walkingtalkingwriting

   - 'What is there to keep us here?'   - 'The dialogue.'  

Ghosts (ak)

Walter Benjamin writing about Proust:

 

‘There was something of the detective in Proust’s curiosity. The upper ten thousand were to him a clan of criminals, a band of conspirators beyond compare: the Camorra of consumers.’

 

Uncle Scrooge, a riot of tartan and SNP rosettes, plus missing teeth, feet in a bowl of gently steaming water, eyes gleaming with something like malice but maybe it is only his sense of humour, caught on camera in his North Caucasian rest home. Eyebrows jutting ferociously, willing Alex Salmond on to ever more demanding political pirouettes. At the age of 93, a well deserved retirement of non-sobriety in his antechamber to the cardboard coffin.

 

I saw one of these being carried out of the Methodist Chapel the other day, painted a perfect blue of high summer sky and I like to think there were one or two clouds and maybe even a bird or two flying free. The four men carrying it made it appear that it was as light as a feather. Perhaps the cardboard box was merely a container for a departing soul.

 

A couple of thoughts from Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism:

 

‘The new world should be formed with a clear recognition that we have only limited powers of objective reasoning.’

 

Now, that is important to remember, and:

 

‘People are not as much propelled by material self-interest as free-market textbooks claim. If the real world were as full of rational self-seeking agents as the one depicted in those textbooks, it would collapse under the weight of continuous cheating, monitoring, punishment and bargaining.’

 

Though, surely, in free-market heaven there would be no need for monitoring – the market would sort everything out. Do you know there are people who actually believe such nonsense!!

 

Of course Uncle Scrooge was forced to glimpse and contemplate his unhappiness, or ghosts of time as Dickens has it. A touch of reality as the fabric is stretched to breaking point, to tear and reveal in the sharp light shining on all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. Look, there’s the ghost of Hamlet stalking through Borgen.

 

Since acquiring a Kindle a few weeks ago I have been able to begin a clear out of some of my books that have been accumulating dust and cobwebs over the last decades and I found revealed Julian Beck’s The Life of the Theatre, bought, I think, in Camden’s Compendium Bookshop in the early seventies. The pencilled price is £1.55. Under the heading of BREATHING, he quotes K. M. Bykov, “Textbook of Physiology,” Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1960:

 

“When insufficiently supplied with oxygen, the nervous tissue and especially the cells of the higher divisions of the central nervous system cease functioning.”

 

Strange visitations, ghosts if you like, from the past. But do keep breathing.

 

Travel to a City you probably have never heard of (mmj)

Riding the Northern Line this morning, my eyes travel along the row of small rectangular ads, which are always to be found above the seats on the opposite sides of the underground carriages. Alongside bio-tablets for everlasting health and vitality, and online dotcoms offering match making and endless job opportunities, my eyes stop and open wider at the bold red lettering of this message; travel to a city you have probably never heard of.

“Think smarter not harder”, Tio Amaretto (or Uncle Scrooge as we liked to call him) always used to tell us when we were children. We, the young McDucks, would sit at his fluffy woolly-slippered feet which poked out from under the tartan blanket that lay over his legs. Uncle Scrooge sat in a large armchair like the ancient patriarch he was. He was old and his skin looked yellow, but he was a toughy, and he was always bright eyed inspecting us out of his wrinkled face, peering over his NHS prescription glasses. His stare would silence us. Then he would tell us fantastic stories of his past in the Wild West of America both north and south, of meetings on the frontiers with men who knew how to use six shooters and how to fight duels with long knives. Think smarter, he would say. It was all very new and exciting even if we didn’t understand what Uncle Scrooge was trying to tell us exactly.

“Heavenly heather!” Uncle Scrooge exclaimed to us once, “The genie in the magic lamp! The fortunes I own! I could have the world’s biggest diamond! No! The entire mining industry! Yes, yes, yes! I can see that this is going to take some careful
thought.” Because Uncle Scrooge had also become very rich, one thing having led to another. That is how it was those days when causal logic and analytic reasoning ruled the roost; one thing always led to another.

Yes indeed, and it all needed the hardest of hard, and most careful thought. Simply counting up the quantities Uncle Scrooge owned took up most of everybody’s time. “One multiplujillion, nine obsquatunatillion, six hundred and twenty three dollars
and sixty two cents!” his health service book-keeper told him another time when
we were with him. It was still those long off days before computers got quicker
at counting, and numbers like that seemed like an awful lot to us.

We were young, and we thought it was real, although his people always had to keep
counting over and over again so Uncle Scrooge was always waiting for that final final figure which would tell him how much he had got to spend keeping him well, and we thought it would last for ever. Of course those were the days before the Goatee Goats got even bigger than the McDucks (the Goatee Goats and all their branches, both the protean firm of Goatman-Sacks out west and the scary Goatam-ovich oligarch family in the east). For thirty years those Goatee Goats have hoovered up everything, causal logic and analytic reasoning having been taken over by their newer ontological categories and more exciting algorithms of hegemony, power and influence. Hoovered up everything… as everybody knows these days… until there was nothing left.

But even though Uncle Scrooge has grown even older still these last thirty years, and
his NHS joint replacement surgery and heart bypass operations notwithstanding, his eyes still sparkle from behind his (now thicker and thicker) NHS prescription lenses when we visit him in his social services state-funded old people’s home in north London. “Think smarter not harder!” he goes on telling us again and again, quack quacking his toothless gums together… now most of his NHS decayed teeth have also been taken away.

Travel to a city you have probably never heard of. Not London. No. It sounds like something Andrzej Stasiuk would tell us to do in one of his feuilleton literary travelogue pieces which win international prizes! And it is true: Poland-Travel, the ad sign says under this headline message which has stopped my roving eyes in their horizontal tracks today, City of Culture, 2016: the invitation is to travel east and south to join the carnival in the city which is called Wroclow, the state capital of that very part of southern Poland in which Andrzej coincidentally also lives.

The underground train is slowing down and it is my stop. Wroclow is not the only name the city has known during the last eighty years, I reflect as I gather my leather
bag off the carriage floor, sling the strap over my shoulder and make towards the exit. Vratislav and Breslau are two of its other names among several others by which it has also been known… It is not like London whose name one cannot think of ever changing however hard one tries.

Travel to a city you have probably never heard of. Hard to get your head round? Not if you are smart enough to actually live - and of course write from - there.

Inscrutability in the face of dictatorship? (ak)

Are we trying too hard to think? Well, no, must be the simple answer to that question. Are you saying there is a problem? Are you pussy-footing around (in your decent English fashion) implying a question/problem that you don’t actually define. There is something you call NHS Intelligence as though it might a branch of MI5 or MI6 and there is something about speed . . . you are probably not talking about waiting time for operations but then again maybe you are.

    In your plea for less thinking, are you referring to the constant interference by every government to reorganise the NHS; to attempt to move towards greater efficiency – a much beloved trope of authority talking about others. It must be why authorities, those with a smidgeon of power, move reflexively towards tyranny. And why the rest of us have to busy ourselves with keeping an eye on things and discovering new and exciting ways to resist their forays into dictatorship. And it’s why there is no such thing as a free market – because those with a smidgeon of power always want to distort the market in their favour and there are those who have accumulated great wodges of power and have developed cosy relationships with those we have (with faint hopes) elected as a government.

    It does seem certain that there is a whole strand of thought in England which is infected and dominated by US hysteria about anything remotely socialistic (like the NHS) and this strand of (non)thought is also dominated by neo-con free market madness, despite the recent evidence that it doesn’t work – except of course for the few. And no doubt the Tory Party is about to morph any time soon into a Tea Party look-alike, a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-European Rottweiler.

    What am I supposed to be not thinking about?

    Should I adopt a mitteleuropean shrug of the shoulders? Inscrutability in the face of dictatorship? 

    Yes, no doubt we need a smile, a shrug and a bit of cunning in order to survive. A subtle (or not so subtle) resistance to the government of the day which these days seems to be infected with the Blairite hypermanic managerialism. So far the secret police have not infiltrated every aspect . . . though who knows how far off that day is . . . the privileged obviously have to protect their privileges, the pirates their treasure, the bankers their bonuses. And the rest of us . . .

    What comes to mind is 60 million ways of resisting and 60 million ways of working and laughing . . . actually that’s what we are:

 

    Working, resisting, loving, laughing

        Creatures

Persons

            Women and men

                    Children

                Babies

                                And the still to be conceived

        All that force waiting to be formed human

 

    And of course doubting, thinking, believing, making the wrong decision (again), not overly efficient and, yes, complex.

