| Author | Message | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I have just been reading Gramsci, a believer in the proletarian revolution. I gape in wonder. In 2007 the absurdity of that expectation seems obvious. Revolution and modernism: science fiction out-imagined Gramsci the modernist intellectual. His expectations, values, judgements, in many ways appear naive in the extreme. So what happened? Why did things disintegrate? Shakespeare's politics is a great deal more real, perennial; Hamlet, Richard III. Henry IV. In sum: as ever we have a politics predicated on self-importance. To which there seems no alternative. Does an alternative *realistic* idealism exist to that? Or does our kind of democracy represent the only pragmatic way of dealing with (of pandering to) the dictator inside, the little dictator, that petty figure which Gramsci seems so strangely to have overlooked? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I am in a pessimistic mood. Maybe lack of a good humour is a consequence of low energy or something - excess of sex for instance which gives to the light a kind of clarte or something. Good god. One beer at a time. Coffee and cheese. Who invented them? What we have in history, and that has changed with each epoch, has always been the same - variations on the theme - the issue of our own importance. I feel like Hamlet with his slice of ham bounded in a nutshell. A nut of ham. When I myself am the guilty party! Pour it in my ear. Never understood that line. A something of something in the something. I'll make. Or break. An union in the something what was that? | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It is a practical problem but of insurmountable extent: how do you make the self-centered, self-indulgent, self not such and thus governed by other criteria? It was an incredible illusion to believe in, in Gramsci's time, that the proletarian masses would somehow prove exceptions to human history and cease to be subject to the Midas complex, to self interest and money - ! How did intelligent educated minds ever believe it? Maybe because it seemed to need to be believed in; so that if life was to make sense you couldn't not think that people were fundamentally benign and good. The question is fatuous, "Is the human good?" What needs to be asked is how are we to believe in anything other than the figure in the mirror? What am I but the me which I see Horatio? | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
I question whether the person you see in the mirror is you. I think 'you' might be the person who looks in the mirror, but the person you see looking back only exists as long as you look at him. I don't think about my face unless I see it. I don't even really think about my hands even though I am making them work as I type this and I can see them working, or at least I *think* they are my hands. I can't be sure. I see people around me, too, right now - but I'm not sure I'm one of them. From my seat here in my head I can't even tell I look like them. It's like the moment in The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway when the Slipperman tells Rael he has become one of them: "Me? Like You? Like that!" | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
There is an insurmountable impracticality, if I may again put it that way, in the expectation that human self-interest will pave out a golden tree lined avenue to the benign harmonious, intelligently governed ideal state; that state that does not engage in rapaciously destroying anything it feels threatened by or in not bending to its will anything that it sees as serving its interests, that is strangely impossible. I mean this judgement in the sense in which in the elements of the state yet seem benign. Individually, to a degree, we may be kindly people, but what is the cumulative effect of our lives on the planet around us? A peculiar dissonance invades our niceness; our cleanness. All those cleaning fluids - an entire aisle of them - in Sainsburys - all those insecticides and weedkillers - another 30 meter aisle of that - all that washing and cleaning, watering and weeding, in the pursuit of the good life in ecological terms is a disaster. I light the barbecue and, without knowing it, watch an Indonesian forest of rare woods go up in smoke. This is peculiar. My niceness kills everything! | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Alex, the view I am suggesting uses the idea of mirror reflection as a metaphor. What I am saying is that this is the case with everything. That wherever you or I or anyone else looks all that we see is ourselves. Self-interest. Nothing else at all. The facts bear this out. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
One of the problems with 'doing the right thing' for example; with being enlightened about the environment or Iraq or whatever; is that at base - if inadvertently - it still subscribes to the same world view in which the self is all that exists but is assumed not to (as it were): where it grasps 'reality'. It is still assumed by the critic that *he* knows better but in what terms? If the mirror remains unbroken? I look at Iraq and see only my own world. Me. Myself. The only thing different morally, if that is the right word, is the perspective, the position. (You could say that the typical Guardian reader is morally superior to the typical Telegraph reader for instance. But in the end what is that but self-righteousness?) What I am saying is that there is no way out of this connundrum and yet our politics, the whole way that it operates, is based on the presupposition that there is. It assumes that we can see beyond ourselves. We can't. I think we need a politics that assumes that it isn't possible for us to see beyond our own noses. That would be the beginning of a pragmatism. | ||
| alex Username: alex Registered: 10-2006 |
>>That wherever you or I or anyone else looks all that we see is ourselves. Not sure I agree with you there. Did you know that scientists have discovered a bunch of cells in the brain that fire off what they call mirror neurons when we perform an action or watch another perform the same action, and that they have also discovered that this mirroring effect applies also to feelings and emotions? They reckon autistic people may have malfuntioning mirror neurons, hence their lack of empathy. I do agree about the new politics, though. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
