Old Notebooks

I'm rather busy with exams at the moment, so am reluctant to write up with anything new or involving non-legal intellectual exercise. However, as my next exam was on constitutional and administrative law, I thought it salutary to refer back to one of my old notebooks from election day last year. The notebook was written for personal perusal, so is rather fragmentary and lacks the even threadbare cohesion my blogs often have. Nonetheless it should be intelligible:

[NB I've inserted a couple of notes that clarify references in brackets.]

06.05.10

so i’d voted in the morning, partially to show by example that Mirka [1] should vote. but also because i wanted to vote
voting is r democracy.

to the point (now 10.20pm ish), went to N Gallery, after cycling to Waterstones for Stillinger’s Complel Keats Complete, and happened upon LaRoche Foucauld’s Charles I Insulted. [2]

what happens to these kings + queens
when translated into a society such as ours

common, and commons, and that r inexact impossible ‘common man’ blowing smoke in the haughty’s reader’s face, as his immaculate historicity was being reconstructed.

It makes no sense to tell a country about Europe,
where English history was all Kings + Queens, [3]
The historical record is scratched bombed and torn,
just as much as a map of Charles I’s face.
Godsend of an image. [4]

[1] our Polish cleaning lady. She had been here long enough to vote. No, I'm not proud of having a cleaning lady.
[2] a painting on display at the National at the time; Charles is shown haughtily reading a book, while a roundhead blows smoke in it; the image of his face was damaged during WW2 and had yet to be repaired when I was there. http://bit.ly/jVIyZH
[3] paraphrasing E H Gombrich's Little History of the World
[4] Charles believed in the divine right of kings to rule.


[Also see this great article on prisoner's rights: http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/02/prisoners_voting_rights]

Things Can Only Get Better

New Labour came to power in 1997 with the anthem 'Things can only get better.' Now look at us. Real wages are falling at their fastest rate since the 70s. The impossible promises were too good, too untrue.

Not that I disliked New Labour that much. It's just that at some point they must have realised 'no more Mr Boom and Mr Bust' was a fiction; but they kept on spending.

All the major political parties agree the country needs to cut - the debt mountain is so gross. I think the speed of the Conservative cuts is potentially crippling, but I understand the logic - to my mind, it is analogous to a fat man who needs to get fit - better sooner than later, before another heart attack.

SO now the economy is in for a horrible two+ years.

Thank you Conservatives, Lib Dems, Labour. You've done us proud.

A Proper Philosopher on Portraits

http://bit.ly/kLh5F5

A Moving Portrait

I cannot help but see everything through the present. For the moment of the past is always gone, and even the present can only ever be understood in relation to the past.

Take Walcott's phrase "Insomniac since four" from his poem 'Nearing Forty'. "Insomniac" is too polysyllabic and too psychologically objective for a four-year old to grasp. Yet Walcott's narrating self, nearing forty years old, can only understand the word 'Insomniac' through the identity in himself, his own repeated experience of the non-repetition of sleep, of that four-year old agency.

Thus, we can only understand our present experience as a constantly moving portrait. This portrait is tinctured and textured with the emotional fabric of the past, and modifying itself as it assimilates new sensory awareness and new fields of information.

Moreover, it can only ever be represented through the means at hand (and the understanding at head!). Laura takes a snap that encapsulates a party's zing. Madeleine paints, burrowed in her bedroom, with a Blakean intensity of colour that will one day inform her photographic portfolio. Karys swivels between retro and black-and-white filters to frame atmospheric vistas that leave the human aura in tact. At times, their eyes see the world as it would appear in their cameras.

And their memory is a little fresher.

And that is only one of many means.

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Most of us are unaware of how complex this process is. I'll illustrate with some paragraphs I wrote at uni on the mutual influence of Coleridge and Wordsworth:

Coleridge's mode of uniting and separating ego contemplans (mere self-consciousness, the fact of “personal identity” (Literaria Biographia, chapter 4)) from ego contemplatus (the visual image, object or form we imagine to represent our past selves) would inform Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey.’[1] In the central section of the poem (ll. 66-80), Wordsworth reflects on the absence or repression of self-consciousness that occurred to him five years prior. With the present tense “hope”, the reader is left in suspense as to what the word “hope” applies to. It is a retrospect much like Coleridge’s “hot-fair day”, but it is one which illuminates why Wordsworth sees it as central to his survival as “a man” not to “doubt” that “in this moment there is life and food / For future years.” Five years prior, Marat was executed, the Bastille was stormed and Wordsworth may have been in France; it was a disorientating experience. In contrast with definite nature (“the sides…the deep…the mountains”), he is uncertain what he was analogous to (“a roe…a man…one”; reinforced later by “I cannot paint / What then I was”). His former self was impelled by “dread” so powerful that this sentence has no main clause; the relativity of perception is underscored; the motives and determination of Wordsworth as ‘man’ were and are obscure like a “sounding cataract”. In Wordsworth’s application of language, separating ego contemplans from ego contemplatus entails a radical uncertainty about the category of ‘man’, even ‘Wordsworth’ as man.
The obscurity of man to himself had been central to debates about the course of the French Revolution from 1788 onwards. Rousseau emphasises a primal self that needed to be recovered from the mystification of social conditions, leading to the French Revolution. Burke appealed to history, arguing for innate “prejudice” and “habit”, even what motivates isolated monks and other “inferior classes” to experience unnecessary suffering, as a healthy corrective to the abstract impracticality of the Revolutionary self. Godwin asserted the progressive triumph of reason over the ‘false consciousness’ (to use an anachronism) of ‘prejudice’. Malthus had restored a Burkean sense of ‘inferior’ man who needed to be educated out of his prejudices to keep the political economy healthy, or be destroyed.
In The 1805 Prelude (and prospectively The Recluse), Wordsworth offers his own version of man’s liberation from his obscurity to himself. Where his predecessors had classed or de-classed types of men, he offered a context-dependent (or to forge a neologism, a memory-dependent) model of human nature, where man must reflect and clarify the classes of his previous sense-experience; only through this movement can he escape the twin-errors of “prejudice” and abstraction.

