Existentialism, Nihilism and Gnosticism

This was mildly interesting:

"The struggle of our generation..an existential threat"

Well, what poppycock, what utter nonsense on stilts! That the fundamentalists and extremists are morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt goes without saying. How, then, could they ever pose a threat to 'the west', or state powers? And here we get to the crux of it: their lack of being to one side, it has to be said they are not politically bankrupt. But to go down that line is to ask some awkward questions, such as: who has been funding these crazies from the start? No-one wants to look to Saudi or Qatar because, well..er..they're,like, our allies. Yeah, whatever.

No-one wants to talk about one of the root problems: the wahabi backlash, post '79, that has spread its venomous tentacles everywhere. Don't mention that because one would be forced to talk about internal reasons for the growing backwardness (internal to the history, and perhaps even theology) of the place and religion. Equally, it would be to question why 'the west' has supported so many dictators and autocrats over the years (don't go there!). 

The wahabis, with their puritanical outlook, share something with the gnostics in that they do not have a proper appreciation of the world. Materialism, hedonism and fundamentalism share an affinity. 

~~

This is a summary of one of his chapters. Makes for fascinating reading:

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/virtual-reality-as-moral-ideal

Makes you wonder, again, about the connection between virtual reality and the mindset of fundamentalists and ideologues (read: Conservatives and Right-wing parties). Free is 'free from'. The fundamentalist want to be free from the complexity of the world and any real engagement with it. Gibbon was surely right: fantasy, fancy and imagination can lead to all sorts of destructive behaviour; the Church, on the other hand, was more moderate because it had to mediate its position in the world, had to take into account contingencies, complexity, conflicting dispositions.

~~

There is some nice writing here:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/08/the_best_teachers_and_professors_resemble_parental_figures_they_provide.html

'You need to step outside the role a bit, regard it with a little irony, if only to acknowledge the dissonance between the institution and the spirit. It often feels that there are certain things you cannot say inside a classroom—the most serious things that you want to say, the most genuine things. You want to say that life is tragic, that we are dangling above a void, that what’s at stake, when you read a book, is nothing less than life itself. But you feel your institutional surroundings holding you as if between quotation marks.'

~~

Yes, will get to the Le Guin in a mo. and then try and tie all this together.

The end of Europe

k

"Black crows were entering our country, and they pointed to me"
(from Different Trains).

Europe lurches to the right again. The light in the late afternoon is old and frail. These pathways could have been here for a thousand years, as could the trees and the shade, all of them older really than the mountains. Ancient hatreds re-emerge and on the black seas, disease and impurity await.

England is gone, faith, too, petering out to a whisper. Brick by brick, we are informed, buildings are being stolen and in time nature will reclaim what was taken, restoring in a broad, horizontal dash a time in which nothing happens. 

Yesterday in the long grass outside my house I found a ten of spades, its corners moth eaten. Little r collected flowers and acorns in her hat. It's amazing how many things can be found in a small space: feathers and light cigar-shaped sticks, buttercups and leaves of various shades, wild berries that we are careful to handle in case we stain our hands. We gather these things to ourselves, but we know in our hearts it is too late. Our hands want to cup these things, hold these moments against our chest, but they also want to release them back into their own quiet time or leave them untouched. 

'The rain, the sometime summer 
rain on a memory of roses
will fall lightly and come a-
mong them as it erases
summers so long ago.'
--Barker. 

There was time

You've stopped listening to contemporary music. I guess it's a sign of old age when you find comfort in what is familiar and that only. One of the disadvantages of a happy childhood is that you can never quite forget it. Someone said that on the recent death of Benny Green-that he always had a bit of the child in him. Exupery, too, I suppose. Or maybe it's nothing as poetic and really has something more to do with the sheer amount of music, films etc. that is available nowadays. Time narrowing down to a point, a point in the past, is not something that is willingly achieved but, instead, a function of institutional developments (including the advancement of technology that disrupts any continuity). At a more delusional level, perhaps some of those sentiments get overblown into a fully developed hatred of the present (From The Time Machine: "I don't care much for the times I'm living in").

