anonymity when chatting with or engaging with someone of the opposite sex. What is that charm of it, though? Is it that one is free of responsibility, accountability? A bit like when you go to a hotel on holidays..or the Ibiza experience..you can be no-one and let go of all the false images of yourself that you've carried around with you for so long. No more social constructions, just words and still images. Just a body, just a mind. Never the whole person, as you simply are, warts and all. 

The narcissism of investing so much of your time online. Of course. 

{This is not about me, just in case you were wondering}.

But how do you interact with real people or the world around you if you've been conditioned to responding (or not responding) to online friends?



    



   

Misc.

One of the above was valued at $450 million. I'm sure you can guess which.

There's something to be said about preservation here-the desire to keep things from the distant past intact. The defacement of the sleeping Buddha is a tragedy (being 1,700 years old makes it the oldest of its kind). Horrible as that it is there's still some hope in the fact that it has been restored and that it will (hopefully) be exhibited. 

But the sale of the Leonardo is also a symbol of the astronomical wealth of some people, the vast inequalities of late capitalism, and not simply bout the love of art. In effect, the commodification of art is what this is all about. Will the painting be viewed by the public or will it just be an investment, part of someone's private collection?  

~~~

Point of order.

Do rats in a maze follow a strict map (if rewarded then turn right; if not, keep going straight) or do they form a complete cognitive map? And humans? Does reliance on GPS result in us losing that map since, like the rat we simply turn left or right depending on what the electronic voice tells us to do? And does our ability to notice the environment we live in subsequently dwindle? How will we ever find home?

~~~

How to Think.

Not in isolation but with others, for others. This seems like a radical overturning of centuries of a false sense of autonomy. An autonomy, incidentally-and to join up the dots-that is leading to more reliance on machines.

~~~

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.

--Machiavelli.

I come from another planet, another time, another epoch.
--Milosz, more or less

Of course, everyone lives in the times they find themselves; lives well or badly, more or less.

What is this world but the six yards before me-and the nothing beyond. This patch of land at my feet, dry as ice. Beyond the perimeter wall the sound of a lone rickshaw, out there in the sea with its single soft white light. The light so dim now that it's almost grey. The traffic lights flickering senselessly, saying to itself, "no one obeys". 

Inside, inside the calls of crows in the windowless branches and the sound of the leaves being swept by the other ghosts, as if they were making grand preparations for the arrival of a special guest.    

Rivers.

And our lives are full of rivers.

North. Winter river. The Roding down to its last thoughts. The frozen reeds like spears in its heart. Stones hold the memory of summers gone.

Where were you born, R? I don't think I ever asked you. Under which uncontrollable star?

Stay a little longer!
I know you have other faces to see.

There is a clock in every room; each strikes a different hour. So it is, the guide of the time/ is broken up. Find centre.

Sit in the morning gloom, book in hand, soft pencil dormant; the cat has awakened as I stumble in the half-light. I am fearful of the cat. A Sicilian breakfast beckons but nothing can move me: here I am, unknown by own heart/I lay there in my shadows.

The moon is somewhere. The sun is somewhere. Earth has lost its proportions. This is like Space 1999. Out there, the seas, the night, the night in the sea. And a grain of rice lit by the moon.

The winds of the comet 
are like a whirlwind.

The silent trail of a life.

~~

At the small oblong patch of gravely land they called "a beach" we set our towels down. Stepping into the sea. Is there anything more pathetic than a grown man standing in the sea, his jeans rolled up to his knees, trying to keep his balance against the sway of the world? Little r drops a unique shell and then scrambles desperately to find it. "It is gone, you have to let it go". She pauses to think and then looks again. Everything is in motion. The moon draws the shell to itself.

~~

I keep a picture of you with me. There is something dark/in this bright sun.  

Do you know how to sing?

In a foreign land the snow falls. Introductions are made. But neither you or I will be here in this cosmos. But now, now...

Love, morning, stars.

Where are you?

Nothing happens. Marooned under this fog, waiting for it to break. Like months of rain that flood our time on earth. 

Nothing moves. 

The sun that seems now
only a stone glowing
A cloud.

Is this just a dream? Sun and stone and star and cloud all within? This dark love without love. 

This last star, this ancient fish in the deeps. There is an ancientness to your walk. The old, mechanical heart whispers to itself a word that no-one knows. This song of one note and a million intonations. 

Of all the souls I could have had I had this one. I look at myself coldly, like the moon. How did I ever come in this century?

~~~

Across the border they're burning the rice. Clouds and smoke enter our lives, burning our throats, constricting our lungs, stinging our eyes. There are no forests left anywhere in the world. I would speak as another person, hidden, as you are. I imagine what is lost. A coin left under a tree for safekeeping, London's underground streams. 

The Roding slows and slows, inches its way forward. A discarded plastic bag, some leftover from a happier time, snags on one of the reeds and flutters like the flag of some unknown country. All our lives are full of rivers.

{Words by Joseph Ceravalo}