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[1] “ego contemplatus…the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 4. Qted in Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),138; Leader reads this discussion of the Irish bull as clear evidence that Coleridge thinks we make or create our images of ourselves in memory, so that he can show that for Coleridge publication was an important factor in the creation of a coherent self.

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Lastly, I might relate all this to the movie I saw tonight: F. W. Murnau's delightful The Last Laugh. It is a tragedy tinged and framed with delirious comedy. An Walrus-bearded old man (the magnificently expressive Emil Jannings) loses his prized position as a hotel doorman, has a drunken party in his flat where it is assumed he is still a porter (dazzlingly shot with his Point of View, blurred and experimentally shifting) and is forced to be a bathroom wash attendant. These are intercut with flashbacks, which lurch towards the surreal as he gets drunker and drunker, capturing how the present purgatory sets in relief the gleaming pride of his former self. Murnau captures the buzz and exteriority of the city through that simplicity of expression that was perhaps only available in the silent era. As one critic put it, he "set down the first form of the cinema: the simple universal theme without complexity of narrative details. And it realised, as well as articulated in intention, the principle of constructed environment converging upon the character in relief." (Harry Potamkin) 'Relief' is an appropriate word for Murnau's dreamy poetic artistry. He sculpts in film. He creates a constantly moving, three-dimensional portrait of a life without means of colour and without means of word.

Should death be celebrated?

I was intrigued when I saw this in a friend's twitter feed - it's a genuinely interesting question and few dare to broach it. As it turned out, this was a reference to Osama bin Laden's death, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm. Of course, the question of whether his death should be celebrated is a controversial topic at the moment; it interrelates to all sorts of questions as to whether this will escalate tensions between patriotic Americans and radical extremists, or serve to improve things (less likely!); as to whether the use of military force against a possibly unarmed man is legal in international law; and as to what heroism and martyrdom mean in a world where science returns most well-educated people's frame of reference to within the immanent, though not necessarily to atheism. Yet beyond this reference to a specific, historically significant person, the question is a profound one because in most cultures death is so strongly associated with mourning.

Of course, it is right that, in most circumstances, rituals to commemorate a person's passing (funerals and interment, etc) should be sad. In the Jewish prayer recited in memory of the dead (Keil Malai Rahamim), it is said "may their soul be bound up in the bond of life." Here, bond of life means the bond of eternal life in God; but I, who am more convinced of the present reality, always think of the bonds of life we form here: the intense emotional attachments that are formed from our inception through to our birth, interlinked with our siblings' birth and then our teachers, mentors, friends and loved ones. The majority (I hope) have formed such intense bonds in the hearts and minds of a few around them - a husband or wife, children, and certain others - that their sadness at having a person wrenched from them must be respected.

At the same time, I am fond of a memory when a friend of mine studying history recollected a detail of a town in France where death was celebrated, ritually and with an upbeat passion. Long ago, and very rare, it gave me a sense of what perhaps is underrepresented in mourning for people - to celebrate that people have really lived and fulfilled themselves within the human span.

Wittgenstein said

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." 

Perhaps it is because I am young and irreverent, but I enjoy jubilation and humour, expressions of a person's vision and desire for achievement, at a ritual of passing and think it is often apt. My uncle, who died in 2006, has written on his tombstone his bumper sticker: 'Defeat terrorism / Have a nice day!' And at his funeral I gave a speech about an article he'd been telling me about, which described the technology for a bridge spanning the Atlantic possible. I think funerals should also be about our striving and our sense of possibility.

I also like macabre humour, if tasteful. At my grandfather's funeral, I read the famous song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
 Nor the furious winter's rages;
 Thou thy worldly task hast done,
 Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
 Golden lads and girls all must,
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

 Fear no more the frown o' the great;
 Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
 Care no more to clothe and eat;
 To thee the reed is as the oak:
 The sceptre, learning, physic, must
 All follow this, and come to dust.

 Fear no more the lightning-flash,
 Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
 Fear not slander, censure rash;
 Thou hast finished joy and moan;
 All lovers young, all lovers must
 Consign to thee, and come to dust.

