Choice

Autonomous choice has value, however, only in an environment that is rich in choice worthy options. John Gray Enlightenment’s Wake p 12 summarising argument of Joseph Raz’s Morality and Freedom.

And more: from Berlin: incommensurabilities among ultimate values set a limit to the ambitions of theory in both ethics and politics. .. politial life as being permanently intractable to rational reconstruction.

Idea then: forms of communal action under different types of states/ traditions. [eActivism as an archetypal instance of liberal rights based ‘communal’ activism? vs types of activism in China and other authoritarian states vs secessionist activism.

my birthday poem

Written one line at a time by guests on Sunday. Not all sober. Some too young. Manuscript hard to read in places. No admissions. Make of it what you will. E&OE.

He looks good in a cap; And a Tshirt that reads like a map.

We’re consumers of friendship; you are our choice.

We turn on our telly and hear your voice;

He’s had a few girlfriends and taken a few drugs. He’s been in a band about fxxxers and slugs.

But now he salsa dances all day and night. So why does he always seem perky and bright?

Night after night, day after day, we wish we could live a more Gordonish way.

Thank you for being so gay.

We love you just like that, even with your silly hat.

You’re funny, really fun to play with.

Have lots of fun before your fifty. ith.

the danger of resolution

When I was younger I used to make resolutions, which I imagined were virtuous. I was less anxious to be what I was, than to become what I wished to be. Now I am not far from thinking that in irresolution lies the secret of not gowing old. Gide The Counterfeiters 296

France and Italy and other places …

.. said Robert Dessaix (just after discussing ‘Uzes, a gem’) at about 8.30 into this Slow TV broadcast, meaning perhaps that other places, other countries, the 180 odd there are, count collectively less than France or Italy.

On a more quotidian level it’s the sort of thing someone might say (unremarkably) at a picnic – that’s where they are going or want to live or mostly travel. And thinking about it that’s the two countries I’ve been the most places in outside my home country (perhaps more time all up in London than Italy). I’m sure there are more ads for flat swaps in the New York Review of Books for those three countries etc.

So what is it about the two of them?

nowhere to go

Image of cover of Arabesques

Modern travel:

He was exploring his own mind’s labyrinths rather than the casbah’s. This was a moment of pure self-discovery, not a heroic quest to find the Northwest Passage or the sources of the Nile; this was merely dallying with danger rather than a swashbuckling fight to the death with monstors or marauding natives. Dispiritingly this sort of adventure is the only sort left to most of us now that there’s virtually nowhere left for us to go – nowhere wildly unfamiliar – and absolutely nothing left to do when we get there except photograph it. Dessaix Arabesques p17

.. photograph it or perhaps write about it? … and it might be a mere quibble but there was ever – by dint of personality as much as resources and opportunities – rather few adventure options for ‘most of us.’

Another option: die, or nearly so, doing it (Into the Wild; Touching the Void).

science, civilisation, economics and democracy in China

Something we don’t know know, here, is that in the first part of the last (20th) century people in the West were generally ignorant of the scores of technological advances made by China before about 1500. Now the  idea that ‘ It’s well known that the Chinese invented masses of things before they were known of in the West‘ is commonplace whether or not most people could name any; there is at least a general understanding that fireworks and spaghetti have their origins in China. Joseph Needham records an average of somethig like 15 major inventions per century from the time of Christ until 1500 years later*, including not just Bomb, Book and Compass (the title of a book by Simon Winchester, subtitled Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China), and the predecessors of the first two of these, gunpowder and paper, but also centreboards and multiple masts, segmental arched bridges, ephedrine, the decimal point, stirrups, the breast strap harnass, negative numbers, toilet paper; and there’s more: they discovered diabetes is associated with sweet and fatty foods (in the first century BC!).

Once the general outline of the creativity and power of Chinese technology is understood, two more questions arise.

are quotations the beginning or end of ideas?

The Counterfeiters, Andre Gide

Bernard: Laura, Laura you don’t love Douviers. You feel affection for him, pity, esteem, but that’s not love. I think the secret of your sadness (for you are sad, Laura) is that life has divided you; love has only consented to take you, incomplete; you distribute among several what yo would have liked to give to one only. As for me, I feel I am indivisible; I can only give the whole of myself.

Laura: You are too young to speak so! (p181)

Edouard (earlier in his journal): The man they (women) love is as a rule a kind of clothes peg on which to hang their love.

