Black Sun

The great object of life is Sensation-to feel that we exist-even though in pain-it is this 'craving void' which drives us to Gaming-to Battle-to Travel-to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.
---Byron's Letters and Journals, vol. 3, p109

There is nothing more depressing, nothing more deflating, than a visit to a shopping mall-except, perhaps, being unaware of its utter nullity or, God forbid, actually shopping there! Like an airport or a waiting lounge, these are non-places, no-place-like-home. I brush past other zombies and listen to the announcement of some special deal. This, then, is the life of the Eloi. God forgive us.

I think we'll look back at the solid world of the bourgeoisie with some nostalgia. At least they possessed something, had something. They still managed to live in a world and knew the value of masks and hypocrisy, knew something of the attachments to work, family, and place that are necessary for civilised conduct. Compared to the wares of the 99 pence shops and the endless amounts of plastic, gaudy junk that floats our way, unceasingly, via the South Pacific and that is ultimately destined for the heaps of rubbish, there is something to be said for the simple and enduring pleasures of a previous generation. The fanaticism of the fundamentalist is not too dissimilar to that of the hedonist: in both there is detachment from reality and a flight to the imaginary.

Bourgeois conformity, middle class norms and conventions, the daily rhythms and patterns of a life-not very exciting or noble, I know-are still to be infinitely preferred to this unbearable lightness of being. One wonders if the whole problem of western life isn't to ensure that pleasure doesn't become unhinged from "the good", doesn't descend (with the help of the imagination) into an endless whirl of desire and frivolity. How to be open and still not shallow, trivial?

[Is Chopin at this balancing point? On the verge of sliding into the most banal sentimentality]

Pleasure, which is fundamentally the intensified awareness of reality, springs from a passionate openness to the world and love of it.
----Hannah Arendt.


Forever inflamed and dissatisfied, his spirit will go abroad in the world, the busy industrious world. ; it will go abroad, I tell to you, like a whore yelling: Plasticity! Plasticity! Plasticity has poisoned him, yet he can't live without his poison now. He has banished reason from his heart...The happiest thing that can happen to him is that nature strike him with a terrifying call to order. And such, in fact, is the law of life: he who refuses the joy of honest activity can feel nothing but the terrible joys of vice...

The immoderate pleasure he takes in form will drive him to monstrous and unprecedented excesses. Swallowed up this ferocious passion for the beautiful and the bizarre, the pretty and the picturesque, ..the notions of the true and the just will disappear. The frenetic passion for art is a cancer that eats up everything else..excessive specialization in a single faculty can only end up in emptiness.
---Baudelaire, from Roberto Calasso's 'Literature and the Gods'

This is the emanicpation of the aesthetic-Nietzsche's aesthetic justification of life. The Beautiful becomes free from the True, just as art becomes autonomus: art for art's sake! and reason, too, loses any necessary relation to the Good. And yet, the strangest of things is happening: these freedoms are morphing into compulsions and vicious circles so that we are, quite literally speaking, becoming slaves of our desires.

Not knowing or able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves....taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge their, exploring them like large unknown territories.
---Pessoa, 'The Book of Disquiet'

From Calasso:

'But the supreme beauty, nay the supreme order, is still and only the beauty of chaos, and to be precise, of a chaos waiting only for the contact or love to open into a world of harmony, like the world of ancient mythology and ancient poetry'.

The problem for the Romantics was that whilst evoking the name of the gods they realised that they had to remember the communities and the world in which they felt at home. That world was no more-who now talks of the "muddy centre"? But if the world has disappeared, the spirit that fired their aspirations hasn't. The problem, then, for the Romantics (and all rebels) is that they are desert wanderers without a qibla.

If everything is "constructed," then why give oneself to one myth? This is the paralysis and uncertainty of modern times (and , incidentally, why all serious questions are answered in anon-serious way: power, technology or utility). The world itself has become a spectacle, insubstantial. Without Reality 'Appearance' also loses its charm. Everything 'given' is now but a wandering fragment (Van Gogh's shoes). Nothing is sacred and everything can be questioned, ridiculed or analysed. And because it can, so it is; worse than that: so it must be.

It's us or them. That simple. Me or you; peace or war, light or darkness; order of the soul or the raging wilderness without; the pure against impure; the chosen pitted against the damned. Just don't ask: who is black , who is blue-or who's with me, who's with you.

We live in liquid times, when nearly everyone is an "extra"...superfluous humanity. The contradiction of capitalism: production requires a non-capitalist sector to provide cheap inputs, raw materials. But it is the nature of capitalism to expand, to flow across borders. Capitalism, like modernity, destroys "the limit," devours 'otherness'. There is a constant need to reconstruct 'the other', to find exotic spaces, untapped markets.

