Running Boys and Dead Girls

In the title essay of her 1991 collection, Good Boys and Dead Girls, the American novelist Mary Gordon analyses a recurrent trope in American fiction – “the healthy male animal, the running boy”, the male hero whose poignant search for absolute self-determination is celebrated, despite the rising body-count (literal and metaphorical) of women left in his wake. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner and John Updike (in differing but still deadly idioms) all see women as menacing them because women speak of boundedness, connection and continuity. These are the things that stand in the way of the young man struggling to retain innocence – understood, strangely, as boundlessness and the unfettered liberty to keep moving. Much can be forgiven these heroes, it seems, because they are filled with a “virginal desire” that is “beautiful” (Faulkner’s words); the reader is invited to collude with this passionate longing for the unfettered self, and to ignore the cost to other (overwhelmingly female) lives.

--Rowan Williams, The New Statesman.

And that's the problem, really. There's something that's too white, too male, too 1950's sensibility, that has begun to grate on your nerves (not that I can abide the thought of reading anything that is deliberately non-white, non-male..etc. ..the very notion of a genre just another ploy by the market to price discriminate and capture surplus).

But it's the whole angst business, the whole goddamned business of "loss" and, worse, "a meditation on loss". Added to that is the need to be seen to be intelligent, witty, ironical..to find the perfect line (quickly followed by the blurb: the writer's writer who says in a sentence what other writers say or don't say in a whole book. That's just more of the Great American Salesman for you!).

So, it gave you great pleasure when you read Maddie Crum-that can't be her real name, surely?-taking down Updike for writing this awful tosh:

"Rich girls frigid? Nymphomaniacs? Must vary. Just women after all [..] Funny how the passionate ones are often tight and dry and the slow ones wet. The thing is play them until just a touch. You can tell: their skin under the fur gets all loose like a puppy's neck."

Again, this just sounds like the modern/American obsession to say the first thing that comes into your head. Realism is equated to sticking close to the tenor of everyday speech and the writer's contribution is to make it sound real, as if those are the words that someone would actually speak. 

Misogyny? Yeah, like, whatever. Deal with it. Get over it and move on. Stop trying to "judge" everything and take it at face value. 

Akenfield

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

Half way through Blythe's wonderful Akenfield. Has got me thinking about work. Much more of our work seems to take place indoors and alone with computers. That means that more often than not we're isolated from other people. It also usually means that a larger part of our work is of the eye/mind and has little feel of the world through our hands. 

Also, what kind of narrative forms around the work we do? It's not that increasingly a lot of it seems meaningless (Graeber: Bullshit Jobs!) but that there's no story accompanying it (in the final analysis these two may be the same thing). Today you work on something; tomorrow it's something else. Nothing accumulates and nothing endures. Another aspect to that lack of continuity is that we never grow into or inherit a profession (which is another way of saying that there isn't really a 'way of life' any more). Instead, isolated moments of consumption..a "constantly moving happiness machine".  

So: time and place. everyone's on the move (or act as if they are) And no-one has any time for anyone else or even for themselves! Nothing can be allowed to grow slowly. Is that why so many of us -men, especially, are so immature? 

The mad rush to get there. But then you realize, there is no there there. There, there. 

