Black Sun: October 2014

Thursday, October 30, 2014

The fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she.

(2/3?)

|

He opened the door and looked at the wide, bright spaces in front of him. Out there, he thought to himself. Yes, given the times one was living in it was still acceptable to feel lost now and then.

||

Hazlitt: our relation to our future selves is tenuous-at best. The imagination may reach out for it, along with reason, may try and draw patterns, intuit unity, posit a continuity of consciousness, but if the truth of the matter is that the future is only a shadow, then what?

Then it is pointless speculating about the primacy of self-interest (self-love) over benevolence. Both are related to future acts or consequences whereas I am only truly concerned-can only be concerned-about the past and the present.

|

Through memory we become who we are

|

I live in this time and this place. If my consciousness could be transplanted into another being, would he be me?

|

But if nobody knows the future does it follow that nobody knows no-one? We think, we would like to think, that the solution to one is the answer to the other: if we can reach out and touch another person, then that 'person' can exist in the future as well.

|

'When memory is of the future'
--J.Riley.

||

The bookshop.

This is a message I receive early in the morning:

'We are BEYOND excited to announce that The __ __ has received the most amazing new shipment of the finest and newest fiction and non-fiction titles, as well as the most popular new titles in children's books. And don't get us started about our beautiful, drool-worthy coffee table books on fashion, textile and art!

Our favourite new books include "Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage", the bangin' new book by Haruki Murakami, "Mecca: The Sacred City" by Ziauddin Sardar, "This Changes Everything" by Naomi Klein, and "Horns" by Joe Hill.

And just because we are THAT excited, we're giving a 10% discount on all new children's books, starting Monday all the way through to Wednesday.

See you at the bookshop!'

I think I'm going to throw up now. This kind of cheap American enthusiasm is really irritating. I can't even be bother to try and understand what it means. Khair...

'Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the slightest sense? Not on a leaky houseboat, when life is a daily struggle to look after all the people you have to look after. Nor, presumably, in the realms of ethical life and spirituality.'

Penelope Fitzgerald's bookshop reminds you of a quieter age. A.S. Byatt writes of her 'mysterious clarity'. Yes, there is a serenity to be found here in the old world, the old words. I often wonder about those words from The Time Machine: "I don't care much for the times I'm living in". It must be said: my heart looks back too much.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Deep South

I stumbled across these pictures from someone's blog.

The first is for Macdonald's French Fries (man, they've really gone downmarket). The second is some random maulvi selling fruit. Love the flag! The third is from outside Hafeez Center, arguably south Asia's largest centre of illegal software and dodgy mobile phones. Hafeez centre is a modern dystopia, a veritable warren of dilapidated, tiny shops packed tightly together. The strange thing is that despite all the illegal stuff that is traded there the shopkeepers are the most sanctimonios, reactionary bigots you'll come across. Signs of 'no dealing with Ahmadis' are common and I am now told by a friend that they have Israeli flags engraved on the floor so that to enter the main shopping area you have to walk over the Israeli flag. Childish, really.

Also, you will never see any women at Hafeez Centre. In many respects it's worse than Peshawar.

On a more positive note: Halloween this Friday!

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

the life of the mind(less)

'A spokesperson for Strathclyde says the university is "committed to world-leading research, education and knowledge exchange'

No disrespect to Strathclyde, but this is material for a Monty Python sketch! To take up just one point in this classic: what is meant by the word 'and' here?