We live in a waste society. The waste accumulates, piles and piles of it. Like a swamp that has has become stagnant through an excess of energy equilibrium requires that something has to give..there has to be an outlet, a draining, creative destruction (Bataille). The surplus must be consumed or destroyed.

Surplus humanity.

The libertarians are always put on the back foot when asked if their idea of freedom of capital movement and information applies to labour as well ! With globalisation there is no more wilderness, no more places to colonise. We live in one space. Where does the surplus go now?

Humanity on the move.

It is estimated that 4 million Iraqis have been displaced since the war on Iraq ( two million internally). The refugee is an outlaw, an outcast, subsisting on the periphery of the city-like the lepers and madmen of old (Foucault) or the dead (Peter Brown, Cult of the Saints). We must avoid the sight of them. Stateless, and doubly so: since there isn't even a state to which they could potentially belong and no state will accept them. Welcome to the desert of the real, to no-man's land. A lawless space, limbo, purgatory. A frontier land where one cannot look back or forwards. There is only a waiting -but we've forgotten for what.

Camp life.

Detention centres, checkpoints, Reservations, camps, gulags, workhouses, walls and fences (Berlin, Baghdad, China, the occupied territories, American-Mexican); gated communities, fenced-in existence. Ilfo, Hagadera, Dabab...

Being a refugee means to lose the media on which social existence rests, that is a set of ordinary things and persons that carry meaning-land, house, village, city, parents, possessions, jobs, and other daily landmarks. The creatures in drift and waiting have nothing but their 'naked life,' whose continuation depends on humanitarian assistance.

People without qualities, living in ground zero.they have been deposited in this nondescript space ( a desert) and are all at sea, nothing to cling on to. One day is as good as the other. A frozen transience chills the heart. Nothing happens here. Groundhog day. These people are not even a people. Who knows their stories and what do they leave behind? They are, as Derrida says, undecidables-neither nomadic nor sedentary. They are the unthinkables, the undead, the untouchables, the unimaginable community. Are they communities at all or mere aggregates, surviving by the grace-if that's the right word-of others, in utter dependence on the outside. They have become puppets, pulled one way or the other by the strings of power.

The refugee is the great unknown, the harbinger of ill tidings (Brecht). He is a mirror image of the stateless elites who have lost all contact with the earth, any love for place, any ties to the world of men. The permanently transient are a sign of our times, our liquid times.
---based on Z. Bauman's Liquid Times

--For Jonah.

Jonesy, I'd post the brilliant, brilliant song you sent but if the so-called intelligence services are watching I'm in Gitmo mate :)

Best line of the day:

Isn't CCTV reality TV on a national scale?

Everybody's a star....



and...

Tot semblava un mor en flor,i l'anima n'era jo

All seemed a world in flower ,and I was the soul of this world.

He who sees Ratio sees only himself.

Anyone who goes to university is brainwashed into believing that "critical analysis" is the be-all and end-all of thinking. Everything must be broken down or seen from a fragmentary point of view.

The end of Aristotelianism is the end of the world having a soul and the birth of modern science.

For the world is not atoms or radio-active or other forces, the diamond is not carbon, and light is not vibrations in ether. You can never come to the reality of creation by contemplating it from the point of view of destruction.
---Rabindranath Tagore.

What is the difference between charcoal and diamond? Nothing but a mere matter of structure and arrangement ! So speak the moderns. Those who look at the world from the perspective of material continuity are wont to say: we share 99.4 % of the same genetic material with apes or monkeys and other such absurdities. And what, do they think the same of us! And if so, why so many cages?Yes! We are earth and wind and stars as well..but for the moderns this is merely a question of 'fact', not of truth.

The world that people had thought themselves living in-a world rich with colour and sound..speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals -was consigned now into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead-a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity.
----E.A. Burtt.

The self-revealed mystery which maintains the fundamental unity of the created shape , its idea, through all its variations and modifications.
---Goethe.

Any statement about the nature or meaning of Being are invalid. The metaphysical is, strictly speaking, non-sense; science is concerned only with the processes in the phenomenal world , the laws that govern becoming, matter-in-motion. It represents a change in perspective from the cosmos and proportion to the infinite universe and function, from geometry to algebra.

The spiritual destructiveness, the sheer nihilism implicit in such a shift is only too apparent. What is the universe and to what end is it moving? Nothing but a play of blind forces; Nature is reduced to quantity, 'extension' , power and that alone. "Dead matter". And to ask 'to what end' is to ask an illegitimate question.

