Entering the room at Walburton, I knew there would not be many chances left to visit her.
It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.
It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.
We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.
Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.
So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..
"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.
But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....
Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."
This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).
But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.
So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Friday, 4 January 2013
US Election Politics: Information Wars in the Digital Era
The Obama campaign had a lightning-fast recruitment method. Simply sign in to Obama's website, sign up to various action groups at the click of a button and, hey presto, you are recruited.
(Examples of personal data given: email address; password; gender; age [as I recall]; example action groups: local; Jewish; young.)
(Examples of personal data given: email address; password; gender; age [as I recall]; example action groups: local; Jewish; young.)
Want to enjoy the Obama battle bus to Ohio from New York? Why not? It would be fun.
You can now telephone folks in Philadelphia and Ohio.
Read the script, first, of course.
Second, elicit their electoral preferences to work out what you say to them; try and improv a little to give it a measure of reality.
Third, build support for the Obama movement so it becomes unstoppable.
Read the script, first, of course.
Second, elicit their electoral preferences to work out what you say to them; try and improv a little to give it a measure of reality.
Third, build support for the Obama movement so it becomes unstoppable.
Totally unreal.
- - - - - - - - - -
I tried this calling method on the night before election night. You dial the number on the screen, with a name attached. All four calls got no response - not unexpectedly, since receiving a random call on the night before elections is likely to mean an election call.
- - - - - - - - - -
I tried this calling method on the night before election night. You dial the number on the screen, with a name attached. All four calls got no response - not unexpectedly, since receiving a random call on the night before elections is likely to mean an election call.
Even such superficial impressions made me realise that Obama's campaign was an extraordinarily slick operation. It utilized the latest in digital technology and data-mining to mobilize the vote. Now UK politicians are clamoring to repeat the trick.
The language of US elections is highly militaristic (campaign; mobilize; fighting an election), and for good reason. Politics arouses a lot of violent opinion, especially in the States. The election is a situation that invites people to pick sides; to swear allegiance to their leader and party; to battle with their friends, family and acquaintances for recognition of the party as representative of their values; and then to take action and vote.
Through utilizing military rhetoric, people are strongly engaged and personally connected to their campaign. (And the election wasn't the end of it because I've received emails since then, eliciting my support for Obama's actions.)
It reminded me of the computer games I used to play as a teenager. Except this time, the information and the overarching narrative of election conquest played out in real time and real human lives. Peculiarly, Obama delivered videos directly into my inbox, just like the instructions you received in (video game) Red Alert.
Despite the artificiality of my connection to Obama, the videos generated a sense of personal immediacy and directness that was unusual in our media-driven age. It also reminded me of TV speeches of Neville Chamberlain we watched in the Appeasement module of A-level history. As of yet, the internet has not been tarred by the same sense of inauthenticity, and mediation by video channel, that prevents directness on TV.
But looking at other sources of my political awareness - the newspapers I read; the newsfeed I got on facebook; the channels I watched; all the sources were designed to reinforce my opinion that Obama was a good choice. Divisions in the US would suggest that exactly the same belief-reinforcing effect was happening to Republicans. They may not have been as likely to be tech-savvy as Obama's supporters (generally younger and in better connected areas such as the two coasts), but Romney was surely playing the same tactics.
Looking back at the now infamous '47%' speech, it's clear that people were being fed completely different angles on it. Republicans got the 'victim psychology' lecture - without always realising this rested upon a false dichotomy (i.e. that people always think of themselves as victims or as achievers; whereas surely we think of ourselves as both at different times, and neither much of the time too). Democrats got the 'elite' Romney lecture, which was also a less-than-rounded characterisation of him. (In fact, Obama's campaign spent a huge amount tarring Romney as a candidate, which is pretty dirty as a tactic.)
There were massive differences in the information given by each side. The intent was to mobilize core supporters with a one-sided wall of information. This information divides the people into two warring sides. One could make a case for calling it 'information wars in the digital age.'
It's not entirely new - Orwell certainly wrote about it in 1984; and this thread of information distortion is a subject that surely goes back to the classical era; in works such as Utopia and Richard III, humanists such as Thomas More recovered the distorting effect of eloquence noted by ancient writers such as Tacitus. For example, Utopia captures the paradoxical quality of information distortion that occurs when any powerful entity tries to create an idealised image of itself in order to win over and mollify its subjects and proximate populace.*
However, the difference today is the quality of virtual interactivity made possible by modern technology. It creates greater opportunities for each of us to be remote agents, rather than full-body participants, in these 'information wars'.
I wonder what happens when this behaviour moves outside the military and political sphere. Surely, subject to regulation, this is already occurring in the world of commerce. At my last job at Little Pim, I was certainly aware of digital strategy, and ways of winning over potential buyers in order to sell our product. And as a start-up, we were far from the cutting edge of this desire to encourage other internet agents to actively promote our product.
Will there be information wars between rival companies in the future? Is this already happening? What kind of distortions will that create?
My feeling is that regulation will keep commercial information control from becoming dangerously distorting (in the way that politics can be), but my current knowledge is insufficient for a conclusive answer.
- - - - - - -
[*At many universities, people interpret Utopia as a depiction of an ideal society, where the semi-communist state intervenes to minimise people's working hours and prevent disorder in order to create social harmony. However, readings since the mid-80s have noticed that this coincides with chilling details of repression that exist within the text, suggesting that really this idealisation is a way of blinding people to the regime's flaws.
Example: "THEY do not make slaves of prisoners of war, except those that are taken in battle; nor of the sons of their slaves, nor of those of other nations: the slaves among them are only such as are condemned to that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing."]
It reminded me of the computer games I used to play as a teenager. Except this time, the information and the overarching narrative of election conquest played out in real time and real human lives. Peculiarly, Obama delivered videos directly into my inbox, just like the instructions you received in (video game) Red Alert.
Despite the artificiality of my connection to Obama, the videos generated a sense of personal immediacy and directness that was unusual in our media-driven age. It also reminded me of TV speeches of Neville Chamberlain we watched in the Appeasement module of A-level history. As of yet, the internet has not been tarred by the same sense of inauthenticity, and mediation by video channel, that prevents directness on TV.
But looking at other sources of my political awareness - the newspapers I read; the newsfeed I got on facebook; the channels I watched; all the sources were designed to reinforce my opinion that Obama was a good choice. Divisions in the US would suggest that exactly the same belief-reinforcing effect was happening to Republicans. They may not have been as likely to be tech-savvy as Obama's supporters (generally younger and in better connected areas such as the two coasts), but Romney was surely playing the same tactics.
Looking back at the now infamous '47%' speech, it's clear that people were being fed completely different angles on it. Republicans got the 'victim psychology' lecture - without always realising this rested upon a false dichotomy (i.e. that people always think of themselves as victims or as achievers; whereas surely we think of ourselves as both at different times, and neither much of the time too). Democrats got the 'elite' Romney lecture, which was also a less-than-rounded characterisation of him. (In fact, Obama's campaign spent a huge amount tarring Romney as a candidate, which is pretty dirty as a tactic.)