The amount of bullshit-to use Harry Frankfurt's technical term-that management comes out with is hilarious. What is "world-leading" research and what is "knowledge exchange"? Committed to education? So glad to hear that, Stratchclyde!

~~~

This is important: the takeover by managers, accountants, pen-pushers, publicists, self-promoters, consultants and whores is, you think, probably a feature of a number of areas of social and cultural life. What that entails is an exclusive focus on research, league tables, rankings and the number of foreign students you can pull in. Quantification and 'commodification' go hand in hand and so the poor hapless teacher, that grim survivor from the old world, is left clutching at values and approaches to education that stand out like a sore thumb.

'Since perhaps the 1970s, certainly the 1980s, official discourse has become increasingly colonised by an economistic idiom, which is derived not strictly from economic theory proper, but rather from the language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism. British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms.' (Stefan Collini)

The 'marketplace of ideas', students who are now 'customers' and research projects that can bring in the dosh. Universities now have to be centres of "excellence" (but of course, who is going to say: "We aim to be a fairly good university"?)

Use the technology, ride the tiger. Can't you teach Shakespeare using only 140 characters? Wikipedia says Shakespeare never existed. Click the 'like' button if you think Descartes is cool. Isn't there a film-version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations? If Dante could write a blog what would he say? How to teach African farmers basic English using txt mssgs 4 ex so them :-)

The knowledge economy. There ain't much left of it but, hey, don't let that get you down. Training sessions. Training the trainers, inspiring managers, quality control matrices for dummies. What are the KPIs? (Key Performance indicators, in case you were clueless), the TOCs, the data points? Impact factor: what impact has your research had on society? Suicide rates, for example? Was Ghazali's Refutation better than Dan Brown's Da vinci? Is Islam a religion of peace. True or False? (You will receive bonus marks if you are a Muslim).

The communications revolution (better than that stuffy old Marx's). The revolution is on the horizon. Yale has a course with 160,000 students (and I thought I had grading problems!). In the end we can whittle it down to ten universities. 100 million people studying psychology 101. If you don't like parts of the course you can edit the material yourself. Gold stars are awarded to students who can explain the ontological tension in a Kant-Hegel synthesis of inter-cultural, dialectical a priori objectivity in a cartoon.

An applicant for the Dean position used the following words in his talk:

knowledge economy
cutting-edge research
global player
student-demand
critical thinking
what do employers want
best ethical standards
knowledge transfer activities
innovative strategy
funding opportunities

Blahspeak, Blairspeak.

The next candidate is a bitch who has only made it to the short list because her daddy knows the vice-Chancellor.

In the morning you drive past a sign that reads 'education city'. After that comes another sign, 'Smile, you'll feel better'. It's at times like this that my hand reaches out for someone who could have been my best friend, Johnnie Walker.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

Elizabethan

I looked into my heart to write
   And found a desert there.
...

Great summer sun, great summer sun,
   All loss burns in trophies;

--George Barker.

'Graves compared it to the Elizabethan word ‘virtue’, in its meaning of ‘act of blessedness’.

The act of translation, the act of love, making something one's own, letting it be. Let us have winter loving that the heart...The season where you are not to be found. And so I shall write you on my white page, and there you shall exist, a single brush-stroke of concentrated time, a pattern within the loving mind.

Autumn has swept in, a dense mist of foreign particles hangs over us. The light dims, the temperature is lowered and we stumble in the dark morning light. We are reciprocal to this light, the quality of our intuition faltering with time.

I am not myself any more. No matter how hard I try I cannot fathom the mechanism that works on me, the hands that would move all things away from their own moment.

This autumn contains all seasons, looks back to summer and forwards to deep winter, to a wide field and a narrow road. In this time each brings an island in his heart to square with what he finds. We tap words to each other, like prisoners across a wall.

Now autumn arrives-and there's an exact word for it that you've forgotten. A word that strays but is true. We collect quotations and sayings the way other people collect boxes or firewood, imagining the surprise or the sparks they contain.

You remember the darkest night, many Novembers ago, the old shops with their thick glass windows and old wooden frames, the Norsemen and women strangers in their own home. And November is a season of forgiveness and burning. The straw men we carried now put back in the back rooms or attics, straw returning to straw to straw...

But every season is a kind

of rich nostalgia. We give names-

Turn back the clocks, save some time or expend it, let it flow and collect in the fields the way the Roding floods the flat land around it.

I am carried back against

my will into a childhood where

Autumn is bonfires, marble and smoke.

You carry a word with you, deep in your grave pocket, waiting for a time to unfold it, so that it becomes a mirror to your soul.

[(words by Elizabeth Jennings)].

Friday, October 24, 2014

the culture show

Consultants are an essential ingredient in modern bureaucratic power, lubricating its machinery...the consultants themselves lacked much understanding of creative work, so tended to dismiss its inherent value. The consultants were paid, then departed...

