The truth is within

Culture means not so much a better world as a nobler one: a world to be brought about not through the overthrow of the material order of life but through events in the individual's soul. Humanity becomes an inner state. Freedom, goodness and beauty become spiritual qualities..The inner state is to be the source of action that does not come into conflict with the given order.

Culture should enoble the given by permeating it, rather than putting something new in its place.

---Marcuse.

There is a sense here that we are all captives, waiting for the inevitable. "We"? Now that the blasts are coming closer to you..now you say we! Ten dead, many more injured. Some still buried under the rubble. Little r cried for two hours steady because the school had a "lockdown". Everyone's on edge and the sense of fear is palpable. 

What to do? Carry on with the ridiculous charade, the life of the mind and all that posturing, while everything around you falls to pieces? Take refuge in books, theory..anything whatsoever, in order to avoid looking at it in the face. 

Which planet are you on?

This is from Bellow, Mr Sammler's Planet:

"She [his daughter] turned up in a miniskirt of billiard-table green, revealing legs sensual in outline but without inner sensuality...But who knew how many sexual difficulties and complications were associated with Shula's hair." 

Is it me, or is there something slightly creepy about those lines? And inner sensuality? What on earth could that possibly mean? Of course, it goes without saying that you do like Bellow (a lot) but does it follow from that that you leave all scepticism behind? I know this has been a theme from the 1960s onward and that it has sometimes been accompanied by a somewhat hysterical denouncement of hierarchies but, once the shouting stops you do have to ask: white male dudes?

~~
The four richest people (in terms of assets) in Indonesia are apparently richer than the poorest 100 million according to a new Oxfam report. Nah, let's stick with the old story (all together now: I've got some wheat, you've got some potatoes. Let's trade!)

The HEC 2025 is yet another example of the pandering to the rich (who are now called "entrepreneurs"). They are to play a role in the development of 'Tier I' universities. Tech. entrepreneurs are supposed to work with faculty to develop solutions for the "overall" problems of higher education institutions. Perhaps I''m going mad or am on a different planet but it appears that no-one here sees anything wrong in that-or if they do they're too scared to say so. 

And in the same way we call those who sell their wisdom to anyone who wants it sophists, just as if they were prostitutes.

I've already been told to "clam down" or "ignore it"..to "think about my family". Criticism of these clowns will only end you up in trouble. Part of me wants to press on, to burn all the bridges.  

What's higher in 'higher education'?

"The rich cultural traditions in these areas [arts and humanities] need to be nurtured further to create an enlightened soft global image of our society, add value to our economy through creative and performing arts and design, tourism and highlight our ethical and aesthetic values."

That was from the "vision 2025" document, Higher Education Commission, Pakistan. Cracked me up. In fact, the whole document is riddled with corporate bullshit: "knowledge economy," "productivity," "entrepreneurs,", "innovation," etc., etc. Universities are supposed to make the land of the pure the "next Asian tiger." There is also a lot of tosh about the "fourth industrial revolution" and "embedding technology" in classroom teaching. I suspect that by now you can probably guess that my views are opposed to nearly all of this tripe. The philistines are quite good at cutting and pasting. 

Of course, what no-one wants to address is the startling mediocrity one finds in these universities (not to mention the fundamentalism or half-baked conservatism). Also, the financial corruption that has seen the mushrooming of "franchises" and "distance learning". All that goes unmentioned by the HEC clowns. The bureaucrats and their fantastically paid consultants are a joke, beyond a joke, even; spewing out their vacuous drivel will do nothing but ensure years of gaming and posturing.   

But the passage above in particular had me reeling (the VC didn't see the funny side of it, of course). It's hard to single out what is the most ridiculous aspect of it. But if pressed I'd say it is the idea that we should highlight our ethical and aesthetic values.

Excellence in Leadership, Governance and Management of HEIs, 

Strengthening systems of Research, Innovation and Commercialization and and linking the ingredients of triple helix of Academe, Government and Business Entrepreneurs, Use of available and evolving Information Communication Technology resources in Teaching and Research, Technology Embedded Academic Programming to prepare scholars to participate effectively in the emerging “Fourth Industrial Revolution”

Good grief!