There were massive differences in the information given by each side. The intent was to mobilize core supporters with a one-sided wall of information. This information divides the people into two warring sides. One could make a case for calling it 'information wars in the digital age.'
It's not entirely new - Orwell certainly wrote about it in 1984; and this thread of information distortion is a subject that surely goes back to the classical era; in works such as Utopia and Richard III, humanists such as Thomas More recovered the distorting effect of eloquence noted by ancient writers such as Tacitus. For example, Utopia captures the paradoxical quality of information distortion that occurs when any powerful entity tries to create an idealised image of itself in order to win over and mollify its subjects and proximate populace.*
However, the difference today is the quality of virtual interactivity made possible by modern technology. It creates greater opportunities for each of us to be remote agents, rather than full-body participants, in these 'information wars'.
I wonder what happens when this behaviour moves outside the military and political sphere. Surely, subject to regulation, this is already occurring in the world of commerce. At my last job at Little Pim, I was certainly aware of digital strategy, and ways of winning over potential buyers in order to sell our product. And as a start-up, we were far from the cutting edge of this desire to encourage other internet agents to actively promote our product.
Will there be information wars between rival companies in the future? Is this already happening? What kind of distortions will that create?
My feeling is that regulation will keep commercial information control from becoming dangerously distorting (in the way that politics can be), but my current knowledge is insufficient for a conclusive answer.
- - - - - - -
[*At many universities, people interpret Utopia as a depiction of an ideal society, where the semi-communist state intervenes to minimise people's working hours and prevent disorder in order to create social harmony. However, readings since the mid-80s have noticed that this coincides with chilling details of repression that exist within the text, suggesting that really this idealisation is a way of blinding people to the regime's flaws.
Example: "THEY do not make slaves of prisoners of war, except those that are taken in battle; nor of the sons of their slaves, nor of those of other nations: the slaves among them are only such as are condemned to that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing."]
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
The Personal and the Collective 2: The Personal (poem) 2
How I Became Known as a Poet
In retrospect, one of the strangest turns my life has taken was becoming known as a poet in Oxford.
Here's how it happened: In November 2006 my classmate Sam C asked me what I'd been doing that day (we were waiting to enter The Bridge, a club). I told him I'd been writing a poem which, actually, I might be able to recite for him. The poem was The Personal.
I delivered it with a complex array of emotions - zipping between passion and angst, bitterness and zest, a fluid engagement and lonely monologue. Sam convinced me later that night to recite it to all my peers studying English at Catz. Some (Tom C notably) were so impressed, they would ask me to read it again and again over the year.
I must have recited it dozens of times that year, including twice in my packed-out room on my birthday. Some people looked on me like something of a legend, which was completely unlike anything I'd experienced before. I've never thought of myself as a star, or really as an artist, but people treated me as such; for which, I was grateful. Basically, most of my reputation as poet that year rested on that poem. I wrote a number of others in 06-07, but barring a line here or there, most of them were rubbish. It wasn't until 3rd year that I would write good stuff again.
It's particularly strange because The Personal is such an odd poem - fragmentary and sometimes so ambiguous as to lack real meaning. But I guess a lot of it - you can basically recognise the sentiment. So here I offer, as far as is recoverable, my commentary on what I meant by the poem.
It Only Makes Incomplete Sense.
The poem was inspired when a girl accidentally touched my hand in class. Though I wasn't attracted to her, I felt a frisson of sensual excitement. Reflecting on the sensation, I thought about how different my situation was from how I expected it to be. I had expected that by now I would be getting somewhere with someone, having more physical contact than I was. Clubbing was fine, but as JM Coetzee describes modern dancing in Disgrace, "she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode." Furthermore, men must have been feeling this way - missing physical contact even before they've experienced much - since Adam, since 'the dawn of man'.
Link to poem
Lines 1-2
Like my eczema, thinking about it only made the feeling worse. The more self-conscious about my inexperience I became, the less active I would be in seeking out and finding someone I could personally connect with. Applying this contraction of mutual desire to another, I wrote "I miss physical contact | we retract | " The odd punctuation | was a kind of wall of feeling. It emphasised the intransitiveness of the sensation. The demand for pleasure was impeded by the lack of someone else to be around - hence, "I demand but cannot."
Lines 2-8
At this point, I realised it would do no good to continue in this line of thinking. It was time to change direction. It would be better to imagine the mutual seeking out and finding of someone.
Yet I did not know how you find out enough about someone else to be sure of them. The process of discovering another was inherently incomplete, mediated through the senses and prone to false conclusions about what that other is like. Like a forest, some areas of another person are dark, some light. Lines 2 (+1/2) - 8 describe the mixture of sensual and mental imagining necessary to round out the incompleteness of another person.
The language of this mutual desire is exploratory. 'we' are exploring a mysterious landscape - it could be real or imagined. The boundary between inner and outer is left deliberately vague, reflecting the difficulty of sorting one's feelings about another person from objective facts about that relationship.
"Here" is different for both presences, but felt to be the same; this is visualised in the paragraph break "space inheres // the breath."
Metaphors of exploring places are mingled with metaphors drawn from bodily gestures - 'reaching' (hand/touch), 'sucking' (mouth), 'breathing', 'gasping', being 'shrill' (lungs). The bodily gestures move from out to in, even as the exploration moves from tight, dense places (forests) to more expansive and open places (crossing over a violent natural event, tugging oneself up out of the earth (little bit of rock-climbing imagery)). At the same time, the rhythm goes from long-syllable words to words with more, shorter syllables - increasing its pulse, becoming more heated and more suggestive of climax.
Here I was borrowing Laurence Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy of suggesting sexual resonances to my language without being explicit. This technique brings the reader/listener in to wonder whether I'm talking about sex or not. The technique creates an emotional pull, a frisson of excitement from the incomplete suggestiveness of the sensual language. (At the same time, I protected myself from describing something I had not experienced. All the physical action refers to the upper body.)
However, there is intimacy without clarity. The audience is in the position of the voyeur, listening in almost to a relationship between people who have no identifying details. The aesthetic experience is borderline pornographic.
The surreal imagery, and ultimate unreality, of this collective voice is further suggested by the fact it is contained in quotation marks. What do these signal? A speech bubble? A speculation of the mind?
Physical presence and mentalness
In the opening line 'I miss physical contact'. What other kinds of contact are there?
Firstly, mental contact e.g. through reading. When you read about people, you imagine them. You mentally connect with the world being written that contains or describes them, and the way in which they make contact with that world. The textual sensation of frisson is an example of a writer recreating contact in the mind instead of in the world.
Secondly, virtual contact. My year at Oxford was one of the earliest Facebook generations. Online you create an image, an impression of yourself that is distinct from you as a physical presence. Sometimes, in creating this online presence, you can become a bit detached from your real-world existence - ignore the pressing need to find love. The poem begins in complaint about our mutual dematerialisation, and ends in affirmation of being "in person" - physically present.
The opening line is also a complaint about the dehumanising effects of technology of which Descartes wrote so eloquently. Descartes dissected a cow's eye, and discovered an image on the back of the retina, demonstrating that the operation of the eye was mechanical. Nothing divine about the soul's action there. If my eyes deceive me into believing an image is reality - if my eye is just a machine for translating images - how do I know the other is there?
