The philosophy of cricket

"[the very sophisticated feature of cricket is] that one can appreciate the significant detail of the monotony that lies before one at a given time only because one understands remote and hypothetical moments of excitement that might grow from it"
---Bernard Williams, The Point of View of the Universe:Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics.

"Sport, serving the same needs as the myths and religious traditions utilised by sculpture and painting, offers its own culture of parable, tragedy and redemption-its own art...affords the same potential for the expression of genius, passion and vision."
---Geoff Dyer.

"I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain, but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgement embodied in a migratory vastness."
---John Cheever

How to explain cricket to those who don't understand it? The simple answer, as with much else, is that you can't! So that it appears to such a person much more mysterious than it really is or, alternatively, just a silly pursuit by people who haven't really grown up (does this apply to blogging as well?). Without a common world, words and rules don't amount to much?

A lot of it is bound up nowadays with petty nationalism. Of course one likes to see India and England lose, but that's not at the heart of the game...

Ford

Is all truth in the way things end? Not the first moments, with the gentle look, the tenderness that sets us on our way, with the photographs lovingly slid into the new silver frames, and even the blotches of dazzling light on the discarded over-exposed ones promising so much. The lists, the white ribbons, the music between you. This is how it was. You thought your life could go by unnoticed whilst it accumulated all the time.

Keeping your head down, or your mind pure, or your hands busy. You'd let the years roll over you, as if nothing mattered, as if things could go on for ever, the minor fuck-ups, the missed chances glossed over, the mirrors speckled, the wall clock tilted to an angle, others not even wound up and exhausted.

As the final moment crumbles, revealing what was always there, something you always knew and feared. Behind the mundane, the sheer ordinariness of it all there was a small tale of tragedy and farce working its way to the surface, unraveling, untying, undoing what was barely stitched together. A few moments, that's all it was, like a dark landscape intermittently illuminated by flashes of light, without any rhyme or reason, the contours of well-known objects, a face, an emotion, briefly acknowledged, remembered, for all it's worth, for what it's worth.

"But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled."

little r, little l

Angina days, spent waiting for coincidences, and letters explaining the way things are. Little R discovered her belly-button and looked on in amazement as she saw a wasp for the very first time. Not it's colour or it's rather clownish face was worth noticing; but the random movement of its flight, so carefree and precise, as if another dimension, mysterious like the smile of a child, had opened up.

The aborigines have to retell a story, a dream, a songline exactly the way it is (or was), either that or face death.

"Tell me the colours again, and in the right order this time"

Red, and yellow...

Angina days, blue snow,
time tucked away...
time is blue, time is snow,
red sleeves, black hat,
time is a yellow woman.

angina days, Swiss,
blue Devon..
wall map of England, yellow and time.

Angina days, blue Kent,
time so yellow that none
can tell it, a black index finger
protrudes from a blue glove
and points you the way home
along the red wall.
---gunter eich.

We want, in this day and age, a kind of wisdom that doesn't mention God or Love. Or a kind of wisdom that isn't wisdom, but just sounds profound and is worn lightly. Like the Greeks. If it has to be love, then a little one. I can't give you nothing, if you give nothing to me. And all this sounds serious, terribly serious. Are you sure you haven't been struck? But with a cinnamon roll anything can be imagined. Still, this wild honey you spread on your toast every day is probably the only kind of assurance you'll get.