 

Decision Time (mmj)

Are we trying too hard to think? In our thoroughly-decent fair-play English way we have always put a high premium on thinking. Yes, there is common sense, but when we have got a big problem like the future of the world, or even a medium sized problem like the future of the United Kingdom, how about doing some superior thinking? How ever much it hurts our heads, how about some intelligence.

Let's take a medium sized problem like the future of the Health Service. That calls for NHS Intelligence... (Let's play the Harry Lyme theme now - NHS Intelligence - I kid you not). Now there is a title that makes me smile.

You see I have a theory about the NHS. Composed in the spirit of historical determinism it is called my "Russian/Soviet Army/Hospital Trust Theory" and it goes like this:
Take a large organisation with over 1 million 'employees' or 'people in arms'
+ plus a passionate ideology of freedom for all at the point of delivery (of a bayonet or a needle)
+ plus the need to be in a constant state of decisive change (radical reform or
revolution)
 =
The outcome (however well intended) is that the organisation moves 50% slower each time a cycle of reform is completed. eg the tank/hospital divisions/services move at 32 kph then 16, then 8... and so on... ad finitum.

Yes, there's the rub. It is 'Ad Finitum' not 'Ad Infinitum'. Things do not go on for ever, and there is always a cut off point... It was 1989 for the Russian Soviet Army... And it will be a date in the relatively near future for the NHS. It is not a question of whether, simply of when.

The above theory has nothing to do with Right Wing Think Tanks by the way. There is and has clearly been a Tory ideological objective to do away with the NHS for some time under the guise of 'market reforms', and if these kinds of people get their way this of course would simply hasten and bring forward the moment of 'Ad Finitum'.

NO, my theory is based more in the tradition of mind of central european thinking
post-communism... and now (perhaps) post-capitalism. This tradition is embedded in the 200 million people of our european neighbours who live east of Berlin and west of the Urals, people have seen more terrible and violent things in the last 100 years than we in our gentle English isle would ever care to think about or imagine, and experienced  the worst excesses and most ridiculous absurdities of ideological practices of both the Right and Left. In this tradition they have developed the wisdom of being superflous, and a deep knowledge of transience having seen many things come and go. They know the horrors of superior thinking, and they would have little time for NHS Intelligence or UK government's 'market reforms' (if they happened to live in Ukania as opposed to Ukraine). They would in fact be entirely indifferent.

Being indifferent to 'Decision Times' is their way of surviving because they know that, whatever is done on their behalf and whatever is changed to improve the system (intelligently or otherwise), they are always the ones who will end up suffering the worse consequences.

They have my entire sympathies... etc...

Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka (The Good Soldier Švejk) knows better; NHS Intelligence indeed!

There can be something very exciting about quotations (ak)

How do we think about something that we can’t yet think about? The pressure is intense, likely to lead to bashing one’s head against something hard – this something that we can’t yet think about and yet it is very hard and causes endless amounts of pain. How fundamental is the shift going to be? Could I, for instance, carry on my life much as I am at the moment? It would be convenient. But what if I am going to have to understand everything in a fundamentally different way? And what would startle me out of my dreaming state, my constant attempts to rebuild what I know and what is familiar?

    Here’s something I saw in adbusters magazine:

    ‘So, students. Decision time. You live in what many believe is a bifurcation point in human history. You’ve seen all the graphs with lines curving up like a ski jump. Human population. Gross domestic product. Species extinction. Carbon emissions. Inequality. Resource shortages. You know that something has to give. You’ve got an idea that the price isn’t right. Maybe you’re even suspicious that if the world economy does turn out to be a Ponzi scheme, you or your children are a little bit late to the game. You therefore stand at a fork in the road. You can take the orthodox route – and risk ending up with a qualification as impressive as a degree in Marxist ideology right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or you can take a chance on regime shift by speaking up, questioning your teachers, being open to disruptive ideas, and generally acting as an agent of change. You can insist that the economy is a complex, dynamic, networked system – and demand the tools to understand it. You can point out that the economy is unfair, unstable and unsustainable – and demand the tools to heal it. You can tell the oracles that they have failed. You can go in and break the machine. And then you can do something new.’ Adbusters took this from David Orrell’s Economyths.

    I suppose we are all students really, or at least sort-of-students – puzzling and studying and puzzling – possibly offering our own thoughts into the never-ending task of interpretation.

    Here’s the uber-interpreter Walter Benjamin, quoting Goethe:

    ‘What one wishes for in one’s youth, one has in abundance in old age.’ Benjamin adds: ‘The earlier in life one makes a wish, the greater one’s chances that it will be fulfilled. The further a wish reaches out in time, the greater the hopes for its fulfilment. But it is experience that accompanies one to the far reaches of time, that fills and divides time. Thus a wish fulfilled is the crowning of experience.’

    What, I ask myself did I wish for? Does wishing require some sort of courage or confidence or merely desperation? With millions of celebrities shouting out for what they wish or want or demand, with the help of their personal Max Clifford and the tabloid press screaming in adulation or pouring filth on them, wishing has developed an unattractive aspect. Perhaps it was better when we cut our birthday cakes and made a secret wish. These days, secrets are only here to give some passing friend the chance to betray.

 

Travel stops, and progress with some ideas (mmj)

“Paradigm Shift?” - I am writing online this morning on my aging notebook, whose battery is failing. Time was when it would hold a charge for two hours, now I am lucky to last thirty minutes. So mostly I keep myself plugged into the mains, and so I thought I was this morning in Camden town at a favoured café with free wifi. Then thirty five minutes into the piece, the screen goes blank. The plug wasn’t in the socket properly I guess. There is nothing to compare with the effect of the totally blank screen, and being brought to a sudden stop; thirty five minutes of occupation killed off in a nanosecond of power failure.

I stop to consider “Paradigm Shift” again, that old gnarled idea for moving back or moving on, and toponomastic inventiveness, like changing the name of a city from Leningrad to St Petersburg, or Pogradec to Perparimi. The latter town is in Albania had its name changed for a time during the second world war when the country was taken over by the Italians and under occupation. Perparimi means “Progress” in Italian by the way. I expect there are many towns and cities in the USA called that too.

I have been in the company of the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk in London the last two days. It is he who told me about Pogradec’s name change for instance. He also offers me the consolation, brought to a stop as I was by my power failure, from the time when he was last in Albania, and the power cuts lasted twenty out of twenty four hours. It was a long hot summer, and the waters behind the hydroelectric dams in the north of the country had run dry. So in Pogradec, plugged into the wall or running off an aging notebook battery, total power failure was more or less a permanent fact of life.

In conversation with Andrzej it is as if we are strolling on the Corso together, but it is not Italy, we are doing a passagiata far beyond Trieste to the east. I am reading his book Fado (Dalkey Archive Press 2009*), which is categorized by the publishers as ‘Essay / Travel Writing’. The truth is that the writing belongs to neither of these categories however. The pieces are too short and wandering to be considered essays, mostly about one or two thousand words long, and they are written in a style which is less about travel and more about what happen afterwards, and the uncanny experience when everything has been brought to a stop: challenging, amazing and unfamiliar perspectives, they should of course be called feuilletons.

Thus it is that power failures at this precise moment feel far more relevant in their irreversible way to me than the idea of paradigm shifts, which anyway somehow never actually seem to arrive for us in the here and now.

In the company of Andrzej I do not think I have ever found a companion whose writing shows such a close an affinity to the form and practice of serial dialogue we try to follow here. For instance, another piece in Fado is titled Rudñany. “This is a story of Slovakia” it begins. Rudñany exists, this is no fiction I tell myself, it is a village on the Google maps where I have discovered it for myself. Andrzej tells me of the difficulty he has reaching it, the long drive into the mountains along a narrowing valley past rusting factories, warehouses with broken roofs open to the skies, and overgrown railway tracks. He explains that for seven hundred years the mines at Rudñany provided plentiful supplies of silver, copper and mercury, but the mines were closed a few years ago when the seams of ore finally ran out.

After he finally reaches the village Andrzej describes the community of gypsies living there, literally at the bottom of the abandoned and utterly barren mine pit. It is important to add here that for Andrzej gypsies are people of hope, the nomadic tribe of Europe who for nearly a millennium have always possessed nothing and progressed nowhere. Their population is growing he tells me, soon they will be the majority, and perhaps then they will need their own state, he adds. At a certain point he describes the large concrete square at the centre of the closed up mining village where he has stopped. At this moment for truthfulness sake, I feel I must repeat his exact words: “The square was filled with hundreds of people walking about, stopping, and chatting, as if on the Corso.  They had no other occupation and so they were simply spending time with one another.  It looked like an allegory of Sunday or of a holiday in general.  The crowd was animated, dressed up, colourful, and at the same time listless.  No one needed them and so they occupy themselves with each other.  They killed time together.”

