Black Sun

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.


We carry on as we always have: clueless, bewildered..stumbling through the dark days, imagining things can carry on like this forever...

At this age it is only natural, I suppose, to think that things are falling apart. When life is on an upward trajectory, or when you're young, or when your body is still resilient I doubt anyone gives too much thought to ' endings', failures, missed chances..how a seemingly simple life can go pear shaped...what need is there for reflection when there is life, pure and simple, when there is so much space and time in front of you ( or apparently so)?

At this time of the year there's the annual ritual of naming ' books of the year'. How comforted we are by lists! And schedules, I might add. Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without the Radio Times, for example. But what is it? The pretence of being wel, read? So much of one's life flitted away in attention to fictional lives, or semi- philosophical reflection ( of which you cannot remember a single word). For example, you're sure you read most of Bernard Williams's Ethics and the limits of philosophy but if anyone asked you to say something about it they'd be met with a deafening silence.

So, the accumulation game continues but the suspicion that we've darkened our minds with books and thoughts for too long only grows with each passing year. Is this really just a higher form of entertainment? A diversion from any really serious engagement with more pressing questions? Of course some novels are serious, but serious about what?

There are an infinite number of books. Don't follow false infinities. Hugh of St. Victor wrote, more or less, nearly 800? years ago. I can read ecstatic get reviews of  ' All for Nothing' but if I do pick anything up it is likely to be something that realises the limits of fiction ( perhaps Rachel Cusk or David Szalay's new book).

There are no more storytellers. Well,  part of you wants to say: Good! Get on with your own story...

Non- fiction fares only slightly better ( for me) since it's also part of culture - machine, the endless expansion of " productivity" and " ideas" that can never be assimilated into one's life; the life of the mind, that much vaunted and slightly ridiculous phrase, is not life ( lest one forget). Not saying that as a disgruntled academic. I'm not really an academic anyway. Besides, there's no time for that...

I don't know what has moved me this year. Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree for sure. Pond was a quirky, original voice. Like her writing but ' moved'? Not so sure. Anyway, not really a year for reading since most of it was preoccupied with writing your own book. And by other things..illnesses of loved ones. Although I still laugh a lot, I think underneath it all there's almost a permanent sadness. God, Tessa Jowell, was right, " The most precious thing is time". There's no two ways about it.

" What gives a life meaning is not only how it is lived, but how it draws to a close."
--- Tessa Jowell.

I know nothing about her politics but I don't need to. What does it matter?

The only book I'm on the lookout for is T.J. Clark's one on Breugel. Someone mentioned Sam Shepard..spy something. Wim Wenders, now that I think of it. Some poetry, perhaps, ' Supernatural Love'. Let's see. Might not venture out. It's impossible not to think: How many lives have you lived? Or, more accurately, how many half lives have you?

The light is mellow today and it actually feels quite warm. A dear uncle dropped in for 5 minutes. So fond of him and his old- world charm. Dementia has set in and so he forgets words regularly now. Soon, I fear, it will be whole sentences. Then what? Faces? Doesn't bear thinking about. Not sure when I'll see him again. Jesus.


Man, I really should try and find my R.S. Thomas. Via negativa. The dark way, the unsaid.

Might pluck up the courage and see Charles ( the famous Jack Robinson). Not sure what I'd say to him anyway. Leslie Chamberlain once asked me to her book launch and I stood frozen like Rita in Educating Rita ( if you know what I mean).

A strange thing this autumn..the apple tree in the park didn't bear any fruit. Waited and waited but there it was, just a small, gnarled tree near the Roding. Everything seems a bit off key these days. Even the lovely Gillian Welch sounded as if she was singing another song under the one she was actually singing.

The weight of beauty in my life; I wanted to escape from all that. Why should my soul be broken by an ideal? Why this pattern of a life and not another? Why one thing above the others?

How to begin? There are so many beginnings. You can look at that how you like, positively or otherwise. I was caught up in its dark energy, the momentum of the image- machine. Right now the dark rain is sweeping in, from way out there. It takes a long time to reach its destination but when it arrives it does so with great haste. You know what I mean?

There's a reckoning about. Whether it comes to fruition or not..who knows? Look inward, anyway. Not trembling, not yet, but a rattling...yeah, that's it. What price do we pay for the choices we make? A fair price? Only a saint could think so.

