Black Sun

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

--T.N. Coates.

Black & Green

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying

--Denise.

The task of learning is to be at home in the distance within which we live.'

'One learns to keep house with the means, energy and time available.'

--Gadamer.

As time goes by...

As time goes by I never stop wondering: who were you, fish? But, a sigh is but a sigh...

'The human heart sometimes follows the hand'.

I liked this Sufi saying for many reasons. The idea that we don't always know beforehand; that we're not in control but in the midst of wonder. And if it simply follows, what then of free will?!

Of course, the hand is also 'the self-revealing gesture of the soul (K. Clark). But to talk of beginning and end, or of causality, is to miss the point...the 'point' that is in-between...

Or: we act now, moved by habits of the heart which reason does not and can never fully know. What we know is not distinguishable from *how* we know. What is an education but an awareness of this unknowingness?

We see through a glass darkly, dimly perceiving something before we comprehend it (faith opening up paths and directions before reason..'fides et ratio'). What is 'and' here?

And there it was: the swell
and glitter of it like a standing wave –
the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising
through the blue,
the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,
the glamour of buried light
as the world turned round it
very slowly
this autumn morning, all amazed.

Robin Robertson.

Sketches

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).