“I watched them and imagined the future of the world, with its growing numbers of people of whom it will be said that they are simply superfluous, because there is no work for them, there is no room, no prospects, and actually we are closing up shop just now and don't anticipate reopening.  Those who arrive late will have to stand or stroll around and talk for whatever time is still remaining, or for eternity, on a concrete square.” 

You may perhaps be surprised to hear that Andrzej is not at all a gloomy companion to be with, nor does he have dystopian beliefs or pronounce terrible prophecies. If I was to ask him about paradigm shifts, I think he would shrug his shoulders and laugh, because the fact is he is entirely indifferent to the West and its economical or any other ways of constructing reality. Post communism, and now post capitalism, power failures matter more to him than paradigm shifts – where walking about, stopping and chatting, as if on the Corso, we have no other occupation.

The nobler journey? Yes, Andrzey says at another moment, it is pilgrimage.

 

* Fado – and book prize winner, joining the several he has won for othere of his works, but Andrzej’s books, although much is now in translation, do not occupy the interest of the western literary press.

Here's another year to get on with (ak)

And where do I go for the truth? The wind rattling the windows, worrying at the dry leaves of the beech hedge (actually, a promise of a future hedge). I saw the isobars packed tight, the depression off to the north-east, giving the Scots another bashing.

    Our minds sleep fitfully in the ordinary, the day to day detergent dramas of our lives.  Intimations of truth or Truth perhaps could arrive in that moment of waking up to the strange, the unheimlich, the not at home . . . so, yes, you were right to go off to Russia to be shocked out of the blank wall of the familiar into something so startling one might think of it as the truth, to see the weirdness of truth or the truth of weirdness. Though Macbeth had only to step outside the castle gates to see the witches stirring up a whole cauldron of trouble.

    I’m holding on to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the paradigm shift applied to the possibility of a change in economic thinking. Rather as there was the advent of the neoliberal, market dominated thinking that was picked up conservative politicians in the late seventies. There’s a desperate need to move on but will it be back to Keynesian ideas or something more startling? Will it emerge in this Olympian year or will we continue to wait, despairingly perhaps, no holding our breath, as inequality increases and the hyper-rich get even richer (well why not if we can get away with – you can hear the self-pity in their voices). When will the tipping point (as Malcolm Gladwell described it) arrive?

    To what degree is my poverty self-chosen? Or merely the result of stuff happening (Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of looting – hadn’t he heard of capitalism?). But then again, these days, that used to be hours, I puzzle my way through months that used to be days, one myopic eye on studying, the other on the, yes, weirdness of aging. Perhaps the fear that I am no longer going anywhere at all – it’s all got to be handed over the children. What could I say in my defence if there should be any accusations of wasting time, making wrong decisions (is there any other type of decision?)? I did what I could . . . but I was in such a rush to get to the somewhere where I haven’t arrived (yet!). So there could be some hope that even at this late stage (how late is late?) I will, in fact, arrive where I intended – even admitting that the destination was never entirely clear to me – lost in myopia, as usual.

    So let’s admit it, life is way too difficult, but hope flickers on, putting up a head or at least a hand to emerge from the dream wreckage or the wreckage of dreams, wishes emerge from the mist . . . oh yes, I could do A (or B or even C) . . .  I promise I’ll let you know when I get there or like you, when I’m on my way back.

Happy New Year!

 

Connecting (mmj)

I am sat in the departures lounge of Berlin's Tempelhof airport, waiting for my connecting flight back to London, heading back to Ukania. The airport cafe's and shops are all gone and it is a long wait, but I am at ease sat in the stripped back and bare walled halls since I have a strong feeling for time, a strong feeling for its immeasurable length, both for the historical complexity and the particularity of its geographical location.

Where have I been? To Russia. We go to Russia for truthfulness. Time was I was unable to fetishise, but age brings its consolations and I was in transit from the Argentine pampas to... Where was it now? In transit from the Argentine pampas to... ("alone, disconsolate, and in some way, interesting" is one option referred to by Borges in his 1951 essay The Argentine Writer and Tradition).

Ah yes, I remember, to Russia, and now I am heading back to Ukania. Because the political economy of life is laid bare there to the fullest extent, the reality of the extreme gap between the 'Haves' and the 'Have Nots'. I was reading a review of Luke Harding's new book Mafia State: How one Reporter became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia (Stephen Homes London Review of Books 05/01/12 p23-27), describing the way democracy works in Russia democracy, vyboria bez vyborathe, "elections without a choice". Go check it out I thought. So I did, voting with my feet through that other option (the other one which Borges had suggested in his 1951 essay) finding: "room for manoeuver and capacity for innovation".

To Russia looking for truthfulness. And now heading back, I am halfway to London, and I am stopped again at the Tempelhof Airport outside Berlin. Not a living soul around "the will-o'-the-wisps of the dead are glimering; there's no sign of a living soul around...". This time it is the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk speaking (boss with his wife of Czarne Publishing), being like Anselm Kieffer a visitor more than once at Tempelhof, and travelling to places nobody else would think to visit, such as Galicia, and obstinately leaving his words for someone else to find, since nothing is washed away without leaving a trace. Not even there. And not even in Ukania.

And in Ukania, the candles are also being lit by invisible hands for the dead.

Ukania (ak)

Grinding through the slow moving traffic, the blackened pillars, the open wrought iron gates come into view on the right. There is a spasm of nervousness as I indicate and pull over to the centre of the road and wait for a break in the oncoming line of cars. The metalled drive curves up the hill, through the park like acres of grass and trees – oaks and beeches. No sign of the inmates or the Victorian pile of the asylum. Damp December morning, a week before Christmas. Reluctant to get there too soon, I ease slowly over the speed humps and watch the stark trees for signs of life. For something! I imagine corpses swaying and slowly spinning in the breeze, hanging from the massive branches and leave them, pass them by, not knowing who they might be, whose side were they on, speed up, jolting over the humps, putting that image behind me. Are the inmates better cared for than my imagination does for them?

    Oh, look over there, the first signs of human life, little figures skip skipping through the long grass. Little Englanders, mostly men, cared for on this reservation, free to roam and dream of distant empires. Well, they look happy enough. Well fed – even a bit on the pudgy side like little round steamed puddings; full of roast beef and, Yorkshire pudding and roast potatoes followed by spotted dick and lumpy custard. Don’t look now, they’ve noticed me, in unison their heads turn towards me. Can they see my pro-European disposition, my tendency to see England as a small peninsular off the north western coast of Europe that got cut off by the incoming tide leaving the marooned islanders to believe that they had done it themselves.

    Ukania with its dreams of fratricide, its dreams of slaves beaten into submission, cutting the sugar can on distant tropical islands. How quickly the years pass. How unreliable the memory.

    Ukania – are you suggesting we look in the mirror and see Serbia? I remember both the dark streets of arrival in Belgrade and the bright sunshine the following morning as we strolled the castle grounds.

    How the little Englanders cheered for their pinkly glowing champion. Though at the end of another week a different narrative seems to be gathering ground –  turning a blind eye to the petit gesture of the veto and getting on with what needs doing. But then again it’s Christmas.

    Reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando one of the many things I have been struck by is how she describes the changing character of people over the three centuries of Orlando’s life. The shift towards allowing an uncertainty of identity. Of course she wrote in the midst of both her privileged background and the ‘wild’ community of the Bloomsbury group. A threat to certainty – it must have been deeply disturbing for many readers. The older idea of fixed identities – take Dicken’s characters, for example – was passing. We became more interested in the complexity of our inner lives, the complexity and conflicted nature of our desires.

    In twenty years (God willing) we’ll be able to look back and see the where, when and who of the coming paradigm shift – what out of all the stuff we’re reading – will form the texture of the future?

 

Fraternité, Brüderlichkeit (mmj)

Or walking on the shadow side, let's call it - "On the inability of the english to fraternise".

What is it about us, as if a gap of 20km makes us in some way unable to be friendly with the people over there? An island race? I am enjoying reading Norman Davies's extended demolition job of that notion; Vanished Kingdoms... (2011),The Isles... (1999), and 'Not Forever England' in Europe, East and West (2006).

Call me obstinate if you like (judged by the opinion polls, I am clearly in the minority), but I like this thing of being european. It is a big topic! So here is one way of making a comparison 'feuilleton style'.

'Feuilleton style'? I have recently come accross a splendid website which provides a summary of the best current Unter der Stück pieces of writing out of Mitteleuropa, and they are ALL IN ENGLISH! - signandsight.com

And there among the pages and pages of good stuff, was that article describing the habit of "self-imposed national isolation". Ah yes! An article about David Cameron's Veto (2011)? No, actually the article was talking about the behaviour of Serbia over the last few years.