Fear and Love

k

This is some heady stuff (from Eagleton, Holy Terror): 

Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

---G. Monbiot, The Guardian.

~~~

I cannot without deceit and corruption love a self abstracted from the vision, involvement and investment of others...there is an interiority that is hidden from me.

--Rowan Williams, Lost Icons.

I survey the world from my lofty heights, am detached from it. I have nothing to say about -for or against-the violence all around me..I am not a part of it..(the delusions continue)...I appreciate art/poetry/nature, have seen through the shenanigans of the experts and the politicians. I'm even quite spiritual (even though I say so myself). 

I'm not sure about the two-state solution. I'm not sure about any state solution. The truth is within (says the modern-day Gnostic). 

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle

~~~

"Connectedness or recognition are fundamental to any position that can reasonably be called human." 

What would it mean, for example, for an American to recognize the atrocities against the Red man? Or the violence that lies at its origins (slavery and segregation)? Or for the Pakistanis to bear witness to the horrors committed against what was then East Pakistan?

Without a sense of shame is there only the posturing of the isolated ego and its defence mechanisms? (Of course, 'shame' itself has often been shameless..honour killings are just one example).

you cannot be serious

Your failure to understand much stems from what, precisely?

"Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously."
--K. Barth.

There is great weight in those words and yet they are, at the same time, liberating.

There is sometimes a lot of pressure on Muslims to speak out against the cruelty and barbarism inflicted by the radicals. I can somewhat understand that and yet, at the same time, it has to be asked: Who is my brother? I barely take responsibility for myself-in practical terms-so why extend it to anyone else? Escapism? Perhaps. But why draw yourself to the world in an inappropriate manner, or why further than necessary?

You live a life at odds with yourself, a life in which you do not give enough serious attention to what is required. Avoid the easy consolations of talking about the falseness of 'the world'. But also avoid thinking there is only an 'inner' truth. To speak up against or resist, in some manner, the ugliness of a Trump or a fundamentalist is not, I think, to become 'politicized'. Is there such a thing as neutrality here?

Sometimes we take ourselves too seriously, with all the attendant deceptions. And this false seriousness is really, ultimately, a form of childishness: a demand for recognition, an assumption that, on our own or by our own lights, we can reach maturity. 

But to be childish in another way (Blake?) is to take faith seriously. I think Bob would like this: to acknowledge the self is groundless. You respond to a call or you don't. To the extent that you do there is a self.

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

The blessings of the sun

I sit for at least two hours out in the sun, usually under a tree, the natural light warm on my skin, my hands darkening with time...

I usually have something to read but am constantly interrupted by colleagues who see me on the bench and immediately come to sit down next to me and chat. I don't mind that at all..I'm only drifting anyway, and it is interesting to listen to what's on people's minds. It's usually frivolous and so that helps put things into context for you. Your own trivial consternation, for example. 

It is hard not to think of how everything is really floating, despite the apparent solidity. The sun, the trees, the ancient cycle that brings the late afternoon breeze back this way at this time of the year. And about how what preoccupies us is really very often of no account, of little relevance, that is, to what is most enduring in our being. Which 'I' do you talk about? 

I can't remember much of what I've read. There are a few standout lines, though, that seem to mean more than I can incorporate into my own life (Gillian Rose, Paradiso, Rosenzweig). It is an effort but, truly, knowledge and books are not everything. I see it now as clear as a face before me.Whose? Yours or mine? 

Is this a kind of fatalism, a letting go, an acceptance, at root, of your own frailty and limitations? 

You continue to think, one of the most radical of positions, stances (not "gestures" as the post-moderns would have it) is tawakuul. A trust in the goodness of the world, in the continuing good. But it is, obviously, not just that: a kind of resting in mystery that only God can grant. Is this dependent on an awareness of one's own finitude (Ricoeur)?   

You ask me why I smile
But I do not answer,
for my thoughts are carried downstream.
Far away from the world.
(from memory)
--Li Po.

4 o'clock blues

Mr Sammler did feel somewhat separated from the rest of his species, if not in some fashion severed-severed not so much by age as by preoccupations too different and remote, disproportionate on the side of the spiritual, Platonic, Augustinian, thirteenth century. As the traffic poured...
--Bellow.

Michael said to me, as he scoffed down his second slice of cake after dinner, "You're becoming destabilized by too much reading". There was some truth to that, but it really is too much fragmented reading that is the problem; more than that it is the belief, what is now a plainly obvious false belief, that reading is the solution.  

He must have started drinking by four o'clock in the afternoon. Vodka, gin. Hard stuff. The lights were out, a game of chess abandoned, he just sat there in the cold with his woolly hat on, looking out into the dusk. By the time you met him he was sloshed, his mind stuck in a groove as he endlessly repeated the same old one-track thought: 'In my grandfather's time...' Nothing could be more boring than a lone drunk. He's thirty-five and washed out for no apparent reason-except perhaps boredom (if that's a reason).