Lines 9-15
Lines 9-10 make fun of the senses. The Shakespearian, grandiose "O" creates a loud noise but signifies nothing. The world is compared to an eye - "stuck in its gelatinous orb." Both world and self are bounded by mechanical limits.
The solitary 'I' is announcing his skepticism about the meaningfulness of our bodily experience. In lines 11-15, he exaggerates the fleshiness and self-indulgence of physicality. In doing so, he attempts to affirm the vanity of experience with others, to deny that his integrity can ever be enriched by love. Loftily, he pours scorn on mutual feeling. For him, the language of the collective voice is a 'pact' between body and mind to delude us into ignoring our mortality. Better to be alone than to give in to false desire.
Lines 16 - 21 Flaws and performativity
This stanza is very unclear. Explaining it is difficult because it contains the weirdest, most ambiguous ideas in the poem. I don't blame any reader who gets lost with this next section.
Two half-formed ideas underpin the stanza: -
1. In order to become personally close to someone else, to reconcile your self with the self of another, you must give up something in yourself and become like the other.
I had been reading about JL Austin's and Judith Butler's notion of performativity: - that performative expression involves acts of expression that transform the world. For instance, a novel brings into being characters and their actions, ideas, concepts, things which it names and communicates. A classic example: 'I do' performs becoming married.
Butler suggests this produces gendered-ness - through feminised performative acts, a person becomes more of a woman. Hers is a much more radical version of performativity than Austin's relatively acceptable ideas about, say, 'I do.'
My idea was that, by being with another person, you occupy the same performative space as them. It becomes harder and harder not to act within the rules of performative expression that that person abides by. I myself felt under transition due to all the new people I was engaging with, and finding it harder and harder to reconcile my changed self with my former self.
2. In order to enliven a poem and give it imaginative richness, I had to make my language almost new - in the same way language is new to the developing child or teenager. I did not want to give up the sense of creative language acquisition that comes with youth.
To comment on these lines proper:
The 'I' has a change of heart. He concedes that there is intimacy; but intimacy always depends on an 'estranger.' The 'estranger' is a third person (who either exists within oneself, or theoretically exists as a kind of nemesis to your personality) estranging you from who you had been before.
This loss of self is an exotic experience, wild and terrifying. I tried to convey this through coining strange words with gendered connotations - "unwovenly ganders." 'Unwovenly' - Penelope perpetually unweaving her shroud; 'ganders' - a male goose made verbal; the act of the sexual gaze. [I'm the first to admit the ludicrousness of these solecisms. How was anyone meant to guess what they meant?] Sex is the drive for overcoming this fear of losing yourself, of becoming someone for the other. Sex is both the pleasure-giving exchange between the sexes that reconciles you, and the act of exchanging personality between you.
Line 18: "'s" is either a contraction of 'his' i.e. the estranger, or a reference to the genitive tense, to the possessive aspect of human personality. By claiming another, you foray into who they are as a person. In a way, this describes the action of the first and second stanza from the skeptical position of the "I." Where lines 2-8 had used exploration as a metaphor for mutual desire, here this metaphor is critiqued as a tool for effectively dismantling the integrity and identity of any particular person.
The "I" argues that this creates gaps in your personality, and exposes flaws in you ("clefts in nooks"). As you grow closer, the person you were when you first desired the other person ceases to exist - so that both of you are receding from your mutual starting point. Who you believed you were at the start of your relationship will exist in each of your memories, but the present reality with a person will no longer match up to what you had thought at the start. You'll see more of the cracks and flaws. Neither of you will live up to your early dreams of an ideal love. This idea is reinforced through reflection on the vertiginous extremes of the emotions ("up" "down").
It's a pretty bleak view of relationships - elevating the idealistic highs and lows of a new relationship over the mellow pleasures of becoming comfortable with each other; saying that retaining your individual integrity is more desirable than the strength gained from the shared bonds of loving. It's also the last thing we hear of the "I."
Third part of this post
As you can see above, the poem becomes more complex as it progresses. For reasons that will become apparent, I am going to start afresh commenting on the last lines, which will be a forthcoming blog post.
Apart from the preceding section and the 'Intro', most of this post was written well over 2 months ago; but I was so busy and content in New York that I didn't want to complete the difficult work of commenting on the last fourteen lines. In the meantime, I did rewrite The Personal and the Collective 1, (see below).
In retrospect, one of the strangest turns my life has taken was becoming known as a poet in Oxford.
Here's how it happened: In November 2006 my classmate Sam C asked me what I'd been doing that day (we were waiting to enter The Bridge, a club). I told him I'd been writing a poem which, actually, I might be able to recite for him. The poem was The Personal.
I delivered it with a complex array of emotions - zipping between passion and angst, bitterness and zest, a fluid engagement and lonely monologue. Sam convinced me later that night to recite it to all my peers studying English at Catz. Some (Tom C notably) were so impressed, they would ask me to read it again and again over the year.
I must have recited it dozens of times that year, including twice in my packed-out room on my birthday. Some people looked on me like something of a legend, which was completely unlike anything I'd experienced before. I've never thought of myself as a star, or really as an artist, but people treated me as such; for which, I was grateful. Basically, most of my reputation as poet that year rested on that poem. I wrote a number of others in 06-07, but barring a line here or there, most of them were rubbish. It wasn't until 3rd year that I would write good stuff again.
It's particularly strange because The Personal is such an odd poem - fragmentary and sometimes so ambiguous as to lack real meaning. But I guess a lot of it - you can basically recognise the sentiment. So here I offer, as far as is recoverable, my commentary on what I meant by the poem.
It Only Makes Incomplete Sense.
The poem was inspired when a girl accidentally touched my hand in class. Though I wasn't attracted to her, I felt a frisson of sensual excitement. Reflecting on the sensation, I thought about how different my situation was from how I expected it to be. I had expected that by now I would be getting somewhere with someone, having more physical contact than I was. Clubbing was fine, but as JM Coetzee describes modern dancing in Disgrace, "she dances by herself in the solipsistic way that now seems to be the mode." Furthermore, men must have been feeling this way - missing physical contact even before they've experienced much - since Adam, since 'the dawn of man'.
Link to poem
Lines 1-2
Like my eczema, thinking about it only made the feeling worse. The more self-conscious about my inexperience I became, the less active I would be in seeking out and finding someone I could personally connect with. Applying this contraction of mutual desire to another, I wrote "I miss physical contact | we retract | " The odd punctuation | was a kind of wall of feeling. It emphasised the intransitiveness of the sensation. The demand for pleasure was impeded by the lack of someone else to be around - hence, "I demand but cannot."
Lines 2-8
At this point, I realised it would do no good to continue in this line of thinking. It was time to change direction. It would be better to imagine the mutual seeking out and finding of someone.
Yet I did not know how you find out enough about someone else to be sure of them. The process of discovering another was inherently incomplete, mediated through the senses and prone to false conclusions about what that other is like. Like a forest, some areas of another person are dark, some light. Lines 2 (+1/2) - 8 describe the mixture of sensual and mental imagining necessary to round out the incompleteness of another person.