Bizarre of course comparing Serbia with England, or the nostalgia for a 'Greater Serbia' with that Daily Mail way of longing for a 'United Kingdom'. Norman Davies has an even better way of describing the state of (self-imposed national isolation) sentimentalist mind - "Ukania".

Ukania: the mouse that roared - like the Grand Duchy of Fenwick. Or Ruritania: Somewhere that never was, and soon enough will no longer be.

Cut Off! Or down there at the coal face?

A flaneurish sort of project and I guess shadow is a good, appropriate word to describe this flaneur’s progress: ogling the poor, the shoppers who can’t be far from dropping and the leaden rust of Anselm Kiefer together with supplemental readers of paperback books (what are the titles, who are the authors, I want to know). It’s all air-conditioned alienation in free fall towards Christmas and beyond. The tantalising glimpses of what may or may not be the mysterious Higgs Boson down in the depths of the LHC at CERN and to top it all a planet glimpsed only a few light years away with seemingly similar qualities to this planet which we are pleased, at times, to call home.

    Cameron is so deeply in the pockets of his rich friends who gamble their way through the days with guarantees provided free-of-charge by the government courtesy of this strange conglomeration known as tax-payers. And then we seem to be abandoning the old high streets which in turn are being taken over by betting shops, pawn shops, pound shops and charity shops. Maybe the country is now financed by the Lottery. Meanwhile, if I had any or ever get any, I plan to keep my gold coins in ancient leather bags, smelling of wine and goats, under the floorboards under the bed in a secret place I don’t yet know. Gambling never did exert any pull for me.

    But physics might if I could get a bit more of a handle on it. Physics is bursting with linguistic energy – quarks, worm holes, dark matter, the above mentioned Higgs Boson which sounds like a joke but is also known as the God particle – language that has become poetic to keep language in the game at all because as I understand it the work is done with what looks to me like pages of incomprehensible mathematical formulae or experiments buried deep at the coal face of the LHC. The excitement palpable as they push on ‘deeper and deeper into both inner and outer space.

    Meanwhile the EU – possible minus ‘national interest’ Cameron – has to sort out a political model that has the clout to oversee the workings of the single currency. And surely this was bound to have to be engaged with sooner or later. No easy matter though – ferociously complex negotiations compared with that, the work at the LHC (in my ignorance) I imagine as a relatively simple matter. A bunch of big beasts with many different interests to fight for with their battle hardened advisers, fighting for strategic advantages and alliances with devious ploys. I can’t say the work appeals to me, yet at the same time I relish the unfolding story as it will continue to appear in daily instalments. And I like the fact that the market goes on its usual hysterical fashion because politics is a quite different activity with its own traditions and rhythms. Are we witnessing a further shift in the balance of powers between the great estates – the political, industrial, financial and the media? And not to forget the rest of us, the so-called public willing on our champions and booing who ever we consider the enemy. It is been an interesting year and next year surely looks to see that interest increase. Interesting times we are living in.

 

The Big Cut (mmj)

Let’s begin with the first issue. In the beginning, when wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew began working together, in a kind of obstinacy each issue contained a humorous idea in what was called ‘The Big Cut’. It was July 17^th 1841, the first copies being based on the satirical word taken from France, Charivari, and for two years the humorous ideas continued under the name of The Big Cut, illustrations in the form of a woodcut image and accompanying text.

Then in 1843 a series of drawings was begun by John Leech, the first being called Cartoon No 1: Substance and Shadow. The full page drawing showed a crowd of ragged paupers stood in a gallery, some of them looking up at the richly framed elegant portraits on the walls. On the opposite page, divided by a thick margin, there was the text; the government had “determined that as they cannot afford to give hungry nakedness the substance which it covets, at least it shall have the shadow. The poor ask for bread, and the philanthropy of the State accords – an exhibition”.

And so on. It seemed to Charivari owners that the right thing to do thereafter was to replace ‘The Big Cut’ with a cartoon. It may have seemed at first that this turnaround invention would never outgrow its usefulness, the cartoon flourished, but over time the absence of ‘The Big Cut’ took its toll, there was a process in which everything sweetened and softened itself, and eventually dissolved into thin air. The last issue was published in 2002.

Creating ‘The Big Cut’ was like walking along Oxford Street in December in the opposite direction to the crowd (in search of less fashionable memory sites).

Yesterday I also visited the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey, south London to see the exhibition of new work by Anselm Kiefer. The twenty or so works, more or less all also created in a kind of obstinacy, were spread through three large rooms on the south side of the White Cube concourse. Grey, grey lead sheet leaves, and the colours of rust. “Many of the large-scale works have undergone an accelerated process of oxidisation” the exhibition notes explained, and I almost forgot to describe the eagle wings of lead spread wide, and rising above the solid sheets of tomes or tombs, reminding me of George Basolitz’s upside bird. ‘Sprache der Vögel – Folcanelli’ was scrawled on the white wall along with alchemist references to lead and sulphur elsewhere. Weight. And there was counterweight and balance, and perhaps there was also weightlessness. And there were dried sun-flowers with long stems, also painted grey with streaks of black. And, who knows, somewhere there may have been gold hidden, it was not at all clear; ‘Antonin Art….id Heliobabel’.

The gallery walls were very white and there was a small of fresh paint everywhere. In the first room a tall boy/girl dressed all in black leant against one of the walls reading a paperback. I hesitated to call him/her employed. In the next room, there were three more boy/girls in black also leaning against the walls reading books. I noted that it was cool and silent everywhere apart from the rushing sound of an air-conditioning fan. Taking flight, like The Big Cut, it could have been a demonstration of transience I supposed, in another story, such as in Kiefer’s largest works in the third studio room, which, with their cracked surfaces similar to dried up river beds, appeared to be cut the monumental geometries of the Tempelhof Airport, lines of perpendiculars, perspectives toward vanishing points, and curvatures of buildings; built in 1929, transformed in the 1930’s by the architect Albert Speer, and closed at the end of 2008.

A humorous illustration, I remembered my own passage through that airport's halls in November of that year on the way to Alexanderplatz, and cut deeper, since neither kinds of work benefit, or could ever benefit, from being described figuratively or in any other way as cartoons.

Where do we start? (ak)

Where else should we start but with the failure? If we take that old story of God and Adam and Eve and a certain serpent in their Garden of Eden, this paradise of plenty, we have a man and a woman created fully adult yet fully child-like, held in innocence until the breaking of the injunction to not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How were we to get out of our child-like dependence? It had to be by breaking the rules. There is a sense in which every part of the story is necessary to give some insight into our predicament as thinking animals; held in animal nature with minds that soar to the heavens. Of course we might see it as tragicomedy or we might see it as a policier – it was all a set up, the cops planted the evidence via an agent provocateur and then arrested us with smirks on their faces.

    Whatever it was it was surely necessary for our innocence to be rudely disillusioned though whether that means we should leap directly into the murk and confusion of guilt must be rather doubtful. But let’s leave the question of guilt to one side for the moment, let us see it as a struggle through to awareness. And awareness it has to be said is an opening to something bigger. The room that we were in suddenly gets bigger. The Garden of Eden became an exercise in limitation: let’s check this out. Is this really the case? So we have exploration, development of hypotheses, dialogue, feedback and I could add the overused cliché of journeying.

    So, it’s thanks God (Mum, Dad) for all you’ve given us but hey, this garden is beginning to get a bit on the small side. You know it as well as we do, after all you’re throwing us out, but actually we got there first . . . well Eve here got chatting to some serpent and well you know how these things happen I guess, one thing leads to another. Anyway, we’re off and thanks again. No hard feelings eh! Yeah, we are a bit scared but I think we‘re going to be okay . . . there is one thing though, one last thing, could you give us your blessing. We’d like that if you could see your way to bless us, we would really appreciate that.

    The garden we’re in currently is that of the Market and the great patriarchs of the Market have told us that we must never interfere with its pure workings. So we have to work (if there are any jobs) harder and longer with less complaint, be flexible, go here, go there for less money and at the same time consume, consume, consume.

    Is it time to leave this Garden of Market? I suppose that depends on who you are. For those cocaine fuelled traders and bankers, millionaires, billionaires presumably not. It remains snouts in the trough time. For the rest of us?

    You mean you’re getting itchy feet, too?

    Perhaps thinking moving into another sort of space where less is more . . . meanwhile there’s ever more exploring to do, learning to keep up with and the never ending spiral of dialogue.

 

No Sure Signs of Progress Here (mmj)

We are also writing history:
                    Again we work between space and space - /  And both are dark.

Writing history in what appear sometimes to be altogether dark times, even downright evil. Is God truly about to make another sudden landing here on earth in 4 weeks time, or will he put it off this year because we have been too naughty? Or rather, not writing history, but transcribing it, setting it down
                         - With no mistakes.

