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WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

2/2/2017

WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

So far in my life, I have read three books dealing with the subject of “why I am not whatever it is I am not”. They are Why I am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Hindu by Kancha Ilaiah and Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq, and so it seems to me that a brief sortee into the the subject of atheism called Why I Am Not An Atheist, is following in a proud and noble tradition of Why I Am Nots. So let’s have a bash at it.
            For an atheist, the matter is simple. There is no God. End of. For me, the real question does not revolve around whether or not there’s a God, because we first have to determine what we mean when we use a term like “God” and that opens up a whole can of worms which anyone in their right mind would be very reluctant to get into. No, the question for me is what is to be done about religion, which I believe can be summed up as the collective expression of ideas and beliefs with a supernatural content. In other words, the real question is the institutional manifestations of those beliefs and ideas, which believers are hardly ever encouraged to think through and because of that can be highly toxic and dangerous.
            But let’s go back to the question of God. What do people mean when they use the term “God”? In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, they surely mean some out of reach entity who created and governs the world and expects us to behave in accordance with his commandments – as laid down in one or other of their holy books or scriptures. It is important that this being is separate from his own creation and creatures, otherwise, he could not be superior to them. And, if he cannot be superior to them, then he cannot boss them around by issuing commandments for them to obey or submit to. Simple as that. Whether or not such a being actually exists is not in my opinion the real issue, although I think, on the face of it, the likelihood is rather remote. However, one thing does seem quite clear to me. This “God” has many potential rivals for the title of “God”. For instance, uNkulumkulu, (In Bantu myth and legend.) the Great Spirit, Brahman-Atman, Dharma, Zeus, The Supreme Being of the French Revolution, Ahura Mazda, the “Deity” of the Enlightenment Deists who, once He has created the world, leaves it to its own devices, and the myriad other potential pretenders to the throne ready to take their place in our collective imagination and, in the process, boot out Jahweh, God the Father and Allah from their apparently secure and pre-eminent positions. After all, they all have as much claim as these to be called “God”. This “God” can also be a pantheistic God, a dualistic one, a trinity (or Trimurgi in Hinduism) – even an amalgam of lesser gods - sort of committee of gods, each one with a particular function.. It can also be the usurping Gnostic Demiurge or “That tribal / b in the Bible / who got so big for his boots / he thought he was God.”, Ein Sof in Jewish Kabbalah is another contender, as is the “immense intelligence” which Emerson thought we lay in the lap of. Hegel, might just have called his “God” “The Absolute”, Schopenhauer “Will”, Leibnitz “the Monad of Monads”, Plato “the Idea” and so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless and also bewildering; contemplating them seems to trigger a whole slew of speculations in which no final conclusion can ever be drawn. In the end, we just find ourselves going round and round in circles trying to arrive at a proper definition of whatever it is we have designated as “God” and getting nowhere in the process.
            So when atheists say, “There is no God.” I just want to ask, “Which God are you talking about?” For me, the question is not whether this abstraction that we can give no concrete determinants to without tying ourselves up into all sorts of knots, actually exists or not, but what are we to do about institutions which pretend to speak in ‘God’s name – and, of course, it is always they and they alone who speak in ‘God’s’ name. What these institutions actually do is cut the debate about “God” off at a certain arbitrary point, so they can prevent it slipping out of their grasp. It’s a bit like a mathematician cutting Pi off at a certain arbitrary point in its progress towards infinity in order to fit it into his or her finite algorithmic equations. This, of course, is what all religions do to make the concept of “God” serviceable to their own needs. Thus we are no longer encouraged to think through all the possibilities inherent in the idea until we arrive at our own conclusions – which, by the way, we may reject a couple of days later – but instead have to accept what they say about it, along with all the phoney ‘sacred’ texts they use to shut down further debate on the question. Religion, therefore, is the problem, not an abstraction like God, which can be argued about from here to eternity without anyone arriving at any definite or long-lasting conclusions. And that’s why I think the question about “God” which atheists ask and also pretend to have the answer to is something of a red-herring.
            Of course, atheists may not form a coherent or homogeneous group, just like individual Christians or Muslims might also not form a coherent or homogeneous group. The New Atheists, of whom Richard Dawkins is a spokesman, obviously do seem to form a coherent and somewhat homogeneous group. And there is nothing wrong with that as long as it helps them oppose organised religion, especially in its most toxic forms. But they don’t just do this. They also make a big issue of the existence – or not - of “God” and seem to think that that is central to their quest to undermine religion. They never consider the possibility that it is totally pointless to be opposed to something that one can say nothing about. And therefore any idea that they do have about Him/Her/It, etcetera has to be taken from the religions whose “God” they say they deny in order for them to make progress. That is to say, that the “God” whose existence they deny has the shape given ‘Him’ by this or that organised religion and is therefore hardly representative of the idea of "God" as a whole. In other words, their focus is wrong. What they are actually arguing about and pretending to know something about is Kant’s “unknowable thing-in-itself”, which may – or may not – be nothing at all, depending perhaps on what side of the bed you got out of that morning.
            When it comes to the existence of “God” or any questions concerning the nature of ultimate reality, surely the jury is out. “God” is like Schrodinger’s Cat – He/She/It/Thou/They/We/You/Zero/Wotever exists and doesn’t exist at the same time because we haven’t yet opened the box and precipitated the collapse of the wave-function by means of which we might be able to decide. In other words, “God” exists in some kind of epistemological limbo, like Schrodinger’s poor cat, waiting for someone to open the box – or just take the money and run.
            I am playing around with these possibilities because I want to show – paradoxically – how impossible it is in the end to arrive at any kind of certainty regarding ultimate questions, even though many atheists talk as if they knew all the answers. Sky-Fairy, Imaginary Friend, Flying Spaghetti Monster and so on. Do any of these terms even get close? Not only can these things not be proved, they cannot even really be delineated. Language comes to a grinding halt every time you try to discuss the question or even create a framework in which to debate it. That doesn’t mean, of course, that all speculation should end. Such speculation may be fun, or may be an important plank in our own quest for sanity, it may even be a good subject for the myth-making powers of the poet – but, hey, let’s get a sense of proportion here and not imagine that what we are talking about is something of substance, something people should worship or go out of their way to deny.
            So excuse me if I refuse the label of atheist. It is not that I would identify with theists or deists or anything as wishy-washy as an agnostic, but I do believe that atheists ask all the wrong questions. They talk too much about “God” and not enough about religion, not enough, in other words, about how human institutions have arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of a ‘God’ that neither they nor the atheists who deny this ‘God’ are able to say anything intelligible about.

