Black Sun

And now this is ‘an inheritance’ –
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long ago, yet willable forward
Again and again and again.

"The ‘Finnsburg episode’ immerses us in a society that is at once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided over by the laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are bound to exact a price for the death, wither by slaying the killer or by receiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the ‘man-price’), a legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doomladen atmosphere of this interlude gives the reader an intense intimation of what wyrd, or fate, meant....All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world.... [v]engeance for the dead becomes an ethic for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed; the wheel turns, the generations tread and tread and tread..."

"Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here are heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture."

http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/beowulf/introbeowulf.htm

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I signed off a 'post' (no-one writes letters any more!) with the word 'salaam'. An American, 'M', wrote back saying I was unaware of Islamic Jurisprudence, had a poor grasp of a great religion ..either that, or I had an "ulterior motive"! There's something quite endearing -as Larkin saw- about Mid-West desert bigotry. It's produces the type of innocence that leads one to think CNN or the World Bank are "leftist" organisations -I kid thee not, I have heard them described in this way in America. Or that the East Coast is full of "liberal elites" with their love of gays, Jews, commies, Negroids, feminists, "welfare"...the list is endless.

And this, from an intelligent and very articulate correspondent,

By any objective standard George W. Bush is not a stupid man, but he gets elected by playing one on TV cause everytime the Democrats call him stupid he calls them pointy-head.

What's intriguing about that is not only that an American has to play stupid (as if there's a whole vast constituency that identifies with a moron) but the idea of "objective standards". Corruptio optimi pessima.

Reading in Luban's article that 33% of Americans think torture is permissible, and that an equal number think the govt. had something to do with 9/11, why is it that that doesn't, now, seem so weird after all?

People are always harping on about India's tech boom and her shining economy. Well, yes, all well and good-especially if one's view of India is gleaned from glamorous Bollywood films and nothing else. A more interesting (and realistic) perspective was forthcoming from an exhibition at Tate Modern: five million people do not have access to toilets in Mumbai. One billion people worldwide are living in slums (see Tillim's brilliant photos of Jo'burg). Those of us who lived in 'Defence' (Karachi or Lahore) were totally oblivious of the wretched of the earth just minutes away from our comfortable Green Zones.

A insightful piece on what's really happening is Pankaj Mishra's piece here

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America: land of opportunity (unless you're black, that is); Britain: the great neoliberal experiment where through honest hard work anyone could make it. Finally, at last, the old social hierarchies would be broken down by capitalism. Er..think again

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One day early in 2004 as I was eating a meal in the green zone, the seven-square-mile enclave of air-condi-tioned comfort in Baghdad, I asked one of the Americans at my table what he thought of the massive suicide bombs that had killed dozens of people at a Shi’ite shrine in the city that morning. “Yeah, I saw something about it on my office television,” he replied. “But I didn’t watch the full report. I was too busy working on my democracy project.”
---Rajiv Chandrasekeran, author of Imperial Life.

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Stumbled across an old record shop and asked for an Emmi Leisner CD. No-one had heard of her. I was asked if I was a singer myself (no doubt, the portly stomach had something to do with that). The old man said he'd check if he had the album in the basement. After less than 30 seconds he ran back up and said: "this is the first thing that came into my view" and lo and behold, there it was, an old Emmi Leisner LP. "Do you want me to play some?"
"Yes, please do"

And there we stood, transfixed by the mesmerizing beauty of her singing...a Shawashank moment, if you like. Everyone stopped what they were searching for. Now all I need to do is dig up that old record player from the garage.

Criticism of new forms of communication technologies stretches at least as far back as Plato's Seventh Letter. Then we were warned of the dangers of abstraction and the hold of the spectacular on our imaginations. Current concerns over the ICT revolution, though similar, stress our lack of autonomy over such changes, and this is reflected in the view that globalisation, with which it is inextricably linked, is somehow inevitable. Globalisation - whether political, economic, or cultural - is alleged to lead to the formation of a "network society" where the space of flows (of people, capital, goods, information, or culture) comes to dominate the more solid structures of our habitat, our moorings in a particular time and place.

The internet, whose staggering growth in extensity, intensity and speed is well documented, is seen by some as both a central driving force in these global changes and as a profound symbol of them.