Please, suppress your groans, this is not a boastful claim. It is not that errors don’t take place… Oh, they do, they do, and all the time! Take it as read, the truth-telling is dishonest. It is only that the effort is towards accuracy.

Accuracy, rather than originality (…or even point of view). And despite the surrounding dark there is enough light here to be going on with. Could we be doing with more? It is not an option at the present time, we must work within the limits of our technology. Just about enough to see across the page.

It is true of course our eyes do peer and wander towards the circular rim, eccentric, where light meets shadow, and memories and imagination creep in so that he who is telling us all this, appears to admonish.

As at this moment now soon.

Such as when the historian, poor dead Tony Judt receives a terrible bashing from the most recent New Left Review for his “grand narrative for today’s Eurocracy”. Oh dear! I used to rate Postwar, I thought the other day in central London walking along Piccadily, but like everything, now I see, only another dazzling failure.

Passing an open courtyard on the north side of the street an amazingly tall red painted angular metal tower. I walked into the courtyard and spent several minutes mingling with the small crowd walking round the circular base of the pryamidical cone. It is Tatlin’s Tower, I told myself excitedly, named after the Russian who designed it in 1921, and this was an exact scaled down version of the original, which (I am reminded, we have visited here before) in fact was never built.

Go to look at it if you can while it is there, it is free!  Looking up, what you see is a breath-taking spiral, a cut-away cantilever cone like a crazy helter-skelter with vertical planes of slender steel. And what you feel is a sense of being in common, of a human intelligence, and a location where people can meet and disseminate ideas under the cover and protection of what could be described a sort of shade or shadow. It reminded me of something old and historical, about a joined-up vision, or, if you prefer that simpler old-fashioned word, about solidarity.

Telling it better than putting it in books, and the wall installations, if you can slip by the brocaded doorman of Royal Academy unnoticed and continue past the toilets under the stairs, include the structural engineer’s further admonishment having calculated the margins for error (with no mistakes), “the long and slender members shown on Tatlin’s original drawing would have been even harder to realize in a full size tower”, predicting its certain collapse before completion.

--

'Bede's Copyist' by Chris McCully

I have no proper name, yet his is tall
On Europe's stones and in the candleflukes
Whose culture briefly held a sparrow's brawl
In a crowned head. We set it down in books,
A lettered Latin - that bird, this birth, that stall -
    With no mistakes.

Outside, the snow almost obscures the park,
Our wooden Christ's obliterated face.
Inside, with all the negligence of grace
His habit falls across my page's mark.
Again we work between space and space -
    And both are dark.

Skulking in darkened streets (ak)

Steps echoing in the empty night street. Damp raw air, unkempt privet, acidic soot coating every surface. My God, what year is it? Spilling backwards out of a window, silently, over and over again.

    Probably an old black and white film made by desperate men in crumpled suits and greasy ties. These are evil times. To rule the roost the cock must terrorise the hens. Divide and rule, don't hesitate to tell lies and be ready. Don't leave anything to chance, make sure you've got the sources and channels of information under control and functioning smoothly. Search out the advisers who have that certain brilliance, that finger on the pulse of next week, the speed that enables them to be several steps ahead of the others.

    Better to disarm your enemies than get involved in hand to hand fighting. Make sure you're in the chauffeur driven armour plated, blend in when necessary, vehicle, dusty from the deserts . . . but we were skulking in the darkened streets, longing for a quiet life, a family life, not this dog eat dog existence . . . but what year was this? It never became clear. The question, back then, was how to step into the limelight, but then more questions arise: what was possible, what doors were open, what windows forgotten by careless homeowners. Skulking in darkened streets with robbery in mind, eyes narrowed, mouth tightened to a thin slash of a sneer.

    The silent night imposes its will. Over and above the greasy streets, in back rooms, after the children are asleep, we'll mark out the changes required, sketch the route map, programme the satnav.

    When will we be there?

    Ah! that's not an easy question to answer. When is the baby due? Has it even been conceived? There's a proper order to everything. What grabs your attention because that is where you are going in everlasting and unfolding majesty or ignominy or probably both.

    Let's take the step to walk and transform how it looks. 

An Exile from Croydon (mmj)

A picture of Thesiger, all skin and bones, taken from off his death bed, and out of a smoke filled 'tobacco trance' room... I feel myself being firmly shaken and somebody is shouting in my ear, over and over the same words, but I can't understand their meaning. There must be an electric light swinging from the ceiling too, the shadows are leaping up and down the wall, and a bell is ringing somewhere too.

Overdose of excitements, and exotic like Bulgakov's story titled 'Morphine', where the diary entry runs:
"Vomiting in the morning.
Three syringes of 4% solution at dusk.
Three syringes of 4% solution late at night."

Except the eccentric is also a form of protest in a situation where the courts of the land have long ago pronounced their judgements. No antigonal voices are permitted to speak, muffled that well-known story which is an intergenerational tragedy, where the bad stuff is working itself out. Taboo to tell.

I light up another one:
"... Puff. Cigarettes are bad. That is why they are good - not good, not beautiful, but sublime." (Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime [1993], P 3). And nobody can make me stop! Cough.

Sick humour. Quite unlike Mr Wilfred, this one is stood round gawping and slack faced flicking ash, far from the Empty Quarter where the traveller's firm set jaw was razor edged and pointed sharp for going on journeys and heading in certain directions with deep eyes glinting like coals under hooded brows. These ones are decidely blank. Lobotomy comes to mind. Ah yes, when all were to be anaesthetised by order? This one looked so dim, perhaps it was thought a waste to use up a dose on him.

That's so eccentric, says one of the soldiers passing the time of day.

10%? 10% of what? (ak)

To do what? What’s the problem? Solvents, solutions, mucoid, sticky, sticky and slimy: a list plucked from your post ‘The 10% solution. A tithe perhaps? 10% of your language must be donated once a week, but if that’s the case then you owe us a lot more than four or five hundred words. And you confess to being 90% self aware – WOW! – the remaining 10% must be in the realms of sticky, slimy stuff that you keep out of sight. The place where you go to. But it’s magnificent to be 90% self-aware; that is almost pure radiance. Something that would push Gautama into the shade of his banyan tree . . .  oh honoured disciple. And the word is eccentric. Ummm let me get a taste of that. One of those English eccentrics. I always think of somebody tall and willowy, with an obligatory bow tie – something with spots on – a mischievous twinkle in his eye. I know who comes to mind, Wilfred Thesiger. Tough as old boots and a boxer when the need arose. Wikipedia tells me he was born in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia and that the Emperor Haile Selassie invited him to attend his coronation in 1930. In between he managed to fit in Eton and Magdalen College where he represented the university in boxing and was captain of the boxing team. He apparently died in Croydon which perhaps could be seen as an eccentric place in which to die.

    Where do I go then? You ask and then ask again. Well if you were Wilfred Thesiger you would have gone to the Empty Quarter. But I suppose whilst Thesiger literally went to the Empty Quarter those of us more mundane chaps dim the lights and go into what Eliot refers to as a ‘tobacco trance’ or some other sort of non-state, drug induced or not. Life on hold, waiting for something more interesting to happen which may suggest an argument against drug induced anything except anaesthetics when undergoing an operation, you would miss the more interesting thing that happens along.

    Though no doubt I should be intent on making that first billion. Then one could get out of it full time; simply let all that dosh make more dosh, meanwhile living in some paradise. But what about the front line, what about the occupation, the barricades – should I be pushing my way on to the barricades and making a stand with the other comrades. Mind you, it’s good to have a nap now and again and I wouldn’t like to be come so agitated that I couldn’t sleep at night.

    The New Labour project ran out of energy. Did Blair sense that and hand over to the sulky Brown bear something that was already well on the way to dying. The present “coalition” wants to turn the clock back to 1979 and do it all over again. It’s as though nobody has grasped what actually needs to be brought into consciousness. It is like waiting for a birth _ what sort of baby is it going to be?? What is to emerge? And when?

    It seems impossible to see beyond economic growth and yet that seems to imply ecological disaster. The US and Europe, with the UK (the City of London) strung on a thread between the two, in a mess still addicted to being world leaders and the wolves are at the door and the ammunition has long since run out.

    Oh, I know, I’ll read that new book* about the quantum universe. It’s all a dance,

mate, don’t fuss yourself.

*The Quantum Universe: Everything that Can Happen Does Happen by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. It was reviewed in The Guardian 19.11.11.

 

The 10% Solution (mmj)

I am exploring the efficacy of solvents, searching for one that is neither so strong that it is destructively corrosive, nor too weak that it is ineffective, but somewhere in between: the 10% solution seems about right.