I wanted to help people but really I wanted to only help myself. And this is where it got me. Detached from myself and from reality. I'm less interested in beauty now. It's damaging and brittle. I grew into a picture and didn't like what I saw. There are too many images in our society. I can't make my mind like my body. To think of the whole person means thinking in a different direction, at an angle to all we've been led to believe. Or else it's a lie. I think there's another way. You don't have to control yourself...and who could anyway! But accept it anyway..there's no perfection here.

I don't know the way forward any more but I know it isn't this. Let's see. Everything takes time. Grace, if it arrives, does so unannounced.

( Some of these words are Grace Woodward's; most of them are mine. i.e. Made up)

You prepare for the hours of silence with scrambled eggs and, uniquely, a square paratha. As luck would have it, I switch with someone and move to the back. Always been the quintessential backbencher, the kind of person no one would remember in 20 years. " yeah, what did happen to K...?"

There is on inflight entertainment; most of the lights don't work. I roam around and eventually find one that, miraculously, does. I love this low key way of traveling. Find the time to read the first chapter of Macintyre's fantastic new book. Read this chapter three times already ( dense, or what!). But this idea that one can always understand things has to be given up. Take what you can. Let it go, it's okay.

A life that goes wrong because, amongst other things, our desires are frustrated, confused, or because they seek the wrong objects, cannot be ordered, be made coherent. What pattern of a life is this? Don't ask me what you already know.

~~~

You land and float through customs and passport control without talking to a single person. On the sombre train, more silence, but this time bitter, cold. There's a terrible harshness to the faces. Why is that? Time of the year? The ravages of materialism? What warmth and light there is is inside.

The old tree, bare and stark, a single dark letter in my life. The next day you see the light has failed here. Up above you see a plane flying wonderfully into its own beams of light. Human life, from a distance, is mysterious. I feel sad for the strangers, for no reason whatsoever. As it passes me I eventually hear it roar.

I stand in reverence, trying to make sense of my life in this brief moment. So much time has passed, R. Do you know what I mean?

~~~

Wellmon is a verbose writer. His book is full of too many details. What can be remembered now?

~~~

It is dark here early. Time is about to turn. You find yourself unprepared for the hours of silence...

Kevin Anderson writes really clearly on carbon budgets and the level of mitigation that is required if we're to have a good (more than 66%) chance of avoiding +2 C. 


Here's a graph from the recent Global Carbon Budget (available online). The kind of mitigation in emissions (9% p.a.) are roughly what Anderson concludes as well. That's global reductions, mind you! As of now, I think that's only been 'achieved' during major economic slowdowns (Russia in the 1990s?). 

So, here's the dope. Emissions increased by 2.7% this year. That's despite technological improvements (carbon efficiency). It seems clear that technology is not improving at the necessary speed (that statement is based on the last 100 years of data, not just the last year). Of course, it could be that there's going to be this one spectacular breakthrough that makes a nonsense of the average figures but that's really just like placing a bet on an unlikely event (and what are the stakes here!).

Can we expect more deforestation over the next few years? I think so (given what's just happened in Brazil). Deforestation rates in Brazil were at their highest in a decade (8,000 sq. km lost last year).

The basic point: with urbanization, increases in population, and the growth in income there's a lot of momentum leading us to disaster. Factor in the investments made into extraction (which are unlikely to be reversed) and the political climate (right-wing climate deniers) then it's hard to see how this is going to be slowed down (let alone reversed).

My own view?

After the Camps there wasn't much left to say about humans anyway. That is not to say that the end of our time here is a good thing but just to acknowledge that we have sown destruction on this beautiful planet of ours and that things are coming to a head. No wonder people are obsessed by post-humanity and artificial intelligence/robots.

I think we need to buckle down. A storm is going to come, and things are going to slide.    

I tumble through the season like a second-rate acrobat. Nerves all a-jangling; the inner wrist of certainty; time on your hands. Stand outside and read with an espresso, kit-kat. Christian Imagination, if you must. George Herbert.

And now I am here.

Hold the thin book up in one hand, to the faltering light. The sun retreats behind a cloud and darkness and stillness falls all around me. Gather what strength you can for the final lecture and then let it go, sail away. Don't dwell on anything for Christ's sake. Nothing to tie together or reflect upon. And now, a moment. Preparation. Lights. Trembling: In-action! The circus goes on.. 