There's a certain grace in accepting the times one is living in, the time that has passed, even if one feels estranged from the former. Was there a time when time wasn't time; will that time come again?

Nihilism today is to live as if there is only today.

There was time-and you blew it and the magic spell broke.

But 'there was time' also suggest an amazing capaciousness.

~~~

Gosh, that Kanye West is crap. The anti-music that is rap and hip-hop, the fake gangsta, hard-man, disillusioned loner against 'the system'. It's not just the misogyny; it's the whole sell-out to corporate America, the way they perpetuate 'the system'. Rebel Sell, in fact. Get you free Che Guevara mug while you're at it. Or maybe a poster of Aung Sui. 

To think a bit more about commoditization: Mutuals. Mutually Beneficial Arrangements (or Relationships) is just another term for prostitution, dressed up (or down, depending on your preferences). Sounds quite harmless, something Adam Smith might propose(only might, though). If both parties to the contract-and this is how we tend to think of 'relationships' nowadays-benefit from the transaction then what's wrong with that (Pareto improvement, etc., etc.). Does it matter that these might not be voluntary transactions or that an element of co-ercion is involved given the asymmetric situation the parties are in (typically it is a rich man looking for a young (ish) student for "companionship", no strings attached. A growing number of university students, it is argued, are using this as a way of paying-off their debts. Which just goes to show how successful capitalism is in generating a problem and then using the market, or promoting a market mentality, to resolve the problem. Another way of saying that is that capitalism needs crises or contradictions, or that at the very minimum it plays off them ('17 Contradictions'). The same old story, in other words.

~~~

Tim Parks, NYRB: Readings and Re-readings:

'What is different on a second and subsequent readings is our growing capacity for retention, for putting things in relation to one another.' 

We're pulled in two directions:

'Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension. The book, at once complex and endlessly available for revisits, allows the mind to achieve an act of prodigious control. Rather than submitting ourselves to a stream of information, in thrall to each precarious moment of a single reading, we can gradually come to possess, indeed to memorize, the work outside time.'

On the other hand:

'Yet such [temporary] perceptions are very much part of the pleasure of being here in the present.'

'Words in general have a vocation for rearranging and fixing experience in a way that can be communicated across space and time. Yet often it seems that our experience of the words once written down is as volatile and precarious as our other sense impressions.'