The language of this mutual desire is exploratory. 'we' are exploring a mysterious landscape - it could be real or imagined. The boundary between inner and outer is left deliberately vague, reflecting the difficulty of sorting one's feelings about another person from objective facts about that relationship.
"Here" is different for both presences, but felt to be the same; this is visualised in the paragraph break "space inheres // the breath."
Metaphors of exploring places are mingled with metaphors drawn from bodily gestures - 'reaching' (hand/touch), 'sucking' (mouth), 'breathing', 'gasping', being 'shrill' (lungs). The bodily gestures move from out to in, even as the exploration moves from tight, dense places (forests) to more expansive and open places (crossing over a violent natural event, tugging oneself up out of the earth (little bit of rock-climbing imagery)). At the same time, the rhythm goes from long-syllable words to words with more, shorter syllables - increasing its pulse, becoming more heated and more suggestive of climax.
Here I was borrowing Laurence Sterne's technique in Tristram Shandy of suggesting sexual resonances to my language without being explicit. This technique brings the reader/listener in to wonder whether I'm talking about sex or not. The technique creates an emotional pull, a frisson of excitement from the incomplete suggestiveness of the sensual language. (At the same time, I protected myself from describing something I had not experienced. All the physical action refers to the upper body.)
However, there is intimacy without clarity. The audience is in the position of the voyeur, listening in almost to a relationship between people who have no identifying details. The aesthetic experience is borderline pornographic.
The surreal imagery, and ultimate unreality, of this collective voice is further suggested by the fact it is contained in quotation marks. What do these signal? A speech bubble? A speculation of the mind?
Physical presence and mentalness
In the opening line 'I miss physical contact'. What other kinds of contact are there?
Firstly, mental contact e.g. through reading. When you read about people, you imagine them. You mentally connect with the world being written that contains or describes them, and the way in which they make contact with that world. The textual sensation of frisson is an example of a writer recreating contact in the mind instead of in the world.
Secondly, virtual contact. My year at Oxford was one of the earliest Facebook generations. Online you create an image, an impression of yourself that is distinct from you as a physical presence. Sometimes, in creating this online presence, you can become a bit detached from your real-world existence - ignore the pressing need to find love. The poem begins in complaint about our mutual dematerialisation, and ends in affirmation of being "in person" - physically present.
The opening line is also a complaint about the dehumanising effects of technology of which Descartes wrote so eloquently. Descartes dissected a cow's eye, and discovered an image on the back of the retina, demonstrating that the operation of the eye was mechanical. Nothing divine about the soul's action there. If my eyes deceive me into believing an image is reality - if my eye is just a machine for translating images - how do I know the other is there?
Lines 9-15
Lines 9-10 make fun of the senses. The Shakespearian, grandiose "O" creates a loud noise but signifies nothing. The world is compared to an eye - "stuck in its gelatinous orb." Both world and self are bounded by mechanical limits.
The solitary 'I' is announcing his skepticism about the meaningfulness of our bodily experience. In lines 11-15, he exaggerates the fleshiness and self-indulgence of physicality. In doing so, he attempts to affirm the vanity of experience with others, to deny that his integrity can ever be enriched by love. Loftily, he pours scorn on mutual feeling. For him, the language of the collective voice is a 'pact' between body and mind to delude us into ignoring our mortality. Better to be alone than to give in to false desire.
Lines 16 - 21 Flaws and performativity
This stanza is very unclear. Explaining it is difficult because it contains the weirdest, most ambiguous ideas in the poem. I don't blame any reader who gets lost with this next section.
Two half-formed ideas underpin the stanza: -
1. In order to become personally close to someone else, to reconcile your self with the self of another, you must give up something in yourself and become like the other.
I had been reading about JL Austin's and Judith Butler's notion of performativity: - that performative expression involves acts of expression that transform the world. For instance, a novel brings into being characters and their actions, ideas, concepts, things which it names and communicates. A classic example: 'I do' performs becoming married.
Butler suggests this produces gendered-ness - through feminised performative acts, a person becomes more of a woman. Hers is a much more radical version of performativity than Austin's relatively acceptable ideas about, say, 'I do.'
My idea was that, by being with another person, you occupy the same performative space as them. It becomes harder and harder not to act within the rules of performative expression that that person abides by. I myself felt under transition due to all the new people I was engaging with, and finding it harder and harder to reconcile my changed self with my former self.
2. In order to enliven a poem and give it imaginative richness, I had to make my language almost new - in the same way language is new to the developing child or teenager. I did not want to give up the sense of creative language acquisition that comes with youth.
To comment on these lines proper:
The 'I' has a change of heart. He concedes that there is intimacy; but intimacy always depends on an 'estranger.' The 'estranger' is a third person (who either exists within oneself, or theoretically exists as a kind of nemesis to your personality) estranging you from who you had been before.
This loss of self is an exotic experience, wild and terrifying. I tried to convey this through coining strange words with gendered connotations - "unwovenly ganders." 'Unwovenly' - Penelope perpetually unweaving her shroud; 'ganders' - a male goose made verbal; the act of the sexual gaze. [I'm the first to admit the ludicrousness of these solecisms. How was anyone meant to guess what they meant?] Sex is the drive for overcoming this fear of losing yourself, of becoming someone for the other. Sex is both the pleasure-giving exchange between the sexes that reconciles you, and the act of exchanging personality between you.
Line 18: "'s" is either a contraction of 'his' i.e. the estranger, or a reference to the genitive tense, to the possessive aspect of human personality. By claiming another, you foray into who they are as a person. In a way, this describes the action of the first and second stanza from the skeptical position of the "I." Where lines 2-8 had used exploration as a metaphor for mutual desire, here this metaphor is critiqued as a tool for effectively dismantling the integrity and identity of any particular person.
The "I" argues that this creates gaps in your personality, and exposes flaws in you ("clefts in nooks"). As you grow closer, the person you were when you first desired the other person ceases to exist - so that both of you are receding from your mutual starting point. Who you believed you were at the start of your relationship will exist in each of your memories, but the present reality with a person will no longer match up to what you had thought at the start. You'll see more of the cracks and flaws. Neither of you will live up to your early dreams of an ideal love. This idea is reinforced through reflection on the vertiginous extremes of the emotions ("up" "down").
It's a pretty bleak view of relationships - elevating the idealistic highs and lows of a new relationship over the mellow pleasures of becoming comfortable with each other; saying that retaining your individual integrity is more desirable than the strength gained from the shared bonds of loving. It's also the last thing we hear of the "I."
Third part of this post
As you can see above, the poem becomes more complex as it progresses. For reasons that will become apparent, I am going to start afresh commenting on the last lines, which will be a forthcoming blog post.
Apart from the preceding section and the 'Intro', most of this post was written well over 2 months ago; but I was so busy and content in New York that I didn't want to complete the difficult work of commenting on the last fourteen lines. In the meantime, I did rewrite The Personal and the Collective 1, (see below).
Saturday, 29 September 2012
The Personal and the Collective 2: The Personal (poem) 1
Some Context
For me, writing poetry is a therapeutic act. It enables me to express ideas or imagine versions of myself that I would otherwise find difficult to explore.