We don't know who the students are. Yes, but there is a deeper problem: we don't know who we are. The idea that teachers know that much more than students, I mean really know, is, I think, something of a fallacy. Yes, read more; yes, know more tricks and techniques. But in terms of what they've seen of the world, in terms of what they've learned from their experiences-if they've had any- they're remarkably similar (which is what accounts for the childishness of academics).   

First and Last Things

The main elements-stresses, sorrows, pleasures, challenges-in our lives do not change.
--R. Hoggart.

Or do not change that much. This is still the tent of scattered stars that love made, is it not? This old story, of joy and sorrow, is old, not only yours. The wounds we think ours alone have scarred others before us (though there's no solace in that). There is no need to insist upon it. If someone wants to maintain that faith is a story, then that's fine. There are no proofs here, no philosophical arguments. Get over it. Reason without faith can circle around itself and, quite evidently, lead to barbarism (Goya: "The sleep of reason..."). Instrumental reason that knows nothing of first things, final ends, can and has served bureaucracies that sent people to the gas chambers.

To talk of faith seriously in these times is, it is claimed, to border on contempt-a contempt of the most obvious of realities: that religion is a handmaiden (or perhaps even inextricably bound with) the most atrocious violence and nihilism in the modern world. 

'The sense of constant unfinishedness' might, for some, point to despair and meaningless; for others it might necessitate the belief in progress and a striving for human perfection. I like to think, though, that it points to the divine. Ahad and 'm', as the Muslims would say. 

The pattern of our belief composes our sense of the self.

For centuries now we have believed the polar opposite. The self, if it can be said to exist in any enduring sense, is a moving tissue of desires and fragmentary self-awareness, a mirage or phantom, as insubstantial as the morning mist that is dispelled as soon as the sun rises. the unreality of the self mirrors the unreality of the world. I don't know if that's Buddhist...

But what pattern the self has is composed of its material desires. When you look at the commodities around you, the material possessions you've surrounded yourself with, you're supposed to say: that's me! And in a sense, a depleted one, that's quite true. Men and women cannot live without images. What image or picture (Iris M) of the self do we have of ourselves today? What image do we grow into (are allowed to grow into)? 

The radical nature of religion: to reject false images. To negate the idols of the day. But that can never be enough since it is, sure enough, often accompanied with a zeal and a fanatical spirit devoid of all humility and charity. What, then, do we turn to? Which qibla? 

Who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?
--Solzhenitsyn 

Perhaps more reasonably, and less dramatically we may aim to tame those aspects of the self we find disagreeable. Does opposition, resistance to the world have to be so one-sided? (Render unto Caesar..?). 

We are surrounded by vast areas of self-deceit. In many ways we haven't really grown up, preferring denial and childish outbursts to an understanding of what we really are. Who, today, can bear to look themselves in the mirror? Under what light?

The moral courage not to be swayed by the opinions of others, the dominant way of thinking. A certain amount of obstinacy is required to stand against the times. 

Time and the self

To theorize is to place oneself outside of time. The instinct or impulse is a deep one. To arrest the flow with our constructions, physical or mental. Or the desire for eternal youth or the sense of the loss of an irretrievable golden age. A painting, a photograph, to capture the moment, still life.

And yet, and yet, we live in time; time lives through us. Perhaps not just in time but...

There is something absolutely heart-breaking when you lose a student (as we did this week). A twenty-one year old young woman from leukemia. 

And here we are, with our illusions of independence and invulnerability. Rational man, oblivious of the frailty of the body, blissfully unaware of the fact that he needs other people to converse with. Time as a space that opens up the possibility of fulfillment but also a series of erasures. The slowing down, the forgetfulness, the hesitations and stumbling. Our backs curve, as if we were withdrawing from the world, trying to protect ourselves (as a child does when he sleeps). This ancient process down in our bones...the old drift of the world taking us with it. Drift..drift, there are no anchors (Bronk). For the love of God.

I see it now-the world is swiftly passing. 

Technological changes mean that knowledge can be stored; the sayings and experiences of an old man, embodied in old speech patterns, gestures, shapes of the body, become ever-more redundant. But more than that: because technology and the world has changed so much it's not clear if the old man's experiences matter that much. What can they explain to us, after all? They speak, if at all, from a bygone era whose sensibilities and assumptions do not resonate with ours. Fundamental human truths? In a relativistic age, really? 

