square white world

‘All I know about method,’ Cage writes at the end of ‘Lecture on Nothing,’ ‘is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.’ Others might call that enlightenment.

• FROM HERE

Find a heaven within, Rumi had written–and it came back to me now as Ali, the driver and I sat on a platform in the sun, munching on chicken with barberries–and you enter a garden in which

“one life is worth more than all of Paradise.”

It had long been too easy to say that Jerusalem is our world in miniature: the family home in which everyone is squabbling with his siblings over a late father’s will.

Yet Jerusalem spoke for a peculiarly twenty-first-century challenge as well, as the dissolution of borders meant that more and more conflicts were internal. In Kashmir, in Belfast, in Tibet, I’d witnessed one belief system against another; in Jerusalem, the fighting was not just between traditions, but within them. Orthodox Jews were spitting at their secular brothers, while those brothers were pinning posters of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus on synagogue doors to affront their sensitive coreligionists. Sunni Muslims lived harmoniously together within the country’s borders, but they were ringed on every side by Shia, who were pledged to committing Israel to oblivion. Far right often made common cause with far left here–ultra-Orthodox Jew aligning with Palestine Liberation Organization–on the grounds that my enemy’s enemy must be my friend.

The Pope himself had, in my lifetime, been denied permission to pray in the Greek chapel of what is often regarded as the holiest site in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And doubters could always point out that the emperor who had ordered that church’s construction, Constantine, had murdered his own wife and son. An English traveler in the nineteenth century who’d gone to observe “Holy Fire”–the apparently miraculous appearance of a light in a crevice in the church on the Saturday of Easter Week, announcing the rebirth of the world–had found himself stepping over “a great heap of bodies” after a stampede in which “soldiers with their bayonets killed a number of fainting wretches, the walls splattered with the blood and brains of men who had been felled like oxen.”

Jerusalem was a parable that had turned into a cautionary tale, a warning about what we do when we’re convinced we know it all. A Jonathan loses his temper and every Jew is condemned to perdition; a Salman misspeaks and every Muslim is assaulted. Even those who had worked to turn the place into a long-planned New Jerusalem could not wish away the bloodstains all around. It was Theodor Herzl, the spiritual founder of the Jewish state, who had written, as to the holy city, “The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in your reeking alleys.” It was the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who had observed of Jerusalem, “Anything done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It’s impossible to imagine so much falsehood and blasphemy.”

Ladakh

… to find ourselves in a rich and barely lit Tibetan Buddhist compound. Its chapels were thick with the smell of centuries of melted yak butter; its white terraces …

Ladders led up to rooftops that dropped off into an almost allegorical landscape of sand and space and blue emptiness. Every door through which we passed led to thangkas swarming with skulls, furious depictions of the contest within each one of us of light and dark. Mandalas, often sacred diagrams representing a paradise of Buddhas, lined up in rows or arrayed in receding squares, presented maps for every visitor to awaken a Buddha inside.

Dalai Lama

I remembered how the Dalai Lama, with his emphasis on facts and empiricism, often suggested that the seclusion of Himalayan cultures had perhaps allowed them to develop skills in meditation that had resulted in spiritual technologies not so refined yet in the West.

Whenever someone stood up–this happened after almost every large public lecture–and asked him what to do after you’ve been disappointed in some dream (to bring peace to the Middle East, to reverse climate change, to protect some seeming idyll), the Dalai Lama looked over at the questioner with great warmth and said, “Wrong dream!”

…

We humans, William James would write …, are akin to dogs in a library: we’re surrounded by extraordinary wisdom and knowledge, but entirely in a form we cannot decipher.

…

Along the walls were painted orange faces, laughing monkey gods, sacred looming phalluses. Shops on every side were selling sandalwood paste, and clarified butter for dead bodies, tiny clay urns for ashes.

The city of death had once been known as “Kashi,” or “City of Light.” The English writer Richard Lannoy, who had all but lost his soul to Varanasi, had called it a “city of darkness and dream.”

… in January 2020 Greta Thunberg went as far as to specify just eight years [to avert a global castrophe].

Just a few months later, the president of the UN’s General Assembly gave us 11 years to avert a complete social collapse whereupon the planet will be simultaneously burning (unquenchable summer-long fires) and inundated with water (via a rapid sea-level rise). But, nihil novi sub sole: in 1989, another high UN official said that “governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control,” which means that by now we must be quite beyond the beyond …

Such predictably repetitive prophecies (however well-meant and however passionately presented) do not offer any practical advice about the deployment of the best possible technical solutions, about the most effective ways of legally binding global cooperation, or about tackling the difficult challenge of convincing populations of the need for significant expenditures [the] benefits [of which] will not be seen for decades to come. …

Why should we fear anything–be it environmental, social, or economic threats–when by 2045, or perhaps even by 2030, our understanding (or rather the intelligence unleashed by the machines we will have created) will know no bounds and hence any problem will become immeasurably less than trivial? Compared to this promise, any other recent specific and intemperate claim–from salvation through nanotechnology to fashioning new synthetic forms of life–appears trite. What will happen? An imminent near-infernal perdition, or speed-of-light godlike impotence?