What have top managements to gain by employing consultants? In part, the consultants presence sends an ideological signal that power is being exercised..By hiring consultants, executives at the centre can shift responsibility for painful decisions away from themselves. The central unit commands but avoids accountability...In creating social distances which divorce control from accountability, consulting reveals a fundamental shifting of bureaucratic ground, a reformulating of inequality, increasing social distance...

Rapid turnover at the top can have this effect; there is then no-one in power who has shown commitment to the organization, who has experience of its problem, who can serve as a witness of the labours of those below. In part, the sheer disconnect between centre and periphery dispels the belief, at the periphery, that a particular human being is really in charge.

--Richard Sennett.

Of course, Sennett is primarily talking about 'cutting-edge' industries but it has important ramifications for the public sector and for universities if we think of the growing role of administrators, managers, wafflers and bureaucrats-people who have no idea whatsoever about education and, it has to be said, no real interest in it either.

||

When did it begin, this idea of the individual on his own, free in a way? Locke, Descartes? Life was a show, a mechanical show, while all along the real thing, the real deal, was somehow buried behind all that dross, behind the games of language. Hannah's 'second turning inward', the unencumbered self, thinking of oneself, for oneself. But the first?

The gnostics,then, the divine spark within, temporarily trapped in a matrix of deception. The "punctual self": 'extensionless', timeless...an image of God? The world is but a stage and we play our part-sometimes well, at other times with much folly and gaiety.

Culture, truth-seeking, the whole point of it all was supposed to be about breaking free from contingency. Not: I am what I am. Either that or the decadence of giving in to all the flux, adding to it, even, or the false idols of king or country, tribe or nation, money and property...Simone's 'false infinities'.

In the beginning, Hans Jonas tells us, life was everywhere. But soon, the satanic mills strike up. What gets decided is the result of a kind of statistical analysis or brute power or the whole thing's an absurd game and it doesn't matter a jot which way it turns. From dualism to nihilism. The lust for the world turns the world into a desert...

|| ||

The simple life. If we ever understood what we need, truly need, and if could take a step in that direction much would be resolved. One can say with great ease what one is against. But the quality of our understanding lies in the quality of our attachments.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Readings

He looked around. The title of a book caught his eye and he was transported back to a former time when things made a lot more sense, to a time when he shaved each morning and could look at his face in the mirror. A shadow passed over his face, tarried in his eyes...

Back in the car he clenched his fists and his jaw tightened as his teeth clamped together, grinding against one another..."fuck it, fuck it...I was there and I blew it".

"My mother always wanted to see New York in the Fall..she'd read about it in books"

"All the chances were there and I could have taken any one". He thought hard, too hard and relentlessly, about what had happened. No-one forgives no-one today. What does the weather remind you of, he asked. I don't know, it's still too hot, I guess. I don't have any specific thoughts or feelings.

"I always seem to start my relationships in September or October". She said to him: "look at your gestures and he thought to himself: where's the whiskey? "It kills me to think, right now, what's she doing with someone else".

But you said she was a slut?

He's torn by the fact that all that intelligence doesn't count for much. Just words and paper behind glass. All he learns now is direct, from life itself, as if there were some dark and malevolent gods up above toying with him..a single word, the flutter of the leaves is enough to draw him out of his habitual stupor and un-nerve him. The quality of light, the particular slant of it will transpose him to a different time...

"People don't take me seriously any more. I don't blame them, I don't either". I have in an extreme form of what everyone my age has, he thinks. Or maybe they don't see it. Everyone looks insubstantial in this city. But to them he appears as a loosely held together bundle or nerves and flesh. "Is there a way back for me?" he asks, "or is that it?" No-one can read another person or his fate, not even themselves.

We search for books, some one book that will make sense of it all. Outside it is a blustery day and three young women step out of a car, with deep tanned skin and wild, dark hair, sleeveless shirts, laughing. He puts the books back on the shelves and scrunches the money up in his fist.

The view from nowhere

'Instead, change the subject. It’s a big one all right: the violence that men do to women. Easier to accept that it is just the way things are, unless perhaps you worry for yourself or your child or your sister...

The scale of the violence and abuse of girls and women keeps on trying to make itself heard. We don’t want to know. No, let’s talk about Ebola or Isis. Distant, scary threats...

Do we simply accept that this is the product of technology combined with overwrought masculinity? That gamergate represents angry wounded men? Do we say that male violence is innate?...

Women also murder and abuse, but 94% of murders in this country are carried out by men ...'

---Suzanne Moore, The Guardian.

|||

Can we only see and understand things from our own position ('position' includes not only geographical location but identity, social conditions that have gone to form our way of thinking, the constraints of the human mind)? What does it mean 'to step into some one else's shoes'?