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shylock, the extremist

1/11/2017

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shylock the extremist

No play in the Shakespearean oeuvre more completely illustrates the Keatsian doctrine of Negative Capability than The Merchant of Venice. It is a play of extraordinary ambiguity, a play indeed which one comes to the end of with a whole host of questions, but very few answers.
            Is it an anti-Semitic play? A Jewish friend of mine who once saw it with me thought it was. But I’m not so sure. There is a lot of anti-Semitism in the play of course, but is this the anti-Semitism of the play, or simply that of the characters within it? One thing the play is is a tragedy. Don’t let the fact that the tragic hero, Shylock, isn’t killed off at the end mislead you over that fact. He is so much the loser that he might as well have been killed off. What makes him a tragic hero is that he is a sacrificial victim, and what is being sacrificed is not simply Shylock the Jew, but the desire for revenge itself which has grown out of his own victim-status at the hands of the anti-Semitic Antonio - in other words, the consequences of the anti-Semitism so endemic in his society. What makes Shylock grand is that he is the only non-hypocrite in the whole of the play; and where hypocrisy is necessary to a society, its absence in a person represents something inimical which has to be sacrificed. The Merchant of Venice works itself out as a tragedy on a much more primitive level than a purely anti-Semitic - or indeed anti anti-Semitic - play would, namely that of the ritual expulsion of unacceptable impulses for the sake of restoring social harmony and group cohesion.
            But the play is not simply about Shylock, and Shylock is not the only tragic figure within it. It is also about his adversary, Antonio, who is not only anti-Semitic, but also almost certainly homosexual, and this fact is his own tragedy, because he lives in a society which can no more accept homosexuality than it can accept Jews. At the end of the play, Antonio is left as deprived of what it might take for him to be happy - ie Bassanio - as Shylock is left deprived of his property and Rebecca. They are both major league losers, while the winners are those who can adapt themselves to the norm and ‘fit in’, that is to say the Christians and heterosexuals. The Jew and the Homosexual, are, I believe, the two characters this play is mainly about. It is as if Antonio, the homosexual, recognised a rejected and despised part of himself in Shylock, the Jew, who had become too much of a painful reminder of the outsider he could not accept in himself. Is the play anti-Semitic, therefore? Or does it simply revolve around these complex emotional axes? We need to discuss it in more depth to find out.
            The play can be divided into two halves. The first half gives us the background to Shylock’s desire for revenge. He has every reason to hate Antonio, whose anti-Semitism is obvious right from the start. Shakespeare clearly empathises with Shylock here, and shows how the canker of bitterness, hatred and revenge might put down roots in a man not otherwise given to feeling them. “You that did void your rheum upon my beard / And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur / Over the threshold;” is how Shylock himself expresses his grievance against Antonio, when Antonio needs to borrow some money from him. Yes, Shylock may also hate Antonio because he’s a Christian and also “for that in low simplicity / He lends out money gratis, and brings down / the rate of usance...” but the real cause of his hatred is Antonio’s mistreatment of him as a Jew. He is offended right to the depth of himself as a Jew, as we can see from his famous speech beginning “Hath not a Jew eyes...”.
            Antonio, if he had embraced rather than despised his own outsider status as a homosexual, would have recognised a brother in Shylock. But he doesn’t, and what he rejects in himself, he also rejects in Shylock. He is miserable because of his homosexuality. Of that I have little doubt. Shakespeare doesn’t draw direct attention to this fact. Nevertheless, from the very first words of the play, his problem announces itself. “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, / It wearies me: you say it wearies you; / But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, / What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn: and such a want-wit sadness makes of me, / That I have so much ado to know myself.” He refutes the suggestion put forward by his interlocutors that he is sad because his merchandise is at sea, and therefore at risk, as he does the idea that he is sad because of love. He is sad, it seems, for no other reason than that the world is “a stage where every man must play a part / And mine a sad one.”
            Must we take his word for it that he is just of a melancholy disposition? Or is something gnawing at him which he cannot give tongue to? Perhaps the short speech to Bassanio in Act 4, Scene 1, will give us a clue. “I am the tainted wether of the flock, / Meetest for death, the weakest kind of fruit / Drops earliest to the ground.” (N.B. A “wether” is a castrated ram.) To understand the full import of such a speech to Antonio’s state of mind, one could do little better than turn to Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets - which are roughly contemporaneous with The Merchant of Venice - in which the young man is encouraged to marry and beget sons who, after his own beauty has faded, will perpetuate that beauty. One might also turn to Sonnet 20 in which the Master-Mistress of Shakespeare’s passion is said to have one thing to Shakespeare’s purpose nothing, namely a penis. Shakespeare sees his love as sterile because it cannot beget children. What seems clear to me from the sonnets is that Shakespeare had the same kind of problem with his own homosexuality as Antonio has in the play, although with Shakespeare the problem was alleviated by the fact that he was also heterosexual and was the father of children.
            Thus, when Antonio refers to himself as “the tainted wether of the flock”, I am sure it is because he knows that he will never beget children because he is exclusively attracted to men. Shakespeare must have been fully aware that there were people like Antonio, and that they were fairly common. Let’s scotch a rumour here that was, I believe, originally promulgated by Michel Foucault, and that is that before the end of the 19th. century, there were no homosexuals, only homosexual acts. (What about ‘Molly Clubs in the 18th Century?) Although the word “sodomite” was frequently used, and the authorities of certain cities believed that their cities would suffer the same fate as Sodom if no action was taken against them - a belief which was thought to justify the horrendous cruelties involved, particularly in Venice - the category of the homosexual was not recognised; but does that mean there were no homosexuals, no men or women with an exclusive attraction to people of their own sex? Put in that way, I think Foucault was spouting nonsense. The problem surely is not that there were no such people, but that there was no category to fit them into, therefore they did not officially exist. This was especially true in England, where sodomites were hardly ever burnt at the stake because the English authorities did not want to admit that sodomy existed in Protestant England. In such a state of affairs, there was no question of being glad to be gay. Being exclusively that way must have been regarded by those who were as extremely anomalous, a defect and an affliction. That’s how Shakespeare - in contradistinction to Marlowe - probably viewed it, and also Antonio. Many homosexuals would have hidden their orientation under the disguise of marriage and children. Others, like Antonio, would have simply kept it to themselves and been unable to talk about it. That wouldn’t have stopped it preying on their minds, of course. Many would have grown gloomy and melancholy as they constantly brooded upon their ‘affliction’. Shakespeare throws out definite clues as to what Antonio’s problem is, but, of course, living in the time and place that he lived in, he could not be open about it.
            I would hazard that Antonio and Bassanio had been lovers, or if not physical lovers, they at least shared a love “which surpasseth that of a woman”, as Bassanio himself hints when he addresses Antonio in court. “Antonio, I am married to a wife / Which is as dear to me as life itself, / But life itself, my wife and all the world / Are not with me esteemed above thy life. / I would lose all, ay sacrifice them all / Here to this devil, to deliver you.” Two men can love one another, of course, without their love being sexual; and if Bassanio was heterosexual and Antonio homosexual, then that could have been another cause of Antonio’s melancholy. What is important is that Antonio was gay at a time when being gay was not publicly recognised and therefore, because he could no more openly discuss it than Shakespeare himself could, he was constantly given to brood on it. It must be remembered in this context how gloomy a disposition the bisexual Byron was often thrown into and perhaps for the self-same reason. To underline what was at stake for Byron, it is only necessary to add that sodomy was punishable by death in England in Byron’s time, and more homosexuals were executed between 1806 and 1835 than at any other period in English history.
            It would be easy to forget who or what one is if others would let you. A person does not feel black until he or she is looked at in a certain way; a Jew does not feel Jewish until he or she hears an anti-Semitic remark; a Muslim cannot feel at home in a society which constantly obsesses about Islam and kills Muslims by the thousands abroad; likewise, a gay person doesn’t feel so different from others until he or she is made to feel different by others. But once that line has been crossed, there is no way of responding which can be contained within the rules of the dominant culture. A black person, Jew, Muslim or gay person must make his or her own rules in defiance of the dominant culture, and the implicit rules of behaviour which that culture frames to hedge them in. Antonio is not grand in the way Shylock is grand because he plays the game by the rules of the dominant culture, whereas Shylock doesn’t; he attempts to play the game by his own rules, not those of an anti-Semitic society. He will not be browbeaten and bamboozled out of his revenge. What if he were to show mercy to Antonio? He would be back to square one and defeated - as if he had never put up a fight in the first place. Once he’d set out on the path of revenge he couldn’t turn back. Thus, Portia’s speech about the quality of mercy was an irrelevance to him. To have heeded it, would be to submit to the Christian logic of his enemies. The fact that, in the end, very little mercy was shown to him after he had been outmanoeuvred demonstrates the hypocrisy of the speech in the first place. (What a lot of people miss in Shakespeare is the subversive irony implicit in the contrasts between what is said and done in his plays. So many people assume that what he says is what he means, but drama doesn’t work in that way.) Therefore, why should he have relented? Did Antonio relent when he was abusing him as a Jew, when he spat on his Jewish gabardine? Shylock was in this up to his ears. He could not relinquish his bond; for what was at stake was not just himself as an individual against Antonio as an individual, but himself as a Jew against an anti-Semitic culture represented by Antonio, and, in that struggle, the individual Antonio had to be sacrificed. Shylock’s obstinacy in insisting on his bond wasn’t just gratuitous cruelty, nor was it simply the desire for personal revenge; it has to be placed in this larger context.
            Of course, it was inevitable that the Christians would close ranks against him for taking things to such extremes. Drawing moral conclusions in such situations is stupid, futile and hypocritical, and Shakespeare was not interested in drawing moral conclusions, but simply in presenting a situation rich with potential for drama. I have no doubt that Shakespeare was exploring his own ambivalences regarding homosexuals, Jews and anti-Semitism, and that these ambivalences unconsciously energise his dramatic portrayal. However, what I am also sure of is that these energies cancel one another out in the end, so that what you have as a result is the appearance of a Shakespeare who doesn’t take sides. (Samuel Johnson berated him for this ‘amorality’.) Shakespeare is the tragic dramatist who knows that right and wrong are not simple matters. His priority, therefore, is to work things out to their final dramatic conclusion and settle for nothing less.
            Having said this, I think it is necessary to get the Keatsean concept of Negative Capability into its fullest perspective. Keats applies this concept in particular to Shakespeare without mentioning the political context in which Shakespeare was writing. Shakespeare was a master of the art of subterfuge. He had to be. Had he said openly what he secretly thought about certain things he would probably have been crucified. We have only to look at the fate of Marlowe to see what happened to playwrights who couldn’t keep their views to themselves. Admittedly, as Charles Nicholl has argued in The Reckoning, Marlowe may have been a pawn in the political struggle between the Essex and Raleigh factions in the Elizabethan Court; nevertheless,   it was his outspoken views which made him vulnerable in the first place.*
            Shakespeare seems to have allowed them to surface only as those of the characters he is presenting on stage. (Freud’s concept of The Return of The Repressed is highly applicable here.) The ambiguity which one finds in so much of Shakespeare’s work, therefore, was one forced upon him by circumstances. Shakespeare had to wear his inscrutable masks, for if he hadn’t done so, it is doubtful that there would be a Shakespeare for us to discuss today. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have his own thoughts and feelings about what was happening around him, especially in the political sphere, only that he had to keep them to himself until he could provide an appropriate mask to express them in. The task for any critic of Shakespeare is to know how to read between the lines; what you see is not always what you get. To find the real Shakespeare requires a certain amount of historical imagination, a modicum of incredulity regarding the motives and methods of the political class of both his time and ours, a refusal to accept the Establishment’s image of him as unambiguously one of its own, along with the recognition that he was a complex and contradictory human being registering complex and contradictory feelings and thoughts at a time when it was extremely dangerous to do so.
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*M. J. Trow, in Who Killed Kit Marlowe, is much more explicit about the likelihood of an actual political conspiracy behind Marlowe’s death - or assassination – than Nicholl. Marlowe, with his opinions about Christianity and his ‘in your face’ homosexuality, was clearly a thorn in the hide of the Elizabethan Establishment, and it is refreshing to see a finger being pointed at the very highest of government circles, with the taboo word “conspiracy” uttered, but of course, nothing can be proved one way or another. Although Nicholl is more cautious in attributing blame, Trow’s more penetrating historical and political imagination, and his willingness to see states and governments as the entrenched mafias they are, gives him the edge. He knows where the bodies are buried in general and has the courage to say so, even though, in this particular instance, his hypothesis may be even more full of conjecture and guesswork than the one Nicholl puts forward.
                In her novel, The Slicing Edge of Death, Judith Cook puts forward an alternative view - namely, that Marlowe was murdered at the orders of Robert Cecil, the Acting Secretary to the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth. Marlowe, according to Cook’s novel, was privy to information regarding a homosexual scandal which took place in Rheims at about the time Marlowe himself was there, a scandal involving Antony Bacon (Cecil’s cousin and Sir Francis Bacon’s brother), which had been hushed up by Cecil himself. According to Cook, Marlowe threatened to expose this cover-up in court if he were put on trial. Records exist in France about this scandal, but not in England, showing how effective Cecil’s cover-up had been. Of course, like Nicholl’s and Trow’s account, such a story, and especially Marlowe’s role in it, can never be anything more than conjecture.
                Finally, Jeremy Reed, in his own dystopic novel, The Grid, has Shakespeare himself kill Marlowe at the prompting of Lord Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, whose lover, protégé and investment Shakespeare is in the novel. The only way it will ever be proved, of course, is if we could all go back to our previous incarnations at the time, like the characters in the novel, and take a peek; but then, in the case of a novel like The Grid, the question is not whether the thesis is literally true, but whether, it contains an imaginative truth - i.e., whether what happens in the novel has some kind of metaphorical force. And since the novel is in part about how politics has influenced literary reputations over the centuries - the same kind of politics which not only had the non-conformist Marlowe murdered, but has also preserved the reputation of the more outwardly conformist Shakespeare as the English poet par excellence – I believe that it does.

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a tale of two books

12/19/2016

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a tale of two books

The two books in question are by same author, although there is a gap of almost forty years between the writing of the first and the second. Their author is a French homosexual man who had been a thief, prostitute and aspiring traitor when he was younger. His name was Jean Genet and the two books in question are The Thief’s Journal and Prisoner of Love. The actual subject-matter of the two books is very dissimilar, but there is a strain of continuity between them which is not only due to the fact that they were written by the same author but is also down to their being summations of periods of the author’s life which he obviously felt an urgent need to capture and transmit to his readers. The writing is supple, poetic and at times quite incandescent in both books. The Thief’s Journal deals with Genet’s adventures in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia and elsewhere in Europe prior to the Second World War, while Prisoner Of Love is less Eurocentric and concerns his time spent largely with Palestinian revolutionaries of the PLO and also The Black Panther Party in the USA prior to his time with the Palestinians. In Prisoner Of Love, the period under discussion is the early Seventies. The book however was written in the early Eighties and finally completed in 1984.

There is a great difference between the depiction of the characters within both of the books. In The Thief’s Journal, the characterisation is in bold relief - Salvador, Stilitano, Robert, Lucien, Armand, Guy and others all stand out in highly distinctive ways, while the depiction of individuals is more evanescent and subtle in Prisoner Of Love. Thus Genet himself. “I feel now like a little black box projecting slides without captions. My times with the fighters seem to have consisted of abrupt appearances and disappearances. But all of them are vibrant.” That is certainly the feeling one gets as one reads about the various characters, who more often than not seem to be just passing in the night. And yet they are portrayed with such vividness that this fact hardly seems to matter.

When I was in my twenties, I must have read The Thief’s Journal five or six times altogether, each time discovering new riches in it which I either had not noticed before or had forgotten with the passage of time. The thing I most noticed at my recent reading of the book was the strong Catholic tinge to the writing – to the imagery in particular and also to some of Genet’s obsessions. The quest for moral abjection seems to me an inverted Catholic one, which wouldn’t much occur to someone from a Protestant background, like myself. It is as if Genet wanted to rehabilitate his degraded characters and subject-matter “by writing of it with the names of things most noble.” He goes on to say. “My victory is verbal and I owe it to the richness of the terms, but may the poverty that counsels such choices be blessed.” Later on he says. “The idea of a professional writer leaves me cold. However, if I examine my work, I now perceive in it a will to rehabilitate persons, objects and feelings reputedly vile.”