At least 15 books started, unable to get beyond 30 pages for most, flitting between one and the other with a remarkable casualness. What, exactly, are you looking for you old fool? Whatever it is, you won't find it in a book. What to write, and what to leave unsaid? You spoke her name, exhaled it, so that she wouldn't be in you any more. Even your denials are a kind of affirmation, as much as you deny it.

~~~

Sidgwick and the duality of practical reason. You, and other people. How to weigh up the good of one and the other? Of course, the coincidence of his interest in seances and what not...Blithe Spirit, Ugetsu. Not really a philosophical question, but one of love, if you read between the lines, if you know what's what, what's on, and not-what's on-not that you do know!

Finishing up Ill Fares the Land and you stumble across a line from Donne. No man is an island. Bizarre. Fifteen minutes earlier, you said to yourself: I'll give Merton ten minutes, max.

"That is why all the answers that are not supernatural are imperfect; for they only embrace one of the contradictory terms [self-love vs love of others], and they can always be denied by the other."

"Every man is a piece of the continent, part of the main."

The choices today: Ugetsu, Blithe Spirit, or Blue Valentine. Scrambled eggs of poached. Mustard oil or castor. A phone call at 5 or at 10. Does it matter? No, no questions. For the love of God.

the dark intervals

The heat of the day locks us in. The cool mornings and evenings pinched, gradually whittled away. More leaves fall than are swept up.

By the time you're ready, you don't want to go.But nevertheless you go through the motions with mechanical artificality, participate in the easy conversation and trite observations, the shallow humanism and lightly-worn conventions: dinner, then after-dinner pleasantness. One guest in particular has found an audience and spins off tales about Muhammad bin Qasim. N, bless her soul, is bored out of her mind, but puts a brave face on it. Where's the whiskey?

The pretence continues as we move from one room to another. Work to leisure. Paint your face. Since you're not really all there anyway, your mind already drifting, you talk to the kids-still green-eyed to the world- in order to pass the time. If you play the joker for long enough you can slip into your role unthinkingly. Slipping out: not so easy though.

Remember not to educate your daughter. Become a musician or something.

We speak to one another as if we were strangers, waiting for a late train at a departure lounge, incessantly and thoughtlessly, without any metaphysical consolation, and as if by doing so we could paper over the cracks, keep the dark intervals at bay.

R, little darling R, looks out and out, towards a tree. She's in one of her 'mesmerized' moods. Hears the shuffling of crows, the slow beating of wings, as if they were staving off mortality there, high up in the dense foliage. This dark window, this thin veil of night between us all. A few more leaves fall to soft ground.

"Where's my food?", she demanded.

Is that all you can think of, little one?

"No. But I thought I'd play your game for a while as well."

青い花

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

What is the true colour of your feelings, when you sit alone in your room and sip your tea, the lights dimmed, the moon broken? As the hours twist and fall gently away, the reflection of your face pale, just visible on the cold windowpane, yet more real, and more beautiful than anything else in the world. Are your eyes green or brown? I forget. Or maybe with time they've changed. But what does remain the same, tell me? And nothing was in the details anyway. The snow was general all over, blinding me at first, until I awoke from this dream in which I was dreaming of you.

And you, yourself: a darker shade of white? Parts of your heart darker than the rest. Not to speak of. How strange, patching up the tear, preparing ourselves in shadows for the new life, unimaginable though it may be. This exile, this island-life, the blue all around me, never inside me.

It was evening, and the sea and sky were one.

Sea and sky were one blue flag, with no design
but for the darker bluer line
but no matter what we do
you can't be me.

I've gathered all your pictures and stored them for safe-keeping in a box, cross my heart and hope to die. So that (when) the time comes. Then the hand will know what the eye could only see.

I think of you, of love, that foreign flower.
The music stops. Come close.

(John Riley, Don Paterson, Novalis)

Experiments in Living

Buddha


"The male, destructive principle is diametrically opposed to the female, constructive one, which is based on mutual aid, on grace, on understanding and dialogue. In the modern, male, states, women have not only been deprived of any possibility of expressing their essential nature, they had to submit to the male principle, they were forced to recognize it..."