Melancholic thoughts were spilling over from the previous few days in a pervasive way. Of death, and indeed especially of the moments before death, and “death anxiety” (as it is sometimes referred), mucoid and sticky thoughts arose in the form of questions, such as how will it be for me when the chips are down? Will I be paying attention? Or, perhaps better put, will I be there in any sense at all?

However, over last weekend with friends these impenetrable questions of future dying began to turn towards the living and the present, and to another question, but still equally sticky and slimy: How does it happen that, even when I am with those who I love and cherish more than any others in the world, I sometimes find myself giving them far less than my full attention, and where do I go then?

Being generally disinclined to beat myself up too badly with a perfectionist rod, I regard myself as being good-enough-present with my attention perhaps 90% of the time. Not bad you may think, but the personal horror is in the other 10%; those times when I can fall into a kind of desperation, often in the presence of an intense feeling such as love (or it could equally be grief, or even fear) that I yearn with a childlike passion to express… but I find myself 100% stuck somewhere else with my attention. In a word, absent. ‘Where do I go then?’.

Absent: the tenacity of being stuck somewhere else, in an experience of all pervading exile, both internal and external, personal and collective - (I happen to read the same just now in W G Sebald’s Campo Santo [2005] P 114, in his essay titled ‘Constructs of Mourning’, quoting Benjamin concerning “the darker aspect of the melancholy… its tenacity”) – that is an exile involving a judgment, both a sentence of guilt and a punishment of shame.

‘Where do I go then?’ indeed… The rest of the weekend opened up an exploration of this question, around the rim of this quaking heart space, and more than once I was reminded of the “active volcano” Vulcano, which I had walked up only six weeks before on one of the Mediterranean Aeolian Islands, vertigo instilling steep slopes bereft of any form of life, and foul smelling sulphurous hot smoke emitting from dark pits located within the lip of the crater, some of them close to the footpath which circled the rim, the sign at the bottom of the volcano warning against approaching any of the smoking pits too close because of the great danger of ‘intoxication’ and falling in.

And more than once over the last weekend I also fell into dark pits exploring the question ‘Where do I go then?’, as I revisited the prominent traumas of my past and the tenacious judgments which had been passed upon me, on each occasion for a time falling into a kind of desperate ‘intoxication’.

“You are an eccentric!”, an Australian friend said to me at one moment during the weekend, as I spoke out, describing another circuit of my past life, speaking with him and another. I truly had not considered the possibility before.

Eccentric! That I had survived exile, and become a survivor of past judgments, in lighthearted excursus dissolving, since by this time we were all laughing loudly together.

Out of the Woods and into the Weirdness (ak)

At CERN, I understand, the Large Hadron Collider, is examining some incredibly tiny fragment of a second after the BIG BANG. Oh look here there’s a funny little item that Google picked up – Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man (presumably not over 50) said he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world. As a response to your collective ruminations around DEATH and the FALL in the midst of momentary minglings with men (over 50) in the majestic woodlands, I wonder about that equally tiny moment of time prior to our removal from life.

    I suppose the hungry bear of autumn is in trouble, she should be stuffing her guts for all she’s worth in preparation for her months of living off her fat. A bit like how the Osborne/Cameron combo expect us to do exactly that. It is probably some sort of punishment for not having been to the right schools.

    And why would death have a purse? Surely it’s a one-way freebie.

    And then there’s this Hansel and Gretel image of opening the door of the witch’s cottage. Oooooh and what does this taste like! Yummy yummy! Entering death with a wide-eyed curiosity.

    Coincidentally, in a moment of crazy joy, half an hour or so before reading Rethinking the Fall I had one of those thought flashes – I hope I die laughing.

    Another common thought I have is the wish to be aware in those split seconds before the death event. But generally speaking my attempts to pay attention, say to my breath, do not last long – say three or four breaths – then something more interesting comes along. Backwards and forwards, reaching in, getting flung back, like trying to swim in a rough sea.

    Oh dear. I want to giggle again

    I often imagine that death is rather like falling asleep: I know nothing about it. And then “later” (though time is not part of the experience) I, (or somebody vaguely related to me) is in some rather weird, more or less connected movie. This (though I don’t think this whilst in it) could be some sort of bardo state. And would it matter if I never woke up BUT instead remained in that bardo/dream state. Occasionally there is the consciousness of dreaming but mostly not and often when I do wake, it is a shock. What am I doing here! What is this place!

    One of the books I’m currently reading is Murakami’s latest offering, 1Q84. It’s very gripping. The usual Murakami weirdness about isolated individuals plus an examination of cults. Presumably based on his research of a few years ago into the people behind the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo tube.

 

Rethinking the Fall (mmj)

I spent the weekend with a group of older men in a wood. We had two windless days of radiant sun which allowed us to spend a lot of the daytime outside under the diminishing bronze leaf canopy of beech and oak trees. It was uncommonly warm too for the November time of year, and by the end of Sunday the sense of male companionship and community was strong.

Inside, the fall was equally well held, the sense of falling. The falling word was in fact spoken several time by different men, both marking the transition of the season and the essence of autumn, and also the changes going on in our own hearts. As it was used, the word seemed to be pulling two ways at once. There were those of us who were determined to celebrate, desirous of engaging with the beauty around us, the turning falling and fallen leaves, for the purposes of song and dance. And there were those of us who were determined to close our eyes to the light and only see the dark.

Or so it seemed. I myself was split, being pulled both ways at once for most of the two days; a trembling lightness of spirit and a trembling dread at night. At one point early on one of the men recited by heart a poem:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like that cottage of darkness?

Rethinking the rest of the  poem (by Mary Oliver - perhaps surprisingly I had not heard it before), today I watch myself falling the rest of the weekend: twisting both ways, the rest of the weekend falling, both engaging with and withdrawing from the hightened awareness of the natural world as this realm of fear - such is our solidarity as humans to experience - our finitude.

And full of curiosity, like the poem, the falling not yet ceased or ceasing, continuing to turn.

By the way, the weekend workshop was held under the auspices of Men Beyond 50, a new project with which I am collaborating. Bundles of words are being amassed, collected and distilled. Fragments and fragrances of text (for instance, watch two men in conversation about work on  YouTube) are being wafted towards social media outlets. And the older men are meeting in woods. You have been warned!

Falling Away (ak)

Rather like Von Trier’s movie your quote from the Butler is at first sight rather indigestible, so I began to pull it apart:

 

‘ . . . a melancholia that attends living and loving

 

                        outside the livable

 

            and outside the field of love , , ,

 

 . . . overcome, in part, precisely

 

                        through the repeated scandal

 

by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard

 

through borrowing and exploiting the very terms

 

                        that are meant to enforce its silence.’

 

Perhaps the gaps could be even greater. Digestion should never be hurried.

Silence, perhaps, is an unknowingness until some

Thing emerges, something like an awareness of loss.

 

A sharp expelling of breath

Then more silence

Comforting silence – if only we could stay here –

 

But life intervenes, a clock strikes and it’s time to catch a bus.

Melancholy was always more accessible before we all had cars to hide away in.

The silent melancholy of the lone passenger wiping at the misted-up window

Where are we?

Yet in the loss does it matter as all journeys approach the timeless

 

For some reason I picture this bus heading away from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall halfway between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square and it is probably less than half full. It’s about 8.30 on a rainy November evening. Working people heading home.

 

The driver is taking care of us through the wild country of government

 

No More Friends Please (mmj)

Fellow traveler Judith (aka Judith Butler) also announces she no longer wants to be my friend! She doesn’t hold back either in what she says, less of an Australian broom handle up my backside kind of experience, the words she used were more direct and far reaching.

“What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love…

… produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence.” (Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Columbia Univ Press 2000, P78).

The loosen-up scandal she had in mind seemed to me at first to be similar to that done by a large planet named Melancholia colliding with earth, along the lines of the Von Trier film of that name, the scandal of total destructiveness. But I quickly began to have an even worse feeling that Judith was shoving her words further up, as it were, both reversing and bringing to cultural life a new kind of meaning, one which was also being repeated over and over.

So that I was of course forced to cry out in tears!

It happened apparently by chance, as it so often does with melancholic coincidences, that today I was in Bridport attending an event in the town’s Literary Festival titled, ‘W G Sebald 1944-2001 A Celebration’. After some of Sebald's poems were read out by Cheryl Campbell from the new translation done by Iain Galbraith (Across the Land and Water, Selected Poems, 1964-2001), Anthea Bell began to speak of her experience in 1999 working with Sebald on Austerlitz simultaneously translating his German into English; “Which Max was writing at the time all the way through”, she said.