George Bush proclaims Truth Day: "I George Bush do hereby proclaim that I cannot see beyond my own nose, and that's why you good people of America voted for me; because you too cannot see beyond your own noses. That's what made this land of America great: we cannot see beyond our own noses. This is written into the American Constitution; it was affirmed in countless ways by the Founding Fathers. God Bless America." | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
>Mirror neurons ... Amazing! The things I'd never heard of before logging on, etc.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neurons | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I met a girl when I was fifteen She was the only daughter of the sports teacher I liked her and she liked me We used to sail in her boat a forty foot catamaran we went past the Needles on a bright pink afternoon. I liked her and she liked me. Oh boy oh boy. We slept on the beach by a fire. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Roll up roll up. I'll tell you what I have to offer. Misfortune and priceless pain. The armies of the uncertain! The empty shelves of rustproof supermarkets! No tv! Wind blowing along carless streets! Vote for me and you wont forget it. Those who dwell in the tyranny of freedom will discover the iron curtain homeless laboring in pagan shadows to build a door into a wall that isn't there beneath a sky like a sheet of paper. The question is: what is the alternative? | ||
| martin Username: martin Registered: 10-2006 |
Well, there's always: http://www.natural-law-party.org.uk/UKmanifesto/in dex.htm They can fly, you know. No, really - | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
>> The empty shelves of rustproof supermarkets You are JG Ballard and I claim my five pounds. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
M John Harrison has just won the AC Clarke award. Congratulations to him. ...on the current subject, could anyone imagine living in terms in which their being at the centre of the universe is not the issue? (Or is that just me? Ho ho ho.) I was looking at a man with a heavily tatooed forehead walking through a crowd; he wore a fixed downcast self-conscious expression, as though his tatoo were a loud noise or something that he wished to disown. It struck me that his plight - if in magnification - is the same for us all. That we are all to some degree downcast by our dual need to be both seen and not seen. He wanted to be seen in his own terms; but he was not with his own crowd. So he felt insecure; he wasn't at home and so was downcast. But then if he had been with his own crowd, bikers maybe, being seen was vital. Was a great deal of the point. A kind of "Here I am!" doggy dog thing. Language is imitation. So is all of human behaviour. Mimicry is its lock and key . In a way we are only free through others. And yet that is illusion too! People take on the shape of the world. They not only fill every corner of the visual field, they are it; have become it. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
When that whistle blows Girl, I'm down the street I'm home, I'm out of my work clothes When I'm out in the street I walk the way I wanna walk When I'm out in the street I talk the way I wanna talk When I'm out in the street When I'm out in the street Springsteen's lyric expresses that need very neatly. Where does one feel at home, in the world because visible to one's peers, friends? When is visibility desirable? Out in the street. In that hinterland between the domestic and the wild, as it were. This is a constant theme in the music of Springsteen - or in Iggy Pop's music or in the Beachboys' and so on. The street is where they find and define themselves. | ||
| al Username: al Registered: 11-2006 |
The street is a space where a personal performance can be seen and appreciated - uninfluenced by work needs etc. Reminds me of Travolta strutting at the start of Saturday Night Fever (and the clash between his street self and work self that goes on there). | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Saturday Night Fever: another musical basis ... I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396 Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor She's waiting tonight down in the parking lot Outside the Seven-Eleven store Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch And he rides with me from town to town We only run for the money got no strings attached We shut 'em up and then we shut 'em down Tonight, tonight the strip's just right I wanna blow 'em off in my first heat Summer's here and the time is right For goin' racin' in the street (From Springsteen's Racing in the Street) It is more mythic than actual. Springsteen's 'living space' consists in these sorts of mythic images or oppositions that all the same have a reality. Work/Play Youth/Age Home/Street Girl/Pregnancy Car/Poverty Fighting/Dancing. This is the space in which he lives; it isn't real - or it is less or more than real - but in that it has an actuality, since after all he lives somewhere; and so these things have meaning for him. Darkness on the Edge of Town is an album of passionate disaffection. (It has an intensity that he never quite matches elsewhere.) In other words, Springsteen has the intelligence to incoroporate the unreality of his ideals into the very texture and sense of his songs. They are songs of doom and loss and hopelessness and longing. The Beach Boys but in a kind of Blue Collar Arizona, a thousand miles from any beach. But in microcosm isn't it the same for us all? Yesterday evening I went for a walk in the late sun after the rain. It was irresistable. So fresh! That first smell of the trees! So out into the world. But that was as far into their mystery as I got: that first couple of seconds glimpse. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Perhaps the basic opposition is Baby/They. The two forms of witness. 'Baby' is love, the centre. 'They' are the outside world. Error. Baby tie your hair back in a long white bow .. They've made their choices and they'll never know ... | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
