hænep

At the end, he said, No Metaphors! Nothing is like anything else.

Except he said to me before he said that, Make your hands a hammock for me. So there was one.

He said, Not even the rain—he quoted the poet—not even the rain has such small hands. So there was another.

At the end, I wanted to comfort him. But what I said was, Sing to it. The Arabian proverb: When danger approaches, sing to it.

Except I said to him before I said that, No metaphors! No one is like anyone else. And he said, Please.

So—at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him.

My arms the trees.

--Amy Hempel.

And now I find myself
with nothing
left to say.

The old human gestures, twenty centuries old, are forgotten in  decade. Time, like a bridge, draws to a close. Did you make it in time? 

The last light of the day. You run back with your heart in your mouth, the darkness falling around you in the streets. Everything in the old country lives and breathes in the shade. 

Moral education and the neo-liberal university

K
K
K
K

Antique Sound

Antique Sound

There was an age where you played records
with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive
stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond
which wore down the records and the music receded
but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority
that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind
and I knew where to find those off to the left
of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale
that once had been forest and had grown back
into a scrubby wilderness alive with
an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches
crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons
rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets
the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony
all long gone since to improvement but while
that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out
on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches
picking the thorns and we took back the harvest
and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky
quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.

--- W.S. Merwin.

The world we have lost

In the early morning you awoke to the sound of a large plane flying above. Perhaps too close for comfort. Things are often thrown into sharp distinction in the silent hours. You pictured the sound of it passing over you as if it were a wave. And the birds were startled out of their slumber as well as they started to chirp wildly and this huge shadowed bird flying up above them. 

First one or two, then more and more until it peaked with the wave. All this seemed to be happening in slow motion. As the plane moved out of range the chirping also died down and came to a rest. You imagined a perfect bell curve with the chirping distributed in a smooth pattern.

In the morning you found a dead crow on the ground beneath one of the trees. What had happened to her? 

~~~

L. Daston writes in the Chronicle about great books (not Great Books) that we once read but have supposedly been surpassed by more narrowly focused disciplinary works. The kind of wide-ranging books with huge imaginative sweep written between 1920 and 1980, say. Not popular or general books but not specialized texts either. Instead, what one might call scholarly works (is there a distinction between intellectuals and academics now?)

~~~ 

Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize

-- W.S. Merwin

Water Margin

“I’m going to jump into one of the fires – I have no intention of continuing my life,” says Devi.

In the time that remains

The wheels have come off. Time is out of sync. No terrestrial ebb and flow. Isolated moments without duration = fleetingness = a sense of acceleration. But directionless, therefore 'endless'. The end of time means no time.

We work and then we die. Actually, death doesn't exist. "Afraid that if it did it might cause the robots to stop working for a bit and to start expressing themselves, falling in love, wondering what it all means. --S. Collini (more or less)

The sun returns; the old light warm on your hands. Stand next to tree and listen to the crows. The black and the green. Better than listening to the students! Time moves in spirals: Always the same, always different.

Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it. --Nico Walker. (Walser syndrome: asylum=peace=books)

"Inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship. The comparison [is] to the Venetian Republic, a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed." -- H. Gray

~~~

So, there you go, R, reduced to isolated sentences, fleeting thoughts- precisely the thing you're criticizing! Cut and paste, stitch it together, the way our mam did with the Guy Fawkes man all those years ago, wearing my yellow jacket, carted along in a makeshift trolley before being flung into the flames for reasons beyond him.

Pascal, it is said, stitched the few things worth remembering into his clothes, so that they'd be a living word.

Strange to think that after all of these years I still can't bring myself to thinking much of academia. It really does strike you as the most awful fraud. You're a stowaway on board, waiting for your moment to jump, just before the whole damned thing crashes.

It provides a space, though, and one is grateful (to God, of course. Becket: fidelity to what or who?). I'm in purdah. Safely -one hopes! - left alone for the time being..in the time that remains. So out of touch and out of date that I'm almost a museum piece. Which is good since it saves me all the small talk and from engaging in questions of 'success'.

What is your next 'project'?, a colleague asks

I think less about the future. Not that I ever did. Now where? Nowhere, as before ?

He lit a fire and all there was was smoke in his room.

He left the room, but nobody noticed. It stung his eyes, blinkered him. But there was warmth. The smoke lingered on his clothes for two days and then Spring came all of a sudden.

~~~

Are these posts generate by an algorithm? Question to self.

The Burnout Society

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornamental collection of small glass bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them . They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of color, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the center of the wall.

--Bellow.

Misc.

"But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval republic, governed by and for its citizens. It’s not always well governed, but it is self-governed."

--Hannah Gray.

“There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water." --Eagleton.