~~~

I grew up in a dark country, originally, sort of. Wales, my whore, with your old-time piers and last breath, made up of old forms and forgotten words. You arrived after so many detours and brief stints in old cities, hurtling to a stop in a second-hand maroon Anglia that cost 15 pounds back in the day. And witnessed, for what it was worth, the last remnants of a way of living that was about to disappear before everyone's weary eyes, a life whose key and timbre would enter no history book or official record. File under: 'Without Title' or 'Missing Persons'.

No-one arrived (or at least no-one left). Objectively speaking it was run down from day one and all the people seemed to be permanently tired. Borrowed time. The thriving port now a distant memory. Sunday roast and the obligatory ritual of boredom thereafter. Piece it all together and it doesn't amount to much, but what does? A few sharp memories, the dread of first days, but much else has sunk into oblivion. Wandering tribes have such fantastic features, Bellow wrote. Perhaps.

The familiarity of being a stranger to oneself, to the life you're living. First seeds sown in the dark right then. 

All cities look the same at dusk. Your hands stained with ink. Some of it smudges on the tightly arranged words in Anglican Identities. Perhaps that should be angular. Tyndale sounds like a wahabi. There must be patience, dry spells, an acceptance of absence- Lord help us. Nothing finds perfection; that's just the way it is. Speak, even though there's silence in your words, the silence that recalls other times.      

There is darkness in the morning. I don't know why. My books are scattered on the floor, on the desk. Why even bother with 'my'? The window is open. I hear birds chirping, a few stray notes from a guitar, distant but also close up if you know... I hear the silence of my own life and record it here, for you, as if you could tell it or you could hear it. 

There is darkness at eleven o'clock and I don't know why any more. The coffee was too bitter. Danish blue and walnuts. A quiet hour spent noting the thoughts of Finnis's Natural Law. Copy the words down in your hand until they're real. Old ways staying down below the lights keep the song of the world going, no matter how faint.

Eight hundred years of thought and commentaries, almost unbroken. The sky is older by a couple of billion. But the thought and not the theoretical formulation is older still. There is no time. 

The door to this phase of the year is closing. You'd take stock but all you got is a blank page and a blunt pencil. Why expend any effort. The birds are chirping in this mysterious darkening and there is laughter far away. Things roll by. Same as it ever.      

  

They do not see that the streets shine beautifully, that they themselves are walking on stars and water, that they are running in skies to catch a bus or taxi, to shelter somewhere in the press of irritated humans...

--Merton.

The books are falling to pieces, the cards are on the table; with time I've darken'd my mind with words. Aquinas in the 1260s or ancient cities near the Amu Darya, swept over by layers of dust, now sunken, forgotten, a mere flickering of a single pulse in the vast life of an indifferent universe. What takes us from this present moment. The scratch on my arm, the line etched in a fallen stone now invisible, deep as it is in the bright, high grass.

Nothing will last; the spectacle I see behind the glass of my heart is without pomp or splendour.  

   
"Dark and light, certainly, death and life, and the title, which calls up both wakefulness and funeral starkness, intensifies the riddle..the youngest things in the image are also the oldest."     

--Robert Hass.

How Professors Ceded Their Authority | Chad Wellmon 

Re-reading J. Jacobs' book. The first chapter is the best, setting out a general discussion of crises and how they might be linked (do they re-inforce one another?; is the seed of hope and a possible future already contained in a crisis?). Things can fall apart, spiral downwards; there's no law that states that an equilibrium will be reached. Or if it is, then it's a low-level one of survival: a tired and low-key civilization which is closer to barbarism. K. Clark: 'by the skin of our teeth' western civilisation came through the darkness. One wonders, though, how much of our character, mode of thinking and temperament is formed by a crisis?

Do we become cruder, lazier, more indifferent? Does our language splinter and coarsen so that we lose our finer sensibilities? What do we care about in the end days? Will we, as Milosz asks in his great poem, 'bind the tomatoes' in the Great Scattering? Why tend to crops, to other people's concerns, to our dress or way of being in the world when the order of the world is barely discernible? 

Scheffler's question: how much of what we value depends on its value and the activities that bear value, continuing over time? Without that sense of continuity, succession and transmission is culture even possible? If we live only in the 'now' isn't that a very impoverished kind of existence?

J. Bridle's New Dark Age is really fascinating (will write about it later).

J.J.'s choice of imminent signs of a multi-level crisis are really intriguing (and perhaps a little surprising).

The dissolution of the family. The distortion of education. She's trying to get at the roots here. Climate change is an effect. I'd add technology as a potentially disastrous disruption of the time-worn ways of thinking about what it is to be human. 