"The dogs on mainstreet howl 'cause they understand" But what makes mainstreet mainstreet? The street is a peergroup created reality. (John Travolta walks along a peergroup created reality.) Therefore he exists in this space only in others’ eyes. But then in others' eyes he sees only himself. Mainstreet being the myth. A space defined by a mirror. So that he occupies it only as one of the mirror's objects. (Thus is the whole of our civilization reflected in a sliver of glass.) | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Does gravity exist? Does time exist? These are peer defined realities. A new era comes, a new physicist takes a fresh look, and decides that time doesn't exist. Newton was right. Newton was wrong. The street exists. It doesn't exist. It exists as I exist. In others' eyes. I announce myself in others. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
To what degree are there others? "They will never know." Our entire culture, social system, way of life, human idiom, presupposes that we can see outside ourselves. That is the project of science, after all. But can we? “X or Y can’t see beyond the end of his nose” – but neither can I and nor can anyone else. In these terms we live in a culture of self-deception. How is sweet sweet? Someone I know exquisite in looks, manners. Self-centred to the point of being her own victim. But what is her flaw or is that the flaw? If I am in others and they are in me, then – in reality – I see only this ‘me in them’! I was thinking that, logically, it is impossible to think oneself out of this conundrum. This was the concrete proof. This morning I passed a blind man awkwardly blocking the way and I experienced my usual irritation, especially as I was on the route to work (time pressure!). He was about to cross a busy road, waving his white stick. I skipped around him and carried on. A perfect metaphor for my solitariness. I am the blind man. I could have helped him over –– but fell victim to my self-absorption. The attractive woman approaching the bus stop, distracting me by her high heels. I realise now she wasn’t looking at me but somewhat over my shoulder, projecting herself into the blind man. … Perhaps one could represent it as in a novel. The novelist’s ‘people’ are only aspects of him- or herself. (A good novelist has a particularly fecund idea of self.) No idiom exists other than that of self-reflection. I look at your pain but see only mine. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
But doesn't a morality avoid this? One learns to treat another as an end in themselves just as in art one learns; so that one is able to see a thing or listen to a sound as an end in itself. See it as making its own sense. It could be said that a morality thus frees us. But most of the time what we call morality is just the lip service paid to an ideal - so that we can get on with our lives. Steer unimpeded down the street. There is far less of it than we think, just as there is far less art; in place of its honey and blue excellence the grey miasma of kitchen smog; the flakey plaster of damp. Doggy dinner. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
If everything were blue blue wouldn't exist. The human race is red; I am blue. Thus am I visible. But only because everyone else is red. I am blue because of red. But when I look at myself - not a trace of that foreign colour is visble. Complete, uninterrupted blue. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It's yes and no. Yes as against no. No nos are allowed. Thus ME: me me me me me me me me - yes. YES! Thus YOU: no - me me me me me me me me. NO! Thus is human life a picture of elegance. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
Me me yays and me me nos. A kind of ying and yang. Yo its harmony. Nes - that sound is too muddy. Yo then then yes then no. Maybe. Perhaps. ... Politics being its reckoning. A kind of adding machine of zeros and ones. But so: the image of the tyrant. The winner. The one that wants yes. The human tyrrant emerges with the child and then never ever leaves, sets up permanent camp in the psyche as a spider. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
I may move these sorts of comments onto a blog since they are of limited interest to other posters. They amount to my style of tin pot philosophical investigation, but that may be an intrusion for the general poster. Too singular. I particularly want to make them however because of the last ten years of politics and the Iraq debacle. I found it devastating that someone who is (or was?) 'nice', 'reasonable', 'ordinary', 'undogmatic' should make such a stupid and tragic error, an error of such unbelievable proportions (after all, since Blair is not a million miles from what I am like). I don't believe in demonising him, though the temptation is very great sometimes. In short what I think he has done - inadvertently - is drive home the degree to which the entire democratic project is flawed so that we urgently need a more pragmatic self-aware approach to politics, one that takes our innate stupidity (vanity) into account. "Some are born great, some become great, and some have greatness thrust upon them" thus Shakespeare's caustic summation of the problem of human self-importance. We are all Malvolios in some degree. Idiots. But how do you factor that in to the human political equation? Because these issues are so protean. What can count as a definition of the human fool? There are a million fools; an infinity of them. There will be no politial sensibility until we are somehow able to take account of that. Very simply, I don't want to hear that I am wrong. I don't want to hear the word "no" when I am looking for "yes". I don't want to see "shut" when I am looking for "open". But my inability to want what I otherwise don't want makes me - like Malvolio - a fool. I need to be able to want what I don't want in order to be able to confront the inner tyrant: that inward clown. | ||
| mjp Username: mjp Registered: 10-2006 |
It's like this (Spanish?) poem (not sure who it is by): Give me God what you still have Give me what no one asks you for I don't ask you for health or for success, not even for help people ask you for all that so often, that you can not have anything left Give me God what you still have Give me what people refuse to accept I want insecurity and disquietude I want hardship and struggle with no end and if you should give them to me... God give them to me once and for all because I will not always find the courage to ask you for what you still have. |