"We do not hear the murmur of God's song, we hear it only when it ceases." -- Hans Carossa via Gadamer

"Next, I’m planning to read Robert Fagles’s translation of The Iliad. My cellmate’s reading it now. I’ve looked at a couple pages of it already and I have a good feeling about it." --Nico Walker. Walser syndrome: head for the asylum to get the time to read.

Smith

For Smith the possibility of morality depends on reflexivity, inter-subjectivity

and imagination (Brown, 2016). Sympathy, for example, depends on not just

me imagining what you’re feeling in your situation or what I might feel in your

situation; it can also involve a change in person and character so that I imagine

myself as you in your situation. In the latter case I must, to some extent, identify

with the other person to enter his perspective; on the other hand, I can only

reflectively and normatively sympathize with the other and endorse or disapprove

of his feelings/actions if I can maintain the ‘distance’ implied by having my own

perspective. Sympathy in this sense is a bridge which simultaneously allows for

imaginative participation in the life of another while at the same time maintaining

the distance required for judgement. It is hard to see how a preference function

can capture all of these nuances.

In some sense the matter is more complicated since there is no ‘I’ who exists

independently of both the other’s perspective and the sympathetic act. The self

does not exist isolated and fully formed at a particular point in time; instead, any

understanding of who I am depends on an ongoing effort over time to ‘see myself

as you’.

---K.M.

God made the frog jump; but the frog prefers jumping.

--C.K. Chesterton.

In the morning the fields are flooded. The grass is sodden, pools collect leaves and display them on their rippled surface. The rain makes this 'grave old planet shine' once again. A pathway shimmers amid the gloom. Further ahead, fresh garlic and green tomatoes...the peas are so sweet that you eat them raw. 

Nature follows its course without knowing why. The rain, however predictable, always amazing. 

The strawness of straw.

You remember to take a pencil with you. So that you can mark the words in the book on Spaemann.  Two hours of peace, sitting by the window, an espresso..

Before you get there you see a fetching young woman, moving at great speed, her hair tied to one side. You drop the pencil. There are no more words.

~~~

Rosenzweig continues to fascinate, though you're not really reading him, just plucking out sentences from a book. Deal with the demands of the day. Look around, small glances, towards the world, towards yourself but nothing more. Small steps. Don't look for some big truth or something too far away from your own life. At best, you're only on the first lap. Low-level, low key. Which means you're still on it, which is to say a lot. 

Mid-morning is a great time since nothing happens. Find yourself where you are. What do you say? The small space that has been allotted to you can, perhaps, open up if you allow it to..or, if you are granted permission. Apperception of Being is the humanness of the human. 

Denise: The strawness of straw. 

Without title..still thinking of one.

Look carefully. A pathway in the grass, its faint outlines just visible. How old and ancient it looks in the bright sunshine! Or is it in the process of being formed, my very steps and footmarks adding to its definition? Now, at this very moment there is no answer, only a question mark. Who walked here before and what was spoken; who comes after and what is remembered? (Here was a unique soul, just like everyone else.)

The first day of Spring. The warmth on our backs, the eyes narrowing to make out faces in the distance. Winter fades, warm clothes are placed back in the closet. Open summer days lie ahead. But perhaps all that is an illusion? You remember summer days past and think fondly of the dark days of winter ahead.

When memory is of the future, then we shall talk about love.

~~~

"To live without questions."

"There is no direction from which He could not come and from which He had to come; there is no block of wood in which he may not take up His dwelling, and no psalm of David that always reaches his ear."

--Rosenzweig.

Moral change and moral achievement are slow; we are not free in the sense of being able suddenly to alter ourselves since we cannot suddenly alter what we can see and ergo what we desire and are compelled by. In a way, explicit choice seems now less important: less decisive (since much of the ‘decision’ lies elsewhere) and less obviously something to be ‘cultivated’. If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at. This is in a way the reverse of Hampshire’s picture, where our efforts are supposed to be directed to increasing our freedom by conceptualizing as many different possibilities of action as possible: having as many goods as possible in the shop. The ideal situation, on the contrary, is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’ 

---Iris M.

Some people are thinking about the end of Europe.

“There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water."
--Eagleton.

Across the lines

The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression, change for the sake of change, now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation."

and:

That frenzied sensibility of pure experience, life on the edge, immediate gratification, and total freedom from moral restraint which the Beats first propounded back in those heady days..an official style of the consumer society.

and:

It is capitalism..that is “the bull in the china shop of human history. The market economy, now global in scale, is by its nature corrosive of all established hierarchies and certainties….”[D. Rieff]. 

That's Thomas Frank from way back in 1993 (The Baffler (online)). Remarkably prescient.

Tarentino

The sheer pleasure of stumbling across a writer you'd never heard of. I don't think he's published much and I couldn't find a picture of him - and that all adds to the charm (a bit like finding Breece). But it's not just the 'stumbling' bit that is of interest; ultimately it's the thought and the clarity of writing itself. I don't know who Francis Slade is -and perhaps I have no need to know. But the thought..that's well worth trying to become acquainted with. Here are some parts of his ontological priority of ends (whence the picture above). Heady stuff. 