Scheffler writes that the loss of a sense of temporal continuity results in us being less interested in long-term projects. Why bother if the world is nothing but a shape-shifting agglomeration of half-formed images and styles of thinking that are redundant before you can say Jack Robinson? What stands today is pulled down tomorrow. In fact, must be pulled down. And that, perhaps, is all that modern freedom consists in: the ability to negate. 

~~~

‘The old look inward at things we cannot see’.

‘The bells tumble through their paces with hypnotic precision. They are incredibly old and vast, with the names of saints..as well as rhymes and prayers engraved on their sides.’

'Because the ringers put their whole personality into their efforts ‘ they often look as if they had lost their will, and as if the bells were in charge of them’.

A wheelwright says of his work, ‘It was as much in the hand as in the eye. There was a moment when you had to say now ! Then you could breathe again.’

‘ He likes to leave everything just as it was'.

[Throughout the book there is this sense of inheriting and getting into the old ways..an idea of perfection that comes with time].

‘None of us are looking for wonderful changes’..’ If I get out of my routine I’m finished’.

‘The holy time was the harvest’.

Summertime and the living's

The heat and the light have arrived and I search out the shade, the small oases of repose to prevent my skin from burning. That reminds me of a character from the old Batman t.v. series. 

Been reading the endlessly fascinating Against the Grain (alongside Zerzan's latest). A heady mix and they often re-inforce one another...

Permanent settlement comes really late in human history (maybe the last 5% of our time so far on earth). Even then, agriculture doesn't dominate. It's more a continuation of a reliance of lots of different webs of food and a mixture of foraging, hunting, gathering..

Then we get domestication: of animals, other human beings (slaves), women, grains. From then on the wilderness is the dark place of the barbarians. Here is all warmth and light and familiarity and stability: the "domus module

But hang on a sec., why does it take us so long to settle for agriculture (monocultures)? And why this gap of millennia (3 or 4) before we go from settlement to full-fledged domesticated crops? All does seem a bit strange, especially when cultivation involves so much drudgery and not as much nutritional benefit per unit of energy expended.

From 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE world population only increases by 1 million (from 4 to 5). Which means a really low growth rate. why? Climate change, war? Or could it be that living in towns, settlements, cities (the largest of which was inhabited by 25,000-50,000 people) brought with it lots of diseases (contagion between humans and between humans and non-humans)? So, yes, maybe sun-and-wheat consciousness. Sumertime and the living's not so easy. 

This is the beginning of control, productivity, spaces of power, specialization (priests, scribes, labour), the war machine, bureaucratic control, patriarchy. Standing crops, standing army. Since the surplus has to be manged so too does labour. The beginnings of the biopolitical, then. standardization and linearization. Efficiency. But also the time of rituals, of absence and return. The moon and the sun. Fertility 'gods'. What kind of religion, you wonder, existed before the neolithic period?   

Evidence from domesticated livestock over thousands of years suggests that they become tamer, more productive, less ale to respond to the environment, and hornier. It appears that difference between males an females also narrows. They also have poorer nutrition and are more susceptible to disease (because of confinement). With the narrowing down of our diets and our own confinement, does the same happen to us (Scott intriguingly asks). Skull size of domesticated sheep falls by 23% over 10,000 years! Are you kidding me?

Which is to say, we've been profoundly shaped by this shift to agriculture. Maybe that's all coming to end as our attachment to the land wanes (50% of us now live in cities). But the underlying mentality probably hasn't changed that much. So, the question is: why did we stay? Poor nutrition, slavery or drudgery, upsets the idea that people are always drawn to the city. Maybe they were forced to (and prevented from leaving). Can't think of cities without walls.

So, the next thing to think about is how power is re-oriented by settlement. States, interestingly, come to the scene relatively late and are usually fragile. Extractive states, monumentality, state machinery, lists, quantification, representation. The centre must hold. 

Have we ever really escaped from all of that?Why grain states, though? Why not a banana republic?

Interesting..    

Anywhere, any time.

At the end of time, there is no more place.

--Merton.

"The message is that surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioral flows. Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it.”

From the vantage point of surveillance capitalism and its economic imperatives, world, self, and body are reduced to the permanent status of objects as they disappear into the bloodstream of a titanic new conception of markets. His washing machine, her car’s accelerator, and your intestinal flora are collapsed into a single dimension of equivalency as information assets that can be disaggregated, reconstituted, indexed, browsed, manipulated analyzed, reaggregated, predicted, productized, bought, and sold: anywhere, anytime."

--Zuboff.

The old field

No-one knew the way to it.
But: There it is!

No-one could speak of it or even know where it was. Like a lost word only your grandfather used to speak. But it was somewhere, sometimes, darkly glimmering in the evening even if no-one could remember.

No-one knew the way to her heart, he thought. Couldn't even tell if those clown's words were for me anyway. Behind them was always that dark glimmering space, somewhere, sometimes, not that you could tell. 

It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine...'

--Transtromer.

Lost Icons

"..I cannot absolve myself; just as I cannot love myself truthfully without another person's love, because I cannot without deceit and corruption love a self abstracted from the vision, involvement and investment of others. If I were able to absolve myself, I should be saying that my acts and their meanings could be-as it were- reclaimed , drawn back out of their life in the lives of others and ordered by my will..."

This is similar, he [Rowan  Williams, Lost Icons]argues, to a "therapeutically-guided introspection", the rhetoric of "self-discovery" popular in North American culture.  But that itself can be a tool for denying a role for the perspective of others  or a way of "retreating into an enclosed frame of reference". 

Gillian Rose's Paradiso on Sunday This remarkable line: Augustine lived a life of brokenness and integrity.  That word 'and' is simply stunning in this context. 

~~~

Notre Dame...

Dim memories but Sainte Chapelle always stood out as the real gem. But so sad to see this happen. Hard not to think that this is a sign of the demise of faith in the west (or at least in France). 

I spy

The dark in the morning light. Something of the night carried over. Look back and tell me what you spy.

I have read Spy of the first person. Not sure that I always understand it. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. Then it's clear, as clear and muddied as my own life. Sometimes. Which is why I like it, I suppose. Just don't ask. You know. 

I remember..I think I remember something of the old time. It all makes perfect sense now. When words are struck out then there's a deeper connection between what remains. Like the dark in a house. That narrow cellar room with its sloping slated floor. It blocked out all the light but was also the dark nerve of the whole house. In that way connected. Through some old memory.

Well, what do you think when you think, she asked. I was thinking, when would you walk into my life. 

And now that I'm here?

There were no more words in his words. He looked at himself/me from a distance. Try and trace the words you wrote in the dark, see what carries over into the day. Look for the word that was found in nobody's heart. Yeah, there was another beginning...

The summer heat drowned the day out, blotched the hours. And then night fell and a cool breeze from another land entered the city gates. So many flowers and leaves lay sprinkled at your feet when you woke up...