The world of values is lyingly added. Only man is of any value in this alien universe. Man is all but he too is but a part of the universe, he too is , ultimately, a machine of sorts, a chance agglomeration of matter. After that, why philosophize one wonders...

But why reproach science for its dynamism when you maintain that life itself is ceaseless flux, constant striving? Yes, but it is held together at every moving point and at every fleeting moment by a centre of stillness:

Und alles Drangen , alles
Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Hernn.

'And all this struggle, whirl, and stir is infinite peace in God.'

All truth which cannot be 'realised' in one's understanding, imagination, reason, and soul, that cannot be lived, assimilated into one's experiences, that remains an abstraction from life and one's whole personality, is a partial truth and from a certain perspective-that of the absolute truth- "false", or at least worthless.

A form of knowing (science) that has nothing to say of friendship, love, art, thought itself and its emergence from matter, the freedom to act in this way and not that, the different degrees of freedom that exist throughout nature, a methodology that rules out on a priori grounds the metaphysical, that says nothing, can say nothing, of God, the soul, spirituality: this is an impoverished conception of what a human life is and can be.

The Urphanomen is at the intersection of 'idea' and 'experience', thought and reality. Science, on the other hand, is hell bent on insulating the experiment from man and attempting to get to nature through artifices and instruments ..an empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber.

The dangers threatening modern science cannot be averted by more and more experimenting, for our complicated experiments have no longer anything to do with nature in her own right, but with nature changed and transformed by our cognitive activity.
---Heisenberg.

Everything 'factual' is already theory. For experience to be experience there must already be the idea , the 'categories of understanding'.

Every scientific theory is merely the surface rationalization of a metaphysical substratum of beliefs, conscious or unconscious, about the nature of the world. ---Heller.

Would scientific discoveries even be possible without had a new type of explanation not been sought, had there not been a change in man's sensibilities, a radical shift in his outlook and perspective or his desire to look at things in a new way?

Kant: We are able to think of an understanding which, not being discursive like ours, but intuitive, starts with a universal vision and descends from there to the particular.

Walter Benjamin:
For Goethe, modern science is 'subjective' because it does not address the whole man, because it depends on the emancipation of the subject from the totality of which it is a mere part. The scientist appears imprisoned within the hypothetical limitations of an obstinately self-willed and narrow-minded individuality...what is there exact in mathematics except its own exactitude?
For the scientist the subject-object distinction means thinking of the latter as lifeless, so much dead matter. Compare this to Goethe:

If the eyes were not sun-like how could we ever see light? And if God's own power did not dwell within us , how could we delight in things divine?

(For Jonah, one of the few people left who truly understands Blake)

The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist....
neither blindness
nor death can take away the object
which does not exist.
mark the place
where stood the object
which does not exist
it will be a simple dirge
for the beautiful absence...


Now all space swells like an ocean
a hurricane beats
on the black sail..
now you have empty space
more beautiful than the object
more beautiful than the place it leaves
it is the pre-world
a white paradise
of all possibilities
you may enter there
cry out vertical-horizontal
perpendicular lightning strikes the naked horizon....


Obey the counsels
of the inner eye
do not yield
to murmurs mutterings smackings
it is the uncreated world
crowding before the gates of your canvas
obey the counsels of the inner eye
admit no-one
extract
from the shadows of the object
which does not exist
from polar space
from the stern reveries of the inner eye
a chair.
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the wilderness.

Place on the chair a crumpled tablecloth
add to the idea of order
the idea of adventure
let it be a confession of faith
before the vertical struggling with the horizontal
let it be quieter than angels
prouder than kings
more substantial than a whale
let it have the face of lost things.
we ask reveal o chair
the depths of the inner eye
the iris of necessity
the pupil of death.

---Z.Herbert.

Black is the place of non-manifestation, the place prior to manifestation; the black space is empty, the object before the object*, Holy of Holies, the Ka'ba.
*Jabes:

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing. He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling.

He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening. He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its primitive infinity.

But man, proud man
Dressed in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of what he's most assured-
His glassy essence-like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven
As made the angels weep-who, without spleens
Would all laugh themselves mortal.

The mirror accepts forms without changing and is, therefore, itself the image of a quiet contemplative mind. Still waters reflect. Mind can reflect knowledge of the highest, purest universal qualities. Mind is not the brain, the "spleen", but something that is timeless, or at least has the capacity for timelessness. (The materialist monism of the evolutionists poses all sorts of problems of how one can know..as the Greeks would have said: if everything is flowing , everything is a stream, then who sees it?)