When I wrote The Personal, I had been at Oxford for about a month and felt like I was becoming a new person. (In many ways, I am more comfortable in myself now than I was then; as a result, I am not writing much poetry.) The Personal enabled me to reconcile two versions of myself: - my former self at Westminster who was a thoughtful, introspective, hiphop-loving teen (and I guess hiphop was a key way of marking myself out as different and knowledgeable while still being credible); and the self I was becoming - much more sociable, outgoing, immersing myself in a range of different social groups.
I began to develop a classic English combination of traits - identifying myself as introverted, but presenting myself as extroverted (at least, I am much more extroverted in company than I normally am alone; whether other people see me as such, I don't know). A model figure of this type would be my dad, who said last week "A lot of people don't realise quite how introverted I am." Yet as a friend of his said last week, my dad has this strength of personality that enables him to create a world around him. With great cheer and warmth, my dad projects an aura of sociability and engages with a huge range of friends; yet if you watch him in company, you can sometimes observe him switching off in order to attend to his own thoughts. He turns inward with much discretion. This is a useful habit to acquire and I fully intend to master it myself.
Anyway, back to myself in November 2006, I was making friends with lots of girls. This created issues of desire. No one struck me clearly as someone with whom I shared a lot personally, and I only wanted to kiss someone with whom I shared a lot personally. So I felt stuck, and that's what laid the foundation for writing the poem.
An Introduction to the Poem
I was still making up my mind about issues of desire and sex. Modern media often tells young people that it's good to experiment with sex when you're at uni so that you can discover who and what you like. And we can all see the sense in that, even if it involves a shallow, almost consumerist attitude towards romantic engagement. Try before you buy!
But actually the shallowness caused me quiet disquiet; and it was a feeling I'm sure other people shared. So I decided to write a poem in which two voices offer their thoughts on issues of desire.
One voice is lonely, solipsistic. This voice selfishly regrets our dependency on other people; the 'I' views our dependency on others for sexual satisfaction as both a nuisance and an impediment to personal integrity.
The other voice is collective. This 'we' expresses more complex and mutual states of desires; yet 'we' has a curious lack of interest about who is desiring. It presents what I suppose is the extreme of the socially normative attitude towards sexuality - have sex with someone! Give in, it says - it's so good! Who cares who it's with? I've met quite a few girls who had sex for their first time to 'get it over and done with.' To me, that's so weird. I still can't get my head around it.
Now, here's a link to the poem: -
The Personal
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
See the next blog for more on the poem.
For me, writing poetry is a therapeutic act. It enables me to express ideas or imagine versions of myself that I would otherwise find difficult to explore.
When I wrote The Personal, I had been at Oxford for about a month and felt like I was becoming a new person. (In many ways, I am more comfortable in myself now than I was then; as a result, I am not writing much poetry.) The Personal enabled me to reconcile two versions of myself: - my former self at Westminster who was a thoughtful, introspective, hiphop-loving teen (and I guess hiphop was a key way of marking myself out as different and knowledgeable while still being credible); and the self I was becoming - much more sociable, outgoing, immersing myself in a range of different social groups.
I began to develop a classic English combination of traits - identifying myself as introverted, but presenting myself as extroverted (at least, I am much more extroverted in company than I normally am alone; whether other people see me as such, I don't know). A model figure of this type would be my dad, who said last week "A lot of people don't realise quite how introverted I am." Yet as a friend of his said last week, my dad has this strength of personality that enables him to create a world around him. With great cheer and warmth, my dad projects an aura of sociability and engages with a huge range of friends; yet if you watch him in company, you can sometimes observe him switching off in order to attend to his own thoughts. He turns inward with much discretion. This is a useful habit to acquire and I fully intend to master it myself.
Anyway, back to myself in November 2006, I was making friends with lots of girls. This created issues of desire. No one struck me clearly as someone with whom I shared a lot personally, and I only wanted to kiss someone with whom I shared a lot personally. So I felt stuck, and that's what laid the foundation for writing the poem.
An Introduction to the Poem
I was still making up my mind about issues of desire and sex. Modern media often tells young people that it's good to experiment with sex when you're at uni so that you can discover who and what you like. And we can all see the sense in that, even if it involves a shallow, almost consumerist attitude towards romantic engagement. Try before you buy!
But actually the shallowness caused me quiet disquiet; and it was a feeling I'm sure other people shared. So I decided to write a poem in which two voices offer their thoughts on issues of desire.
One voice is lonely, solipsistic. This voice selfishly regrets our dependency on other people; the 'I' views our dependency on others for sexual satisfaction as both a nuisance and an impediment to personal integrity.
The other voice is collective. This 'we' expresses more complex and mutual states of desires; yet 'we' has a curious lack of interest about who is desiring. It presents what I suppose is the extreme of the socially normative attitude towards sexuality - have sex with someone! Give in, it says - it's so good! Who cares who it's with? I've met quite a few girls who had sex for their first time to 'get it over and done with.' To me, that's so weird. I still can't get my head around it.
Now, here's a link to the poem: -
The Personal
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
See the next blog for more on the poem.
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
The Personal and the Collective 1: Collective behaviour and the ideal of individualism.
I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between the individual and the group. It played a pivotal part in the central ideological conflict of the twentieth century: between communism and capitalism. With the Fall of the Berlin Wall, many were drawn to the notion that capitalism had triumphed; or, at least, that welfare capitalism had triumphed. The relationship between the individual and the state seemed to have been resolved. Globalisation would crusade across the world, bringing the merits of liberal democracy with it.
The recession of the past half-decade has ruptured this narrative. The relationship between group structures (such as the state and media, the 'public' and businesses) and the individual is being reconfigured throughout Western societies as we speak.
Fortunately, we are unlikely to see a return to extreme collective ideologies of a kind that emerged in the twentieth century. Soviet Communism, Chinese socialism and others all demonstrated a certain logic:- in order to make sure people accept and enforce collective ideologies, collective ideals must be imposed from above; individual opinion must be brutally suppressed. Such systems could only be brought about with speed and authoritarian leadership, with the consequence that these 'collective' revolutions became acceptable only in countries where authoritarian structures were the norm. The leadership ended up replicating the authoritarian structures that preceded them in significant ways. (I acknowledge that I leave Nazism and Fascism out of the account, mostly for the lazy reason that it would be too difficult to accommodate them within this essay.)
Nonetheless I detect that the various publics of most European nation-states are becoming less enamoured with the celebration of individualism, almost as with a myth whose godhead is in decline. I must admit that I have never fully agreed with those who foster individualism as the be-all-and-end-all of our society. To me, 'rational economic man' has always seemed a bad fiction invented by a self-loving bunch of Platonic economists. Group behaviour plays too much of a role in who we are.
(In fact, a distrust of such abstract systematicity made me so passionate about political, economic and philosophical ideas that I decided I could not study PPE with a cool enough head, the subject I first applied to study at Oxford. Instead I applied for a subject which weighed the subjective and objective aspects of human experience as of equal importance - English Literature.)