---Lida Heymann (from the Vertigo Years)

"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.

"Genius is not allowed for by regulation."

'The English alternative vision of the future , it seems, was essentially private and domestic'

The pacifist movement as one way of imagining a new type of living together, against the dominant culture of war and (male) aggressiveness.

'These newfangled designs for living were often intertwined with bohemian lives..an ever-shifting landscape of spiritual leaders and hangers-on, of mystics and scholars, charmers and charlatans.'

Of course, these sentiments have probably always been with us in one form or the other, are in all likelihood as old as humanity itself. Who hasn't, after all, dreamt of escaping from one's family, home, and country, the weight of the world with all its attachments, responsibilities, burdens and complexities into a realm of uninhibited freedom, lightness, or towards a utopian island of equality and meaningful idleness, with the toil and drudgery from work on the one hand, and the divisions between people- man and woman, class and caste, religion and race-on the other, finally and permanently abolished? "Whither shall I flee?"

But there are certain times as well in which the pressure of such feelings, aspirations, become more keenly felt. This desire for escape (Levinas, or Peter Brown's Making of Late Humanity) becomes more acute at particular junctures in history. Is it any wonder, then, that such an 'ecstatic, irrational dimension' would appeal to a 'young generation whose childhood had been dominated by rigid notions of discipline, control, reason, self-sacrifice', and mechanization?

But what kind of freedom can be imagined when those boundaries are less restrictive, when things can be acquired at the click of a button, when neither nation nor God can inspire and, more to the point, be worth the effort of rebelling against?And when the shock of the new doesn't shock any more? (Of course, class and gender inequalities and exploitation still exists, but the trend has surely been to one of greater freedom and equality, and less stuffiness?)

The 'experimental communities' might have been set up rebel against conventional morality and decency, but in an age when conventions are themselves almost synonymous with conservatism and have the slight whiff of backwardness about them, one has to ask: rebel against what, exactly? (Iris M., in Existentialism and Mystics: the left has run out of steam because it has achieved a lot of its historic goals)

'The cult of life and the idea of true community, of free spirits not subjected to the rules of society, and the vision of a rebirth of truth long lost, fascinated German artists...Society is always prone to suppress the charismatic ferment of communal visions.'

Er..well, we know how that ended up! A sense of place, attachments, middling morality and middle-age duplicity, the acknowledgement of constraints, the daily bourgeois compromises and numb-like passivity before spectacles, all that seems infinitely boring and trivial in comparison.

A diversion: driving in the early morning, the only car on the road, the plain fields stretching out forever on both sides of me, and the sky, the grey-blue sky filling up the horizon, great and reflective, heavy with the night but ready to break into self-awareness at any moment, to awaken from its dream...

On the way back it was if the land had been redeemed by time and light. Brilliant light poured down and struck the white mist still hanging about at knee-height. In the distance this produced the effect of transforming everything into a blinding, pulsating flash of whiteness, strangely alluring- as if nothing existed there, or maybe it was that everything did.

Driving past it, or through it, saw a family huddled together on a donkey cart, their thin rickety bodies draped by the same honey-brown check shawls, their dark faces and hair covered in dust. Ridiculous to think of a photograph or a post at this time. You think you see people, but you don't really.

At the airport, a thin, slightly-balding middle-aged man stood in front of me. His hair slicked back, his stubble slightly grey, like an old dog's, his eyes soft and light, he wore a 1970's jacket with sheep's fur collars and lining. All very Jack Nicholson. He backed into me, looking upwards at the arrivals board. Nearly said, "what the fuck, watch your step uncle!" but let it pass. Zen training. Even though 'Jack' was up for a fight. A fat kid, like something out of Charlie and the chocolate factory, with striped shirt, puffy red cheeks and all, tried to inch his way ahead of us. "Kid, you ain't going nowhere," I thought, but nah, it's too early in the day for that. Your hands remain loose. Your defensiveness falls away. And then 'Jack' lets him go in front of us, turns back to me and smiles, nods. Yeah, okay, go on then.