This strong Catholic element in his writing, whereby, like Christ, he seems to want to take the sins of the world onto his own shoulders and redeem them, is one of the reasons why Sartre dubbed him a saint and wrote a tome in his honour called Saint Genet. This was a book which for some time seemed to sink Genet as a writer, and he came to view Sartre’s efforts on his own behalf as very debilitating. One perhaps shouldn’t look too closely at the machinery which causes one to write what one writes and the desire to do that seemed to have been Sartre’s besetting sin in relation to Genet. However, regarding Genet’s ‘sainthood’, Sartre probably had something of a point. After all, it can’t really be denied that in The Thief’s Journal, Genet is seeking some kind of sainthood – although a highly inverted one from a Catholic perspective – on behalf of those who would normally be considered outcasts by the Catholic community. So there is an element of irony in Genet’s quest for sainthood, which is hardly likely to earn him much approval among the faithful of Catholicism. (I very much doubt if he will ever be canonised!)

I have often noted this Catholic strain in my favourite French writers – e.g. Baudelaire and Rimbaud, to mention only two. Baudelaire, of course, would have identified with Satan, while Rimbaud seems to have been more content simply with blaspheming his old religion. Neither of these is really the case with Genet, who, at least in his writing, takes the terms of Catholicism much more seriously. Of course, in real life, Genet is an atheist, but this fact has no impact on The Thief’s Journal, where he is under the influence of Catholic symbolism and imagery. In relation to this, I am reminded of the joke about a visitor to Northern Ireland who was asked whether he was Protestant or a Catholic and on his replying that he was neither, but an atheist, was asked, “Ah, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” And it is perhaps a very pertinent rejoinder. Just because one has consciously overcome or renounced one’s religion, it in no way implies that it still doesn’t influence one unconsciously. An ex-Catholic communist I used to know revered a picture of Joseph Stalin and treated it as if it were an icon of the Virgin Mary herself.

In Prisoner Of Love, Genet has largely overcome his Catholic obsessions and so is able to write about Catholicism and religion in general – including Islam – in much more insightful and objective ways. In fact, Prisoner Of Love is a veritable tour-de-force of cultural and historical commentary – which is woven into the narrative tapestry about the Black Panthers and PLO without so much a dropping a stitch. This is especially noticeable in Part Two of the book, which is more philosophical and poetic than Part One, as if Genet felt the need to sum up all the observations he had made in Part One and cast them into a more reflective light.

Genet’s method of writing seems to be to allow everything to come out in the wash and assume its own order, sometimes in rather helter-skelter ways. Very often, the only connections between his ideas are of those of random association – or perhaps a need to relieve himself and the reader of monotony by suddenly talking about something else – only to return to the subject a little bit later. This discontinuity in the writing is something Prisoner Of Love shares with The Thief’s Journal, but it is accomplished with much more panache in the Prisoner Of Love, perhaps as a result of Genet’s learning more over the years. The style is as supple as ever, but his greater knowledge allows him to use it to greater effect. In The Thief’s Journal, the transitions can often seem a little bit gauche, but this is not the case with Prisoner Of Love.

Notwithstanding the quixotic and theatrical element Genet observes in both the Black Panthers and the Palestinian fighters, Prisoner Of Love is clearly motivated by Genet’s sympathy with the political aims of both the Black Panther Party and the PLO. However, what he brings to his account is not only an awareness of the historical injustices that both African-Americans and Palestinians have suffered and the background of oppression which has forced them both to take up arms, but also a keen eye for individual nuance, which doesn’t skim over the faults of the actors involved. In other words, he presents them as real multi-facetted people rather than puppets in some kind of glamourous revolution in which the actors become no more than stereotypes fulfilling the roles designated by either white liberals - in the case of the Black Panthers - or orientalist westerners - in the case of the Palestinians. He thus imaginatively involves his readers in the milieu he is describing, which is the real subject of his book. Genet is no less interested in people as people in Prisoner Of Love than he is in The Thief’s Journal. The chief difference lies in the more uncertain nature of those people’s identities in the Prisoner of Love. There is also the fact that both old age and the environment he finds himself in have somewhat lessened his sexual interest in the characters he describes, although, of course, he is not completely immune to their erotic attractions. The object of love has become much more desexualised and now consists of the intense feelings of comradeship amounting to love which fighters can often feel for one another while risking their lives on the battlefield. This is basically the love that has taken him prisoner.

Finally, Genet’s philosophical divagations. Genet’s philosophy could be summed up as an almost total abandonment to chance. Chance is preferable to God and divine providence. God doesn’t play dice and therefore has to be relegated to the margins of non-existence. After all, if God himself was in any way subject to chance, or even permitted chance, he would no longer be God - that is to say in total control of every event that takes place. “The idea of chance, a random combination of facts, a trick, even, of events, stars and beings owing their existence to themselves – such an idea seemed to me more pleasing and amusing than the idea of One God. The weight of religion crushes, chance brings lightness and laughter. It makes you cheerful and curious; it makes you smile. Claudel, the most religious of French poets, though he wouldn’t acknowledge he knew it, expressed it best when he wrote of 'the jubilations of chance'.” It is curious that this is a position that I myself have arrived at of late, which is perhaps one of the reasons I am able to appreciate Prisoner Of Love more than I have done on previous readings. It should also not go unnoticed that I am the same age as Genet himself was while he was writing it, although it should be added that I am not dying of throat-cancer. Like him, I see chance as liberating. Random Mutations? Without them there would be no evolution. Chance factors in life? Wouldn’t it be dreadful if everything was predictable? Quantum events in physics – and in life. Totally fascinating. Chaos Theory? Bring it on. Genet is absolutely right in his valuation of chance. And it is this fundamental philosophy – which is also crucial to the book’s composition - that makes Prisoner Of Love as good and also as profound as it is – and one of the few truly inspiring works of the last decades of the Twentieth Century.

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Philosophy and science

12/6/2016

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philosophy and science

I have already written essays called Poetry Contra Science and Poetry Versus Philosophy, so it seems kind of natural that I should complete the circle and write one called Philosophy And Science. This is an essay on philosophy AND science, not the philosophy of science, and I think it is necessary to make that plain before I begin. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but this fact shouldn’t disqualify me. After all, it means I have no vested interest in the subject and therefore little prevents me from adopting a more objective perspective on the relationship between philosophy and science, which is really the subject of this essay. However, I don’t wish to tread on anyone’s toes, so I will approach the topic in a reasonably cautious way , while giving my tuppence worth on the subject.

Let be begin by agreeing with Kant that science deals with the world of phenomena, not with what might lie behind that world – if anything at all. To use an analogy taken from astrophysics, I assume an ‘event-horizon’ exists here beyond which the enquiring mind cannot go and return to tell the tale. But isn’t this true of philosophy as well? What Kant called the unknowable thing-in-itself is not the province of either science or philosophy and is the equivalent in both disciplines to a black-hole in physics – from which no light can escape. Science proper is only concerned with empirical phenomena, the world of facts, factual lacunae and the theories which arise out of factual lacunae – and which perhaps produce the “paradigm shifts” spoken of by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a strictly circumscribed field of enquiry which limits itself to the facts or potential facts. But philosophy is also a highly circumscribed field of enquiry, although in a very different way. Its subject-matter is primarily language, testing the logical value of concepts in order to make them more intelligible to thought. It doesn’t tell science what its business should be, but it might help scientists clarify certain conceptual issues and cast them in a more general language beyond the specialist scope of science. The job of philosophy – vis-à-vis science – then is to test concepts to see what intelligibility they might have outside the specialised field of science - concepts like Mind and Matter, Free-Will and Determinism, A.I., Existence and Non-Existence, Good or Bad, True and False, et cetera – generalising from the specialised language of science to the less specialised, but equally rigorous language of philosophy. To borrow from Wittgenstein, it translates from one language-game into another - and possibly vice-versa - without violating either en route.

Philosophy might be accused of being irrelevant to science, although I don’t think this has always been the opinion of great scientists. Neils Bohr, for instance, saw close connections between Hegel and Quantum Mechanics, with its ideas like Complementary. Many neuroscientists seem to be very aware of the philosophical implications their work – e.g. in relation to the mind-body question. These are primarily scientific concerns which have a philosophical dimension and therefore it is legitimate to attempt to translate from one ‘language-game’ into another - and back again. I don’t think there is any room for dogma one way or the other. Many scientists are self-declared materialists, but from a philosophical perspective, materialism is no more or less coherent than idealism or dualism, since they are all grounded in certain illegitimate metaphysical assumptions. Likewise, many of the concerns of philosophy are, I believe, false ones. To take one example, the debate over the question of the relationship between mind and matter. Empirically, they are both valid areas of concern but whether they are in any way fundamental – well, who knows? Perhaps we will have to take a trip through that aforementioned ‘event-horizon’ forming a barrier between phenomena and Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself to ascertain for ourselves. Meanwhile, from a purely empirical perspective, mind and matter do appear to be separate phenomena and everything Descartes said about their attributes is probably correct – namely that extension characterises matter and non-extended intellect characterises mind and observable ‘reality’ seems to be divided up between them in a dualistic way. It seems to be a bit like wave-particle duality in physics, which David Bohm believes is only dualistic because there are hidden variables which we haven’t taken account of in our equations regarding them. In a similar way, it could be that mind-body duality is an illusion – at least in the sense of a strict division between the two. I don’t think it is up to science to sort out these basic philosophical problems beyond establishing the data related to them concerning, for instance, how ‘mind’ is processed by ‘matter’. The question of how something external and extended like a collection of neurons is capable of producing something internal and non-extended – namely thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions and so on are I think questions for philosophers rather than scientists, although of course, the basic data concerning them will be provided by science. These are conceptual questions related to language which go beyond the collection of data which, in itself, can tell us nothing about them. In that sense, it is a matter of translating from one ‘language-game’ into another – to borrow again from Wittgenstein. Moreover, these two 'language-games' may all too often overlap, which can lead to confusion. Sometimes, dogmatic adherents of science and especially of materialism don’t even know they are making metaphysical assumptions because the very taken-for-grantedness of their language hides it from them.

Scientific procedures – which are, of course, necessary to the actual practice of science – often dispose one towards a certain view of the world. It is not the same view of the world in every field of science of course. Perhaps, quantum physics, with its ideas concerning the influence of the observer on the phenomenon observed, might dispose a physicist working in that field towards a form of philosophical idealism. A scientist working in the field of neuroscience might be disposed towards a form of philosophical dualism or monism - a la Spinoza (See Antonio Damasio). A worker in evolutionary biology might be disposed towards a form of philosophical materialism a la Richard Dawkins. Of course, I am only making ‘enlightened’ guesses here. The point is that one’s methods of working and one’s specialised area of professional concern might have an impact on how one thinks outside those particular fields. After all, the way our society works, very few people can afford the luxury of being generalists or thinking outside their specialist boxes. One scientist I knew, who boasted an IQ of 180, knew nothing of the world beyond his own specialist field. An extreme case I know, but one that very probably indicates a trend.