Do we think old people can provide us with security, reassurance, understanding. We have the state and its insurance mechanisms for that. Knowledge, blanket and assets provided. Sign here. 

Also, we don't want to be reminded of our dependency on care. In a time that promotes not just youth but the independent self old age is nothing but a terrible restriction on our mobility and freedom. To be alive is to be able to get up and go. We think we can live forever or, alternatively, that the self is nothing but a series of fragmentary episodes, without any enduring identity or sense of continuity. Time doesn't lead to any deepening of the self any more, which is another reason why old age is useless, another reason why you have a seventy-year old President who is basically still a teenager, another reason why many of your friends feel the need to marry (or have a fling with) much younger women.

Your mind is getting slower; you'd like to believe that you're growing in wisdom but if truth be told the mere passage of time does not automatically confer on you a greater sense of awareness or understanding. Less light gets to you, your reaction time has faltered. You can fail to recognize people (not without humorous and pleasant consequences..like the way you hugged a woman who you thought was an old friend only to realize it was someone completely different!). 

What to hold on to, when to let go? Your thought can get stuck in a groove for longer, sleep patterns are more disturbed than usual (in London you slept in pitch darkness, with perfect calmness, like a horse that's been flogged to death).  

Mc University

I think there are three or four versions of the university and these can be distinguished in terms of their ultimate goals and purposes. So, the university has at various times aimed to promote pure research (from the late 19th c. onward); it has been animated by the deeply humanistic impulse to foster cultural understanding and individual awareness (sometimes this has been about the appearance of culture, as in the production of the gentleman who is supposed to administer the empire or his-and it is usually men we're talking about here-personal assets); it has been about civic engagement, making better citizens. There is the older, religiously-inspired goal of hooking up academic scholarship with religious functions (the training of the clergy). The disinterested pursuit of truth may have resulted in religion and thought eventually going their own ways (K. Minogue). 

In recent times there's been another transformation and it is determined by the imperatives of the 'knowledge economy'. The neo-liberal university is useful to the extent that it can help people get better jobs, promote economically useful research and boost economic growth. Attending this development has been the growth of a business mentality, accounting and management practices, a pathetic show of accountability and a transfer of power to administrators and bureaucrats. As the last bastion of resistance to capitalism, it was obvious the university had to be worked over. And the teachers were not just passive witnesses to this change but in some sense active participants in it. Gamesmanship and one-upmanship, pettiness and political maneuvering taken to the next level. 

~~

Science as the only mode of knowledge and experience. Other, older forms of experience must be denigrated as either useless or untrue. The practical experience of doctors, judges, nurses, teachers doesn't really count. An individual's own personal experience cannot be a source of knowledge, a way of knowing(far too crude and unsystematic). The whole body of inherited and transmitted knowledge that is the arts: poetry, music, paining cannot be allowed to count (mere aesthetics and therefore irrational, unverifiable). Tradition and religion, too, are mere remnants of faulty ways of approaching reality. No, it's scientific analysis or it's nothing.   

Each human life has its own propensity to illumination.
---J.B.

I think we forget that. Either there is no such thing as illumination; or what little there is is reserved for us alone.

It takes the heart time to catch up; it takes the heart time to learn what it always knew. You don't set much store by intelligence these days, having seen through vast swathes of your own idiocy. And the most pompous and ridiculous show of ignorance that one invariably finds at the university. The research university, with its fixations and pedantry, its killing of wonder in the name of general facts, causality, theoretical sophistication and useless refinement. 

This fascination with progress, with the acquisition and possession of greater and greater knowledge (little of which can produce beauty, or be integrated into a life lived well). Add to it, one grain at a time. But what do you have at the end of it all? That isn't a mathematical puzzle but an ethical one.

What counts can be counted. And only what can be counted counts. The bottom dollar is all the context you need. 

The loss of the world

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from? Originally?

Thought is timeless, doesn't belong anywhere. Where were you when you were thinking? Nowhere. Who were you? Nobody in particular. I'm thinking, in my own room, in a stove, cramped up. The universal condition of 'man'?

Reason, scientific procedures..a universal way of understanding reality, relegating all the other, time-worn ways to the false, to untruth. As if we could know by forgetting who we are. As if our minds were a vast and continuous continent and not a series of loosely connected islands. In the heartlands our souls are copied out in a huge ledger by a bureaucratic hand. 

