We travelled through three storms during nine days. We missed small desert towns where we expected to locate more supplies. The horse vanished. Three of the camels died. For the last two days there was no food, only tea. The last link with any other world was the clink of the fire-black tea urn and the long spoon and the glass which came towards us in the darkness of the mornings. After the third night we gave up talking. All that mattered was the fire and the minimal brown liquid.
Only by luck did we stumble on the desert town of El Taj. I walked through the souk; the alley of clocks chiming, into the street of barometers, past the rifle-cartridge stalls, stands of Italian tomato sauce and other tinned food from Benghazi, calico from Egypt, ostrich-tail decorations, street dentists, book merchants. We were still mute, each of us dispersing along our own paths. We received this new world slowly, as if coming out of a drowning. In the central square of El Taj we sat and ate lamb, rice, badawi cakes, and drank milk with almond pulp beaten into it. All this after the long wait for three ceremonial glasses of tea flavoured with amber and mint.
by Kevin Lomax. The best photograph interrogates the viewer in some fashion. i realise that on a dry and prosaic level this is impossible - that the model doesn’t look back, it’s just a picture. But i think a lucky or skilled photographer can fashion an image that arrests and questions the viewer; just as a good book is not a one-way experience, but a questioning and alteration of the reader.
This made me smile when i read it in Longsight yesterday. This is my preferred mode of conversation, from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Here is our Hungarian desert explorer, badly burnt in a plane crash, evading his interrogators:
He was interrogated again. Everything about him was very English except for the fact that his skin was tarred black, a bogman from history among the interrogating officers.
They asked him where the Allies stood in Italy, and he said he assumed they had taken Florence but were held up by the hill towns north of them. The Gothic Line. “Your division is stuck in Florence and cannot get past bases like Prato and Fiesole for instance because the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and convents and they are brilliantly defended. it’s an old story - the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saracens. And like them you now need the fortress towns. They have never been abandoned except during times of cholera.”
He had rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was.
Now, months later in the Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence, in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name. There is still no clue to who he actually is, nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron. The references in his book are all pre-war, the deserts of Egypt and Libya in the 1930s, interspersed with references to cave art or gallery art or journal notes in his own small handwriting. “There are no brunettes,” the English patient says to Hana as she bends over him, “among Florentine Madonnas.”
i spent yesterday tramping through the slums of Manchester looking for a shop. On my map it looked like, at most, 3 miles, but seemed about twice as long in reality. i found myself wandering through Longsight and Levenshulme with a grimace of Roger Scruton-like disgust, even staring at likely brigands with appalled dismay, murmuring, “fucking savages”. i’m quite surprised no one took offense, but i suppose you get used to that sort of thing, in the ghetto.
There was one redeeming incident in all this, however: on the bus into town a huge black guy in full gangster regalia got on and sat next to me as i read The English Patient.
“Great,” i thought. “He’ll probably rip my book to pieces and sit there laughing at me. And i’ll have to take it because he’s bigger than me and has gold teeth.”
An old (white) women got on the bus, carrying a heavy shopping bag. Mr Gangster promptly stood and offered her his seat, which she gratefully accepted.
Andrew K writes of infinity (re: Borges’ “They knew that in an infinite period of time all things happen to all men”):
Of course if we conjecture a universe of all possible circumstances, then all possible circumstances must be contained within such a universe. But this is simply an imposed intellectual framework, the closed system of a thoughtpiece, but certainly not a freely ordained reality. There is no possible reason all possible events must occur within infinite time. It is an unjustified inference; a confusion of the finite with the infinite. This understanding of infinity is merely the finite extended or pushed to a higher power. A mind pushing itself and its boundaries to its limits, but still contained within those limits, and producing absurdities when it imbues those limits with limitlessness, or infinity. The infinite is a beast not so easily captured.
On the rare occasions i read anything serious, i often wish the authors - philosophers especially - would start with a rigorous epistomelogical grounding. For we can only see what our minds are equipped to perceive (should this even need stating?), and our cognitive and perceptual faculties are formed by the accumulation of our emotions and thoughts, that is, by our spirit. As Andrew says above, when people pontificate about infinity they often just imagine a bigger version of finitude. Likewise, when people consider god, how can we but consider our human notions of god? It’s not as if we can adopt a non-human standpoint from which to ponder matters.
And here is the Viking in rare lyrical mood (obviously after quaffing some mead and frequenting some homosexual German brothels in his white trousers):
Statistical probability dictates: the you [insert name here] that can exist here has a finite probability of existence in other galaxies, superclusters, etc.; and thus, if the universe is infinite, then the matter of whether other duplicates of you, sitting in the exact same chair, thinking the exact same thoughts, reading the exact same livejournal entry, exist, is not one of whether such duplicates exist, but of how many googleplexes of light-years stand between you and the next instance of such a (statistically improbable) duplicate of yourself .