Some of the discussion about the role of the internet has focused on the idea of freedom: the internet's ability to strengthen democracy or undermine repressive regimes. What slips though the net in such discussions, though, is the profound way in which the internet affects us in our ability to communicate meaningfully with one another.

One example of the internet's reach on our understanding of ourselves and other people is Wikipedia. The fundamental issue at stake is not one of its factual accuracy or its efficacy, nor is it one of political constraints on accessibility to information. It is, rather, whether how we think about something is radically altered when information is available at the click of a button. What does access to vast amounts of information and the pressures of instantaneity do to our age-old habits of discernment (Google's "top gaining queries", for instance) and quiet reflection? Will we ever be able to return to the "exalted silence" of the book or even read "linearly" (as Jonathan Franzen asked in his celebrated Harper's essay)?

The assault on the senses - whether the dazzling of the eye by the profusion of images around us or the drowning out of silence by background music and conversation and now the hyperinflation of words - can only lead to overload, triviality, and an eventual collapse of meaning. Seen in this light, the attempt to place the contents of those vast cathedrals of the mind - libraries and museums - online might be putting an unbearable burden on our already strained capacities to absorb reading material (how long is your list of unread books?). Even if the British Library (17 million books) were able to catch up with the Library of Congress's 30 million books, plus 80 million articles and pamphlets, would that be an improvement? We "surf" the web, knowing full well that with limited attention spans we must - as skaters on thin ice - keep moving to stay afloat. Perhaps we will have e-books on our mobiles but be like the Eloi, unable or unwilling to read?

It is also possible that this desire to catalogue everything, build a universal library or archive is actually a defensive strategy that speaks of our fears, of the precariousness of our lives. At the individual level one can see this relation to our mortality in the extension of the idea of a personal diary by something called "
lifelogging ". Like other forms of blogging (MySpace, etc) the Internet might be used not to connect with other people but simply be a poor reflection of our narcissistic selves. We are connected with the loneliness or suffering of other people - but only momentarily, superficially, as in a spectacle and then we move on. Ultimately, in an age of "instant living", does the Internet offer us any sense of permanence? How many of you will go back and read this post in three days, I wonder?

He who would play the angel ends up playing the Beast.

In addition to the carnage, in addition to the 4 m people displaced, here is another side to the tragic story. And these bizarre and unseemly cast of characters, searching for "legacies," willing themselves to be the hand of fate, have come to resemble the grossly distorted figures in a fun house hall of mirrors.

What is left to tell of this crazy story? In years to come, when the dust has settled, people will look back and ask what are we fighting for, whether torture , extraordinary renditions, the suspension of the Geneva Conventions , sexual humiliation, rape, Abu Ghraib , and Gitmo were all worth it. Which is to say nothing of the probable dissolution of a country, the displacement and traumatisation of her people, the orphaning of her children. One is reminded of Madeleine Albright's response to the question of whether the death of 500,000 children as a result of U.N. sanctions was a price worth paying for the prevention of the accumulation of WMD by Saddam:

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.

Cavafy.

When suddenly at the midnight hour
you hear the invisible troupe passing by
with sublime music, with voices-
don't futilely mourn your luck giving out, your world
collapsing, the designs of your life
that have all proved to be an illusion.

As if long prepared, as if full of courage,
say good-bye to her, the Alexandria who is leaving.
Above all don't fool yourself, don't say it was
a dream, how your eyes tricked you.

Don't stoop to such empty hopes
As if long prepared, as if full of courage
as is right for you who is worthy of such a city,
go stand tall by the window
and listen with feeling, but not
with the pleas and whining of a coward,
and hear the voices-your last pleasure-
the exquisite instruments of that secret troupe,
and say good-bye to her, the Alexandria you are losing.

('The God abandons Antony'..for those far away from home)
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As you set out on the journey to Ithaka,
wish that the way may be long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge
Don't be afraid

I never quite get to the last stop but it's always there, shrouded in mystery. There, other people live. The strange lives of other people; so ordinary that your heart could break. The final stop on the central line borders an infinite white space and maybe has absorbed something of its nothingness. As we approach it the train driver announces: this train goes no further, all change, all change please...


You won't find a new country, won't find
another shore.
This city will always pursue you. 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'

Never make the mistake of dying in this city.
--Swami.