The Ancient Shore, Shirley Hazard

Neapolitans know that pleasure can’t be deferred for ideal circumstances. (p55)

The contemporary world grappled to its explanations, sets itself to ignore the accidental quality of our existence. (p14) (cf N N Taleb)

in or out of Europe

In Australia we have been trying to cut our last tie with Europe – our formal adherence to the English monarchy – for 15 years or so. In 1998 we temporarily lost our nerve, ostensibly over a squabble about what kind of republic to become. For a much longer time intellectual traditions on the periphery of Europe have conversely anticipated and often sought some kind of union:

For people like me , who live uncertainly on the edge of Europe with only our books to keep us company, Europe has figured always as a dream,  vision of what is to come; an apparition at times desired and at times feared. … A future but never a memory.  (Orhan Pamuk ‘Where is Europe’ Other Colours* 2007 p 190.)

What we share on the other hand is an ‘away from the centre’ consciousness. In an essay about Vargas Lhosa, Pamuk ascribes this, finding no other common bond, to Third World literature:

If there is anything that distinguishes Third World literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics or social turmoil of the country from which it issues but rather the writer’s awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers* where the history of his art-the art of the novel-is described, and  he reflects this distance in his work. What is crucial here is the Third World writer’s sense of being exiled from the world’s literary centers. [... an exile not cured by relocation to] ‘one of the cultural centers of Europe, for the writer’s exile is not so much a matter of geography as a spiritual state, a sense of exclusion, of being a perpetual foreigner.

No well-read Australian can read this without thinking of fifty years of cultural cringe, of writers hiding from, or playing to, their Australian-ness. For only a few Australian writers is it never an issue, an issue worn lightly or otherwise.

* The title is anglicised for the Australian edition but not the spelling inside..

from 2004

Susan Johnson Hungry Ghosts Picador 1997

P 20: he was of the generation that had indulged in a long, extended youth and which would hav trouble coming to terms with the finite nature of life and its unfortunate habit of ageing the body and narrowing choices.

For Anne-Louise life was still a stream in which she was swimming upwards, bound for some unimaginable open sea. She supposed herself destined for happiness as if happiness were a beautiful landing where you stopped and got out, eternally harboured.

P128 It struck me that until this moment our troubles had been small, surmountable, that we suffered only bad tempers and yearning. We had possessed the arrogance of the lucky, believing misfortune to be something which happened only to failures, to the unlucky, people who had somehow rendered themselves powerless. I saw now that there was no such division between the blessed and the unlucky, merely life passing over us all.

Good: yearning. Next sentence not so good – lucky and unlucky aren’t logical – the belief we are lucky and the unlucky is not only tautologous but is held as both true and the chimera she gets over? I like this idea but think that it can be said better.

Same page:

… we were supposed to swim forever upwards, never intending to be swept down.   … this new unexpected diversion … The grief of life cleaved to me and I knew it had come for good, settling within me deeply, beyond light.

seriously fragmented

As you’ll maybe know, I’m a big fan of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow; a magically serious book on the surface about late 20th century Turkey;  collusions as much as tensions between liberals and socialists and fundamentalists and lust and business and pride and history and isolation and fairy stories. It evokes many moods, two of them curiously like the fantastical plot twists of the Master and Margarita or the air of parallel reality in the scenes of the castle with beasts in Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

My last post was a celebration of Philippe Delerms’ celebrations of tiny moments of everyday life; and, perhaps related, I have been reflecting on – or rather justifying the brevity and idiosyncracy of -  my own miniscules,  these blog entries.  Comforting then to read Pamuk reporting his friend’s remark about Walter Benjamin: [His] oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this is why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I [Pamuk] smile and say, “One day I’ll write a book that’s made only from fragments too.”*

Fragments more than whole stories or argued essays are places from where sparks of association strike in the reader’s mind. Or in this case the author’s.

My first link is to the richness of Elliot Weinberger’s fragments -  An Elemental Thing for example – the text’s purpose being obscure, no plot or line of argument to guide it, the reader’s mind is challenged to make something of it but, if the challenge is accepted, free to move in many directions.

A second: one can’t help thinking of Taleb’s rails against storytelling/cause finding when we seek to mollify history and downplay the randomness of events.

* Orhan Pamuk Other Colours: Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities p xi