~~~

I didn't try to communicate any kind of philosophy since I am not a philosopher. I am a photographer. That's it.
---Saul Leiter.

"We do better to slide over the world a bit lightly and on the surface." Through his discovery of sliding and gliding, he lost much of his fear, and at the same time acquired a new sense of his life.'
--from Bakewell on Montaigne.

thoughts of a random nature

O.E. gor "dirt, dung, shit," a Gmc. word (cf. M.Du. goor "filth, mud;" O.N. gor "cud;" O.H.G. gor "animal dung"), of uncertain origin. Sense of "clotted blood" (especially shed in battle) developed by 1563.

gore

c.1400, from Scottish gorren "to pierce, stab," origin unknown, perhaps related to O.E. gar "spear" (see gar), which is certainly the source of the third meaning of Mod.Eng. gore , "triangular piece of ground" (O.E. gara ), hence also "front of a skirt" (mid-13c.), and "triangular piece of cloth" (early 14c.).

Watching the Tsunami (or what one friend called 'the swami') was -and I know this is going to sound terrible-kinda addictive in a way. In the same way, perhaps, that some people are drawn to accident scenes, or have a strange fascination with horror stories-ghoul and gore galore- or others, still, to pornography and violent images. But that picture of the huge wave from the helicopter, silently and inexorably making its way inland, the sun's dazzling light dancing on its back, was an image sheer out of Tarkovsky.

One person remarked, my heart is very upset by all that has happened there and the cynic in me asks: is that true? I mean, is that what you really feel or are you just saying that? Cut off your little finger or save the whole of China? How far out does your sense of identity, sympathy, and commonality extend? Always gets you just how vociferous the brothers are in condemning Israel and how silent they are when it comes to Darfur, say, or the backward rag heads that are the Saudi 'royal family'.

~~~

Last night faced with the choice of watching Bangladesh beat England (hurrah!), going to 'The Last Word' to pick up Lorrie Moore's book (after reading Dyer's rave review), or going to watch a, er..local dance (mujra). But the thought of being in a crowd of 200 drunken guys ogling at some scantily clad, voluptuous women 'dancing ' just doesn't do it for me. And when my friend said to me, "come on, loosen up, get in tune with the 'punjabi way of things'" you knew, if ever you needed convincing, that that was it!

Well, the Lorrie Moore book is very dull so far, I have to say. And no, not in comparison!

~~~

Dyer's usually on the money though, so let's see.

"I don't even need an intellect, now that I've got all my books around me. Finding myself, at last, in the perfect situation for work I don't want to do any work...Needless to say, I have no impulse to read. Books are to be arranged and classified, shuffled around...

I think of people living in my street, couples with children, families, and I feel a kind of pity for them, because they are not here, they are not me, in this lamp-lit solitude, surrounded, at last, by the books acquired over twenty years."

On Camus: "He achieved something priceless: a heart free of bitterness."

a mind in the cave

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."
---Adam Smith.

Thus begins the promising new book by Samuel Bowles. It's strange to think not just how old this dichotomy is, but also how remarkably little can be added to what is already known.

First things first:

Are we, by nature, self-interested animals? Questions of 'nature' don't really interest you and are sometimes mere fodder for reactionaries of different stripes and sizes. But the notion that we are exclusively self-interested and/or that it is uniquely rational to be self-interested (i.e.have self-interested preferences) doesn't sit easily with our common experiences of altruism, a sense of fairness, sympathy, and various commitments or recent experimental literature (Fehr, Bowles, etc.).

It's hard to imagine that our language and experiences are so off the mark that these other motivations/experiences/preferences are ultimately veiled forms of self-interest.

So, the existence of the old dualism hardly seems the question; how we deal with conflicts between perspectives -our own and wider ones (Nagel)- and different interests or motivations seems to be more to the point. The origins of those other-motivations, and following on from that, the institutional frameworks that sustain them, can be important. For example, if we're brought up to believe that self-interest is king, or that our nature is defined by it, or that what counts and what motivates us must fundamentally be related back to a narrow version of the self, then it's entirely possible that we will, in fact, grow into that picture of ourselves.

Bowles's approach doesn't work for me, though. Here's why:

Why are we not purely selfish beings? "Proximate answers to this question are to be found in the way our brains process information and induce the behavioural responses that we term cooperation."

There's something suspect in this reduction-if that's what is-of ethics to the mind. "Process"?

Secondly, "humans became the co-operative species we are because co-operation was highly beneficial to the members of the group that practiced it..competition with fellow group members [heightened group-level advantages]."

So, commitment or "strong reciprocity" (whereby the individual forgoes benefits to help someone else out) are perpetuated, sustained, at the group level because it is evolutionary beneficial.