I love the pun on 'come to dust' at the end of the first stanza; it's so dark and materialised, and puts such a spin of working life on the 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' formula. One that was incidentally repeated at my grandfather's interment, when the church warden was attempting to pour his ashes into the pedestal, and some of it blew away in the wind, on a lovely summer's day.

My grandfather would not have been pleased. He did not want to die, and he wanted to be buried, not cremated. But he was so demented by his death that he was barely whom he had been, and frankly we had all said goodbye to him long before. And we had bought no plot to bury him, and his desire for burial was, I think, not a religious one. (In some societies, they toss the corpse wrapped in a sheet into the ground). In his last decade, he attended church (incidentally, his surname was Church) and became moderately religious; but he had confessed to my mum that looked at as a story, the story of Jesus Christ was one of the most horrible and bloodiest ever written. (One can see that I lied to the man at the door two blogs back). The Christian myth has its positive aspects too, but I think death for my grandfather was not to be celebrated.

If anyone reads this, I'd be interested to hear their thoughts on the question.

Encounters with the Islamic periphery

I came across a quote today from J.M. Coetzee, probably recording a well-known detail:

"The waterskater, that is an insect and dumb, traces the name of God on the surfaces of ponds, or so the Arabians say. None is so deprived that he cannot write."

But it's new to me and brings to mind this famous passage from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria:

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.

Coleridge, like the Arabians, saw God instanced in nature. In both the natural world and in human nature. But, from what I've seen of the Islamic arts, where I've encountered it in, say, the British Museum, in the extraordinary palaces and interlocking geometrical patterns of Turkish mosques or in the (unfortunately) least celebrated of Israel's pasts, they take humility to God to such an extreme that they barely represent animals in their holy places (as can be quite frequent in Judaic symbolism, mindful of the second commandment) let alone human beings.

Returning to the quote, what is striking about Coetzee's tone is the peculiar mixture of reverence ('None is so deprived...') and loathing ('dumb', which is true by most animals standards, not just humans) in which the waterskater is held. The universality of writing is mythicised in the waterskater; at the same time, in many Arab nations, literacy is low for the lower socio-economic classes so this elevation of literacy disguises the absence of will to create universal literacy in reality (see http://bit.ly/mjNvzU). There's some strange aestheticisation of illiteracy and deprivation as the literacy of divinely-bestowed nature, even when it is couched in reference to the non-human and circumscribed as so beautiful that only the divine could have put it there.

It makes me think of an encounter I had with a hostel-owner called Harry in Selcuk in Turkey. He was a very affable person, often very willing to give any advice and he provided a good breakfast. I later discovered that a friend of mine, Katie Murphy, had been to the same hostel and had wonderful memories of Harry's barbecues. But my lingering memory was what I heard him say to me one morning during Ramadan.  [I had obviously made him aware that I had been at Oxford, not sure what else; certainly I said nothing about wanting to make money]

"So what if you get ten scholarships to study at Oxford, or you make a lot of money and feel so proud because you're rich and successful..."

That was the gist of it, though it's perhaps a poor rendering. I believe he may even have referred to the Devil. It shocked me, what he said, both because I saw a resentful side of his character that I wasn't expecting, but also because the old religious language of pride as a vice seemed so far-out and, at least in English terms, antiquated. At the same time, it made me appreciate how far removed the Western education I have been given is from the old morality, gave me a real shock of alternative attitudes to the world. A lovely thing about the opening quote is that it returns a sense of awe and humbleness to the natural world, even if circumscribed by religion.

The other side of the resentment is, perhaps, that noone likes being underrepresented in world affairs, or others falsely overrepresented as no doubt Europeans and Americans of today are (though what in half a century?). Five centuries ago, Islamic civilisation was dominant in the Indo-European region, and the Islamic empires were as revered for their advancements in understanding and knowledge, in science, as they were abhorred for what was perceived as their decadent, decaying dynasties. 
Now they are written out of most people's understanding of history. Like the insect. 

Or, for those business leaders and prominent men minded towards action and objectivity, the imagination. The 'renaissance', which marked the beginning of the ascendancy of Western power, was fascinated by the 'Turk' - from Tamburlaine, Selimus, Othello...on through Robinson Crusoe, enslaved by the Turks before becoming a slaver himself, and beyond.

Now when we look at regimes like those of Mubarak or Gadaffi, there is nothing from these modern states that most Westerners know of or look up to, because Western media so dominates most of our cultural fields. (I don't claim to know anything about whether Egyptian or Libyan culture is actually any good or not. I also don't claim these are Islamic, though they have predominantly Islamic populations. and are predominantly Arab) What is left is the horror at the creaking dynasties and the brute inhumane ways of these outmoded polities. 

What will replace them is a question thousands of political scholars and journalists are picking apart right now, no doubt. Not what we have certainly, but they'll have some of what we have too - big business will want what slices look good, if indeed things look like stabilising. Along with big business will come the globalised infrastructure - the bankers, accountants, lawyers, etc - which is making the world a safer, if little less unfair, place to take wages home.