What happens when end is reduced to purpose and consequence becomes visible in the films of Quentin Tarentino, which picture a "world" in which there are only the purposes of human beings, a "world without ends." In such a world there cannot be any congruity or incongruity of purposes with ends. There being no ends by which purposes can be measured. all purposes are in themselves incommensurate and incongruous with one other. This is a world in which everything is violent. because there is no natural way for anything to move. But a world in which everything is violent means that violence becomes ordinary, the usual, the way things are. The violent displaces and becomes "the natural." Nietzsche observed that "[o]nce you know that there are no ends, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of ends (zweck) that the word 'accident' has meaning."The violence shocks because we are not nihilists, because we are still measuring what people do in these films by a world in which there are ends, not just human purposes. Tarentino says he doesn't take violence seriously and finds it funny. "To me. violence is a totally aesthetic subject." Commenting on these films Michael Wood says: 

"[T]he violence mainly suggests that everyone and everything is out of control. that no rules apply and chaos is come again. What interests Tarentino is not violence ... but fiasco. The sense that life is a mess even in fiction. And then into this mess he introduces not order but style and a peculiar kind of innocence."

A world of purposes only is a world of cross-purposes, the definition of fiasco. What is intended in the portrayal of such a world is not, of course, a "classic form.'' The manifestation of an order, "things held together in a living way with the sense of life going on," but the manifestation of an author. Style, then, not order. Where there are only the purposes of human beings. there are no actions to imitate; there are events to be strung together, not stories to be told. Life must be a string of events strung together "anyhow." Just how must depend upon the postures assumed by the author. Works such as these films reveal-and are intended to reveal-the sensibility of their creators, in this instance "a peculiar kind of innocence." A "peculiar kind of innocence" for there is no place for dismay that what is done wrecks havoc. In such a world that is a "natural" result of anything anyone does. A world of fiasco is a world in which guilt is impossible, because guilt requires responsibility for actions, and there are actions only if purposes are measured by ends. Wood remarks that in Tarentino's films:

"A desperate ordinariness might inhabit the most extreme of circumstances." The ordinariness is human purpose desperate when detached from ends, because detached from ends there are no "reasons" other than our purposes for doing anything. Wood continues: 

"There is also the sense that if you can't get a plausible reason for behaving the way you want to, an implausible one will have to do." Reason reduced to purpose produces the most extreme of circumstances. 

Macbeth inhabits a world in which he acknowledges only human purposes, a world in which he must ceaselessly strive to become the master of consequences. When the achievements of great ambition fall apart, his life seems to him, as all lives seem to him, "a tale told by an idiot. full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth cannot tell the story of his own life. But Shakespeare could and we understand Macbeth's life because we see it within the context of the whole which human life is as apprehended by Shakespeare. The screenplays of Tarentino are and are intended precisely to be "tales full of sound and fury signifying nothing"-but without paying the price of having to regard himself as an idiot. Pulp Fiction and True Romance, the titles he chose for two of his films, suggest that Tarentino believes that he can maintain a distance between himself and the tales that he tells. "Pulp fiction" and "true romance" do not describe Tarentino's view of his own films, but the character and status he attributes to the stories human beings tell in the effort to understand and give substance to their lives. which these films expose (supposedly) as "pulp fiction" and "true romance." Tarentino, self-indulgently, ridicules all purposes except his own. But if there are no ends, what privileges the purposes of the artist? 

In forgiveness, I allow the other to distance himself from his nature, from the way he is. In the moment of forgiveness, the other ceases to be a liar, so to speak. But it takes permission from outside of himself. This, I think, is the essence of forgiveness. When people say they can’t forgive themselves for something, that is nonsense. A person cannot forgive himself at all, for anything. That is arrogance. To be dependent on forgiveness—that is what is decisive. And in Christianity it is the alpha and omega. Forgiveness is at the very beginning. Much is forgiven because Jesus has loved  much. The Gospel of John effects a reversal of sorts and places forgiveness at the beginning. 

--Robert Spaemann.

~~~

Religion comes in all shapes and sizes (and colours). It's amazing to think of that, of how the spirit takes on different forms over time. You wonder what the old paleolithic religion might have been (without symbols, rituals, texts). Ecstasy and sobriety. The old song of sorrow and joy with us from the beginning? 

James C. Scott's Against the Grain really is quite fascinating (if read with Zerzan). Domestication of: crops, animals, women and, in the process, men themselves become domesticated (slaves of their desires?). Surplus. Therefore: war, violence, property, hierarchy, religious rituals to shore up order, administration and management, texts to stabilize the wandering spirit (is that why poetry is banned?)..the fist stirrings of the bio-political, the techno-social management of life..the social machine, the Great Beast (Weil?).