'Positional objectivity' implies independence from personal characteristics or social conditions but it doesn't follow from that that we are free from illusions or that we can always or easily escape having a partial view. We may never fully be able to comprehend things but can still move to clarity (or does the former statement imply the latter is thrown into doubt?) Positional objectivity in this weaker sense means that the view or understanding is person-invariant. But we may still-all of us-be mistaken or only be able to form a partial picture.

94%

94% of crimes..not: 94% of men.

But are men in the position to understand this violence (one might say: yes, since they are mainly the perpetrators of it). Or is this violence so close, so instinctual, that they (we) have difficulty in comprehending it and instead turn our gaze away and distance ourselves from it? Not just through religion and war and the destruction of nature, but day-to-day.

We like to imagine that we can see things from other perspectives. It is a comforting thought and promises much progress. To be too tied down to our own point of view, to believe that our moral duties are more pressing if they stem from a relational perspective can sometimes morph into the parochial and confined outlook of a nationalist or bigot. On the other hand, the universal or the abstract, the view from the point of view of the universe, may only have a limited hold on us, given the beings we are.

That seems like a cop out for what is sought here is not to see another person as a Person, but simply as another human being. Firstly, though, it means seeing oneself as a human being-and that, precisely, is what is in question.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

the unique individual

“But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?”

---Tony Blair.

||

Repeat after me: we're all individuals now.

|||

From Wendell Berry:

To take great and present delight in the modest good that was at hand.

To be on the move, "mobile", is to be permanently searching for something, to be constantly dissatisfied with what one has, where one is. Local pleasures, local associations, actual experience-as opposed to a remote and abstract 'good'. [In academia you will always hear people talk about 'the good', 'the other' and so on].

An authentic economy would imply a different relation to nature, to one another, to time.

It is by imagination that knowledge is carried to the heart. The faculties of the mind-reason, memory, feeling, intuition, imagination, and the rest-are not distinct from one another...But the human mind in its wholeness, even in its instances of greatest genius, is irremediably limited. Its several faculties, when we try to use them separately or specialize them, are even more limited.

[See Macintyre on 'compartmentalization'. We're pulled in different directions. On the one hand we recognize the appeal of a liberal position that partitions the world into distinct realms, 'spheres of justice', each with their own set of norms, evaluative standards, appropriate motivations, ideas of excellence, etc. To think otherwise is to invite claims of totalitarianism. Under the latter all differences-between the private and the public, the sacred and the mundane, the market and the state, are abolished. A single, over-arching principle guides all and that view sits uneasily with our idea of the human condition being fundamentally conflictual in nature as well as with our political ideals (Isaiah Berlin).

On the other hand, we are drawn to continuity and unity, to narratives and coherence, trying to find the thread to our lives through all the vacillations. We want to look back-but not just look back-and picture a good life. There is a sense in which too much fragmentation dissolves into meaninglessness. [a broken circle]].

Further, we reason with other people. There is no such thing as the single reasoner. We are, therefore...The commons of the mind [A. Baier].

We cannot know the whole truth but we can know what is true.

The stickers, who love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

Of course, how many of us make a life for themselves today?

To have beautiful buildings people must obviously want them to be beautiful and know how to make them beautiful...and love the places in which they are built.

What is our sense of beauty today? To the extent that it is detachable, reproducible, what connection does it have to a specific place and time?

Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time...The factual knowledge, in which we seem more and more to be placing our trust, leads only to the hope of the discovery, endlessly deferrable, of an ultimate fact or smallest particle, that at last will explain everything.

The human mind takes apart with its analytical habits of reasoning but the human heart puts things together because it loves them.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

the mystical east

'It is time to unveil a few truths about a person [Gandhi] whose doctrine of nonviolence was based on the acceptance of the most brutal social hierarchy ever known, the caste system...

What do we do with this structure of moral righteousness that rests so comfortably on a foundation of utterly brutal, institutionalised injustice?

---A. Roy.

The full essay can be found here

|||

It always amuses you how some people-a certain class of people- in 'the west' will harp on about the mystical east, sufism, the shunning of materialism in favour of some deep and timeless spiritual truths which 'the east' supposedly preserves in its pristine form.

No-one wants to talk about the vast inequalities and striking injustices in 'the east'. Nothing as crude as 'class' should ever be mentioned. We're in the higher realms of the spirit here..please don't disturb us, and pass me my thin latte with cinnamon!