Part of you doesn't even want to talk about this. Actually, that's probably (in part) what has stopped us from doing anything about it. The problem is too big, too complex and it almost seems inevitable; against that what kind of language is left to us to talk about these things? We have gladly living with contingency for ages, without a sense of final ends or first things, without myth or tradition or religion or a sense of the cosmos (Tarkovsky). Living for the moment or, alternatively, fantasies of linear progress and endless time, infinite desires. As if we could go on forever. Well, all that is over now but a mindset that was structured by such notions now finds it difficult to cope with the hard realities. 

Our little self-interested perspectives have led to the destruction of the environment. Well, damn those brute animals and damn the future generations (what have they ever done for us anyway?).

What words, then, if not Greek, Biblical, Qur'anic?

~~~

Rachel Cusk: the end of character. Hmm.

Yes, in the Dark Age ahead there will be no books (or there'll be books but no reading. The time of the Eloi). 

There probably won't be much play or games either. Life itself would have become a meaningless game. We might look back on the old pictures of the circus, football matches, religious ceremonies and rituals and wonder to ourselves: who were those strange people?

They'll look back at all those pornographic images in the dying days of their ancestors and wonder: what strange creatures our ancestors were. Or maybe not, because the sense of the past will have disappeared with the future.         

Herbert McCabe writes with great simplicity (like Thomas Merton), which suggests to me that he's actually lived a religious (Christian) life. There's an arresting line in one of his books: the social is spiritual (more or less). Goes against the grain of modern thought which holds that the private or individual realm is what distinguishes us a thinking and spiritual beings. But what of Blake's: "He who sees ratio sees only himself"? 

I don't know if I'll get round to reading his book on Aquinas (but this is, perhaps, what I should have been reading in an alternative life). That sounds all wrong, too modern, because there's something to be said for accepting the life that has been dealt out to one (I say that not as a generalization because I know people have gone through terrible things; merely stating my own case and why I have so many grounds to be grateful).

What is true is true and not true because the individual mind thinks it. The individual mind can "latch on to" what is true: the meeting of subjectivity with objectivity. 

Stokowski once said-and I really like this line- a musical score is just a "text"; it only becomes music once the human hand gets involved.

For some academics, perhaps a large number, abstract models or theory, the text ripped out of its context is the thing itself. How does it make contact with life? At one level it's all very clever but it is often really just a form of idiocy.  

The drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory "sequence" of 1968 exhausted its potentials. At this critical point (mid-1970s), the only option left was a kind of direct, brutal, passage à l’acte, push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (RAF in Germany, Red Brigades in Italy, etc.) whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed into the capitalist ideological sleep, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, so that only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence - l’action directe - can awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (Oriental mysticism). What all three share is the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real.

The problem with today’s superego injunction to enjoy is that, in contrast to previous modes of ideological interpellation, it opens up no "world" proper - it just refers to an obscure Unnameable. ..

Perhaps, it is here that one should locate the "danger" of capitalism: although it is global, encompassing the whole worlds, it sustains a stricto sensu "worldless" ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful "cognitive mapping." The universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a "civilization," for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others, so that Europe's worldwide triumph is its defeat, self-obliteration, the cutting of the umbilical link to Europe. 

---Zizek.

The old camera was simpler and therefore better. The old way of looking at the world was simpler...

Yesterday, a glorious early morning drive, past small plots of land (wheat, mustard). The light is golden, gentle. Everything's at peace with itself. The ploughed soil, dark brown and firm at this time of the year. All the ancient ways surviving. Cows grazing..later on a group of camels (with their multi-coloured saddles) passed by you. The trucks with their dazzling, ornate designs, quiet and determined on their long haul. At the service station, deep in the heart of Punjab, they're serving espresso! (not half bad as well).

On the way back you stop on the roadside to see some people making lumps of golden, raw sugar from sugarcane. You wonder how long the process has been around. A thousand years? It's boiled in a huge metal pot under a wood fire. The aroma of the sugarcane is sweet and comforting. A man in wellington boots tells us that no chemicals whatsoever are used in the process. 