If you are drugged, drunk, confronting a difficult decision: somewhere, someone, bearing your name and indistinguishable (by any means known to science) from you faces the same problem (given an infinite universe, probability dictates it). Furthermore, given that your existence is physically possible, therefore, in an infinite universe, there are an infinite number of duplicates of you facing the exact same problem. If you screw up: there are versions of you doing better; if not, good going.
Let us consider the matter from a totally different angle:
There were kings, upon a time, who lavished upon a beloved entire castles, estates, buildings of the largest possible expense availible to them. Considering that, consider also what that one might think of you who has spent an infinity of stars and superclusters merely to decorate your night sky.
The EU is a political expression of the culture of repudiation [...] and goes hand-in-hand with legislative initiatives from the European Commission and the European courts that could be used to bind the entire continent in a regime of enforced political correctness. The commission proposes a Europe-wide police force, with power to extradite from any jurisdiction to any other within the Union, and with a list of extraditable offenses that include “racism and xenophobia”. This offense is unrecognised in English law and as yet undefined by the courts. But anybody who has followed the reasoning of the European elites knows how it could be used: namely, to suppress any kind of nationalist opposition to the centralised bureaucracy.
Probably the cheapest, worst video ever made, but a great unhappy love song by Will Oldham under the monicker Palace, ‘Come In’. How can you resist when you learn it comes from an EP called ‘An Arrow Through the Bitch’?
An essay of Theodore Dalrymple’s begins: “For millions of its inhabitants, Britain is a failing state.” Hard words but true. The essay closes:
If a man can attack and seriously injure a 96-year-old without excuse in front of many eyewitnesses and a CCTV camera, yet receive what amounts to no punishment at all—he was even seen smirking as he left the court—who can blame the public if it concludes that the British state lacks legitimacy?
i think that is it: our Government, our state, lacks legitimacy. It has utterly failed. Does anyone trust Nu Labour, at all? Does anyone trust the police to maintain order?
Over the last 10 years i have felt a discernible erosion in the cultural fabric, at every level. The apparent (relative) civility of life here seems to me a very thin veneer indeed. There is no longer even vestigial faith in the state’s power of maintain order and protect its citizens from its criminals. When Bonehead talks about weaponry or techniques to use on street assailants, it doesn’t seem at all strange to talk as if we already live in some blasted post-apocalpytic landscape where the strong will devour the weak.
In these dark days, a gentleman must swap his cane for an expandable baton, i fear.
Taken far enough, irony becomes a spiritual position. At this point, however, it is serious.
Kierkegaard’s odd and often formidable marriage of wit and severity is to do with his extreme irony. Perhaps it began as ‘an adult coping mechanism’; but it ended as a way of approaching infinity as a finite, mortal man. It is not surprising that he is often misunderstood. His difficult prose is a by-product of his fundamentally ironic standpoint: that is, he would not be easily understood, for that would be to misunderstand him. It is not, as with Theorist scum, that the difficult prose hides an intellectual void - it is rather that in order to really understand his philosophy, one must understand the man and the profound irony of his life and mind, and the effort of kenning his prose encourages this deeper understanding. Like Nietzsche, to seize an isolated aphorism is dangerous. For Kierkegaard, the truth is a difficult matter and one must be committed; as he wrote, faith is plunging into water 70,000 fathoms deep. His prose demands a heightened concentration; and in doing so is faithful to the exigence of truth.
To go to the other extreme, New Age books represent potboiler ‘wisdom’ that must be easy to understand, because its readership are appalled by difficulty of any kind. My mother, bless her, bought me just such a book for my birthday. i glanced through it, dutifully. It was full of things that were true but, somehow, too easy to apprehend; they slid through the mind without friction, without transformation.
i think here of Wallace Stevens’ “poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully”, and conclude that New Age pseudo-insights like “we often create our own unhappiness, but blame others” or “if we could learn to love others others would love us” are useless truths, because one need not work for them. It is only when a saying arrests the reader, and he must strive to become equal to the thought, to transform himself, that he may become wise, or, at least, a little less foolish.
Wisdom literature need not be difficult and forbidding; but if it is easily read and easily forgotten, if the reader need not work to understand it, then it is useless; in much the same way that utterly undemanding exercise has negligible health benefits. If you want to be healthy, seek out hills & mountains. If you want to understand something of your life, seek out difficulty.
A statue of Dante Alighieri, brooding over the Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence. In The Lord of the Rings, there are two huge statues of Isildur and Anarion at the Argonath, marking the boundary of Gondor. Each figure holds an axe in the right hand, the left held out as in a gesture of defiance to the scimitar-waving enemy.
i would like to petition Gordon Brown to build similar statues in our fair land, as a warning to England’s enemies. Instead of Isildur and Anarion, who, after all, are characters from a book (albeit a very English book), i would suggest a series of great men, men of dour expression and heavy hand, men like Dante, Milton, Blake, Kierkegaard, Henry James, TS Eliot - killers and ruffians, great poets and novelists and thinkers, the light of the West.