What matters, I believe, is that philosophers and scientists keep a kind of watch over each other’s ‘language-games’, while respecting each other’s input and insights. Without this, certain taken-for-granted methods of working will become taken-for-granted ideas about the way the world in general works. When it comes to philosophy and science, it is important to remember how the second grew out of the first, and therefore how the two 'language-games’ are quite closely related. It is also equally important to remember how science grew out of Christianity and embeds some of its prejudices regarding the relationship between the ‘soul’ and the ‘body’, which are very separate things in Christianity, though Christiantity certainly problemetised the body. Christianity influenced Descartes very strongly and the dualism of Descartes then went on to influence science which took over that dualism and, in accordance with its own methods, suppressed one side (the soul) in order to focus on the other (the body). In Newtonian science, the ‘soul’ was completely banished and now occupies a sort of limbo, where it lends itself easily to various esoteric and ‘spiritual’ practices – which seems to have been a pastime of Newton’s in his own spare time – that is when he wasn’t hunting down and executing people. Meanwhile, philosophers on the continent got hung up on trying to avoid the implications of Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself in order to develop metaphysical paradigms, which, after Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason had become more or less untenable. While all this was going on, in Britain, good old logical positivism took centre stage and not even Wittgenstein could do much about that. Science came to dominate philosophy and philosophical concerns, because Kant’s own transcendental horizons were considered too ambitious for it. In the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition, philosophy became rather too enamoured of and intimidated by the methods – and prestige - of science to strike out in a really independent direction. In fact, it got so hung up on scientific procedures and methods that it thought philosophy's chief function vis-a-vis science was simply to be a kind of philosophical echo-chamber. This has had very unfortunate consequences. It would surely be much better for philosophy if it saw itself as an independent and equal partner to science, so that it can properly fulfil its role of keeping watch over it. In turn, that could impact on poetry in ways that could really enlarge its horizons.

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THE ULTIMATE MISERABALIST

11/14/2016

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THE ultimate miserabalist

Arthur Schopenhauer, it must be said, is a very pessimistic philosopher, gloomy in the extreme, whose vision of human existence can only be labelled ultra-miserabalist. (No wonder he was on André Breton’s “Ne lisez pas” list.) If Leibnitz described this world as the best of all possible worlds, Schopenhauer describes it as the worst. The hell that is the world begins with simple life-forms which prey on one another for their own nourishment and graduates up the ladder of life through the animal kingdom to man. The dramas that wild-life programmers are so keen to present of life on the African plains, where gazelles and wildebeest are torn apart by wild dogs and hyenas, who begin eating them before they have even expired, is typical of everywhere in the natural world, which in the end also includes humans, although they, perhaps, have developed a more civilised framework in which tear one another apart. Sartre’s words, “Hell is other people.” could have been lifted straight out of Schopenhauer’s World As Will And Representation, except that Schopenhauer laid it on much more thickly and with much more relish. Happiness is illusory; it exists only in the past or future; desire always begets disenchantment once its object is achieved; pain is much more real than pleasure; disappointment always attends the attainment of our ends in life. If it weren’t for the fact that we are driven by a blind, unconscious will to live, we would all take our own lives tomorrow, because, of course, it is better not to have been born than live this life of interminable suffering and despair. And yet, for all the pessimism which saturates his work, Schopenhauer can have a tonic effect on his readers by his very rejection of a shallow optimistic world-view and in the way he confronts so much complacency. That being said, I do find his vision very one-sided. It doesn’t jell with my own experience, which is that of alternating periods of contrasting moods and emotions, none of which permanently dominates any of the others. Furthermore, his outlook on the world is supported and justified by what I think is a dubious metaphysical position. Reality is like this because this is what it is in the deep depths of itself and it has nothing to do with Schopenhauer’s own personal psychology. (That bit goes without saying.)

So what is this metaphysical position that Schopenhauer is so eager to sell us – often with brilliant panache, but no less often ‘re-enforced’ by the outmoded biology and anthropology - not to mention many of the exploded prejudices - of the mid-nineteenth Century? This, don’t forget, was before Darwin had published his Origin Of Species and certainly before Marx or Nietzsche were ever heard of? Schopenhauer’s bête noire was none other than Hegel, but if only he had imbibed some of Hegel’s more dynamic developmental perspective and seen things in a more ‘relativist’ way, he might have avoided quite a few pitfalls.

So where to begin with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics? Well, perhaps we should begin with Kant’s distinction between phenomena and the unknowable thing-in-itself. Kant’s Critique Of Pure Reason was greatly admired by Schopenhauer, who largely agreed with its conclusions and its dismantling of metaphysics, but he could not accept the ultimate implications (Nor could Kant for that matter.) relating to the negative boundary line Kant drew in that work between things you can know and things you cannot know, a boundary line which discourages us from looking any further into the ultimate nature of things. Schopenhauer shares a common ground with his bête noire Hegel here, who also pretended to know what lay behind empirical phenomena – namely spirit. Personally, I would probably side with Kant and Wittgenstein, especially in regard to the way the latter refined Kant’s position by bringing the limitations of language into the equation. “We get to the boundary of language, which stops us asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.” One of the reasons I side with Kant and Wittgenstein is that I prefer to keep questions regarding the ultimate nature of the world open, rather than close them down with metaphysical dogmas that seem to have a suspicious affinity with religion.

Schopenhauer attempts to fill the ‘lacuna’ at the heart of Kant’s philosophy with the idea that the ‘thing-in’itself’, which Kant said was unknowable, was something called Will. This was blind Will which underlay everything else in existence. Since he was also a self-declared philosophical idealist, I assume he meant that blind Will lay behind our perceptions of the world, rather than any actual independent world outside of us; this world presumably does not exist outside of our perception of it. Bishop Berkeley obviously thought in a similar way as his formulation of it in “To be is to be perceived” makes fairly clear.

It is not for me to argue with this metaphysical viewpoint, since, as far as I can see, it has just as much going for it as any of its alternatives, none of which can be established by argument one way or the other. I suspect we will always be condemned to grope around in the dark when it comes to determining the ultimate nature of things, and long may it be the case. (Metaphysics, after all, is the province of the Imagination rather than Reason, which is why it has a place in poetry.) Keats’s own notions concerning Negative Capability revolve round the idea that we should reject this constant drive towards certainty and become much more open to ‘the penetralium of mystery’ at the heart of the world. Keats’s spirit here is more akin to Kant’s in the Critique Of Pure Reason, although Kant did later go back on his position by bringing the ‘moral order’ into the equation, which he believed proved God existed in spite of all his earlier efforts to show that it couldn’t be proved one way or the other.

For Schopenhauer, blind Will is behind the world of representation, phenomena and perception. I am not 100% sure what Will could mean here (Drive? Impulse?), since I have always associated it with something voluntary and therefore born of consciousness – as in a conscious decision to do something and the will to carry it out. Schopenhauer’s Will is completely blind and unconscious, it has no thoughts of its own, but it has created consciousness to do its thinking for it. The impulse behind it is self-preservation in the unrelenting struggle for survival between individuals who are possessed of the self-same Will. Forgetting the actual idealist metaphysics involved, it is obvious to me that Schopenhauer has hit upon a very important insight here regarding the way ‘matter’ organises itself from its very simplest – sub-atomic? - forms into highly complex biological species and further – into ourselves. A reductionist would explain the complex forms purely in terms of the simplest ‘building-blocks’, i.e. the ‘higher’ and more evolved in terms of the ‘lower’ and less evolved. Schopenhauer’s schema allows us at least to think in terms of a shared something or other which they both have – namely Will – which organises ‘matter’ in both ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms.

This shared ‘something or other’, according to Schopenhauer, is blind and gropes in the dark to preserve itself. The trouble is, can we actually access this blind, unconscious Will, become conscious of it and know it? Schopenhauer thinks we can, because we are it and we have only to look inside ourselves to encounter it. However, I would argue that being and knowing belong to completely different realms in relation our own inner workings. Being after all, as Hegel recognised, has no determinate characteristics, so how can we ‘know’ anything’s being beyond its appearances, still less talk about it? Surely we come back to Kant’s “unknowable thing-in-itself” in consciousness’s own efforts to know whatever is beneath itself and render it conscious. It is analogous to Freud – who was very influenced by Schopenhauer – recognising that the conscious part of the psyche can never become directly conscious of its own unconscious underpinnings. And Freud was only talking about the psyche, not about the metaphysical constitution of the world. So how much further has Schopenhauer got than Kant himself had got before him in plumbing the depths of the ‘unknowable thing-in-itself’? I would say, no further at all. He may believe that he can surmise from the empirical evidence of the way the world, or the self, behaves but the fact that he cannot have direct access to it means that he cannot know it at all with absolute certainty. He is as much in the dark about it as Kant.

Notwithstanding my many doubts, Schopenhauer is a thinker who is well worth reading for his many valuable insights. His pessimism is only questionable because he takes it to such extremes and refuses to see the world from more than one highly jaundiced angle. That it should lead to an ascetic denial of the world seems to me to be a logical consequence of this way of thinking, as does his embrace of the ascetic strains within Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism – as opposed to the worldliness he purported to find in both Judaism and Islam – with the exception of Sufism. None of these flaws invalidate what may be insightful in his work. It is just that, like Nietzsche, I find myself in complete opposition to his damning of life and ascetic denial of the world - despite recognising that awful things happen in it.

Finally, perhaps it is appropriate to end with Schopenhauer’s approach to the subject of death. He says, for instance, that death is both the purpose and meaning of life. I dispute this. For me the meaning of life at the end of the day is the fact that we’ve lived it, and, if possible, to the full - drunk it to the dregs, as it were. That I think is what makes it worth living, and worth having lived even in the face of death. As for death itself and what happens after, well, it’s a question-mark, isn’t it? Nothing more; nothing less. In short, another Kantian "unknowable thing-in-itself". And because of that, yer pays yer money and yer takes yer chances. As in life, there are no guarantees one way or the other. In the end, it’s a question of casting the die and trusting to luck. Everything else is in the lap of the gods.

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February 21st, 2016

2/21/2016

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WELLSPRINGS
Richard Livermore

“'Shadow Consciousness' One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” ‪C. G. Jung

There is a difficulty in writing about poetry and where it comes from and it is one perhaps that, among philosophers, Heidegger alone has tried to address. After all, he is one of the few philosophers to actually take poetry seriously. He says in his often tortuous way that we should attend to Being and not just beings in our quest for such ‘origins’. But what can he possibly mean?

Perhaps one can answer this by saying the poets are not merely arrangers of words, chosen as if they were separate objects or things in the world around them. Rather they are immersed in words from the word go. Words are part of their very Being and not simply beings in their own right (Heidegger makes a big thing of the distinction between Being and beings.) which poets are supposed to manipulate to fulfil particular designs they may have. In other words, there is nothing instrumental about poetry, nothing which simply submits to the rigours of external techniques. What techniques it ‘employs’ are part of its own emergence into Being, the movement towards what Heidegger might call its un-concealment. Heidegger was right to say, “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while, in fact, language remains the master of man.” ‘Man’s’ subversion of this fundamental relation is, according to Heidegger, what drives ‘his’ essential Being into alienation. I cannot completely agree with Heidegger on the last point. I would side with Lacan, who, following Freud, would say that language – the Symbolic Order – is itself a medium of alienation, but from the perspective of the instincts and drives, which I think we must consider as integral to our Being as language itself is. Heidegger, perhaps, would like to keep ‘man’ in a state of pre-Freudian innocence, though he is essentially correct to point out that we are used by language as much as we use it and that our arrogant instrumentalist attitude towards it reflects our attitude toward Being as a whole, which we mistakenly believe we can separate ourselves from in a sort of subject-object fashion. Not that we should reject this kind of consciousness completely, or the praxis that corresponds to it. The point is to cast it into the perspective of Being or “Dasein”, to borrow Heidegger’s own word, and recognise how secondary it is.