I am not sure this is any good, he modestly wrote on several occasions in the letters she regularly received from him along with the latest drafts; “We had discussions which went on for a very long time. He always wrote in his beautiful handwriting, and I typed”, she said. “Because we would always take a close interest in each other’s writings”, she said.

The road traffic accident in which Sebald died took place two months after the simultaneous publications of the German and English versions of Austerlitz in 2001.

“I was on my own and I felt very sad”, she said as she later undertook the translation of some of his essays for the book titled Campo Santo in 2005. The collection includes the essay called ‘Constructs of Mourning’, an extended exploration by way of Dürer’s Melancholia, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and other ‘inhospitable regions’ where Melancholia is also known to reside.

There’s nothing there (ak)

What’s all this ‘my friend’ stuff? An image comes to mind of us being members of a panel on a stage in front of a polite audience. At least it is polite so far – when are they going to liven up? And we address each other in some sort of cod parliamentary speakese. Weird!

    Loosen up a bit mate, as an Australian might say – at least the phrase came to my mind with an Australian accent – remove that broom handle from out of your back passage!!

    I have to admit a lack of research regarding Von Trier though news of his dalliance with Nazi ideology has reached me and it does have the effect of making me ask myself, do I need/want to see this stuff from some Nazi apologist?! I had decided some months ago that I didn’t need to see his previous film review accounts of overwhelming violence embedded in it.

    He doesn’t hold back does he!

    But on the other hand do we hold back too much? Are we too reticent, too careful?

    Or to approach it from another angle, do I (we) want to attract attention? Make a splash, create a fuss? Quite quickly I’m scared.

    Briefly in London this week I had the idea to go to St Paul’s to show my support for anti-capitalist camp . . . but a tight time schedule and a certain shyness when it comes to showing my face at a demonstration meant that I didn't get there. I think the last demonstrations I went on were the anti-Vietnam War demos of 67/68. There remains the memory of how easily I was pulled in the direction of what I now watch on the TV as the blackblockers up to their tricks. Not that I went that far, but the impulse was there. What else? The size of the police horses in Grosvenor Square, the pushing and pulling as the hemmed in crowd sought a way forward. And I seem to remember journeying to London on a double-decker bus with the rest of a contingent from Southampton where I was living at the time.

Paul Muldoon, reading some of his poems at the LRB bookshop on Wednesday last, talked of the spaghetti western movies, Clint Eastwood and his (Muldoon’s) early and significant relationship with cinema growing up in rural Ireland. That reminded me of my own responses to the laconic man-with-no-name, coming out of and returning to whatever mysterious place that our imagination might have come up with – an image of a man as potent and free. Perhaps my fear of demonstrations now is that I would both be impotent and trapped. Just think of the Metropolitan Police strategy of kettling and everybody filming everybody else.

And yet, and yet . . . how to stand up and be counted!! That’s the thing about standing up to be counted is it means having to leave the place of mystery. It’s not a million miles from the professional persona of the psychotherapist. A mirror.

What is the slogan branded on my forehead? When I look in the mirror there’s nothing there.

 

Rethinking our Ending (mmj)

How engaging it is to consider an impending catastrophe! Why stop at our mortal selves (simply because, as an honest man once said, "in the long run we all end up dead")? Why not embrace the end of the whole world along with our personal ending?

I have not yet seen the film MELANCHOLIA - and I am not sure that I want to... anticipating another dose of the Tree of Life perhaps - but I understand the film begins with rather an impressive 'special effects' sequence of a planet smashing into Earth from space. So we know the ending before we begin: total destruction.

My first reaction was to recall Douglas Adams 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' which also begins with a similar event, this time planet Earth being totally destroyed to make way for a Super-Galactic Highway being constructed by a superior intelligence from outer space.

There are differences of course between  Hitchhikers and Melancholia. The former (book/radio show/film) is very funny, on the basis that even our endings are not all tragedy. In fact, some of aspects are very comical (and so I have found it sometimes from being in the company of the dying). The latter film I suspect is not very funny, judging by my friend needing to go to the toilet halfway through to be sick.

I wonder about another possible difference between Hitchhikers and Melancholia. How seriously are we taking ourselves? In Hitchhikers the answer is not very. In Melancholia, the answer is... probably a great deal more. Since I am an ignorant unseeing as regards the film at this point, I decided to listen to Mark Kermode's opinion Vox Pops (broadcast on the BBC in September). One thing Kermode does remind us is that Von Trier really does have a very nasty side to him - Breaking the Waves? No thank you - which he likes to take very seriously...

... and sitting in judgement: because the world is evil, we are going to get our just deserts. Total wipeout.

... and/or is there another judgement: because the world is depressed, let's all go kill ourselves. Total totalled.

Conflating MY end, MY death with the TOTAL end of the world does smack just a tiny bit of hubris. After all the probability is that after my death the world will go on - surprise, surprise! Only I won't be "THERE" to find out how it turns out. Ah! There's the rub. That is the bit MY self-important self finds so unacceptable, isn't it?

On the basis, if I can't continue... then I see no reason why the rest of you should be allowed to continue. We have been here before. T4. I gather Von Trier has already got himself into neo-Nazi speak trouble, and perhaps he does us all a service to remind us where this destructive collective urge is lurking.

The urge which equally, despite my friend's nausea (his true melancholy), or my refusal to look at this moment, calls forth an ethical urgency to go see into this darkness that Von Trier has possibly unwittingly laid bare. That at least appears to be my friend's claim, "wanting to see it again and thinking of it as brilliant".

Oh dear, I feel my eyelids are being pealed back.

Naivety and conflict (ak)

You must be right that conflict is situation normal. Yet, at the same time, most of us don’t live our live our lives gripped in the urgency of conflict. We know times of peace, shared interest, cooperation. Those times may be brief moments or more extended but they will be part of the rhythms of our seasons here on earth. Unending conflict would only lead to madness or death. Conflict adds spice but I don’t believe there are many of us who would like to live entirely on a diet of chilli peppers. We have to be able to sleep at night.

    The unsuspecting world that I referred to needs to be understood as part of a pattern of voluntary and involuntary unconsciousness, unknowingness. After all, how much consciousness can any of us bear? A small personal example from this last week may illustrate something of this:

    My post-university daughter has been to and fro these last weeks as she decides where to live and how to live. On Wednesday evening we went to see the latest offering from Lars Von Trier – Melancholia. I found it, quite literally, a powerfully affecting movie in that about two thirds of the way through I had to leave the auditorium to be sick in the toilets! Von Trier works close to the edge and the movie held me close to the edge not only of the end of the world but to the emotional/psychological frailty of one of the two sisters who are at the core of the film. Despite the cathartic purging I came away from the film wanting to see it again and thinking of it as brilliant. In the cold evening we cycled back home through the dark following the little pool of light provided by my bicycle lamp down the mostly dark lane.

    But the point I want to make is that Von Trier has the ability to hold us in an uncomfortable place that we might not want to know about and after all we each have the task of doing what we can to run our own little individual life and perhaps are able to include a family and beyond that have some mind to our community – a community that can include the whole globe – 'us lot' again – just coming up to 7 billion apparently. And as part of that many of us have little idea of idea-tsunamis that are swelling and building somewhere in the ocean of the collective mind. A good example may be the collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and another might be the stunning success of unfettered markets and the consumerist and technological revolutions of our very recent history.

    Unknowingness, a sort of naivety, is also situation normal. My sense of myself is not that I’m no longer naïve, only that I’m differently naïve . . . and actually I have an immediate image of my grown up children streaking ahead, leaving me somewhat bemused and bobbing in their slipstream.

 

Eggs Florentine (mmj)

We meet after an absence of a few weeks and resume our primary task of remembering. Our conversation wanders between the seafaring prospect of eating soggy muesli aboard a storm tossed sailing ship to the more refined cosmopolitan pleasures of enjoying poached eggs on a bed of spinach with a hollandaise sauce on dry land, the white plate laid on a linen cloth at the cafe table of a Renaissance city. Why dont you stay longer? I ask provocatively along with other questions.

!938 and 1978? Pre-war and Post-war? Situation normal and social conflict, and I disagree, hardly a "barely suspecting world", there are always plenty of arguing voices ready to howl out for War, ready for a fight. We remember the Winter of Discontent (1978/79).

Then the breakdown of the (so called) post-war consensus which followed shortly after 1978 apparantly solved the contradiction betwen the thrust of the capital markets for ever more profits and the 'welfare state' demands of the social democrat tradition. A strange and unbelievable kind of social peace broke out, a certain "solidarity" built around the removal of inflation from the system, home ownership (the right to buy), and easy personal (plastic card) credit. Even the other argument between Reformers and Revolutionaries appeared to solve too when the Berlin Wall came down ten years later. Wealth all round (that was the myth on offer of course) for the thirty years to 2008, in other words, situation abnormal.