Is knowledge representation of the object or identification with it, transcendence or immanence? Both!

Aristotle: intellect is mirror and eye that surveys the image. [For Descartes, it is only the latter (i.e subjectivity..cp. the object that guarantees the subject..see Schuon)]. The "substantial forms" of the stars enter the intellect...Coleridge: we want to see and feel the stars.

Scepticism: is consciousness completely separate from these external objects or is mind a product of the body? And yet, if there is only a gap, then how can the mind bridge it? There is a temptation to reduce these complexities in one direction or the other: either all is material or all is idea: idea is an "object" in the mind only ..objects are representations in the inner space..God, pain.. (see Kerr).

The metaphysical outlook is displaced by a materialistic one; 'heaven and earth' by 'earth' (materialistic monism).

For Aristotle, the 'eye' of the body can see/know particulars (sensation, motion) whilst the eye of the mind, reason, can see/know universals. There is a dualism but it is between human faculties; both lie on this side of the knowing subject. For Descartes: mind-body. Now the dualism is between consciousness and inert matter, res extensa (and the body falls into the latter). Now a pronounced distinction between the world of inner freedom (noumenal) and mechanical causality (phenomenal)
--From Rorty's '

Realism (R): the world extends beyond what we can conceive.

Idealism (I): what is, is what we can conceive; what we cannot conceive is not.

Emphasis on can, i.e not on what we actually conceive (empirically) but an argument from reason. (and 'we' implies possible minds, not infinite minds).

Strong version of I: something does not exist unless we perceive it (as opposed to conceive).

Does something (reality) exist independently of our methods of reaching it? Is objectivity possible? But for R an increase in objectivity does not necessarily reveal the world as it really is..a difference between what there is and what we can conceive of is still possible; 'I' is based on a lack of humility and a reductionism: limit the universe to our own self-understanding..'I am the world' (or one first of all limits what is our possible experience and therefore what we can know).

Is there a category of things of which we can form no conception? but wouldn't such a conception of such a category itself be a contradiction since to use words like "exist" is already to be on this side of 'conception'.

Positive inconceivable: there are things which we cannot conceive of; something is impossible.

Negative inconceivable: there may be things that we cannot conceive of that are , nonetheless, real. (we do not know what we do not know). In other words, we cannot say that there are no things that are real and beyond our conception.

'I': what cannot conceived of makes no sense (to us) . We do not possess a general concept of reality that goes beyond 'existence' as we understand it. What would it mean to say that we cannot conceive of 'exists'? By imputing existence to it doesn't that mean that it can, in some sense at least, be conceived? Can something exist without the mind (conceiving it)? [does this lead to a contradiction: reality does not extend beyond what we can think..except for the reality of that thought itself]

But can reality extend beyond what people can conceive of (the blind, the deaf as an analogy)?

If we take away the people (us) who have a higher grasp of reality that reality still exists independently of the mind that conceives it (even though those at the lower level than us may not be able to conceive it); similarly, are there other beings with an understanding of reality that is higher than ours?

Objection: What is meant by 'higher' here, what is meant by 'lower'? In what sense can I say the 9 year-old has a "limited" grasp of reality ?This is only understandable in terms of the language I use. "Limited" assumes reference to another picture of the world is available to me..i.e language can move,a s it were, inwards (or downwards). In a similar vein, the analogy depends on the ability of language to move 'out' : in what way can we say there is a higher reality if we only have our language?

Objections to the objection: Let's say we cannot communicate with the 9 year-old . If he believes that a higher form of understanding exists (ours) -even if incommunicable- is this "nonsense", is it nonsense even though it is true in this case? [Is this the Kantian position: there is a higher truth, just that we cannot know it?] On what grounds can we say that there is no possibility of anything beyond his experiences being real?

Furthermore, concepts contain their complements..what they cannot be applied to. Our general concept, therefore, includes both even though it may lack a name. Would we have reason to believe that nothing ever corresponds to the ideas of things we cannot conceive of..i.e can we positively say so?

Wittgenstein: anything beyond the bounds of human experience , beyond the community's understanding, beyond the words for something, can have no meaning; there can be only silence.

But we can (and do) also publicly agree on what we cannot say and that is a form of judgement , understanding. Isn't this also a part of human experience? This raises the question of the possibility of a transcendent thought , anything beyond language , proof , evidence, empirical understanding. Is this the distinction between knowledge and understanding?

'I': reality is dependent on our thought whereas 'R' would claim, I think, that we and our thought are dependent on reality. I like this second thought, sounds Russian. Subjectivity is fashioned from given materials.