This seems like crap reasoning. Under this tautological approach, anything that is is the way it is as a result of evolutionary pressures . That hardly seems like an explanation. But also, again, is something being lost in thinking of morals in this way? It doesn't really explain, I think, the reason for morals, just how a given moral perspective might be 'productive' in the survival of the species. More to the point, one would like to know, as an individual, how one ought to live, and does the species-perspective (even if true) help?

last word (for Roxana)

through the lens

Well, you don't meet any genuine eccentric ("off-centre") people here and maybe that's not such a bad thing after all. To give you an idea of how bad/good it is: I'm probably one the loopiest (I exclude you, dear N-man, because you only want to be loopy for professional reasons!).

What do you see at the university? Oh, just the usual basic human motivations in play, I guess: pettiness, and self-importance, and self-promotion; ridiculously un-funny in-jokes; the constant desire to cultivate an aura of intelligence and invulnerability around oneself; the thrill of hearing one's own voice; the deep cynicism which passes for cleverness; the desire to have one's thoughts met with approval and admiration by an unsuspecting and docile group; the sycophants and boot-lickers, the court hijras.

Yesterday, in conversation with a student:

I think, well, to the extent that there is an 'I'.

Christ! Give me a break.

And this priceless snippet of a conversation between two students:

"beyond that we label things as blasphemy m...issie...so try not to put another toe outta line or who knows u might be next (=P jokes apart) ...anyways wat is wrong is wrong and u cannot condone wat is labeled as wrong...i know we are all bad and another bad act wont make things better off so try to be where u oughtta be and if not u could simply keep such things within yourself instead of holding a mic and blurting nonsensical/sensitive things out...ppl like me and others do take offence and so FIRST, you need to be tolerant and respect the fact dat we dont hear/receive/take shyt like this, ....KHUDA khofi bi koi cheez hai [There is such a thing as the fear of God]"

~~~

lech: M.E. lah (mid-12c.), from O.N. lagr "low," from P.Gmc. *lægaz (cf. O.Fris. lech, Du. laag, Ger. läge "low"), lit. "that which is lying flat;" related to O.E. licgan (see lie (v.)). Meaning "humble in rank" is from c.1200; "undignified" is from 1550s; sense of "dejected, dispirited" is attested from 1737.

lecher: [Middle English, from Old French lecheor from lechier, to lick, to live in debauchery, of Germanic origin

for anton

This reminded me of the cover of a book on one of anton's post (can't for the life of me remember what it was). Anyway, this remains one of my favourite songs of the year (thanks Bob, for pointing me here. Danke!).

~~~

'Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art'
(What, was Montaigne a Kashmiri?)

'Acceptance of life, of one's self as it is'.

This is incredibly difficult-and isn't one part of life to not accept what is or even care about acceptance? Pascal on M: "He did not want to maintain anything at all."

Who is the enemy of the Muslims? Well, who isn't?! That's the question. Becomes a bit tiresome after a while (Zionsits, Hindus, Raymond, Horus, neo-colonialists, feminists, etc., etc)...

'Imagining your world from different angles, or at different scales of significance'.

But that requires flexibility, the acceptance of 'provisionally fixed points'. Not with the 'eye of the universe' (Sidgwick) , sub specie aeternitatis, but with Blake's (?) 'double vision'.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself.

'To see a dog dreaming-it must have an inner world, just like ours'. But for Descartes it has no perspective, no true experience, doesn't imagine a hare running in a field in its inner world...all there is, is the shadow of mechanical operations of the brain.

Well, if it's good enough for humans, it's good enough for dogs! And God alone knows what the status of the hare is!

But this ability/desire to see things from multiple-perspectives, isn't that disturbingly close to the post-modern? Or, if you want to go back, to cubism vs the static perspective of the Renaissance (a point made by Robert Hughes)?Does one end up with weakened capacities for 'seeing' at all? In some sense, isn't this tied in with capitalism's devaluing of 'place', "all that is solid," the very possibility of experience (E.S. Reed)? Nothing jars against our sensibilities so much as the idea of 'cosmos' or the classical or discipline.