Perhaps there is something in human nature that results in us wanting to draw lines all the time-the damned and the saved, the pure and the impure, the believers and the unbelievers. "Slide over here, you're one of my kind". But if one must talk of human nature then, equally, there is something that will always push us to resist the drawing of these lines and incline us to seeing them as man-made constructs with the sole purpose of establishing or perpetuating the structure of dominance.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Wood

At dawn when rowboats drum on the dock
and every door in the breathing house bumps softly
as if someone were leaving quietly, I wonder
if something in us is made of wood,
maybe not quite the heart, knocking softly,
or maybe not made of it, but made for its call.
Of all the elements, it is happiest in our houses.
It will sit with us, eat with us, lie down
and hold our books (themselves a rustling woods),
bearing our floors and roofs without weariness,
for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness
or question why, for what, how long?
Its branchings have slowed the invisible feelings of light
into vortices smooth for our hands,
so that every fine-grained handle and page and beam
is a wood-word, a standing wave:
years that never pass, vastness never empty,
speed so great it cannot be told from peace.

---James Richardson.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Frau

I have a memory of a larger space of memory.
---after Louise Gluck.

|| |

Before Fall, the structure of the light weakening, we open another door, start another phase. Much is carried over, the way your back knots in anxiety through the night, only to open up during the morning. The sun, returning after some 256 years, is surprised to see none of the same people around, but the same houses, the roofs quietly blazing in the darkness.

I have a memory of my face, thinner, taut, bryter. The rooms were larger and wider when we children. We carry an image of the white room with us, but it only leads to a more specific room, one we know better...

||

A homecoming in the snow: You return, with a simple bag in your hand and nothing much else, some coins in your pocket, maybe. The narrow, winding road to the north. Down Snake's Lane and the dark brick Church. There is ice on the road but you walk quickly...

I aspire to recognize that there is no more desirable pleasure in life than reaping acknowledgement and saying yes to the benevolent phenomenon one has been permitted to see and experience.

|

Many years have passed. You look back and wonder which moments were real.

|

May I see the room?

Yes, of course

Depressed and out of sorts as I was, any acceptable security would have satisfied me...

She went away without a word.

"What are you? she asked.

I had no idea. I looked out of the window, pressing my face to the thick, semi-opaque glass. There is a certain degree of raggedness and neglect on my face, it can be detected by anyone. Women, especially, find it easy to name. An earl, I think.

Who lived here before, you wonder. What lives were contained in this very room? Here in summer the green will come laughing into the room. The human mind always reaches for the future; the heart is stuck in the past. I shall sit in this room and write to myself and imagine lots of people, some of them distinguished.

You should always remember the distinctions, she said.

She had long black hair and a striking face. Introductions were made, things exchanged, there was a tinkling of china. You make me smile, she confessed. His eyes gleamed: how much was it worth...

I cannot allow you to stay in bed so long, she said.

Nothing lasts forever, which is why you sought this cavern in the first place. So I lay there in heaviness of heart; I neither knew nor could find myself any more. There is a time-there is always time- when things will end, but you should not come to the dark conclusion. There will be a time when things start again...

Remember the colours, he said.

Pfft! Can't you speak for yourself, for once in your life, she jeered. Have you ever been yourself?

No, not lately.

Seeing that he was saddened she said: Hold my hand. It's like ice. Whoever has himself been alone can never find another's loneliness strange. There was winter in her heart. I kept my face close and said to myself: Here in summer the green will come laughing into the room.

Then I didn't see her for a while and she refused to speak. I saw on the bed the things she'd worn...her dress..and on the floor, her small delicate boots.

All things past, all things vanishing away, were more close to me than ever. I stood there motionless, not understanding anything anymore.

I quietly left the room and went out into the street.

(words by Robert Walser from the lovely short story, Frau Wilke.)

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

the end of the west?

"Today, racial hatred and bloody collisions ravage the world where liberal democracy and capitalism were expected to jointly reign."

"The result is endless insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, wars and massacres, "

This was from a provocative and long essay by Pankaj Mishra in today's Guardian. Side by side, there was an accompanying piece, sadder in tone, by George Monbiot and how loneliness was an outcome of the playing out of the pernicious governing assumptions about what is fundamental to the human condition.

Now, there are lots of good and valid points in both pieces but Mishra's doom porn just doesn't wash. I mean, just look at the language: "Ravage the world". Er..yeah, like compared to when?

It's an uncomfortable fact that so many in China and India-and not just the educated elite-have embraced capitalism (not saying that that's a good thing, but it does dent Mishra's thesis somewhat). And though it doesn't make the headlines the fact remains that most of the political parties in Pakistan are secular (incompetent and corrupt, but secular) and that of those who vote do so-overwhelmingly-for these parties.

The truth, it seems to me, is that democracy and capitalism (or versions of them) are the only games in town...

Black Sun