What this dichotomising of “Dasein” – the word coined by Heidegger to refer to that being within Being which puts its own being in question, i.e., us - does is lead us away from Being and Dasein towards ourselves as no more than subjects relating to objects. Purged of all metaphysical presuppositions, (God, Spirit, Matter, Will and so on) the question of Being involves a return to Being on a deeper level, a sort of re-submergence into our essential Being seen as a kind of homecoming, whereby Being becomes our dwelling place again. I must admit to having a few problems with language like this because the frequent repetition of words like “Being” begins to seem almost mantra-like to me and I invariably start to lose focus when I feel that some kind of mantra or linguistic formula is being employed to take the place of thinking itself. This doesn’t mean that I don’t see what he’s getting at in his purely critical arguments against instrumental reason, logic, conscious praxis, rationalism, metaphysics, subjects, objects and so on. Furthermore, and this is a real plus, Heidegger’s stress on Being qua Being, mediated by Dasein, pre-empts Sartre’s reduction of Being and Dasein into Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, which are more or less Sartre’s equivalents of Subject and Object. I entirely concur with Heidegger here. Another difficulty I have with his thinking is simply that the effort to think ‘Being’ in more positive concrete ways is an impossibility, since it is clearly without any attributes. In other words, all you can say about Being is that it is; you can never say what it is and therefore never really orientate yourself towards it.

Heidegger is on surer ground, I feel, when he talks in terms of viewing our relation to Being as a sort of un-concealing, bringing forth what was previously concealed into the light of consciousness. I have had many such encounters, even in connection with my own poetry, when I have realised the poem was much smarter than I was and was able to tell me things which I could never have arrived at without it. Opening up to Being in such ways, therefore, might have value in this sense and prompt us towards instances of re-cognition. The last time this happened was fairly recently when someone pointed out how a flayed horse with its eyes “placed on a plate for the gods” in one of my poems could be seen as a form of primitive sacrifice. While writing the poem, I was only interested in the images and not concerned to join all the dots regarding their meaning. Therefore, I had not thought of this possibility. The suggestion then made me think of Peter Schaffer’s play, Equus, in which six horses had had their eyes struck out by a very disturbed 17 year old boy and how the psychiatrist treating him had to go back to ancient religion and Jung to find a clue to the boy’s behaviour. This is what I mean when I say that a poem can be smarter than the poet who wrote it.

It has often been a subject of great speculation to me how much of what Jung called the “Collective Unconscious” – as something integral to our Being – might enter poetry without our knowing. I have long since recognised that intentions don’t count for very much in poetry. This is how it has to be if what Heidegger called un-concealment is to take place and enter poetry without our knowing. Are all these unconscious elements part of our overall Being, which rises to the surface in poetry without our becoming aware of it at the time? If so, how might this happen? It is obvious that what consciousness locks onto is highly selective. But is this the case with ‘the Unconscious’? (Note to myself. Must avoid thinking of the unconscious as some kind of thing or noun, rather that simply as an adjective.) I think we should draw a distinction between seeing and looking. Looking is necessarily intentional, while seeing isn’t. You can see things out of the corner of your eye without looking at them, momentarily registering them and then moving on and forgetting them or remembering them later. How much of what is seen without being looked at is assimilated by us without our ever becoming aware of it? Surely, only that comes to consciousness which consciousness deems important at the time. The rest slips under its radar-screen. But does that mean it just disappears. What of the possibility of its having been instrumental in generating structures as we evolved necessary to the survival of the species, without awareness entering the equation at all?

All that, however, is very speculative. The question of Being itself is not so speculative. But it does need to be explained better. In talking about it, I suppose I could use a word like “spontaneous”, but that term has become too loaded to be very useful. However, if I refer to an ordinary piece of behavior like smiling, the point might become a bit clearer. There are spontaneous smiles, smiles that you cannot help producing and which often make other people smile as well. And then there’s the put-on smile, the rictus you affect in front of a camera, for instance, or the smile the Queen uses when she shakes hands with hundreds of complete strangers at Buckingham Palace. In the first instance, the smile just comes; you don’t have to do anything for it to happen, it just emerges from your Being as it were. In the second instance, it is put on for the benefit of others, it is a product, in other words, of instrumental reason and of you placing yourself as a subject in a world of objects – including other subjects of course – in relationships which Sartre would say were full of “bad faith” or Heidegger would say were “inauthentic”. The authentic smile has overflowed, as it were, flooded your face, your body-language and your whole demeanour, without you being able to control it. The non-authentic smile is a deliberate exercise, a way of attempting to control your environment. It is not an overflowing of “Dasein” at all, but part of an attempt to manipulate the external world in some way that divides you from both yourself and the world. Poetry, I believe, enters the world or comes into existence in a similar way to the authentic smile, or as Keats once said, like leaves on a tree. Once it emerges, you have to get it down and develop it, dropping everything else in the process. It comes as a ‘call’, but from your own Being, at the interface between your own Being (or “Dasein”) and an aspect of Being in general previously hidden from you, which is what I suspect, Heidegger means by “unconcealment”.
Poetry is often discussed in terms of subjects creating objects – or artefacts – as if it were a craft to which certain techniques were appropriate – rather like the craft of a stone-mason or cabinet-maker producing objects according to some pre-existing specifications. This assumes, more or less, that poetry is simply a product of instrumental reason and that while practicing it we are manipulating words which are seen as being ‘at our disposal’, or, to use Heidegger’s expression, ‘ready to hand’. But the very being which is supposed to be manipulating words in this way is ‘saturated’ with words. And that, of course, leaves the question of how it can get outside of itself (and its words) to treat them as objects to be manipulated by some kind of sovereign subject. Mostly, poetry emerges unbidden, imposing itself on the poet, whose activity is not sovereign, although, of course, it is crucial. Poetry, in short, to revert to Heideggerian language, emerges from the highly porous interface between Dasein and Being. I don’t think it can therefore simply be reduced to being a craft and the secret of writing poetry does not only consist in being a master of certain techniques. This is where the instrumentalist view of language leads us, however. It’s one of the many ways we have of dehumanizing and devaluing what we produce which itself emerges from the matrix of Being which we ourselves are an integral part of.

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November 16th, 2015

11/16/2015

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EPIC PERSPECTIVES

What is an epic poem? Definitions have been many and varied, so I might as well start by giving one of my own. Is an epic poem epic simply because it is long? I’ve heard people say that, but I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think that Wordsworth’s The Prelude or Byron’s Don Juan or even Homer’s The Odyssey are, properly speaking, epics. Is Dante’s Divine Comedy? I don’t honestly think so either. On the other hand I would gladly grant that status to Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s The Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I would also add the tradition of Bantu Myths and Legend, of which Vasamasulu Mutwa’s Indaba My Children is a small sample, to this list, as I would The Mahabharata. I have no criteria beyond the fact that they are all in some way or other about war. War is at the heart of all of them and that I think is what matters.
            I am going to take a risk here and say that there are what I would call aboriginal epics and derivative epics, the last of which are parasitical on a literary ‘epic tradition’. The Iliad falls, in my opinion, into the first of these categories, while The Aeneid and Paradise Lost fall into the second. The Iliad to me is simply about the madness or savagery of war, no embellishments, no religious doctrine or political agenda to self-consciously uphold. The gods are bastards who find the horrible things people do to each other quite entertaining; for life must be extremely boring up there on top of Olympus. The gods are there for comic relief; what they are not are moral exemplars. The Aeneid wants to justify the ways of Imperial Rome to Romans, just as Paradise Lost wants “to justify the ways of God to Man”, though that intention does tend to come unstuck when Satan enters the picture to fuck things up for God, who is a pretty colourless and featureless being. Give me the Judaic Jahweh any day, the irascible old bastard, to the concept of God worked out in both Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy. At least Jahweh is human.
            The interesting thing about both The Aeneid and Paradise Lost is the way they begin – as if to establish their credentials as ‘epic poems’ in the tradition of an original – namely, The Iliad. The Iliad begins by invoking the Muse.

“Rage, Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’s son, Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless                                                                               losses.”
(Trans. – Robert Fagles)

and so on. The Aeneid begins, not quite invoking the Muse, but otherwise in a similar way.

“I tell about war and the hero who first came from Troy’s                                                                         frontier,
displaced by destiny” (Trans. – Jasper Griffin)

and so on, while Paradise Lost famously begins thus:

“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse.”

Ok, so The Aeneid does not exactly invoke the Muse, but it is clear that it is trying to establish a link with Homer and a tradition which seems to have begun with The Iliad, just as Paradise Lost is. This whole business of self-consciously establishing links with ‘precursor poets’ and the tradition which began with them is in my opinion very suspect, since it seems to me to treat poetry as something literary or academic. How refreshing, therefore to find The Mahabharata beginning on a totally different note – as one would expect from a work in a different tradition.

First I acknowledge the eternal being,
Brahman, essence of everything that is,
source of all, the inconceivable
bliss-bestowing Vishnu, Hari Krishna.

And I bless the name of Sarasvati,
goddess of deep learning and of art,
she who can touch a poet’s tongue with silver.
To her I dedicate my epic poem.