By the road an old man sells it by the kilo. He seems remarkably content in life and smiles at us warmly. How long has he been doing this kind of work? What is there to say to strangers? If he asked us what we do we would not be able to explain anything to him in any great detail. I ask D, "What, exactly, is the point of our knowledge?". "Not much," he replies, but lets it go, since this question is too close to home. New York, London, tens of thousands of pounds, so many hours of intense devotion to trying to understand fairly frivolous things; a life given over to asking the wrong questions, abstractions, theories. All that has led to this inexorable moment at dusk in an unfamiliar land; we stand at the roadside, bewildered, as limited as the man selling the sugar that has been made to crystallize and then harden under the winter sun.
   
It is night now. The lights come on at the service station as we swill down cups of hot milky tea. The mood lightens, as some people contemplate that the day is done. We look past palm trees to the dying sun. "If there weren't these damned kids on the trampoline we could be in California," says D. That time has gone, like much else.

We drive back in the enfolding dark, with less to say to one another. D wants to listen to the Pet Shop Boys. By the side there are the controlled fires (rice?). Each pile burns brilliantly, separately, deep into the fields, in a time-worn ritual. The fire, pure and clean, seems to burn with very little smoke rising into the night sky.

At the toll plaza entry and exit is noted with some seriousness. The journeys you've made over the years.

You stand over the basin and wash your face with a handful of water. Don't look in the mirror in case you see yourself. Make preparations, as best you can. Another early morning departure, another journey into the unfamiliar. Who is it that goes, who is it that returns?       

   

there isn't an anchor anywhere.
there isn't an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

--Bronk

Before Robinson there was only Robinson. When you've lost sense of direction there is no Englishman, no Saracen.

start again. the drift of the world brought me here...

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

--K. Irby.

Where are you from?, she asked 

Originally?

No, but where are you really from?, demanded the racist 

Originally?

Country of origin?, asked the pale looking official. 

I come from the land of the pure, where the purer the land the more bitter the almonds, he said, lyingly. Then Robinson looked out to the sea and remembered the colours:

"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."

--Isak D. 

A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden, studying its branches and its leaves. I look a long time at flowers. And I am always on the watch for the dramatic changes in the London sky.

--V.S.P.

No, not read. Too late to start. But the small sketch (in one of Dougal's books) did leave an impression. 

And now? As age has caught up with you and you find yourself catching your breath on the stairs. Or forgetting names or squinting to make out the face of the person walking towards you. Who the hell is that?!

The old practical ways, inherited from Ubo, linger on somewhere deep down. There seems to be less and less to say- and I don't know how to say it. Ignore the signs, don't look for wisdom. Carry on, in fact, as the clown you've always been. 

I can't say that life is narrowing down appreciably because it's always been- at least in some sense-narrow. Out of choice more than circumstance it has to be said. A needless distinction, perhaps, for how is one's character distinguished from the times one lives in?Still, you note the old Puritan hat you wear with some distinction (not pride) is nearly threadbare after all these years. Most of my clothes have holes in them for some odd reason. Moths or just general wear and tear.  

The other, special hat of yours you keep safe on the top shelf for Christmas visits to London has been worn only once, the day after your birthday. It blew onto the tracks at Woodford and stayed there all night. Recovered it on Sunday morning and was amazed to see that after a brief dusting off it was as good as new! So, there it rests, along with the other hats and the unworn ties from the 1970s (why did Ubo have so many brown ties, you wonder).

I don't study anything with any attentiveness. Instead, drift, drift. There's been no change in the sky for six hours now (if that helps). The only tree that exerts a magnetic pull on me is a million miles away, north by north-west... There is a road, there is a word, that would make sense of all of this, if I only I could find it (okay, okay, James Salter, if you must).

A sign of old age is that there are fewer signs and you don't know who you are. Apart from that, all's swell.  

"Souling"- the practice, on All Hallow's eve, of going from door to door asking for "soul cakes" and in return singing prayers for the souls of the givers and their friends. "Souling" is of medieval origin; now trick-or-treating.

via Robert Macfarlane.

~~~

A Christian woman accused of blasphemy has-thank God- been found not guilty. But the maulvis have been wailing and foaming at the mouth since last night ("who will rid us of these turbulent..."). Devils on the streets. 

Little r was dressed up as a devil for Halloween. God knows what the domestic help (a forlorn woman from a village) must have thought. [That really does make me sound like some sort of character in a Russian novel before the Revolution]. I'm not sure if there are depictions of the devil in Islam so maybe things are okay. r asked, "How do I look?". I replied in a mocking tone: "It's like, soooo you."