With scientific thought and inventions we live in one world and one world only. If something holds it holds everywhere. I stand on a column and survey it all with perfect objectivity, a view from nowhere. With a calm spirit I note down there: two dogs fighting over a bone.

Other factors are at work in modernity, pushing us to ever-greater abstraction and 'placelessness': religion, with its universal 'brotherhood' (neither Greek nor Jew) knows of no holy land. The spirit knows no such distinctions and the local gods are in disrepute. 

The capitalist system is at heart a system that devours local attachments and bonds. Within the nexus of market exchange nothing of permanent value subsists and everything is interchangeable, a substitute for something else. 'Intrinsic worth' is an anathema. Capitalism is the exchange of represented (or abstract) values. And global capitalism just furthers that process of alienation. 

The same city centre, the same airports and, ultimately, the same mental attitudes. Place, as the locus of a distinct history, the flourishing of unique individual perspectives and collective representations, is replaced, through mechanical repetition, by "space" and abstract flows, by the undoing of real communication in favour of the exchange of equivalents.

So, in thought and in practice, the rootless, the vagabond, is held in high-esteem. Which is not surprising. This is not about investing dignity in an abstract individual (with his universal rights) but in clearing the ground so that capital can flow. 

If there are islands there are bridges. But in the land-locked homeland of our contemporary lives there is only a drab sameness. It is precisely under those circumstances that a false individuality is cultivated ("express yourself") and a false reverence for blood and soil propagated. 

At another level this symptom is expressed in a different way: the withdrawal of the man and woman of culture into their own personal aesthetic experiences; high-minded, standing above the fray, immune to the petty temptations of a shallow culture that has nothing to offer but enticements, allurements and distractions. Culture as a form of therapy, a way of disengaging from the sordid world of politics. After all, only the individual counts, says the poet (oblivious of the fact that his own sensibility has been worked upon by the capitalistic spirit). 

So, if the riff-raff are led into a self-absorbed world of spectacles and digital confusion they're not so different from the educated bourgeois, duped by their academic specialisms and cultivated sensibility of indifference. Both share in the inability to think beyond themselves. This shows up in the abuse of the language: 'the political' is now replaced, everywhere, by 'the politicized', the world can only be conceived of as 'worldliness'. One thinks of himself as rising above the world; the other sinks below it. But both are eminently products, not that they know it, of the hollowing out of the world. 

This withdrawal from the world, the loss of a sense of place, the inability to utter the word 'we'..all this in the name of a private pleasure (whether it is a 'higher' pleasure or not is to miss the point). The disappearance of the public world is effected by the proliferation of images, idle chatter, trivialities and gossip. Common sense becomes as rare as the old medieval notion of the common good in a therapeutic culture. 

With the loss of the world the space of appearances and interactions is replaced by the body and its desires (the new body politic) or by an identity politics, or the amplification of fear, personal grievances. Under such circumstances what scope is there for the development of obligations to other people and to, in fact, the continuity of the world so that future generations may participate in it?

And then there's the personal confession, the growth in widow(er)-memoirs where someone's intense suffering must be brought to light, form part of a "meditation". The loss of a brother, a mother,...it's either that or: the world is going to hell in a handcart so let's have fun, it's the only sane response after all.   

An old refrain

I

I, The rain fell
& was met by the sweet earth one more time. My head spins. I sit under a tree. I'm on the edge of the field, looking back on my life. There I am, I'm on hold, on love, body and soul apart.

What would you know? That would change anything. Find the blank page again, full, so full of open ways to you.  

The thing was then. How much time has passed through us? How many years of forgetting? Say it, whisper it to me now. If there are words, then open your silver box and share them with us. 

As I walk all I see around me is tears, the old human story, playing itself out without an audience in time's dark corner. But our love, our love, the constant gaze through the mist of the morning, this morning, the music of spring returns..a leaf falls and rests on the open page of my book. And something enters my heart again. 

Find your step among the ruins. She is all decked up and ready to go, but with winter's silent shadows like kajol always under her eyes. That's just the way it is, this ancient song handed down. And all this is just a reflection of some other, distant light. There is fresh ground and all the old footprints are wiped away, sink back down.

From the dictionary we find the verb qalaba to mean: to turn around, turn about, turn upward, upturn; to turn, turn over; to turn face up or face down; to turn inside out or outside in; to turn upside down; to tip, to tilt over, topple over; to invert, reverse; to overturn, upset, topple; to capsize; to roll over; to subvert, overthrow; to change, alter, turn, transform, convert, transmute; to transpose; to exchange.
---Shaykh Haeri