So simple in essence and so modest and unpretentious, while at the same time acknowledging its religious affinities. Much of this may be down to the blank-verse, iambic pentameter translation of Carole Satyamurti, but I suspect that the original in Sanskrit has something to do with as well.
            The original of The Mahabharata is, I believe, thousands of pages long – making it the longest poem ever written. Satyamurti has given us about 850 pages, so it is fairly truncated and is therefore bound sometimes to come apart at the seams. Try condensing a poem of thousands of pages long into 850 pages without dropping a stitch and see how far you get. Take the example of the dog who accompanies Yudishthira to heaven. This dog suddenly materialises out of nowhere as on old friend who’d been there all along. But it is heartening how infrequently this actually happens.
            I can recommend The Mahabharata, because it is quite simply mind-blowing in what it conveys of the possibilities of epic-poetry beyond the narrow European perspective. It is not only about war, it is about a whole world-view with cosmic dimensions, which makes it a much richer treasure-trove than you will find in the Western tradition. The only time my interest in it began to flag was when Grandfather, Bhishma, was giving lessons to the new king, Yudishthira, about the right principles of ruling in accordance with Dharma. But even here, I was struck by how flexible Dharma could be, even down-right Machiavellian. Of course, the last thing a ‘just monarch’ should do is let his guard down and allow himself to be taken advantage of. Clearly, Machiavelli was not the first to teach the principles of statecraft and political survival. Dharma is all very well, but sometimes you must betray Dharma to uphold it. (Dharma is personified as a god, but I am using “it” out of convenience.) Contradiction is the name of the game and Dharma is not free of it either, though from a higher or more comprehensive perspective, Dharma’s will is being fulfilled, whatever devious tactics are used.
            This concern with Dharma is what raises The Mahabharata above the Western epic tradition, but I would be hard put to say exactly what Dharma is. In a way, it is like The Moral Law which governs the universe. I suppose one could describe it as the principle of cosmic balance. Of course such a principle could never be empirically verified - or falsified, for that matter – but it is held to be true in some kind of transcendental way. There are things you should do and shouldn’t do, and Dharma is the god who upholds the former and defends it against the latter. In a sense, it’s a bit like a less subjectivised version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative - “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” However, Kant had the disadvantage of not having had a religious world-view like Hinduism to lend his Categorical Imperative ‘proper’ authority. Another difference is that, for Kant, The Categorical Imperative is expressed in a highly abstract and bloodless language, whereas, in The Mahabharata, Dharma can be expressed in all sorts of concrete human ways - such as Yudishthira’s refusal to abandon the dog that had accompanied him on his journey to heaven because the dog had come to depend on him. (Dogs weren’t allowed in heaven, apparently.) The dog, of course, would turn out to be the god, Dharma, who had simply been testing Yudishthira.
            In this poem, then, a universal cosmic principle like Dharma is given a very human form in all sorts of ways. Moreover the spirit of Dharma is meant to rule at the expense of the letter, so that what you get in the end are not dogmatic rules of behaviour, but a flexible philosophy of life which transcends rules. It is Dharma, for instance, that Krishna defends in the famous section known as The Bhagavad-Gita before he reveals himself in his divine form to Arjuna in The Cosmic Vision. Dharma also lies behind Yudishthira's apparently foolish willingness to gamble his brothers, wife and all his possessions and power which leads to them all spending 13 years in the wilderness – but there is a point to all that. Dharma is not an easy notion to fathom unless you abandon all conventional ideas concerning ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and are willing to rise to a much more transcendent and human level in the field of morality.
            Of course, The Mahabharata being a Hindu poem, Dharma is also associated with preserving the status-quo – with Bramins and Kshatriyas (ruling-class warriors) on top and Shudras and Dalits (untouchables) at the bottom. I suppose this is to be expected from a poem with its lineage, but it doesn’t detract from the profundity of Dharma, though it does, of course, add a very important dimension to it which prevents us taking it too much at its word – especially in an India which Hindu nationalists want to reserve just for Hindus. Dogmatic religionism, it appears, is not simply confined to Christianity and Islam.
            In The Iliad, the equivalent of Dharma seems to be Apollo, who engineers the fall of Patroclus when he becomes too self-confident and has gone too far. It is on passing this threshold that Patroclus is killed by Hector – even though the death of Patroclus is necessary to bring Achilles back into the war, ensure the death of Hector and the eventual defeat of Troy. Apollo is on the side of the Trojans, which suggests that Dharma would be as well. After all, the Greeks are the invaders, the disturbers of the peace, the upsetters of the balance, much like the western forces that invaded Iraq or deposed Gaddafi in Libya, thereby opening a whole Pandora’s Box of mischief for themselves and the region.
            In The Iliad, the fate of Patroclus is similar to that of Arjuna’s son, Abhimanyu, in The Mahabharata, although Abhimanyu is not as important a catalyst in the plot as Patroclus is in The Iliad. Nonetheless, Abhimanyu’s death has something in common with that of Patroclus. It is brought about when he penetrates a cakravyuha, the wheel-formation of the Kaurava army, which closes behind him, leaving him isolated and exposed without his comrades to help him. This wheel-formation could be used as a metaphor for the threshold through which Patroclus had also passed, when he was struck suddenly from behind by Apollo. In other words, Abhimanyu went too far in trying to attain individual glory and become a ‘hero’, putting discretion aside for foolish ‘valour’, which is not something calculated to please Dharma any more than Apollo.
            However, although Apollo does tend to fulfil the function of Dharma in The Iliad, he is hardly central. Athena, who is the supporter of Odysseus is much more so. Athena is a martial god(dess) and I suppose one ‘indication’ that ‘history’ might be on the side of the Greeks, for all their upsetting of Dharma – or should I say Apollo. Not that retrospective historical justification is as important in The Iliad as it is in The Aeneid. Dharma is much more important in The Mahabharata than Apollo is in The Iliad, because the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas is a war to restore a broken balance and the rule of the Pandavas, which it is suggested has been usurped by the Kauravas, whose blind king, Dhritarashtra, is heavily under the baleful influence of his son, Duryodhama, who envies and hates the Pandavas. (It should also be remembered that the Pandavas and the Kauravas are cousins.) So it is a war between the ‘rightful’ rulers and those who had usurped their rule, which, of course, makes Dharma much more important.
            I am not going to say much more about The Mahabharata. It is an extra-ordinary poem in so many ways. It is also I believe a work in progress still. Wendy Doniger, the author of The Hindus, writes, “The Mahabharata grew and changed in numerous parallel traditions spread over the entire sub-continent of India, constantly retold and rewritten, both in Sanskrit and in vernacular dialects. It grows out of the oral tradition and grows back into the oral tradition; it flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village story-tellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic.” So, unlike the western epic tradition, it is still a living, breathing tradition. The western tradition revolves too much around the idea of The Book and canonical authors. Of course, there is a great deal more I could say about The Mahabharata, but space is limited. Suffice it to say that this 850 page translation is a real eye-opener regarding the possibilities of the Epic.

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A Few Random Thoughts On The Subject Of Poetry

10/6/2015

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Prosaic reality is an external reality, a reality of this and that in a homogeneous medium we like to call space-time. We are watching the lion stalking the zebra. We see the charge of the lion and the flight of the zebra, both taking place in this homogeneous ‘4D’ medium called space-time. Then we see the leap of the lion onto the back of the zebra, which falls and dies as the lion tightens its jaws round its throat. All this is part of our ‘4D’ view of the hunt. Soon, the zebra has become just the corpse of a zebra. What can we say about that? Well, only this: that in having become no more than a corpse, the Zebra has finally really entered the four-dimensional world of homogeneous space-time, whereas, before, it existed somewhere beyond this prosaic condition in another dimension entirely - the dimension of panic and fright, of pain and struggle, and finally perhaps submission to its inevitable fate. It’s a dimension that we as spectators might get a glimpse of from outside but can only really begin to enter through the imagination

The real challenge of poetry is to evoke more than the four dimensions we’re used to, the inner as well as the outer, as Homer does brilliantly when he has Apollo strike Patroclus from behind in the thick of battle just when Patroclus thinks it’s all going his way and he’s cockahoop with success. Apollo here is the form consciousness takes with the appalled realisation that you’ve finally gone too far, overstepped all prudent limits and rendered yourself completely exposed. Apollo adds another dimension to the spectacle of Patroclus’s death, a much more inward dimension. “Inscape”, in fact, would be a very good word for it.

String-theorists have speculated that ‘in the beginning’ the universe had 10 (or was it 11?) dimensions which split into 4 and 6 dimensions, the first becoming the 4 dimensions we know as space-time, while the other 6 curled up into infinitesimally small points and disappeared from our view. There may be more dimensions, of course, since my physics is poor and my mathematics even worse than poor, so don’t ask me to prove it, or tell you how it actually works. One thing I’m certain of, though, is that the 4D universe we daily inhabit is one which is completely external to us. We live in it, have to function in it, acquire some kind of mental map or image of it, if we’re to survive in it; in this sense we internalise it, but this internalisation is not of our essence. We know this universe consists of 3 spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension. Kant said that time is an internal intuition separate from the external intuition of space. But he was wrong. The internal intuition is that of duration, not time. Time is a function of the movement of objects through space; it is reckoned in years, millennia, nano-seconds, minutes, days, you name it. There is nothing internal about any of these, which is why Einstein was right to rope them all together into a bundle called space-time, adding that gravity was no more than a property of the curvature of this space-time, an aspect of its geometry.

David Bohm has shown us a way we might think of a higher-dimensional world. Think of a fish swimming in a tank with two cameras focused on it wired to two television sets, which we are watching. One of the cameras is pointed at the fish from the side of the tank and the other is pointed at the fish from the end of the tank. On the tv screens we see two fishes each swimming around in two-dimensional space and we think we are looking at two different fishes. But, if you’ll forgive the appalling pun, don’t we also think it’s a little bit fishy that, every time one fish turns, the other one turns in exactly the same instant, even though they turn in different directions? (I actually saw some fish doing this at the Brighton Aquarium, 20 or 30 of them, all turning together, as if they’d been drilled. The friend I was with called them Adolph Hitler fish!) Clearly it is an uncanny property of this 2D universe (or 3D universe, if you include time, which you must, I suppose) that everything happens in duplicate. If we live in this 2-D world, we obviously won’t know how to explain it; it will be seen as a miracle and that is the end of the matter. (Religion 1, Science 0.) However, if we take the viewer into the room where the fish is being filmed, it becomes immediately apparent that in a 4D universe there is nothing miraculous about it. (Religion 0, Science 1.) Some physicists believe that it is only by taking into account more dimensions than the four of space-time that many of the anomalies (miracles?) of our universe can be fully explained.

All well and good, I hear myself saying. But where do I fit into this higher-dimensional picture? And where does my consciousness of space-time fit into space-time itself, if at all? Does it belong to the same continuum? Or to one of those 6 other dimensions which broke off from our 4D universe and curled up inside it ‘in the beginning’? Furthermore, how does this 4D universe organise itself into atoms and molecules and organisms and higher life-forms and human-beings in human societies - for organize itself it seems to? Perhaps it really is a question of the chance mechanical interactions of bits and pieces in a purely 4D continuum. But I don’t believe it. So what does underly this principle of self-organisation we find in the world around us - from the simple to the relatively complex? I’m going to stick my neck out and hazard that the answer lies in one of these other 6 dimensions which broke off from this 4D world ‘in the beginning’. I do not think we will find the essence of ourselves by looking for it in a laboratory, but in this other dimension consciousness occupies, a dimension which can no more be seen from outside than the panic, fear and pain of the zebra being killed by the lion can be seen by the camera-clicking tourist on safari.

Which brings us back to Apollo, thumping poor old Patroclus on the back and causing him to ‘lose it’ at last. Apollo came out of the blue to do this, as least as far as Patroclus was concerned. He came from behind when least expected. Perhaps he came from that other dimension, entering these four dimensions through a hole so small no one could see him. Where do thoughts come from? If we could answer that to our satisfaction, we’d know where gods came from as well.

But I’ll tell you where thoughts come from, Mr. Smarty-Pants says, They come from other thoughts, which, of course, begs a very big question. Where did the first thought come from? That’s called an infinite regress in the philosophy trade. Perhaps the ‘first thought’ came out of that other dimension, which stretches back for ever and ever incubating all thoughts. And why not? Time is a purely external dimension and what we have here is something internal, something enfolded, not part of this space-time continuum. So why should it not transcend the dimension of time and stretch back for ever and ever. And why should not this extra dimension be where we hail from as well, not just in the sense of ‘in the beginning’, but every day of the week.

Of course, not all thoughts proceed logically from immediately previous thoughts. Like electrons, thoughts ‘jump’. And sometimes a previous thought stimulates a process which stretches back in time long before the thought before the previous thought, to couple with a more remote thought and produce a whole new series of thoughts as its progeny. Logical thought, that is to say thought in which thoughts are contiguous with one another and follow each other in an ordered sequence, is as prosaic as cause and effect events which occur in 4D space-time.

As for ‘science’, Zbigniew Herbert once wrote a prose-poem called Wooden Die. “A wooden die can be described only from without. We are therefore condemned to eternal ignorance of its essence. Even if it is quickly cut in two, immediately its inside becomes a wall and there occurs the lightning swift transformation of a mystery into a skin.” David Peat in his book, Blackfoot Physics, says “Western science is a triumph of understanding the surfaces of things. The prehensile power of the eye, hand and mind gives us the sense of reaching to the inner sense of things by breaking them apart, dissecting the parts, exposing ever smaller entities and ever more detailed surfaces.” It seems that Herbert and Peat have both sussed out the ultimate futility of the scientific quest for a knowledge based on the assumption that you can reach the truth behind observed surfaces by reducing those surfaces to other observed surfaces. This notion, however, is only intelligible if you take a four-dimensional universe at face value. I call it prosaic because it leaves no place for the power of the imagination in attempting to get inside the essence of things. The external eye and the understanding are all that are important in this kind of ‘science’; it has no place for the inner eye or any notion of inscape.