'A  contemporary environment that offers us more and more books and less and less time to read them.'

~~~

The commoditization of the book (industry). Ursula Le Guin's fabulous polemic:

~

"At the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right."

--Obama (D. Remnick, The New Yorker)

~

Traditions and rituals, to keep time in its place, so that we (can) remember off by heart. We see everything with memory..

The Sunday papers is a venerable tradition in this corner of the world but you think twice-a rare luxury..no, you think twice because of the cost, the availability of it all online. Like much else, it will buckle under commercial pressures. And yet, for all that, there's something glorious in the actual physical experience of reading it (the smudge marks of the print, the crispness of the pages, the black and white photos). Even better when accompanied by a packet of minstrels.

(Lithuanian) rye bread and pickled herring, followed by an avocado and rocket salad. A small corner of heaven. 

Roti King off Euston is in terms of value for money one of the best places to eat in London. Malaysian food in a small, run-down basement restaurant/cafe. The seats are totally dilapidated and there's hardly space to move, but good, simple food.






  

out of time

It takes twenty years, apparently, for a ploughshare tortoise to reach maturity; three hundred for oak trees. It's amazing that all these various rhythms and time-experiences can co-exist at the same time. In human beings, too, the sense of the timeless never permanently leaves us...

The Four Ages of Man and Woman. In the era of "belief" there is more unity between the intellect and the senses, faith and reason. Belief here does not refer to any particular orthodox doctrine but the realization in experience of values (aesthetic, spiritual, human).In a prosaic age there is fragmentation or a lack of cohesion and reason is taken to be the whole of the truth. 

Is there a time when it all comes together, when hand, heart and eye are in sync? 

'Clocks struck widely different hours'.

In an age of belief there is a balance between what a human being is and what they can do. In a prosaic age specific excellences, a hypertrophy of the mind, or technical brilliance, can go hand in hand with major flaws in one's character. Everything can develop on its own lines without any telos, without any need to refer to 'nature' or first principles. In any case, there isn't really any more an idea of what a human being "is" since that reeks of 'realism' or metaphysics and we've been sold on nominalism. This is as good as it gets and nothing worries us more than an unrealistic idealism (which can very quickly turn into fascism).

On the other hand, we rarely give much thought to the other side of the coin, the part that Simmone failed to mention: beware a reality that doesn't touch or isn't informed by any ideals.

In what sense is a civilisation that is based on technology, science and an abstract, mathematical-analytical approach to reality-designating all that doesn't quite fit into that narrow framework a 'secondary quality'- closer to an understanding of what it really is to be a human being?(Let's not mention the materialism.

What image remains, today, of the human being? I don't think anyone can really raise this question without being accused of being a nihilist or anti-something or the other. And yet one only needs to mention one word to dispel all of those allegations: Auschwitz.

(A new book on the camps is out. Last month I had written: has a history of the camps really been penned down? It looks as if this book could be the answer).  

The flow of time depends on one's perceptions, on one's existence. The whole world is a set of clocks wound to a different speed. We look at each landscape, each segment of life and reduce it down to our own, creating a timeless, static image of it. ---After E. Bishop.

Large parts of this were from Heller's Disinherited Mind.

He continues...

"A soul rich with intuition" can reach beyond the heights of reason. I've often felt that is true. Poetry, religion and wisdom-full of colour- always offer fresh insights, whereas a knowledge based on 'pure' abstract reason tends to fail to excite or hold most people's interests for very long.

Abstraction, "the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will." the "emancipation of reason from the totality of the person."

A balanced vision vs the one-sidedness of the moderns (and extremists must be included in the latter category).

A proper relation to the world, one that sees it as a home, requires "attending with spontaneous care to the duty of the day, examining the purity of your heart, the balance of your mind."    

lost world

These wonderful photos of a fading world are by Ken Paik, courtesy of Tom.

Nick Drake - River Man from fullrange on Vimeo.

You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,
will turn grey in these same houses.
You'll end up in this city. Don't hope
for things elsewhere:there is no ship for you, 
there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this
small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world. 
---Cavafy, 'The City'

All that is

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past , that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, that habitwhich gives us shape. ..He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour , and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...

