Saturday 31 March 2007
Insincere novelists
Friday 30 March 2007
Oceans
Thursday 29 March 2007
A non-debt theory of duty
This semantic separation figures a more profound shift of cultural meaning than is generally understood. We need, if the term is to be made fresh and socially valuable again (as it really, really needs to be)--we need to remove 'duty' from the semantic field of debt. Our sense of duty is too lamentably that of something we owe, the realm of the 'owed' or 'ought' (hence we say: 'I ought to do more about global warming, I ought to give more money to charity'); but the sorts of things we owe now (our mortgage, for instance) are things we seek primarily to get rid of. Duty, in the broadest sense, cannot be 'discharged'; we can never be, and should not seek to be, in a position where all our 'duty' is paid off, and we can relapse into destructive selfishness. Duty is a freedom, not an obligation: a freedom from the tyranny of self, not a mortgaging of that self to society as a whole. Duty is always a free choice, a flowing-out of the human from ourselves to others. Duty is a liberality.
Wednesday 28 March 2007
The chauffeur
So I wonder about the future of the chauffeur. There's has, it's true, been a tension between cars as symbols and status and cars as symbols of our control and power (our seven league boots, our Sleipnir, our magic carpet). Hence the advertisers stress us in the driving seat, as if the car is an extension of our muscles and sinews. But driving is also work; and para-driving activities--locating parking, servicing the machine, filling it with petrol and changing its tires--is especially onerous. As the breach between wealthy and poor gapes ever wider, and as the wealthy gets relatively richer and richer, it's hard to believe that we won't contract this labour to others, as the wealthy tend to do with all the labour they find even mildly onerous. The chauffer will return.
Tuesday 27 March 2007
Rednesses
There's a whole history of the way 'purple' signifies, of course. And red, too. But in red I have a personal stake; for Adam means red, they tell me. Adam means earth, out of which the first Adam was sculpted. And it means red too because earth is red.
But earth is not red. Earth is brown, dark or pale. And now, perhaps as I get older, I find that sauvage expressionist redness of earth too harsh on the sensibilties. Couldn't it be that Adam means red and earth, much as 're[a]d' is able to mean a particular colour and a book that eyes have excavated of meaning, without us having to believe that this colour and those books are somehow connected? ('The past participle of to read records the historical fact that all books were originally red in colour ...')
Monday 26 March 2007
Frag
Sunday 25 March 2007
The puerile-tragic
This willed resistance against the overwhelming force of the Absolute Other, when the Other is God, or Fate, or Necessity or suchlike, produces the sort of tragedy that Schelling and Szondi like. But when this Absolute is "the tragic" itself ... when, for instance, it is the notion of human dignity obtained by willed resistance against overwhelming force ... then it is precisely the undignified, the sardonic, the idiotic and contemptible, the willed juvenility of opposition that occupies this privileged position. This is the space of the tragic today: the puerile tragic.
Saturday 24 March 2007
Self-indulgence
Friday 23 March 2007
Shock tactics
Thursday 22 March 2007
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Rhyming love
I wonder: what if this paucity of rhyme words is not simply a coincidence? What if it reflects a subconscious English cultural desire to separate 'love', in this small way, from the vulgar herd of other words, to preserve its uniqueness and singularity? That would suggest a nicety not shared by other languges (there are plenty of rhymes for amour, after all). It would also, rather oddly, suggest that certain other words ('orange') have a similarly unique position in our collection unconscious. For the love of any number of oranges ...
Tuesday 20 March 2007
Angelus Novus
‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’ [Benjamin]
It has becomes almost a commonplace, today, that we move from past to future with out face to the past and our back to the future. (What does Kiekegaard say? ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’) There’s an intuitive sense of rightness about seeing things that way, I suppose. But is it correct?
I find myself perfectly able to scan out the landscape of my future, barring unlikely accident: I shall work, from day to day, at what I work at. I shall raise my child; she will go through school, to university and into work herself. I shall grow older, weaker, more set in my ways. It’s all perfectly clear. My past, however, is very shady: nothing at all from my early years, distorted and selected elements only from the last three decades. Am I oriented in that direction? No, my life is oriented towards what shall come. The past has died, and things that die cease to be. The only bit of the past still alive is inside my brain pan, and that’s mostly there to help me navigate the future. Benjamin has his angel facing the wrong way; A.N. is actually reading a science fiction novel, and peering as well as his eyes are able to the future.
Monday 19 March 2007
Sunday 18 March 2007
Pity
Saturday 17 March 2007
Bad writers
What we need now are bad writers. Not, of course, run-of-the-mill bad writers (which is to say, not incompetent, or banal, or trivial or merely conventionalised writers). No, what is needful are heroically bad writers, writers who are prepared to stain the form with their own fluids: writers prepared to be as dull as Mann, as self-indulgent as Proust, as sadistic as Nabokov, as creatively old-fashioned as Tolkien. Writers who have the genius to turn their particular badness into fertile new possibilities for the form.
Friday 16 March 2007
Seaside and mess poem
pasta verde everywhere.
The sand is veined.
A breakwater, bricked
stone loaves, bubble
wrapped in barnacles, lobed.
The clouds wring sunlight out in folds,
and these lurking sea brightnesses
are, maybe, how complexity looks.
Not to say that complexity is
merely mess. But only
that decay and complexity mesh
like the strands and gaps in a net,
each as necessary as each for
scooping the sea.
Thursday 15 March 2007
O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.
Wednesday 14 March 2007
Descent
Tuesday 13 March 2007
Categorical
Monday 12 March 2007
Moon poem
The sky coloured blue-grape and white
chickenpox stars all over it.
The lawn is the darkest of purples
in the moonlight, the cold,
in such moonlight as there is.
Whatever you do is alright.
The moon looks no bigger from
an upstairs window than a down.
Sunday 11 March 2007
In the fulness of one's grief
Saturday 10 March 2007
Friday 9 March 2007
The novel
Thursday 8 March 2007
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Hearts
Tuesday 6 March 2007
The sleep of reason ...
It's not even a case of the sleep of reason producing monsters; it's the waking moments of reason that produce the monsters. The sleep (that moment in Frankenstein where Victor just, you know, passes out, wakes up and goes on with his life forgetting that he's just created a hideous monster) is the psychotheraputic part.
Monday 5 March 2007
This microscopic god
Now we know better; but it sometimes strikes me as odd that nobody has thought properly to deify the one living process we know to be immortal: DNA itself. Is it the smallness of the object that makes this unappealing to people? We prefer not to confer deity upon the microscopic. We deny DNAity.
Sunday 4 March 2007
Death is all metaphors
What then?