Certainty

All the world prefers certainty to truth.

Catharsis

It's famous enough: 'Tragedy is, then, a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude—by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament, each used separately in the different parts of the play: it represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and terror it effects a katharsis of these and similar emotions.' [Aristotle, Poetics 1449b]

But what hasn't occurred to me before is the idea that Aristotle actually means what he says here: that the purpose of tragedy is to produce pitiless, fearless men; men who could fight in the Athenian army and navy without qualm or hesitation, who could kill without mercy. It could be that Aristotle's theory is that tragedy produces cold-eyed killers, and good thing too.

Job

"Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world," George Steiner argues in The Death of Tragedy, adding that "the Book of Job is always cited as an instance of tragic vision. But that black fable stands on the outer edge of Judaism, and even here an orthodox hand has asserted the claims of justice against those of tragedy ... Job gets back double the number of she-asses; so he should, for God has enacted upon him a parable of justice" [6-8], Can Steiner really mean this? It is as if to say: 'the Holocaust was a parable of justice, because although Jews suffered, at the end they got Israel to live in'. Wouldn't that be a crazy, not to say insulting, assertion, though?

Job, surely, is a parable of the arbitrariness of life; the arbitrariness of suffering is succeeded, for no very good reason, by the arbitrariness of reward. And that arbitrariness is, precisely, at the heart of tragedy.

London night

Night. Walking down St Martin's Lane, the moon is perfectly hemmed in between two tall buildings, the two upward straights tangential to diametrically opposite points on the circle's arc. A night in Guinness livery, cream-coloured disc on top of a tall draught of black.

Emotions

Scientists tell us that different emotions appear at different moment in the evolutionary saga (so, fear comes early; ennui late) and therefore differ in terms of brain physiology. One question is whether this developmental narrative of emotions will continue; whether new emotions will arise, adaptively, in our environment (specifically urban emotions, for instance; let's say 'spart', 'monahay' and 'fribbishness'); or whether our earlier emotions will become increasingly vestigial ... so that future humans know anxiety and angst, but never the heart-galloping terror that a predator is about to leap upon them.

Cleanness

We need an ethics of uncleanness. The problem is the ancient error of confusing the literal and metaphorical senses of hygene ... striving for the former is almost always a good idea, striving for the latter (counterintuitively, but the lesson of history is unambiguous) always a bad one. Ethnic cleansing; racial purity; fundamentalism--all bad. 'Sexual purity' as a code for sexua abstention is a particularly dangerous and destructive notion. A leaven of (metaphorical) uncleanness is absolutely needful for a fully functioning sex-life. Woody Allen says it very well: 'is sex dirty? Only if done right.'

Dawn

Dawn breaks out of an almond-coloured sky.