My name is John. England is mine and it owes me a living, etc. — expect sibylline, marmoreal sentences ranging over metaphysics, logic, and logical truth, exclamations of beauty to be found in the quotidian, a celebration of sempiternal simple objects, of unbound variables, the nature of representation in general and of propositional representation in particular, the status of mathematics, human athletic achievement, the many gods and their jealous votaries, a monitoring of the bounds of sense, of philosophy and scientific theory, solipsism and the self, ethics and the mystical, aesthetics and the religiose, the several smutty moments in great literature. some lies, many rumours, lots of calumny.
📻 here we are kind to snails
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But Cordelia is the quiet absolute; her very silence is the still centre of the turning world.
— Ann Pasternak Slater
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Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
— T. S. Eliot, from Burnt Norton ii, Four Quartets
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Have I been understood? — Dionysos against the Crucified . . .
— Friedrich Nietzsche, the final line in Ecce Homo
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… and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris,
1914-1921.
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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// Spotify 🎧🌻
:: sensibilities ::
• Comitting to intellectual freedom, while disavowing and attacking ideology:
To be clear, an ideology is by definition a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality, and therefore always vulnerable to the recourse of violence (verbal and/or physical) whenever it is moved to defend itself, especially when those areas of reality-inadequacy are being highlighted. Furthermore, an ideology is in the business of aggrandising those who subscribe to it, and by definition demonising those who do not.
Solzhenitsyn wrote,
‘Physics is aware of phenomena which occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist at all until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed. Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life, but just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.’ He went on to say: … ‘The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, because they had no ideology.’
Ideology, along with organised religion, bring about a disastrous fusion: that of violence and self-righteousness; this allows for a savagery without stain. It provides in humans an inbuilt circuit-breaker for recognising the threshold magnitude of an evil.
• Judging or interacting with the individual on merit alone. I could not care less about your perceived (actual or imaginary) disadvantages or sufferings (of an associated group or you as an individual). That’s not my problem, nor should mine be yours; to expect preferment due to them is inherently perverse and dangerous.
To be clear: I’m talking individually here, not nationally / economically; the state has certain responsibilities to all its citizens, each to their needs; this responsibility is derived from both the taxes and the social contract a polity obliges from its people.
• A disavowal of the reflexive notion that our basic sense of what is Good and Evil is reduced to the following myopic formula:
Good people or ideas = (come from) the powerless.
Bad people or ideas = (come from) the necessarily powerful.
This ought to be seen as self-evidently pernicious and inimical to any notion of development on both a personal and societal level, but somehow today is the default in western mainstream discourse. I reject it wholly and am repelled by those who promote it.
• A disavowal of race obsession. Society should endeavour to be by default colourblind, while maintaining and celebrating without prejudice the multiform cultures and traditions that embody the said society, within the laws of that said same. Promoting preferment or demotion or the throttling of opportunity due to race is inherently perverse, retrograde and dangerous.
• A refusal to replace personality with identity. Your ‘identity’ is not a catch-all accessory that inures you from your actions or your espoused ideas; it is not a shield, yet it can often be a marker for your obvious subservience to an ideology, and due to past enormities of said ideology you shouldn’t be surprised if people, and myself, don’t want anything to do with you. You’re a human being, and an individual, not a capriciously customisable gnostic mannequin connected to a morally insuperable hive-mind.
• Debate over denunciation, persuasion over mere public shaming. Do not presume to tell me how I should think and feel about a person or idea. Ex cathedra positions are hard-won and earned; presuming this position without merit is absurd and should be exposed, and furthermore, if you’re able to and in the mood: mocked, whenever encountered.
• The rule of law over the self-righteous fury of the mob. History teaches that the mob is capable of all and any depravity, and always feels justified in the act, however obscene.
• That said, it is vital to understand that an uninformed majority will always lose a battle for information against an informed minority. It’s important to notice when a manipulative minority is holding an unaware majority to ransom. This is, again, particularly prevalent when dealing with ideologues.
I’m always open to respectful criticism or debate, or even just discussion, about these views : feel free
note. pfp me a year ago. n. tags image & text are my own and saved against all commercial copyright (you’re welcome to reblog those still)
Vico's fantasia is indispensable to his conception of historical knowledge; it is unlike the knowledge that Julius Caesar is dead or that Rome was not built in a day or that thirteen is a prime number, or that the week has seven days; nor yet is it like knowledge of how to ride a bicycle or engage in statistical research or win a battle. It is more like knowing what it is to be poor, to belong to a nation, to be a revolutionary, to fall in love, to be seized by nameless terror, to be delighted by a work of art.
Isaiah Berlin — Giambattista Vico and Cultural History
Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is all cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned... but here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines.
And they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.
in a lifetime of reading it stands to reason you’re bound to come across remarkable things. but just occasionally you come across something beyond the merely remarkable. what would you call it? something gilded or lapidary and yet still seeming new, organic, the cleanest thing you’ve read in years; ineffably heir to only and all: the magnetic moment it finds you, to those of the past, and to all posterity. you get the picture, you know the feeling. anyway, one of those moments happened to me today.
for context: Ahab gathers the men on the quarter-deck and expresses the true purpose of the voyage: revenge, against the great white whale that dismasted him and took his leg. Starbuck, his first mate, is disturbed by the news, so much so he dares to challenge his mighty captain’s reasoning, bravely saying to him, ‘Vengeance on a dumb brute! — that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged by a dumb things seems blasphemous.’ — to which Melville, having spent 145 pages carefully building to the revealing moment, gives us this refulgent sublime glittering outburst from the captain in reply:
‘Hark ye yet again, — the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines.
Take all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood.
In Maltese, the word for Lent is 'Randan' (derived from the Arabic 'ramadan'). In Glaswegian, 'out on the randan' means going out rowdily and drinking unto inebriation. Language is a labyrinth of many wonders.