In the States, it was a form of collective behaviour that allowed the sub-prime mortgage crisis to happen. Let's give some context. Anglo-Saxon governments are generally in favour of home ownership. Home ownership gives citizens a stake in society, encouraging them to save in order to pay the mortgage on their greatest asset and invest in their local institutions - schools, hospitals, police stations, courts, etc. That's one of the reasons why in the aftermath of WW2, the "GI Bill" provided a loan guarantee for purchasing a house to returning soldiers.
Some half a century later, Bill Clinton and then George W had this grand idea that if the Federal Government relaxed regulations around housing, more people would get homes - a great thing for less well-off US citizens. Unfortunately, while it was great thing in theory, the relaxation went too far - leaving way for mortage lenders, banks and credit rating agencies to sell mortgages to people who objectively would never be able to afford them. When enough mortgagors stopped paying off the debt, the commercial models of rational economic action on which these companies depended were exposed as flawed. They were over-optimistic and (it seems to me) in many cases supported by representations that were made carelessly or recklessly without regard to whether they were true or false (source: definition of fraudulent misrepresentation in the Misrepresentation Act 1967). It wasn't just employees of the companies who partook in this collective behaviour. The mortgagors themselves were also wishfully reckless in believing they could ever fulfill the terms of their mortgages. It was both greed and deception which made them ignore a realistic assessment of their prospects.
The past few years has seen economists in the press (e.g. FT/the Economist) submit a series of alternative models of economic theory that do involve collective behaviour. However I wonder if any system like the Efficient Market Hypothesis (which often assumed at the individual level 'rational economic man') will ever rear its ugly head again within my life time. Instead, I hope that, more and more, others will come to agree that individuals respond to a plethora of different systems, none of which can adequately explain human behaviour.
Rather it should be seen that capitalism works well only when it peacefully coincides with a range of value systems, made enforceable by institutions. These value systems include: a dynamic recognition of individual duties and responsibilities which people assume for the sake of obtaining benefits (this underpins the spirit of our legal system); a recognition of individual opinion (and of experience) even if we disagree with it (institutionalised by the media); an aversion to physical and psychological harm and damage (institutionalised by the police); a commitment to maximising the physical wellbeing of as many people in society as is economically sane to do so (medicine); etc etc. This short paean to our institutions (flawed as they are) only scratches the surface. Within every business and industry in our society, a nexus of different value systems coexists and is enforced. The inherent plurality of motivation within capitalism ought always to be acknowledged.
Our system functions well only so far as our collective behaviour is held in check by our individual behaviour, and our individual behaviour is held in check by our collective behaviour.
- - - - - - - - - - -
In contrast to my last version of this piece, I have so far been much less topical. The sub-prime mortgage crisis is now half a decade old, and has been superseded by many other problems.
In that post I focused on the scandals - the Leveson inquiry, the MP's expenses affair, the seemingly endless string of banking problems in the past couple years, the tax avoidance serialised by The Times as 'Secrets of the Tax Avoiders', a populace recalcitrant to modernising energy policy, regulation, etc. In each of these areas, a lax attitude to the spirit of the UK's institutionalised systems combined with individual selfishness led to a failure of responsibility by those in charge.
Don't get me wrong - I haven't assumed that level of responsibility in my life, and I cannot yet know the pressures of doing so. Furthermore, these actions appear in retrospect much worse than they appeared to the actors involved at the time. But the point is exactly that - when The Memory of Justice ebbs, individuals fail our society.
It seems to me that of all the transformations currently occurring in these institutions, the most striking is that in banking. As Gillian Tett pointed out a few days ago (http://tinyurl.com/a84vy5z), historical trends would suggest that the current shrinking of the banks, and of banking to a profession with salaries similar to other professions, may last for some decades now. Public opinion and state control seems to have turned firmly against the excess pumping out of credit that has occurred in recent decades. As the tide has turned, more and more problems with how banks have used their instruments of financial enforcement have been exposed: PPI, interest rate swap mis-selling, LIBOR, the London whale, Iranian sanctions, etc. I fervently hope this is a kind of cleansing. That, for instance, the rise in banking litigation will both preserve the banks (which after all provide a public good of enabling individuals and businesses to invest in a better future for themselves) and create a residue of memories which ensure bankers act with high standards hereafter.
There are some I know who have set up a 'grassroots' movement in banking called Move Your Money. It seems to me a healthy cause, aiming at the diversification of our banking system. However, having spoken to a couple of them, I am also aware that they do not understand the role of banking outside of retail banking - neither the other side of commercial banking - e.g. providing secured loans to businesses - or investment banking.
If their work makes UK society better, it will partially be because their ignorance allows them to be more passionate about their cause; and that ignorance will do good, not harm. There have been some similar movements in the past that have caused harm - such as the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Our generation must not only learn from the mistakes made during our life times, but of the times that precede us as well.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Finally, I realise I have skirted around the issues of the Eurozone crisis - having honed in on individualism in the US and UK (the countries which most concern me). Of course, some may think - but you've left out all the disasters created by social democracy in Europe! Well, that's somewhat true. I have to admit ignorance of the issues that underpin, say, the collapse of the construction industry in Spain and Ireland.
And I have insufficient understanding of the differences between European country's political, legal, economic, media-driven and other institutions which have led to the grand discord so evident in the European polity today. People talk about the southern European states and the northern European states in this abstract way that brushes over the detail of the individuals who occupy those states. What is most sad is how politicians are using ignorance as a means of fostering their own causes, and thus damaging the long-term interests of the peoples whom they serve.
And at the same time, a federal Europe would require a kind of revolution; but they hope to do so without any movement to generate favour or fervour for a federal Europe. A new political system in which noone believes will fail. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'
The recession of the past half-decade has ruptured this narrative. The relationship between group structures (such as the state and media, the 'public' and businesses) and the individual is being reconfigured throughout Western societies as we speak.
Fortunately, we are unlikely to see a return to extreme collective ideologies of a kind that emerged in the twentieth century. Soviet Communism, Chinese socialism and others all demonstrated a certain logic:- in order to make sure people accept and enforce collective ideologies, collective ideals must be imposed from above; individual opinion must be brutally suppressed. Such systems could only be brought about with speed and authoritarian leadership, with the consequence that these 'collective' revolutions became acceptable only in countries where authoritarian structures were the norm. The leadership ended up replicating the authoritarian structures that preceded them in significant ways. (I acknowledge that I leave Nazism and Fascism out of the account, mostly for the lazy reason that it would be too difficult to accommodate them within this essay.)
Nonetheless I detect that the various publics of most European nation-states are becoming less enamoured with the celebration of individualism, almost as with a myth whose godhead is in decline. I must admit that I have never fully agreed with those who foster individualism as the be-all-and-end-all of our society. To me, 'rational economic man' has always seemed a bad fiction invented by a self-loving bunch of Platonic economists. Group behaviour plays too much of a role in who we are.
(In fact, a distrust of such abstract systematicity made me so passionate about political, economic and philosophical ideas that I decided I could not study PPE with a cool enough head, the subject I first applied to study at Oxford. Instead I applied for a subject which weighed the subjective and objective aspects of human experience as of equal importance - English Literature.)
