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?).  

The good ol' days

What will historians make of it all? The shambolic escapades, the shenanigans of the elites, the squalid aspirations and the hate-filled anxieties of the working classes. The low key resentments that seethe with every passing failure, that stifle any generosity of spirit. They  will look back in sadness at the precise moment when the fires raged uncontrollably and the ground beneath us froze. Brexit will then seem like a shoddy little episode in the wider history of a set of warring tribes that once populate the north-western frontier. It will merit a footnote but nothing else in the history that is written with immense detachment- if we continue to write, that is. 

Some will have looked back with nostalgia- it will be posited or imagined- as if they were sipping warm beer in the shade-filled artificial gardens, their turned backs slowly warmed by the low sun. With that thousand-year look on their face the old-timers will be telling the young ones: there is nothing new under the sun. And perhaps it was true after all, since their facial gestures will make them not seem so strange, not so different after all from their distant ancestors, the first peoples who sat around the hearth telling each other fresh stories. 

There will be no looking back in anger, only in wonderment. At how these people had amassed great wealth, piled up vast quantities of gold and then plastic and then trash- enamoured as they were by glitter; first by things that were everlasting, and then in the late days by things that had only a fragmentary existence. This collecting and gathering, they estimate, to have continued right until the end, without desperation, almost a deranged kind of innocence. The blurry statistics were there before them, that is for sure, but they must have passed before the eyes of the weary generation like what they called "flash photography" or ticker-tape news.

How these people were riveted fast to their delusions. In one of their newspapers, one historian discovered, the demise was even foretold since:


'A backward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain  Seedy appeal, is that all it is now?'


And that was England gone. The old ways, enshrined in religious custom had gone first. A buckling and loosening of historical imagination. And soon it would go down further, right into the marrow, the bindings and inter-weavings that had kept people close to one another; the desire to laugh together, to exchange stories, to congregate and celebrate life here on earth.

That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.             

The good old days

Found this at the book fair for rs 200. Then had a superb meal at my old friend's restaurant. Things were capped by this:

Remember the old line that told of old things, the way they were. Somehow words fail, but the light returns. The way light steeles into peares or plums. Totally unscripted but the moment known or anticipated. 

The cold air lifts, and something else drifts into our lives. There is warmth filtering through the glass, held in the body. The earth becomes gentler by the hour. There is a glint of an opening, like the first word she speaks.