---James Salter.

Light Years was dazzling, with its dream-like, lyrical, sentences that seemed to flow effortlessly, like a clear stream over sunken stone-thoughts, or like time itself, the seasons blowing through us before we could stop and catch them, or understand what was really happening.What is a life but a catalogue of what is missed?

But you couldn't read anything else by him. Solo Faces, for instance, had to be abandoned. I think it will probably be the same with Denis Johnson who also had/has a visionary style..but after the wonderful Jesus's Son his Train Dreams came as a big disappointment.

On the other hand, you want to read everything by Walser and by Alfred Hayes. 

J. Lasdun asks what makes a writer "great" and wonders if Salter, great stylist that he was, fell short and if so, why? It's almost as if he tried too hard for-and achieved- the perfect sentences. Is that all there is? But I suppose in an age of falsity we want true grit, a different kind of brokenness, one that stops the machine of seamless desires and imagination and instead brings us closer to home. Anything else doesn't sound authentic.


Breece Panacake, on the other hand...

Some small, temporary interruption that lasts for a moment, stops you in your tracks, so that you can forget, remember something else; something comes back to you even though "you" are not you any more and it doesn't make up for it; the past is never reconstituted and even when it is, to the extent that it is, it is no longer the past.

Interviewers of writers are trying to get at what, exactly? The cliches are legion: who influenced you?; how do you write? (What is this obsession with mechanics?)?; how much of the writing is autobiographical? Questions like an afterglow, circling the main act, the stunned repetition of the thoughtless.

Tobacco's amazing powers of resistance. The way it lingers on on someone's clothes, stains their fingers or teeth; the way it inheres in the body, or makes its presence felt in a room. Someone steps in from the cold and even though they're not smoking now you can imagine their life one hour ago, the conversations that enlivened the afternoon. All the old smokers in Wales are now dead or not remembered. Wales and Argentina are places that only exist on maps, their outlines crumbling against the sky-blue sea.

'The dark river of himself' carries on, north or north by north-west, the set course. Each day brief in our lives. 

A commencement speech is sugar-filled, brown with decay and complacency. A few jaded parents realize this is not the moment of transition to maturity, understanding, world-wise competence,the promised delivery, but just a tarnished picture of money slipping through their fingers on a hot afternoon in a hall with the high windows jarred open. All the time they'd rather be sitting in the shade, dumbed down in front of a flat screen or spend the hours getting sloshed, wasted. Men in wide and flat hats and the deep cynicism of the unsuccessful are asked to rise, to honour those who pass through the doors, never to be seen again, like boats we launch into the wide world.  
   

Unfinished

Egg. Face. My. On. 
Know. I.

Construct a sentence. 

But I feel I'm not done here yet. 

¬¬¬

What is unfinished is intimate, personal, open, still unknown. There is something very often tragic and mysterious when we think about something (or someone) as being finished.

"His gaze, released from certitude"
--Calvino.

Which is not to say that it is arbitrary or undisciplined, just that it tarries on what he loves and is worthy of love. The quality of attachments is the quality of our understanding. I think Iris (or Cheever) would say, in addition, the quality of light is the quality of our understanding... 


___

Falling Man

A man fell from a plane. Flew from South Africa and fell to his death in leafy Richmond. Who was this man, what was his story? What was he thinking for those seven, eight hours in the darkness? Someone looks back, surely, and asks: how did it end up like this?

A few years ago another man, from Angola, fell to his death. He had one pound in his pocket and no documents, no name. Six months to trace a name, a place. 

¬¬¬ ¬¬ ¬

There is a time when things draw to a close. No-one can predict it, or prepare for it. 

The Last Act, the final words.. "I leave the last word to you," we sometimes say.

That’s it, I thought. My sadness is infinite. I no longer expect that my tears will come to an end. I am no longer surprised that my reservoir of grief is so full and refillable. And because I am no longer surprised, I am much better able to live with it. I weave it into my days. I can cry and laugh at the same time.
--from The Last Act of Love

___ __ _

Much is being made of how Muslims ought to speak up, step up to the plate and clearly and categorically repeat some mantra so that everyone can feel comfortable. Your heart cannot be divided. Fidelity, in the final analysis, to who? There is a feeling that religion is over and not just in terminal decline. But the end of religion is also a way. I think Muslims have always understood this: life is absence, a falling away, but also, some kind of wooden, rickety bridge that miraculously floats above the depths. An empty house, abandoned, with some windows broken, others boarded up, reveals what was concealed for so long. Beneath the husk are other layers, stories that remain -despite everything-unfinished.