In the States, it was a form of collective behaviour that allowed the sub-prime mortgage crisis to happen. Let's give some context. Anglo-Saxon governments are generally in favour of home ownership. Home ownership gives citizens a stake in society, encouraging them to save in order to pay the mortgage on their greatest asset and invest in their local institutions - schools, hospitals, police stations, courts, etc. That's one of the reasons why in the aftermath of WW2, the "GI Bill" provided a loan guarantee for purchasing a house to returning soldiers.
Some half a century later, Bill Clinton and then George W had this grand idea that if the Federal Government relaxed regulations around housing, more people would get homes - a great thing for less well-off US citizens. Unfortunately, while it was great thing in theory, the relaxation went too far - leaving way for mortage lenders, banks and credit rating agencies to sell mortgages to people who objectively would never be able to afford them. When enough mortgagors stopped paying off the debt, the commercial models of rational economic action on which these companies depended were exposed as flawed. They were over-optimistic and (it seems to me) in many cases supported by representations that were made carelessly or recklessly without regard to whether they were true or false (source: definition of fraudulent misrepresentation in the Misrepresentation Act 1967). It wasn't just employees of the companies who partook in this collective behaviour. The mortgagors themselves were also wishfully reckless in believing they could ever fulfill the terms of their mortgages. It was both greed and deception which made them ignore a realistic assessment of their prospects.
The past few years has seen economists in the press (e.g. FT/the Economist) submit a series of alternative models of economic theory that do involve collective behaviour. However I wonder if any system like the Efficient Market Hypothesis (which often assumed at the individual level 'rational economic man') will ever rear its ugly head again within my life time. Instead, I hope that, more and more, others will come to agree that individuals respond to a plethora of different systems, none of which can adequately explain human behaviour.
Rather it should be seen that capitalism works well only when it peacefully coincides with a range of value systems, made enforceable by institutions. These value systems include: a dynamic recognition of individual duties and responsibilities which people assume for the sake of obtaining benefits (this underpins the spirit of our legal system); a recognition of individual opinion (and of experience) even if we disagree with it (institutionalised by the media); an aversion to physical and psychological harm and damage (institutionalised by the police); a commitment to maximising the physical wellbeing of as many people in society as is economically sane to do so (medicine); etc etc. This short paean to our institutions (flawed as they are) only scratches the surface. Within every business and industry in our society, a nexus of different value systems coexists and is enforced. The inherent plurality of motivation within capitalism ought always to be acknowledged.
Our system functions well only so far as our collective behaviour is held in check by our individual behaviour, and our individual behaviour is held in check by our collective behaviour.
- - - - - - - - - - -
In contrast to my last version of this piece, I have so far been much less topical. The sub-prime mortgage crisis is now half a decade old, and has been superseded by many other problems.
In that post I focused on the scandals - the Leveson inquiry, the MP's expenses affair, the seemingly endless string of banking problems in the past couple years, the tax avoidance serialised by The Times as 'Secrets of the Tax Avoiders', a populace recalcitrant to modernising energy policy, regulation, etc. In each of these areas, a lax attitude to the spirit of the UK's institutionalised systems combined with individual selfishness led to a failure of responsibility by those in charge.
Don't get me wrong - I haven't assumed that level of responsibility in my life, and I cannot yet know the pressures of doing so. Furthermore, these actions appear in retrospect much worse than they appeared to the actors involved at the time. But the point is exactly that - when The Memory of Justice ebbs, individuals fail our society.
It seems to me that of all the transformations currently occurring in these institutions, the most striking is that in banking. As Gillian Tett pointed out a few days ago (http://tinyurl.com/a84vy5z), historical trends would suggest that the current shrinking of the banks, and of banking to a profession with salaries similar to other professions, may last for some decades now. Public opinion and state control seems to have turned firmly against the excess pumping out of credit that has occurred in recent decades. As the tide has turned, more and more problems with how banks have used their instruments of financial enforcement have been exposed: PPI, interest rate swap mis-selling, LIBOR, the London whale, Iranian sanctions, etc. I fervently hope this is a kind of cleansing. That, for instance, the rise in banking litigation will both preserve the banks (which after all provide a public good of enabling individuals and businesses to invest in a better future for themselves) and create a residue of memories which ensure bankers act with high standards hereafter.
There are some I know who have set up a 'grassroots' movement in banking called Move Your Money. It seems to me a healthy cause, aiming at the diversification of our banking system. However, having spoken to a couple of them, I am also aware that they do not understand the role of banking outside of retail banking - neither the other side of commercial banking - e.g. providing secured loans to businesses - or investment banking.
If their work makes UK society better, it will partially be because their ignorance allows them to be more passionate about their cause; and that ignorance will do good, not harm. There have been some similar movements in the past that have caused harm - such as the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Our generation must not only learn from the mistakes made during our life times, but of the times that precede us as well.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Finally, I realise I have skirted around the issues of the Eurozone crisis - having honed in on individualism in the US and UK (the countries which most concern me). Of course, some may think - but you've left out all the disasters created by social democracy in Europe! Well, that's somewhat true. I have to admit ignorance of the issues that underpin, say, the collapse of the construction industry in Spain and Ireland.
And I have insufficient understanding of the differences between European country's political, legal, economic, media-driven and other institutions which have led to the grand discord so evident in the European polity today. People talk about the southern European states and the northern European states in this abstract way that brushes over the detail of the individuals who occupy those states. What is most sad is how politicians are using ignorance as a means of fostering their own causes, and thus damaging the long-term interests of the peoples whom they serve.
And at the same time, a federal Europe would require a kind of revolution; but they hope to do so without any movement to generate favour or fervour for a federal Europe. A new political system in which noone believes will fail. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.'
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Recordings
Emily and I discovered these old recordings I made. Rather different from my usual blog, but I hope you'll like them:
The Bridge Beyond Catz, Oxford
Out of the Blue (written by me)
Liquid Vortex: An experiment in fluid verse based on Turner's Snowstorm (written by myself)
Wake Up Reminder
The Beast in Space by WS Graham
Take to the Skies (written by myself) - this is rather a silly piece. But I was astonished by the way the birds moved in the winds one afternoon at Oxford and came up with this.
IX from The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill
X from In Memoriam by Tennyson
XI from In Memoriam by Tennyson
The Bridge Beyond Catz, Oxford
Out of the Blue (written by me)
Liquid Vortex: An experiment in fluid verse based on Turner's Snowstorm (written by myself)
Wake Up Reminder
The Beast in Space by WS Graham
Take to the Skies (written by myself) - this is rather a silly piece. But I was astonished by the way the birds moved in the winds one afternoon at Oxford and came up with this.
IX from The Triumph of Love by Geoffrey Hill
X from In Memoriam by Tennyson
XI from In Memoriam by Tennyson
Friday, 20 April 2012
Hands clasped, by the sea.
"Had we but world enough and time..."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Had it not been for Theo W, the romantic promise of my relationship with Emily would never have been fulfilled. We had met just three times in June, and in July she would fly away to the States.
But damn I was smitten. Not only was she beautiful, she was kind and thoughtful, could reminisce fondly about books and California, had stimulating conversation, evidently shared similar intellectual standards as me, and she seemed to love me too. I hadn't remotely met a girl with whom I could be so close before.