Maybe there's something in that, the hidden affinity between Romanticism and late capitalism, but on the other hand, isn't the very definition of what it is to be human the ability to form a second opinion, revise one's views, cross out and start again? This distancing-from oneself, from nature, one's roots and home, and therefore from one's initial point of view, has always been with us, whether we cultivate it or not. The most difficult of things: 'disciplined freedom' (Sen).

...

a thing of beauty

"The sensual and spiritual are linked together by a mysterious bond, sensed by our emotions, though hidden from our eyes."
---von Humboldt.

No, haven't read either Humboldt but liked the cover of this edition because it reminded me of Idris Khan's work. If we could pile up all the words we've spoken-harsh or otherwise-what kind of picture would emerge? If we could superimpose our sentences on to one another, which words would stand out, be distinct?

~~~

Looking for something substantial to read-substantial in the sense of helping me lose myself, pass time, dream a bit as words slip me by. Dip, not plunge, with no hope of ever finishing or learning from. Bellow or Donna Tart. This pale substitute for any real communication, the weight against the complex lightness of the world, or was it the lightness against ...I forget now. Thoroughly modern in your boredom, you look for some space to move about in, lead pencil in hand, to mark out a turn of phrase here, a dazzling insight there, with a few grey lines and crosses (which amounts to a strange Puritanical distillation, not a path in the white fog).

You start. Good. Six pages, before little R races towards me on all fours, a destructive inquisitiveness in her eyes. She touches the tip of the pencil with the tip of her finger with an incredible gentleness.

"Are you writing about me?" she asks shyly.

"No, dear, go back to sleep"

"Are you writing to me, then?"

"Oh, little one! There's more to the life than writing about someone or writing to someone!"

And with that she lunged at Bellow, bending some of the pages with one hand as she clenched her fist in triumph with the other, like a crazy Taleb.

"Then why, o why, do you read little man? And why can you never say what you want to say, except obliquely? Who do you write for then, black sun?"

~~~

Perhaps, when we're half asleep
the same hand that sows the stars
trails across the galactic lyre...
the dying wave reaching our lips
as two or three words.
---D.P.

~~~
Lesley Chamberlain:

ways of approaching

Dear C, I need you to confirm: is this him?

The last four or five posts have been connected to Russia-obliquely, so why not...

And it is memory saying all things must be changed
Yes, but to get beyond this point?

I do not speak of accident, forgetfulness, for weakness
Of this kind is always with us and complaint supposes

No alteration. The point we have reached
Is not an argument, it is a greeting,

As gentle and as loving as I can make it
To you, today, beyond all changing days.

~~~

Your eyes, your face. Our slow time.

~~~

Say there's no word for it, for what it is to say,
That in love's dance we mimic it
And that endless creation, taken how you will,

Is much to be desired. Say now that our adventure
Is quite unsayable, and see -we are open
As summer roses, open for all time.

~~~

that love is never fulfilled
but the ways of approaching
endless.

~~~

and this line, somewhere, recalled from memory because you can't find it anywhere on the page, and maybe it never was. reading late at night, in the silence, when the day is done, means your mind is half-dreaming already. It was:

the song of the whale moves inward.

what is most inward, the very definition of inwardness, this whale in the vast sea, with all that anarchy sliding by unnoticed, overwhelmed by gravity and slow time, it's love-song booming across a thousand miles, till it reaches shore.

~~~

something simple, like the ascent and descent in one's own house; having many rooms, some littered with dusty books and yellowing photographs. what is absolute, what an image? can one be guilty of words not spoken?

the storm before the world

I know, or I once knew you, before the storm of the world; before our assigned roles had set in, before, even, you began to question me (which must have been a very long time ago). Before words, or knowledge, or desire took shape. For desire is only borne from memory, and you were not that, then.

The summation of it, though, is that we do not know, only see through a glass darkly, as it were. The hours like some pagan god, promising little. The world and time flies in all directions, everything in the universe is pulled by some mysterious force. Many fall, others fade. Light reconfigures. Who can say, we were probably lost, even then, before the first shadow fell across your hesitant lips. You, like a ghost in my mind, the deepest part of me that I couldn't locate in life, and I, like a gnostic-seeker, who couldn't tell where this storm had come from, or for who.