A famous line from the Qur'an has it that seas and the ink are inexhaustible.

__

As bookshops go this one-from the photo, anyway-appears unflashy and austere enough. If you can ever get out of academentia unscathed then...

The Black Sun

The first day of true summer was like the last; the shadows in the sun were there from the start...

'Great summer sun, great summer sun
All loss burns in trophies'

Past the old white buildings in West London, abandoned or unused, art noveua, curved facades and an old Lucozade sign from the 1950s; the sunshine is old here, the streets and small lanes, green thoughts in a green shade, and all you can do is think back to the 70s and the people you once knew who are no longer around...

The arrivals, the departures, too many to think about. 

A small cement back yard, forest green wooden rails, moss and weeds growing in the cracks, on the garage's corrugated roof. Little r goes around on a cycle, telling herself a story as she does so, and you think how old this scene is, how many people through the ages have looked out for their daughters, how many stories we weave together: hoops and cycles, curves and arcs and our hands still imagine shapes, we still cling on to those second spaces, knowing the circle is broken. But it's amazing that a small space is enough. Only with time do we notice the fences. You squint against the low light of this late, fading sun. What poetry there is, is here, in this moment. The heart dispenses with the need for words. 

n-1

As I try to wind this blog down, not just over the summer but for good, I'll try and put a few thoughts together for a final post. Ten years seems like the perfect moment to finally start with some real questions.

Thanks to everyone for visiting. In particular, it's been amazing to have come into contact with some fantastically bright women over the years: anton, fff, Roxana and darling C. Hello (and farewell) to nikki, anon. (chef) and Sadia as well. Brill. to have been-even if briefly and from a distance- in the company of Tom and Pli.

Danke, danke!

The Return

At a particular time, you lose track, things are set to return. This day, hasn't it already been lived?

At 5.20 the sky is still covered with grey clouds. A single shaft of light enters your room and taps on the door, waking you. Little H is still blissfully asleep, his head next to mine. I arise and place a pillow next to his body as I turn to leave. 

Outside there is a breeze and it has been a regular occurrence for the last two weeks. Some say it comes from Africa, sweeping in dust from thousands of miles away. What a journey! It has local name and an allotted time. Later in the morning it will faint and fade as the sun regains control, reclaims territory. You don't know the hour when this happens. 

Everything in the world seeks a mirror and every form is vying for space.

You stumble into one room forgetting why you entered it in the first place, just a vague, half-formed idea in your head, so you stand still expecting it to come to you. Instead you notice a small black bird lost in the small green and yellow leaves of a tree outside the window.

The patterns of our lives-the shape of it-that we only dimly discern in the murky light. 

The breeze is cooler by a few degrees today since it rained the previous night. You can detect the faint smell of fresh earth-grass and soil. The breeze is like a guest that has stayed over, or a brilliant conversation whose memory carries over into the next day..a few clear, jewel-like sparkling words. Summer, too, sometimes contains the sense of its own ending, its own beginning. 

In a different light we see a different world.

Without distances there would be no return. But what do you return to and who is it that returns? 

In the corridor someone rather foolishly said: "In a century we will have worked it out, we will have a better understanding of what we're about". You don't argue or dismiss him but it seems that if one is young anything can be believed.

You bump into an old friend who is lionhearted by name (but not by temperament). He's 'on' his second marriage and informs me of other break-ups and impending divorces amongst our mutual friends. No-one could have seen it and there's no telling.This is what passes for 'news', that and the onset of blood pressure, diabetes and angina. How the cards are dealt is anybody's guess. 

A returns from Thailand saying it is dirt cheap. Full of slim prostitutes and shady looking middle aged men. How that makes it more advanced than the land of the pure is beyond me. Over there, he tells me, you can see there is a kind of dynamism, people on the move. It all sounds terribly confusing. Everyone on the move, going where, one wonders, and for what purpose? ('Purpose of visit' it reads on the card). What if I were to write: 'to find myself'? Or, more accurately, 'to be in the presence of loved ones'?

Today the breeze comes and goes, rustling in the high leaves, making a discarded sweet wrapper dance for a while, whistling through the sighing windows that haven't been closed properly, shifting some red African dust, mingling with the local grey in the early hours, ruffling someone's hair, lifting the corner of someone's clothes, flowing, alighting, resting, opening and closing, laughing, murmuring to itself, until tomorrow it will not.