I reckoned that we had not had enough shared experience that our relationship would last the long distance. I didn't want to say goodbye to her before my planned trip to the W's house in the Isle of Wight. So I asked Theo W if I could invite her to the yearly week-long get-together of (generally) Catz students. He agreed. And I invited Emily, and to my surprise she agreed.
I arrived Friday afternoon, and Emily arrived on Saturday morning. Theo very kindly allowed us to stay in the double bed at the top of the house. (The house has about 15 beds so is good for large gatherings.)
It was a beautifully sunny day. We shared some time reading on the balcony in the early afternoon. I was reading Eugene Onegin, and a particularly beautiful passage about how Tatyana's romantic expectations of Onegin grow through the seasons. Yet I had days, not seasons. Approximately what I said to Emily was:
"It must have been so strange even fifty years ago. You would spend years before a relationship could be fully established. Communication would be by letter and could take months. Things would develop by slow increments, by seasons. It had to be so slow, so restrained before anything of magnitude could happen.
Now, you can just call, zip off an email or fly if you desperately need to meet someone far off. There are one-night stands, pretty arbitrary dating is normal. It's so rapid, and there's so much potential for something to be almost, and then gone."
To be honest, I can't remember what she said [which is not very fair, I know] but it was a lovely conversation. In fact, I'm afraid that this blog is going to be pretty much filled with my reflections, and little of what she said - simply because I don't remember her remarks or observations well.
Lingering behind our conversation was the assumption that she would have to depart soon. She had nowhere to stay in the UK, and fully planned to return home in a week or two. The best we could hope for was regular Skype conversation and occasional flights to see each other (a bit like now).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The beach was marked with squiggles, what looked like tubes of sand displaced by worms; sporadic seaweed; water troughs and the fine sea-blue/sea-green radiance of the water; sometimes particoloured rocks; and every so often a human or two, perhaps with a dog, or kids sculpting castles in the sand; and, in each mind, edifices of memory to be washed away.
We walked along the beach and by the sea, clasping hands. Every day we walked along the beach, feeling the pulse of each other and synchronising our pace. It would become a regular topic to discuss what we saw. We talked about many things.
The sea was a kind of frontier. Perversely it's very ability to isolate had forged the English nation-state, and catalyzed its imperial progress across the world, leaving in its wake the United States (itself made possible by the Atlantic). And that division made it difficult for Emily to stay -as she'd need a work visa; and, as we'd discover, the new government was constricting the influx of even intelligent foreigners like her.
So now the sea was isolating us. I remember approaching the tree-lined part of the beach, and thinking about the many millions walking about here and in the US - the random accidents of encountering someone who really suits you. And I had had very bad luck at that. And here our natures uprooted, straddling an implausibly thin margin between the shore of a sustained relationship, and the fragile break-up of the waves. Perhaps we were like ships passing each other on the ocean, never to encounter each other again.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"You are walking through it howsoever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander [which means 'sequentiality']. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes...If I fell over a cliff...fell through the nebeneinander ['simultaneity'] ineluctably!"
Our time there seemed unreal, yet confirmed by motion. As we passed along the seaside, we became a part of what we saw and heard, and of the spaces we encountered. The enchanting lull of the sea, the rich colours dappling the shore. The slim line of the horizon rising up to the built-up scape of the seafront walk, via an endless flow of water. Encroaching waves. Together, apart - some compromise would have to be reached.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Had it not been for Theo W, the romantic promise of my relationship with Emily would never have been fulfilled. We had met just three times in June, and in July she would fly away to the States.
But damn I was smitten. Not only was she beautiful, she was kind and thoughtful, could reminisce fondly about books and California, had stimulating conversation, evidently shared similar intellectual standards as me, and she seemed to love me too. I hadn't remotely met a girl with whom I could be so close before.
I reckoned that we had not had enough shared experience that our relationship would last the long distance. I didn't want to say goodbye to her before my planned trip to the W's house in the Isle of Wight. So I asked Theo W if I could invite her to the yearly week-long get-together of (generally) Catz students. He agreed. And I invited Emily, and to my surprise she agreed.
I arrived Friday afternoon, and Emily arrived on Saturday morning. Theo very kindly allowed us to stay in the double bed at the top of the house. (The house has about 15 beds so is good for large gatherings.)
It was a beautifully sunny day. We shared some time reading on the balcony in the early afternoon. I was reading Eugene Onegin, and a particularly beautiful passage about how Tatyana's romantic expectations of Onegin grow through the seasons. Yet I had days, not seasons. Approximately what I said to Emily was:
"It must have been so strange even fifty years ago. You would spend years before a relationship could be fully established. Communication would be by letter and could take months. Things would develop by slow increments, by seasons. It had to be so slow, so restrained before anything of magnitude could happen.
Now, you can just call, zip off an email or fly if you desperately need to meet someone far off. There are one-night stands, pretty arbitrary dating is normal. It's so rapid, and there's so much potential for something to be almost, and then gone."
To be honest, I can't remember what she said [which is not very fair, I know] but it was a lovely conversation. In fact, I'm afraid that this blog is going to be pretty much filled with my reflections, and little of what she said - simply because I don't remember her remarks or observations well.
Lingering behind our conversation was the assumption that she would have to depart soon. She had nowhere to stay in the UK, and fully planned to return home in a week or two. The best we could hope for was regular Skype conversation and occasional flights to see each other (a bit like now).
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The beach was marked with squiggles, what looked like tubes of sand displaced by worms; sporadic seaweed; water troughs and the fine sea-blue/sea-green radiance of the water; sometimes particoloured rocks; and every so often a human or two, perhaps with a dog, or kids sculpting castles in the sand; and, in each mind, edifices of memory to be washed away.
We walked along the beach and by the sea, clasping hands. Every day we walked along the beach, feeling the pulse of each other and synchronising our pace. It would become a regular topic to discuss what we saw. We talked about many things.
The sea was a kind of frontier. Perversely it's very ability to isolate had forged the English nation-state, and catalyzed its imperial progress across the world, leaving in its wake the United States (itself made possible by the Atlantic). And that division made it difficult for Emily to stay -as she'd need a work visa; and, as we'd discover, the new government was constricting the influx of even intelligent foreigners like her.
So now the sea was isolating us. I remember approaching the tree-lined part of the beach, and thinking about the many millions walking about here and in the US - the random accidents of encountering someone who really suits you. And I had had very bad luck at that. And here our natures uprooted, straddling an implausibly thin margin between the shore of a sustained relationship, and the fragile break-up of the waves. Perhaps we were like ships passing each other on the ocean, never to encounter each other again.
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"You are walking through it howsoever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander [which means 'sequentiality']. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes...If I fell over a cliff...fell through the nebeneinander ['simultaneity'] ineluctably!"
Our time there seemed unreal, yet confirmed by motion. As we passed along the seaside, we became a part of what we saw and heard, and of the spaces we encountered. The enchanting lull of the sea, the rich colours dappling the shore. The slim line of the horizon rising up to the built-up scape of the seafront walk, via an endless flow of water. Encroaching waves. Together, apart - some compromise would have to be reached.
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