In his book, Wholeness And The Implicate Order, David Bohm speaks of the Enfolded and Unfolded Orders. A poem in its essence and truth belongs not to the Unfolded but the Enfolded Order. In fact, all consciousness is rooted in the Enfolded Order, unfolding as thoughts, images, feelings, emotions and so on. Science, which deals largely with external ‘objective’ phenomena, is oriented towards the Unfolded Order. Poetry towards the Enfolded Order. Perhaps that’s why poetry and science occupy two different realms. Poetry places us in a universe where rocks and trees are conscious. They needn’t be conscious in the sense that we are conscious and we don’t need to adopt an anthropomorphic attitude towards them, but the same enfolded ‘spirit’ underlies their own being in the world as our own.

Some things are more enfolded than others. Some people will never ‘get poetry’ because of the complexity of its enfoldedness. This has nothing to do with intellect or I.Q., simply receptivity and imagination. An ex-flat-mate of mine had an I.Q. of 180 but was a philistine nevertheless. Although he was a ‘scientist’, his scientific culture extended no further than his specialist field. As for poetry, don’t even go there. So we are not talking of intellect or the understanding here, which is largely oriented towards the unfolded aspects of the world. We are talking of the way we imaginatively encounter the world, which extends to our whole way of being in the world - or should I say, of the world’s being in us? This is not a world made abstract like the one science constructs. Each moment of the world’s being in us is unique, and art has a special relationship with that uniqueness which science doesn’t have. In science, repetition and reproducibility of experiments to get the same results is essential, and only possible because it deals with things which people can shift around like draughts on a draughts-board in a 4D world which is abstract and manipulable in that way. On the other hand, once a poet passes up an opportunity to write the poem that is in him or her to write at that particular moment, that poem is lost for ever. In poetry, unlike science, there really is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow - or the writing of a poem. And that is the case because it unfolds out of what was previously enfolded.

I am rereading Robert Graves’s The White Goddess a book whose main argument I don’t go along with. Graves seems to be arguing that myth has a primary status in poetry and is essential to the ‘grammar’ of poetry he is trying establish. To me he seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Myth is a product of what, for the want a better expression, I will call the ‘poetic faculty’. The poetic faculty does not derive from myth but the other way round. When poets use myth, they do so in response not to the myth itself, but to the poetic content within the myth, and for that reason, they are not constrained to be ‘true’ to the myth when they adapt it to their own poetic needs. Myths are not part of what Chomsky might call the “deep grammar” of poetry, as Graves believed. An already formed myth is something outside of us. It is there in the world, like a tree or a house. Poetry, on the other hand, comes from inside of us, emerging from another dimension entirely. Of course, it encounters myths, along with houses and trees, and adapts them to its own purposes. But in that encounter, it is primary - the myth, the tree, the house is secondary. They belong to a realm akin to the 4D world which we daily inhabit and take for granted.

I had this argument with a friend fairly recently. I argued that the poet no more chooses the form of a poem, than a molecule chooses its own particular form. The form arrives with the poem, and the content itself is decisive in determining the form - and the form the content. So the form does not depend on a conscious choice prior to the act of writing. One does not say, for example, “Now I am going to write a sonnet. What shall I say in it?” because what you can say, and the way that you say it emerge simultaneously. It is a unified act, whose origins lie in a kind of preconscious orientation towards what you say and how you say it together. The two do not arrive separately but as two aspects of a bundle. And if indeed, as I have suggested, poetry’s origins lie in that higher-dimensional realm, then this is inevitable. Likewise, it’s not one’s intentions in writing that count in the end, but the end-product of the poem you have written, which may be very different from the one you intended. To claim that one’s prior intentions are decisive is to make the mistake of those who believe that our thoughts are intentional. After all, if our thoughts were completely intentional, we’d have to think them before we thought them. The same with poetry. It just emerges in that way. This, of course, makes it a dangerous activity, for anything which just emerges in that way can’t be controlled. Which brings us, by a rather circuitous route, back to our safe 4D prosaic reality and “things which people can shift around like draughts on a draughts-board.” to suit their own ends. Now that’s a reality which can be controlled.

It wasn’t so long ago that a biologist by the name of Rupert Sheldrake came along and, borrowing some of his language from Chaos and Complexity Theory, started to talk of things like “strange-attractors”, “attractor-basins and “chreodes” in relation to biology. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he also threw in some terms of his own invention, such as “morphic-fields” and “morphic-resonances”. He has been jumped on by the scientific establishment ever since. Nowadays, no one speaks of Sheldrake anymore, except to sneer when his name happens to come up. It’s like a lot of poets I think who get air-brushed out of the picture because they write in a different way from the mainstream or treat of a different subject-matter which hasn’t yet been integrated by that self-same mainstream. Personally, I don’t know if Sheldrake is right or wrong, but I do like the idea of morphic-fields and morphic-resonances which, taken out of their biological context, are suggestive to me as a poet. For when I think of how a poem comes into existence, I see that all is not as it might seem to outsiders. When I write a poem I am not making conscious decisions as to how I will write it; instead I find myself ‘falling into’ that pattern of writing – whatever it is – in a willy-nilly way. It is as if the major work of writing the poem was done before I even set pen to paper and I am just adding the finishing touches. I suppose Michelangelo was getting at something like this when he said that the sculpture was already inside the block of marble before he even started to chisel. For me there is no greater ‘proof’ that we inhabit more dimensions than the four we normally encounter in life and that the ‘higher’ dimensions cannot be approached through the four external dimensions. They are ‘curled up’ inside them, inaccessible to those who do not take an inward approach to them.

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August 08th, 2015

8/9/2015

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ROJAVA RISING

In a part of the world where you least expect it, a region that has been witness to some of the worst cases of deliberate barbarity and inhumanity that have been seen since the Second World War, a new ethnically inclusive, ecological, feminist social experiment has been putting down roots and is already beginning to flourish. It is an experiment which could quite easily be snuffed out by the regional players in its vicinity - Turkey especially – but it is nonetheless growing and has even become a centre for trade and commerce in the region according to recent reports.

It is not my intention here to say very much about what is taking place in the Kurdish Cantons of Rojava itself. It will be sufficient to mention that it is an extremely hopeful experiment in the art of living together in which decisions are made by people on the ground in their own assemblies, rather than by politicians or states. What is going on there has been variously described as Democratic Confederalism, Stateless Democracy or more simply Anarchy – but the kind of Anarchy which is characterised more by the absence of states than the absence of order. This kind of anarchy has been tried before – most notably in Spain during the Civil War and also Ukraine during the Russian Revolution - but for many external historical reasons did not survive long enough to bear permanent fruit. One, of course, may well doubt that the experiment in Rojava will bear permanent fruit as well, but, at the time of writing, this is far from certain or clear. And even if Rojava were to survive the murderous attentions of the Islamic State backed by Turkey, could it survive what the world calls “development” – in short acquiring a richer and more diversified economy. That I think is the real question facing it. Indeed, that is also an important philosophical question in its own right connected to how states first appeared on our planet. Did they emerge as Marxists tend to believe because the accumulation of wealth and a surplus brought into existence the question of who was to lay claim to that surplus, or did they emerge as some anarchists have suggested from conquest and subjugation of some groups or collectivities over others. These are questions concerning the pre-history of states which have not been empirically proved one way or the other. If the experiment in Rojava survives all the military attempts to destroy it, and continues to flourish, it may well provide the answer to some of these questions.

These questions are philosophical because they raise issues about the nature of states which are transcendental more than empirical. Empirical questions are relatively easy to answer because they come down to facts in the end. Transcendental questions are both more difficult and uncertain, because they involve the interpretation of facts. Facts about the pre-historical origin of states must be very thin on the ground and because of that, interpretations are bound to be conjectural. But since we never proceed on the basis of facts alone anyway, conjecture will always be integral to the method of how we interpret them – which means, of course, we can never be certain. However, some scholarly work seems to have been done in the fields of both anthropology and archaeology, and though none of it has arrived at definite conclusions they do allow for some kind of starting point.

One school of thought suggests that states were a natural outcome of the development of civilisation itself, which in turns was the product of agriculture and the emergence of cities. In other words, as soon as people started to live, work and trade together in groups larger than kinship-groups, with their systems of chieftainships, states emerged as a matter of course to regulate their affairs. This view is contradicted by a few notable exceptions such as the Harappan and Mohenjo-daro cultures of the Indus Valley, whose political organisation appears to have been that of complex systems of chieftainships rather than states as such. This school of thought also suggests some kind of social compact was involved with the emergence of states whereby each individual gave up his or her freedom voluntarily for the sake of security and that this trade-off was forced on people due to their society having reached a certain stage of development. Let’s call this the Naturalistic School of Thought, since it presupposes that all this happened naturally as a matter of course. It is, of course, no less conjectural than other theories, but it has the advantage of being what our rulers would like us to believe. After all, it is the implicit assumption behind just about every TV documentary that you can watch on the subject.

The second school of thought espoused by Engels one might call the Economic Base School of Thought since it presupposes that the state emerged only when society had achieved a certain economic level of development, one which allowed surpluses to emerge, access to which would have been fiercely contested. One thing seems to be missing in this analysis and that is how class inequality could emerge and spread if one class did not already have the coercive means to impose its will on another. Surely, without those coercive means being already in place, the exploited class would just have revolted and restored the status quo ante – namely equality. It is a theory which does tend to put the cart before the horse because it begs the question of how it could happen without coercion in the first place.

The third school of thought – which I shall call the Military Conquest School of Thought was originally put forward by Franz Oppenheimer in his book, The State, and has been elaborated and given a ‘Kurgan dimension’ by Larry Gambone much more recently. Both Oppenheimer and Gambone spoke of nomadic herding societies which, although stateless, nevertheless were highly militarised and also hierarchical. They had slaves and regarded women as chattel. However, although they were stratified, they did not organise along state-lines because they were too nomadic and mobile. Therefore, they remained chieftainships. What was eventually to precipitate the emergence of states was their conquest of more sedentary and less war-like agricultural peoples in outlying areas due, according to Gambone anyway, to climate change, which forced their migration. Because of their already militarised life-style, the nomadic herding societies were easily able to conquer the agriculturalists and impose their will on them and in the process become a warrior-aristocracy able to ‘live off the fat of the land’ as it were. According to this view, a state is nothing but a group of people able to monopolise the means of violence in order to subdue the populace of a given circumscribed territory. All else - exploitation, class-inequality, class-rule and so on - emerged once the monopoly of the means of violence had been secured and proto-states had emerged. From this point of view, Cameron is wrong to say that the Islamic State is not a state, because it is as much a state as the one he’s in charge of.