Based on the revealed delusions of past prophecies, neither. We do not have a civilization envisioned in the early 1970–one of worsening planetary hunger or one energized by cost-free nuclear fission–and a generation from now we will not be either at the end of our evolutionary path or have a civilization transformed by Singularity.

–Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, 2022, pp. 212-213

… Baba Yaga is also the name used by an Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit under the command of Ruslan Mazovetsky, known as “Barmaley.”

At the end of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma two things happen. Dederer admits to her own monstrosity. She’s a drunk. The other thing is less predictable, Mark Fisher. Fisher lets her off the hook because it’s the system to blame for making us think our ethical decisions–who is deserving of cultural approbation and who of opprobrium and cancellation–are important.

The system makes us individual consumers, us consumers individuals. We are individuated as nothing other. And so the system elevates our individual choices to the level of ethical decisions. It makes them mean something but all the system is really doing by making whether we can stand to watch a Polanski film knowing what he did seem important is reinforcing the only choices it allows us, to consume or not.

Whether yes or no, our vote is for the system. Saying we have ethical responsibility as consumers limits ethical responsibility to consumption. Nothing more.

Cancellation is another spin. It doesn’t remove Woody Allen from the mix. The only freedom is to consume

,

still, what does this say about the freedom we afford the art monsters with whom most of Dederer’s book is consumed?

What has this to do, rather than with its cancellation, with the creation of culture?

— Dora Maar, Portrait d’Ubu, 1936

“Allow me to mention here that a stupid girl, one who spends the whole day picking her nose and lazing on the stove, and eventually becomes a princess or a queen, is completely unthinkable in fairytales! The imagination of folktale-tellers created an equivalent of male heroism in the characters of Slavic Amazons (the Russian Sineglazka or the ‘Giant Girls’, Div-devojke, in Serbian folksongs), but grubby, idle, and stupid girls are usually punished with death. Wealth, a throne and love are only conceivable as rewards for grubby, idle, stupid guys!”
― Dubravka Ugrešić, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, trans. MS Ellen Elias-Bursac, 2011

I was so struck by this photo of Fritz Haber, I have done a … that thing where a lecturer or speaker shows a slide and then simply says, This is … in this case Fritz Haber. In the case I’m thinking of, it was Martin Heidegger which, in that case was a redundancy. The audience already knew it was … and met the announcement with gales of laughter. In the case of Fritz Haber I doubt that they would do the same or know him from his photo. This is Fritz Haber.

He is the first figure in Benjamín Labatut’s literary project exploring the crack in human experience, between science and literature, the void and singularity, the shifting imperceptible boundary between madness and creation, destruction and reason. Paul Barach (here, whence also the photo) describes Haber, after a note warning, graphic descriptions of war, on the German front in 1915, spring,

“Small, bald, and potbellied, … Wrapped in a fur coat against the chill of the late April evening, the German-Jewish chemist … In front of him were 6,000 metal tanks … At six in the evening, the wind was just right to put his plan into action. With his typical Virginian cigar hanging below his trimmed mustache, he gave the signal. …

“168 tons of chlorine gas was released into the world.”

The father of chemical warfare–without whom there would be no Zyklon-B–Faber won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for chemistry, the same year Max Planck won for physics. The prize was awarded for his discovery of a method of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere, the single most important contributor to human population growth. Without the Faber-Bosch method, and the production of artificial fertilizer, only half the current world population is sustainable.

= truth defined by market competition.

What I admire most about science is that it is completely unwilling to accept the many mysteries that surround us: it is stubborn, and wonderfully so. When it comes face to face with the unknown, it whips out a particle accelerator, a telescope, a microscope, and smashes reality to bits, because it wants–Because it needs!–to know. Literature is similar, in some respects: it is born from an impossible wish, the desire to bind this world with words. In that, it is as ambitious as science. Because for us human beings, it is never enough to know god: we have to eat him. That’s what literature is for me: putting the world in your mouth.

–from here

Really, if I’m honest, I … shattered into many pieces and became odd.

… the following excerpts are from …

an interview with Frederico Perelmutter, here

My lack of roots has certainly affected my literature. Though I’m Chilean, and can’t deny it (well, I can, actually, and do so frequently, mostly to mess with my compatriots), I don’t feel identification with my country, or its literature, or nationality. But I don’t feel Dutch either. Argentine, even less so, though many people believe I am when they meet me for the first time, because I share their typical character flaws. I’d love to say (like Bolaño did) that I feel Latin American, but that too would be untrue.

I feel like Pinocchio. Not the dictator

—I feel like the wooden doll: someone unsure of who he is, but diametrically certain of what he wants to become.

–dir. Matteo Garrone, 2019

What do you want to become?

I won’t tell you. Not because I don’t know, but because I’m a superstitious man. People should not know who you are, at least not really. And more importantly, they should never know what you want. Life is at stake in desire.

I write in English and Spanish. It depends on the project. And my fancy. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d take English.

Betrayal is important for writing. For life too. One must always betray something. And since I’m unwilling to betray my parents, my friends, or my country, I prefer to betray my tongue.