One of the fortunate consequences of the fanaticism of the mullahs is that the whole city is closed down today. So, it feels like the first day of the year in London. Grey skies, not a soul about, fresh espresso (which the Guardian, curse them, claim is not as good as filter coffee). I can hear the crows but they're lost somewhere up in the smog. Started Alexievich's Second-Hand Time. 

My double life continues, which is to say my half-life does. Dia-bolical: divided self? Note to self: But don't take your unbelief too seriously, old bean.

~~~

Ali Qasmi really looks the part. He has an old 19th c. beard that Marx would have been proud of. Dressed up in a suit and tie for Halloween. "Who are you?", I asked. "An Islamic banker", said Q. He's got a devlish twinkle in his eyes. In Qatar I thought he'd hung himself out of boredom. When we visited a shopping mall (what else is there?) he said to me, "look at that sexy woman over there". But, Q, she's wearing a burqa! "I know, I know, but I saw her ankles."

He's an old school historian who hates new-fangled words like "multidisciplinarity". Everyone wants to change things all the time. But it takes time, everything takes time. I look at his gentle face closely. Actually, it's not the historian speaking but a fellow Kashmiri. Leave it be.

In an age that has convinced itself that activity is preferable to inactivity it is a pleasure to meet someone who still wants to talk about books. A line from Brodsky struck me this morning: They [he and his friends] preferred to read rather than act. 

I prefer to read than write. And sometimes I don't. And then I don't care about "preferring" or even the "I" that prefers or prefers not to. Instead, a crow haphazardly making its way through the dense fog...

Some things remain the same and some things pass.

--Ronald Blythe, Akenfield.

There is something of the matter-of-fact about the statements of the people that populate Blythe's wonderful book (not finished). This makes the simple statements actually more profound, mysterious, because they've been lived inwardly rather than 'thought'. Similar, in some respects, to Alexievich's superb Chernobyl. It's the voice of the hedgehogs- people who have only known one thing and one place. An old-world solidity that comes, one imagines, from living close to the land and being in touch with the seasons. Less idle chatter, more connection to harsh realities ( which echoes G. Thibon's observations in Back to Reality). A certain kind of narrowness, no doubt, but can there really be a sense of missed opportunities if that's the only kind of life you've ever known?

That's the way it was; and that's just the way it is. Fatalism and the harshness of the conditions of life are perhaps intertwined with one another. The existence of an apparent profusion of opportunities can, on the other hand, lead to superficiality (I say "apparent" because Chesterton's remark should always be kept in mind: after all the frenetic whirl of changing opinions, fads, machines..the "factory remains").

~~~

Zizek writes that in 1970 Agatha Christie wrote an odd book in which she expressed her utter bewilderment about the direction England was taking. The 70s, the decade in which nothing happened, the afterglow after the raging 60s. Nothing new to be said: just retro and conservatism.

Agamben: By the 1870s the bourgeoisie had forgotten all its gestures; from now on they'd have to be recorded, preserved.   

~~~
It is time we spoke in plain English. At the end of times we must recall the most primitive of words and feelings, that long-forgotten love of the world, those old human instincts that drew us to beauty (of a woman's face, the order of our homes, of nature gloriously free from the touch of human hands). Plain and simple words. But also great ones, for the smog and soot from the world-ending fire is reaching us already. 

I really like John Milbank's work. The little I can understand, that is. A philosopher and a theologian who writes about the importance for religious thought of 'the social' and relationality. So, it was surprising and disappointing to see him write this about Sinead O'Connor's conversion to Islam:

"Sinead O'Connor's conversion suggests that Houillebecq has it right. Liberals will embrace an authoritarianism to escape their own contradictions if it is respectably other and non-Western. She is a civilisational traitress. And has no taste." 

Pretty strong stuff! Ultimately, I wonder if this goes back to something R.W. Southern wrote in an intriguing small book many years ago. Islam has always been inexplicable. The real trauma was not just the violence (actual and alleged) nor was it some kind of 'civilisational' conflict. The deep rooted hostility has always stemmed from the question: If there is only one true path how could God allow another religion to emerge? The only answer to that must be a kind of repression: it is, and has to be, a false religion. No-one and nothing compares. 

Yes, we might on occasion recognize the beauty of its art, the personal piety of some of its followers, and its contribution to medieval scholasticism but, ultimately, it's a deception because even though it recognizes one God it doesn't do so in the right way and is therefore a distortion! (A question to yourself: can a culture that produces so much beauty actually be at root a perversion of the Truth?).