Never make the mistake of growing old, son.
---Ubo.

A path that is walked on long enough ceases to be a path.

The beaten path, the end of the line. We retrace our steps there. Just beyond the edge of the known world, the deeply familiar streets that you could run down blindly, is another place. Is it the origin or the nether land? Perhaps it is the promised land? Here one encounters reality beyond words and books, beyond the pretence of status and accumulated meanings. There's no time for that. If you speak at all, then speak plain English. Let your voice ring true.

You walk through the streets like a ghost. Things only seem vaguely different, as if the world had been displaced by a few degrees or the watches were all five minutes behind schedule. The faces are no blanker than others and yet an eerie feeling shimmers through the ordinariness reawakening the power present in all of us to become strangers to the map of places and paths that we call reality...

We, we latecomers have nothing to do but transcribe the words of others. Like the barbarians to whom we once denied entry to the city, we have dreamed with great longing for an escape. This other zone is a hidden, quiet corner of the universe. There we imagine we can undo the certainties of place and once again allow our destiny to become a direction, opening up to wide inner vistas. At last we will become comfortable in our own skin, and re-work all those settled materials; look lovingly back on all we knew and still find something unexpressed. This Late Style means becoming like one of Breughel's hunters, means returning to the world and looking at it from an angle, our unique angle, and realising that the world is not the world any more.

We go back to all that was unsaid. Return to texts we underlined, to dusty books, wondering why this page and no other has its corner turned. So much now seems unexplained. We look for other connections, those that were only dormant, like the bright veins of dazzling minerals set in stone. Try to remember all that was glossed over once again. And all this, let it be added, not to bring things to the surface, to a final resolution-for there can be none- but to deepen what we already know. Nothing is neglected. Every possibility is kept open in these acts of second-thought, re-vision....

A Late Style avoids linear narratives. The ink is not dry. To adopt it is to realise that one's life is infinitely stranger than it is. At the centre of all that strikes you as simply ordinary, plain, or mundane, is the most extraordinary of tales. In the final analysis there is no reconciliation and none is desired. An old man gently touches a flower, as he did when he was a child, and understands now that all life is precarious.

Millions have become strangers to themselves even before they reach this place. Disenchanted, they think untimely thoughts, not identifying with the place or time that has been allotted to them. This sense of lateness resonates with the promise of latent possibilities, the unfolding, ripening of certain potentialities; a trace of what was unthought, of all that was, survives. The line becomes a square, the point a circle.

Without a future, late man returns to those things he once loved. But this is not a final, homeward-bound journey. There are no more journeys, only a longing for what disappears.

Timelines.
Everything has a season. This place is run-down and for some of its inhabitants only survives as long as their memories do. With them the city will also disappear.

The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's absolutely becoming homeless.
--Leo Strauss.

What are rights founded on? Nature, citizenship, rationality, the common memory of horror? Or is such a foundation even necessary. Face to face with injustice, what need is there for theory? Is the only effective restraint on the human use of power sanctioned by what lies beyond the human-the theological?

From the Perplexities of Human Rights, Hannah Arendt:

The Rights of Man represent a turning point since now Man and not God's command or the customs of history would be the source of law. In the new and secular emancipated society man was no longer sure of his rights, his guarantee of equality under God or by social, spiritual and religious forces; instead, the focus of his rights becomes the political order (the constitution) that stave off the arbitrary power of the State or society.

Irreducible and Inalienable: implies that Man himself is the source of these rights, man is sovereign in matters of law as people are in government. The latter is proclaimed not in the name of the Grace of God but in the name of Man. This leads to the paradox that Man did not exist except as a people, a historically constituted social body. The 'people', then, and not the individual , was the image of Man. But inalienable rights means that they are independent of political power, cannot be traded off against political concerns (security). and if this is so, how can they simultaneously only make sense in the context of the nation-state? What authority did these rights have without State power?

Even stateless people and minorities believed that national rights were equivalent to human rights-even though the Eternal rights of Man were supposed to be orthogonal to citizenship and nationality.

What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one.

This loss of a home is a loss of a world; it is to be torn away from the fabric of all that is familiar; it is to lose the protection by the government. A "bare forked animal" on the heath. And what do we owe such a stranger? One can think of our obligations to our family, fellow citizens, and so on. But the stranger?