I don’t think anyone, anywhere, writes like Sebald. I reread his books every year. His melancholy and humor, the density of information that they hold, the beauty of his prose—which has a deeply strange effect, somniferous and hallucinogenic, that prevents you from remembering everything you’ve read, no matter how much you try—make him a complete exception. His oeuvre is an unreachable monolith, a summit that exits our world.

Sebald’s books (about which I can say nothing negative) all have the same absolutely characteristic narrator, who is very present: though he’s talking about real events, his gaze, and a horrifyingly lucid and beautifully melancholy perspective, drenches everything he narrates. In my book, that’s almost entirely absent. I try to avoid appearing in what I write.

… with Calasso: his books are a path to enlightenment and an aesthetic pleasure all at once, but they can also be rather boring, overly cerebral, dry, and theoretical. Erudition is like that, because it doesn’t regard entertainment as the only measure of value.

I’m surprised how “entertaining” Borges is. Such a lucid, winged intelligence that extends toward transparency.

A similar thing happens with Bolaño: he never says anything clever, in the sense that he isn’t crafting a literature of ideas. And yet, one feels the talent and the genius behind every feint.

What I dislike about poetry is the author’s voice, which is usually far too present. That exhausts me. I’m attracted by the impersonal. I prefer the rare beauty one can find in a good Wikipedia entry to the cries and cackles of a poet who feels like they must always relay what lies deep in their heart.

Sebald, Borges, Chatwin, Bolaño, Burroughs: they’re all deeply Romantic writers. I dare say your work is, too…

I don’t feel like a Romantic. Nor have I ever thought about what Romanticism might represent for me. Those ideas and debates that look to categorize a writer or aesthetic movement don’t interest me in the slightest.

What I’m fascinated by is delirium, by reason’s mad dreams and the excesses of thought. I feel called toward the contradictions that at once torture and enlighten us. I’m interested in chaos, senselessness, irrationality, randomness, and infinity. If that makes me part of a 19th-century movement, well, there’s not much I can do about it. I’ll never willingly include myself into any group. Unless aliens arrive.

your literature in relation to “the contemporary” in some way, … ?

I’m interested in the past and the future. There’s almost nothing contemporary that fascinates me. The best literature anticipates what is coming or rescues some treasure from the hands of oblivion.

There are better idioms for the contemporary than the literary. Especially now, when we’re so immersed in and invaded by the present. We have to resist that. Think of other times, other ways of being human.

The past and the future are far wider than the present. Comparatively, the present moment is impoverished, practically doesn’t exist. But we’re ailing with the present, and with a present that is particularly miserable. That the contemporary doesn’t seduce me is not strange: this is my time, …

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Kia ora Simon,

I can feel it: the green wave is surging.

I’m emailing you today from Tāmaki Makaurau where I’ve been visiting violence prevention organisations, and I can tell you that the momentum is growing. I’m invigorated by the aroha of people up and down Aotearoa, some who’ve never voted, or never voted Green before, or people who have been with us through many elections. …

wrote Marama Davidson,

then asked for money

signing off,

Mauri ora.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koe,

Marama Davidson
Green Party Co-leader

I replied,

No, Marama. 

Give up on carbon credits and marketisation of the ongoing disaster of market capitalism. 

Use and endorse in party policy the power of the legislature to create a legal framework restricting carbon emissions at the point of their emission. Fining emitters use business to adapt to the legal framework. 

UBI should be policy. 

You join the ranks of the enablers if you do anything less. 

Best, 

Simon Taylor, PhD. 

…

Kia ora Simon, 

This is it. This is our time. The time is now for the Greens to change the shape and direction of the next government. 

wrote James Shaw to me …

and asked for money,

GIVE TODAY AND MAKE IT A REALITY

Today Luxon is backpedalling trying to rationalise how he’ll work with NZ First and ACT. But truth be told, he’s desperate to get into power – and he’ll do anything, work with anyone, to get it. Even if it means putting our country at risk. 

which as a sideline is interesting, sad and ironic: the Greens and the Left by extension (see below) appealing to conservative values and risk-aversion, when taking a risk is what is needed

James Shaw signed off,

I’ve never felt more hopeful about the future of our country. 

Ngā mihi nui,

James Shaw

Green Party Co-leader  

…

which, receiving an automated reply, I answered,

I would vote for you if you dumped the whole idea of a carbon market. 

What is the purpose of the legislature? 

Introduce a legal framework restricting the level of emissions--at their points of emission. 

Fewer planes, fewer trucks, fewer carbon burning factories, in fact none. 

Use business and the market to adapt to the legal framework. This is the only place where a market is of any positive use. 

Best, 
Simon Taylor, PhD. 

this epigraph,

How many names have I etched in memory

like “dog” or “elephant” or “cow”

So long ago now, I recognize them only from afar,

even the zebra–and what was it all for?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Was hab ich mir für Namen eingeprägt

und Hund und Kuh und Elefant

nun schon so lang und ganz von weit erkannt,

und dann das Zebra, ach, wozu?