All these theories, in my opinion, tend to be a little abstract and perhaps we do need a more complete account of how states could have emerged. Abdullah Ocalan, who presently languishes in solitary confinement in a Turkish prison has, in his Prison Writings – The Roots Of Civilisation, given such an account in connection with the emergence of the State in the Fertile Crescent in terms of a trinity in which the ideology (religion) supplemented the state and the economy of early Sumerian society. He deals with a period that was more historical than pre-historical, but he does so making implicit connections between them. As I have already said, he sees it in terms of a trinity in which, ideology, force and economics are all closely intertwined to the extent of having fully penetrated each other, “generating a historically unique synergy that makes me think of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Ocalan believes that the power and influence of religion was critical in the formation of early states and that it was every bit as important as naked force and economic exploitation. When the state emerged, it was seen as a function of the whole cosmic order, which made priesthoods just as important as warrior-aristocracies. The male emphasis also should be noted. Power was wrested from female deities within the emerging pantheon and placed in the hands of male gods. Babylonian mythology seems to bear this out, with Tiamat being displaced by Marduk in a great cosmic battle between them in which patriarchy was obviously triumphant. Ocalan has clearly added his own refinements to the ideas outline above, and made them much more complete.

Ideology, then, according to Ocalan is every bit as important as military dominance and economic exploitation in the formation of states. Earlier on, ideology would have had a theological complexion, nowadays it takes a much more diverse form – e.g. of the world according to the mass media – now being thankfully undermined with the emergence of the internet – the ‘scientific world-view’, ‘democracy’ - where an abstract Demos is served by a parliamentary priesthood – ‘market forces, the technocratic cult of ‘the expert’, consumerism, ‘austerity’ (but not for the rich!) and, of course, religion in all its various guises. In that sense, Ocalan has done us a great service by pointing up the importance of ideology.

For me, however, there is one thing wrong with Ocalan’s schema. It is triadic – that is to say dialectical. History is viewed in terms of interconnected ‘moments’, though not, of course, in a temporal, linear sense. Although he rightly takes issue with both Hegelian Idealism and Marxist Dialectical Materialism, like them, his historical schema presupposes an identity between the real and the rational. If the real wasn’t rational and vice versa in the Hegelian sense, or if the rational didn’t reflect the real (material reality) in the Marxian sense, there is still a sense in which the rational is being used to represent the real. Deleuze rightly criticised the dialectical pathway to veridical truth, by saying it was based on a “metaphysics of identity” (between thought and ‘reality’). Dialectical oppositions are founded on this. Thought may advance by positing opposing viewpoints, but it still cannot escape being thought. In other words ‘reality’ still does what it will and goes where it will irrespective of thought. Instead of allowing itself to be imprisoned in all these ‘unions of opposites’ whose value depends on the precisely articulated definitions of a ‘thesis’ which produces an ‘antithesis’ and then a ‘synthesis’, (all of which definitionally depend on each other), it would be much better to adopt simple alternative viewpoints whereby each point of view is allowed its autonomy and not forced through a dialectical meat-grinder.

What I am trying to do here is issue a warning. Beware of dialectics whereby one thing appears to beget another in an almost pre-ordained manner according to how it is thought. Hegel believed he had history sussed, as did Marx, but history was to prove a bit more elusive. The relationship between thought and reality is not determined by thought or argument. Indeed, all too often, reality takes thought by surprise. One can’t do without thought, of course, but one should still be very careful not to be caught in its deadly coils. What is required is a much more open-ended approach – namely, critical thought without the straight-jacket of dialectics. It is, after all, the revealing word that matters, not the revealed. What is happening in Rojava is in my opinion a miracle and a beacon of hope for the rest of the world caught up as it is in the stale impasse of the various ‘alternatives’ which are currently ‘on the table’. It is creative; it is exploring totally new pathways, but it also faces huge challenges – not least from Turkey and the Islamic State. (One should not forget that what they are engaged in is also anathema to the neo-liberal order of contemporary capitalism and therefore ultimately the US and the EU). Hopes are riding on it, and not just the hopes of people directly involved in Rojava.

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4/13/2015

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NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

I crossed swords with someone recently who said history was only a question of empirical facts, and once you sort these out, there’s nothing else for anyone to do but acquiesce to their truth. I responded by suggesting that even the facts may need interpreting and that there are many gaps between the facts which may need to be filled in and fleshed out. However, I don’t think he wanted to listen to what I had to say, so I shrugged my shoulders and simply went on my way. That’s why I think it is important to talk about the relationship between truth and fact, because for some people, those who constantly use facts to police discourse, for instance, “nothing but the truth” means “nothing but the facts", and there the matter comes to an end. One thing I do know, however, is that when you are being asked to swear on The Bible, The Koran or The Origin of Species to “…tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” in a court of law, you are not simply being asked to give an account of the facts. There are forensic experts for that.

The empirical is the realm of the actual, the transcendental is the realm of the possible. It is not only the physical universe which is overwhelmingly composed of ‘dark matter’, the mental and intellectual universe is as well. Where facts exist, they are thought to refer to things which are actually there, despite the fact that they often get overturned and new facts are put in their place. Facts, of course, are largely irrefutable and you won’t get far without them, but the truth itself actually lies elsewhere, in the realm of the possible which can never become actual, for once a truth becomes a fact, it ceases being a truth and enters “the dull catalogue of common things” - to quote Keats. The transcendental is this realm of the possible rather than actual and the truth lies in this realm, not the other. Einstein’s theory that gravity, as a function of the curvature of space-time, could bend light, was a truth until it became a fact – that is to say until someone more mortal than Einstein himself had verified it and placed it in the “dull catalogue of common things”. Oedipus, struck out his eyes when the truth he both sought and also dreaded had crystalised into a fact – that is to say, had ceased being a possibility he dearly wanted to reject, and become something which Wittgenstein would say was the case and no longer just a possibility. In the sense a truth is like the wave before it has collapsed into a particle. As a wave, it has multiple possibilities, as a particle these multiple possibilities are finally reduced to one and one only. Suddenly its possibilities are behind it and it has entered the realm of the actual, the empirical.

The transcendental realm is likewise a realm of possibilities. It presupposes realms of theory and interpretation which can never be certain until they are proven as facts. Each of those theories and interpretations may be equally true - depending, of course, on how probable they are. But they may also be equally false. Some may be more statistically likely, but certainty will still elude them until they are established as facts – which is after the event, not before it. The particle was not a particle until it was observed as a particle – that is to say one which had gone through one of a number of slits – or whatever it is the wave has to pass through. Until then it was like a truth before it has become a fact. In other words, its truth existed only as one of many possibilities, each of which could have been both true and false. After a truth (wave) has traversed the analogical slit, it ceases to be a truth (wave) and becomes no more than a fact (particle) that can no longer be falsified.

The world is full of facts and they are of interest to us only because they are there - or should I say refer to things which are there. The world is, as Wittgenstein says, everything that is the case – which can be construed as everything which is a fact. The world contains no truths, only facts. Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade at sea-level, which, of course, is an important fact to know if we are by the seaside and want to make a cup of tea or boil an egg. Apart from that, it’s of very little interest. Truths have no place in the world until they become facts and then they cease to engage us. Truths only exist in the mind and the mind is precisely what the world is not – although a world could not exist without minds to construct them, of course. As Sartre said, consciousness (or mind) negates world and sets itself up on the ruins of the world. Truths are perceived by the mind, but truths are not in the world as such, only facts are, and they do not enter the world until they become facts and therefore stop being truths. Monsieur Poirot has a hunch that so and so did the crime, but he cannot prove it. He may be in possession of the truth (or may not) but this truth is not yet a fact. His task is to establish it as a fact and make it enter the world and, until that happens, his truth is no more than a hunch taxing his little grey cells. Here we see that the truth has a subjective dimension which facts do not. No-one can dispute a fact. Everyone can dispute a truth, because it is still ‘only in the mind’. Its ground is transcendental rather than empirical. To become empirical, it must pass through all the protocols of fact-making. So, in a sense, a fact is a truth which has been dubbed a fact by the world, which is perhaps why a nice bourgeois paper like The Grauniad has a section called “Comment is free; facts are sacred.” Facts, of course, share in the nature of the sacred; which is why they are revered, but that doesn’t mean they are the same thing as truths. A truth is what exists before it has been dubbed a fact and recognised as such. This also means that truth is not the same as knowledge, because, unlike knowledge, truths are things which are locked away from the world, that is to say they are merely convictions which have yet to cross the threshold of a world and been turned into facts. Therefore, the truth will always exist in the realm of the controversial. This is what makes truths poignant and dangerous – unlike facts - they exist in the realm of risk and there is still something at stake in them which isn’t in facts.

Wittgenstein, who clearly had a nose for the truth, says “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” The world is clearly no more of things than it is of truths. We know facts; we blindly bump into things, because they exist beyond a world made up of the totality of facts. A tree in the generic sense is a fact, not a thing. This tree and that tree are things, however. Facts fit into hierarchical categories, things do not. Things are alone, standing there for themselves and no others, only related to other things through the totality of facts which transcends them as things and situates them as facts in the world. Things are unique. Facts are general. Things are aboriginal, facts are derivative and it is through their being aboriginal that things have something in common with truths – quite apart from the fact that truths themselves are more about things than facts. They are both outside of the world as Wittgenstein’s totality of facts. We encounter things individually, this stone or that stone, not stones in general. But, if we did not have the concept of stones in general, we could not know that what we had encountered was a stone and it therefore would not be part of our world. Their being part of a world implies our own familiarity with the kinds of thing that are in it such as stones. Perhaps that explains why poets, who are connected more directly to both things and truths are considered unworldly and are not really at home in a world of facts. However, let’s leave that in abeyance for now.

The world we live in is a world in which facts are valued more than truths. Facts are useful. Truths are not. In fact, truths are never welcome in a world which takes its bearings exclusively from facts, because they threaten that world and the taken-for-grantedness of its facts. Monsieur Poirot was always an annoying little sod – especially to the fact-minded Inspector Japp - because he valued the truth as much as the facts. Not that he disregarded the facts, but because he was able to draw a line of demarcation between the transcendental realm of the truth and the empirical realm of the fact, the inner and outer, he perceived a hell of a lot more things than Japp. Wittgenstein, of course, did not acknowledge an inner world and maybe he was right. Perhaps we should talk instead of inner events, and the coming to pass of truths as kinds of inner events, which may, or may not, impact on the external world of the fact.

I cannot emphasis too strongly this subjective dimension of truth as opposed to the objective realm of the fact, of truth as conviction before it is fact. The transcendental realm which harbours the truth (as it may harbour lies, fantasies, dreams, puns, bon mots, proto-plays, musical phrases, and so on and so forth), is a fundamentally uncertain one, because it is a realm of possibilities and multiple paradigms, each of which may be equally true, although they may exclude one another or cancel each other out. Human nature is such as to want definite answers, neatly pre-packaged in the form of facts. But what if there are only partial answers at best? Answers with fissures and gaps in the middle which continually open up and which constantly need to be filled in afresh? What price your theories, your transcendental assumptions, which promise the whole truth and end up only with parts of the truth? What does that do to the truth? Is truth something we can ever permanently possess like a fact? Or is it something like a path or road, without a final destination, which deposits facts en route, as the horse you are riding on deposits its dung? ‘The truth’ might be encapsulated in facts, but it will also surpass facts, while another truth will be incubated to challenge what has just been surpassed. So, once again, what if there was no such thing as the truth in the sense of a fact? What if the truth was only a way, like The Tao? Where would that leave those like the person I mentioned in the first paragraph who think the truth simply lies in the facts?

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NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

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WHY I AM NOT AN ATHEIST

shylock the extremist

a tale of two books

philosophy and science

THE ultimate miserabalist

WELLSPRINGSRichard Livermore

EPIC PERSPECTIVES

ROJAVA RISING

NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

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WELLSPRINGS
Richard Livermore