Situation abnormal!

The latest copy of the New Left Review offers a transcript of Wolfgang Streek's paper given as the Max Weber Lecture at the European University Institute, Florence in 2011. Under the title "Markets versus Voters?" we are given a review of the history of 19th and 20th century deep suspicions and open conflicts between capitalism and democracy grounded in the fear of the possibility the rule of the poor over the rich. We then look at the strange social peace of the 1978-2008, before looking at the current crisis since then. Crisis. Situation normal. Above all challenging the fond idea of a post-war or any other consensus, the situation normal is a "series of complex contests" and ongoing entrenched social conflict. In a word, crisis, not consensus is the norm of situation normal.

One wonders what other interesting programmmes the European University Institute offers in that fair city of Florence. A course on 20th Century World Literature perhaps? Why indeed dont you stay longer?

1938, 1978 (ak)

I’m thinking . . . a man without qualities (character) and on the cinema screen there arises mug shots of George W Bush, Tony Blair (and his successor David Cameron), Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin . . . could we put them behind bars in a small provincial zoo so that they might be examined, interrogated, perhaps poked with a cane or umbrella and pelted with faeces. How might we begin to examine these men without qualities? Qualities that might lead one to assume a moral core rather than the emptiness of self-creation, ambition and acquisitiveness. These managers and betrayers of democracy. What sort of life do we want to value? What sort of society do we want to be part of?

1938 and 1978

    Dates suggestive of what was about to be unleashed on a barely suspecting world. 1938 – Territory and Ideology. What form was society to take, Capitalist, Communist or Fascist? And then 1978 – the advance of Neo-liberalism. The apparent victory of capitalism. The freeing of capital and the market from every restriction. Nothing must get in the way. Come on! We can all sign the Faustian pact with the devil and we will soon all be wallowing in wealth and privilege.

    And you made it through the storm, young Odysseus. You don’t mention Sirens or Calypso . . . or maybe it was a fleeting visit to Silvio’s bunga-bunga cave on Sardinia. But there you were in clouds of Musil. Though I wonder if there was a certain muesli quality, a worthy and chewy mash soaked in cold water and tasting of cardboard. Ah, the joys of travel. Eleven hundred pages! But then what about a kindle edition of the great work? This tiny box of plastic and electronics to hold the library. Shall I buy one? Yes, no? Kindle? Is that to do with children or lighting a fire? I see our fairy godmother, Annie Amazon, has brought out a cheaper version. How many thousands of books do I need it to hold? Though they say our purchases are automatically backed up in some cloud or other. I really must stop adding to these ever towering piles of books on every available horizontal surface. Get rid of some of them, you say? Easier said than done in my experience.

 

US LOT at Work (mmj)

It was evening all afternoon. It is good to remember, and now that it is beginning to get dark early, that even this far south in autumn that the rain falls as snow at above 1,500 metres, and our friend, the blackbird, sat on a  tree, appears entirely indifferent to our predicament whether the absence of real purpose in our lives, or a situation where we do not know our way.

There is nothing new about this for US LOT (that is mankind, or the human race) of course. As I said before, I have been all at sea these last two weeks, and while I was “Ballroom Dancing the Mediterranean” in southern Turkey a perfect storm passed through. Unable to travel for several days, my “Holiday Reading” was Der Mann ohne Eigenschaft by Robert Musil, in translation The Man without Qualities (…or literally ‘character’). The book was banned by Hitler in 1938, and was only first published in full in 1978… long after Musil himself was dead. The three Parts of the long 1100 page work have the following headings:  ‘A sort of Introduction’, ‘Pseudo-reality’, and ‘Into the Millenium’ (the last with sub-title ‘The Criminals’). These are life stages which equally well describe rather well, as I come to think of it, the experiences of US (older) LOT born soon after the last war ended in 1945.

And it is good to remember, as Steve Jobs put it speaking to Stanford University students in 2005, shortly after learning his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, “Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve encountered to help me make the big choices in life”. While the absence of real purpose - was it a con, a pretence, even for the man who made Apple such a succeess too? Or are there also some of US LOT whose life work is genuinely full of purpose?

A man Without Qualities explores this question, and the hero Ulrich (being somebody representing US LOT) spends a lot of time pondering the purpose of work in the world:

…all moral events take place in a field of energy whose constellation charges them with meaning. They contain good and evil the way an atom contains the possibilities of certain chemical possibilities. They are what they will become, so to speak; and just as the word “hard” denotes four entirely different essences, depending on whether it is connected with love, brutality, zeal, or discipline, the significance of all moral events seemed to him to be a function of other events on which they depended. In this way an open-ended system of relationships arises, in which independent meanings, such as are ascribed to actions and qualities by way of a rough first approximation in ordinary life, no longer exist at all. What is seemingly solid in this system becomes a porous pretext for many possible meanings; the event occurring becomes a symbol of something that perhaps may not be happening but makes itself felt through the symbol; and man as the quintessence of his possibilities, potential man, the unwritten poem of his existence, confronts man as recorded fact, as reality, as character (Eigenschaft). Accordingly, Ulrich felt that he was capable of every virtue and every baseness: the fact that in a balanced social order virtues as well as vices are tacitly described as equally burdensome attested for him what happens in nature generally, that every play of forces tends in time toward an average value and average condition, toward compromise and inertia. Ulrich regarded morality as it is commonly understood as nothing more than the senile form of a system of energies that cannot be confused with what it originally was without losing ethical force.

It is possible that these views also reflected some uncertainty about life, but uncertainty is sometimes nothing more than the mistrust of the usual certainties, and anyway, it is good to remember that even so experienced a person as mankind itself seems to act on quite similar principles…

Apologies for such a long quotation! It would have been simpler and probably better to describe the experience as like the one I had walking an old mule track up in the hills of ancient Lycia; a blackbird, or at least what seemed a dark bird in the shadow of pine needles, eyeing one from the branch of a cedar tree.

It had stopped raining after three days, apart from occasional thunderstorm cloudbursts of cold wetness. As the great Mediterranean storm eased, the sun had come out and the temperature begun to rise again. I could not help thinking that I had passed through some kind of wordless threshold.

The absence of work (ak)

It’s a good image, pleasing in some way, you wandering up and across an active volcano, teetering on vertiginous ledges, peering into smoke holes, awaiting a tragedy or perhaps an epiphany. Isn’t it wonderful how we normally experience a sense of solidity on this magic bit of rock whirling and spinning through what we refer to as space; uncaring as to the molten core, the leaky crust with its grinding plates – a bit like an ancient doctor (medicine or philosophy?) grinding his teeth with dream soaked rage – and billions of light years of emptiness out there.

    Us lot – the ‘human’ race, as we call ourselves – are perhaps the embodiment of optimistic madness. Though, it has to be said, we do, at times, fall into deep smoke holes of terminal pessimism. But the fact is we are such high energy creatures that surely our intention is to animate the rest of the universe – what other purpose do we have!! Once we’ve sorted out how to travel faster than light, getting rid of distance, the universe will be our oyster – to slip down with a squeeze of lemon. Always providing (as ever) that we don’t blow ourselves up in the endeavour.

    Then again, as I try to get my feet back on the ground and my mind back to retirement, it occurs to me that the blindingly obvious thing about retirement is the absence of work, in other words the absence of purpose, real purpose. What else am I but a worker without work? Though I do try to ‘work’ to a schedule to give myself the illusion of work and purpose – there is no getting away from the fact that it is a pretence, a con.

    And here we are sadly arriving at the final stanza of Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

 

    XIII

 

    It was evening all afternoon.

    It was snowing

    And it was going to snow.

    The blackbird sat

    In the cedar-limbs.

 

Peering into the Mist (mmj)

Last week, as well as suffering thoughts of retirement,  a pilgrimage, I had the opportunity to climb an active volcano.

Vulcano, it gives its name to the Aeolian Island I was visiting. The volcano is constantly smoking, a mist of sulphur rising from around the smooth curve of its crater's edge. Sulphurous, these places were often described as gateways or entrances to hell in past times, but I sense no evil. Two blackbirds flying over I take as an auspicious sign, and I wave at them foolishly.

Vertigo on the way up of course, the steep track up the volcano's side riven with rain gullies, but it is not a difficult climb. Still, moments the same sense of panic as on a Dartmoor rock edge once before, and the voice "Go Baack!" in my ears. This time however I walk on.

This time intoxicated by the warning, the sign at the bottom warns against not peering into the smoke holes too closely. Vertigo of course can have tragic consequences; tragic in the sense of moments that are capable of changing something or somebody.

There is the possibility of being given something here, and I struggle forward trembling to find out what it is. Next week... I shall be all at sea... and will return our meeting place here in two weeks time.