Paradoxically, the political refugee has greater rights of asylum than the innocent. He who opposes a state and is hounded for it has greater asylum rights than an economic migrant, say.

The problem for the rightless is that they do not belong to any community and rights, from the beginning, were defined from within that belonging. It is worth pausing for reflection and remember that the Jewish people first had to be stripped of their legal status, citizenship before they were massacred. Are we only human when we belong to the State? Do obligations cease when the passport doesn't match?

Freedom in the internment camps is meaningless because prolongation of their lives depends on outside charity ("threads", whim), not a fundamental right. And freedom to think is redundant because it has no, can have no, impact. So, without a place, they are deprived of the ability to make opinions and actions effective. What you do is of no consequence. In the reservations, nothing happened says Plenty Coups.

Because we now live in 'one world,' an organized humanity, expulsion now means an expulsion into a no-man's land, out of humanity altogether. A slave, deprived of speech and action, still lived in a community of sorts, still had a place (even if it was one of submission). Compare his fate to the homeless man of the camps, reservations, those without a place in the world.What is this man but a naked animal? Human, all too human...

Up until the 18the century rights were derived from nature (natural law or the image of God) and these rights survive expulsion from the human community, plurality, the political. Rights are then defined in terms of "human nature." But what can be derived from a nature from which we are alienated? To say 'human nature' is to return to our origins, the passions: pain and pleasure and to turn away from the classical idea of Nature: human virtue perfected, human excellence. This is not too surprising in an age that has dispensed with the very notion of a telos. The essence of man can no longer be comprehended in this [human nature] category.

Would the problem be resolved if there was a world government guaranteeing (universal) rights? Not necessarily, since if humanity decides (democratically) to eliminate, liquidate, parts of the whole, then?

A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of 'good for'-the individual or the family or the people or the largest number-becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority.

Not man, but a god must be the measure of all things.
---Plato.

The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.

The more civilized he became, the more his hatred for the natural, the given, for what he hadn't produced grew. In a global world we can expect to see more stateless people and they will be our new barbarians.

The Americans talk of a 'right to' happiness and not of our obligations to our fellow human beings. What could express more succinctly the vast difference between the moderns and the ancients? The previous Pope had made the point that the bonum delectabile was not the highest good. The State itself integrates man into this endless quest for happiness and in this respect, if no other, is the Great Beast (Simone Weil).. a veritable Leviathan...

For L.C, and with apologies to everyone else.

If living means dying then the philosopher prefers not to live. Thinking takes place in isolation. 'Speaking thinking' is to speak to someone, and think for someone. The latter needs another person and takes time seriously (these are, ultimately, the same thing). Speech is open, does not know where it will end...
---Rosenzweig.

From Levinas' God, Death and Time':

In looking upwards at the sky, the transcendent , the gaze does not set out to capture (unlike a concept,a hunter)-nor can it. [We are just the right distance from the sun. A step this way and our hearts would freeze; a step the other, we would be blinded by the dazzling truth. Like Plato's charioteers: there is a realisation that there is an "uttermost limit" (to use a Qur'anic phrase)-and this is what is meant by the word "awe" or "wonder"..all that is prior to reflective thought, to consciousness, to philosophy]

The gaze leaves the body and in this separation the complicity of the eye and the hand, which is older than the distinction between knowing and doing, is undone.

The holy is untouchable, inconceivable, sacred...a realm that is set apart (Qadosh). Gaze is deference and to cover 'the gap' is idolatry. Is the knowledge of the West a secularization of idolatry?

The world is always proportionate to our knowledge. Unlike the case for the Romantics or for religious thinking (Realism).

Transcendence is an 'external' that is beyond external, what can be comprehended as external (opposed to an internal). To think this way is to acknowledge that thought can overflow its limits. Is it still 'rational thought' then?

We are responsible to others, others we do not know. Ethics as the first philosophy. The entire opening of consciousness would already be a turning to a something over which wakefulness watches. Insomnia, the passivity of inspiration. Consciousness, on the other hand, is identity, presence of being (the vision, rather than the gaze), a forgetting of the other,a re-presentation, unlike the attention to the other which is not an ex-posure.

It is necessary to put experience in question as the source of all meaning.