Xenophobia, an inclination to violence, a pleasure in humiliating others, the desire to find security from a hostile world in one’s own group or tribe or gang with its own initiation processes and symbols and necessary enemies, all these are features common to all mankind (though not of corse womankind) as schoolboys know very well. We are all born Fascists, and have to be expensively educated out of it. And when all the structures of civil society painfully built up over generations disintegrate, whether through sudden catastrophe or gradual erosion, it is to these habits that we naturally return.

It’s difficult to disagree, though hard to accept, Howard’s ‘born Fascist’ theme. His analysis of the roots of Fascism and the challenges posed by a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society is excellent.

As for the West, we know our situation far too well to believe that the Enlightenment has yet solved the problems it has created and that history for us has come to the end. Andre Gidé said something to the effect that ‘to free oneself is only a beginning. The real problem is to know how to live in liberty’; a discovery being made today by the populations of the former communist countries. A prison is also a kind of home. In the West, intellectuals may have become used to living in the godless world explored by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the last century, Heidegger and Sartre is this. But the social effects are only now beginning to be widely felt, of a world in which people are left entirely free to create and live by their own values, with neither traditional authority nor religious beliefs to guide them. We do now worry too much so long as, for most of the population, liberal capitalism continues quite literally to deliver the goods, in quantities and of a quality undreamed of by our forbears. But it liberal capitalism were to fail, as has its rival communism, we know what would be the likely alternative.

An Addition to my Personal Canon (The Ice-Axes)

I have insufficient knowledge of the history of Lebanon or the Palestinians, only what might be gleaned from a sceptical ingestion of western media. With the difficulties of translation and my ignorance much of the symbolism in Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory For Forgetfulness was probably lost during my two back-to-back readings. This didn’t detract in any way from the potency of this extraordinary book, which elicited not only an intellectual reaction but also a visceral one. Beyond that, I am unable (unwilling?) to write with any cogency (in the immediacy of finishing the book). I urge you to read the extended excerpt, and the book, which enters that small number of ice-axes that make up my personal canon.

The vacuum bomb. Hiroshima. Manhunt by jet fighter. Vanquished remains of the Nazi army in Berlin. A flaring up of the personal conflict between Begin and Nebuchadnezzar. Headlines that jumble past with present, urging the present to hurry on. A future sold in a lottery. A Greek fat lying in wait for young heroes. A public history with no owners, open to whoever wishes to inherit. On this day, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, they are trying out the vacuum bomb on our flesh, and the experiment is successful.
What I remember of Hiroshima is the American attempt to make it forget its name. I know Hiroshima. I was there nine years ago. In one of its squares, it spoke of its memory. Who will remind Hiroshima that Hiroshima was here? The Japanese interpreter asked if I’d seen the famous film, Hiroshima mon amour. I answered, “I can love a woman from Sodom, for love or play. I can love a body whose guards may kill me through the window.”"I don’t understand,” she said. “It’s just poetic fancy, ” I said. “But where is Hiroshima?”"Hiroshima’s here,” she answered. “You’re in Hiroshima.” “I don’t see it,” I said. “Why did you cover the name of its body with flowers? Is it because the American pilot cried later? He pushed a button, and saw nothing but a cloud. But when he saw photographs later, he cried.” “Such is life, she said. “But American didn’t cry,” I said. “She wasn’t angry with herself. She was angered by the power balance.”
Hiroshima tomorrow. Hiroshima is tomorrow.
There’s nothing in the museum of the crime that points to the name of the killer: “The plane came this way, from a base in the Pacific.” Is this collusion, or is it kowtowing? As for the victims, they need no names. Human skeletons bare of leaves. Branches made of bone, just for the shape. Forms, just for the form. A few locks of hair single out a woman over there. Inscriptions on a wall explain degrees of death-from burns, smoke, poison, or radiation. Preliminary exercises for a more comprehensive global killing. Preparing for the end. Nowadays, the Hiroshima bomb’s destructive power makes it seem primitive nuclear weaponry. Yet it has enabled scientific imagination to write the scenario of the end of the world: an enormous explosion, a gigantic explosion that will resemble the initial formation of the globe with its organised chaos of mountains, wadis, plains, deserts, rivers, seas, slopes, lakes, wrinkles, rocks, all the beautiful variety of an earth glorified in poetic praises and religious ceremonies. After the giant explosion, a great fire will blaze, consuming whatever it can eat-human beings, trees, stones, and other things that can burn-and giving rise to a dense smoke that will blot out the sun for many days until the sky weeps a black rain, which they call nuclear rain, that will poison every living thing. The earth will then cool down and return to the Ice Age. And in the period of rapid transition from this age to the Ice Age nothing will remain alive except rats and certain types of insects. One morning the rats will wake up to find they are human beings who rule the earth. Kafka turned upside down. And I ask: Which is more cruel? That a human being should wake up to find he’s a giant insect, or that an insect should wake up to find it is a human being who plays with an atomic bomb thinking it nothing more than a football?

Dorothea Tanning: Birthday (1942)

Dorothea Tanner (1910-2012)

*****

Mahmoud Darwish
Memory for Forgetfulness
August, Beirut, 1982

Gently place one spoonful of the ground coffee, electrified with the aroma of cardamom, on the rippling surface of the hot water, then stir slowly, first clockwise, then up and down. Add the second spoonful and stir up and down, then counterclockwise. Now add the third. Between spoonfuls, take the pot away from the fire and bring it back. For the final touch, dip the spoon in the melting powder, fill and raise it a little over the pot, then let it drop back. Repeat this several times until the water boils again and a small mass of the blog coffee remains on the surface, rippling and ready to sink. Don’t let it sink. Turn off the heat, and pay no heed to the rockets. Take the coffee to the narrow corridor and pour it lovingly and with a sure and into a little white cup; dark-colored cups spoil the freedom of the coffee. Observe the paths of steam and the tent of rising aroma. Now light your first cigarette, made for this cup of coffee, the cigarette with the flavour of existence itself, unequaled by the tastes of any other except that which follows love, as the woman smokes away the last sweat and the fading voice.

Memory of Forgetfulness (translated by Ibrahim Muhawi) is extraordinary, a staggeringly powerful  memoir of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut. To leave the description there would be reductive; Darwish interrogates the nature of exile and discourses widely, from the importance of coffee, to the relationship between memory and history. I’ve begun my second reading, unable to put the book aside.

*****

William Butler Yeats
A Coat

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But he fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

*****

*****

flowerville
[Thomas Bernhard:] An Attempt by Ingeborg Bachmann

I am convinced that the last prose of Thomas Bernhard goes far beyond than that of Beckett and is infinitely superior compared to it [Beckett], because of its compulsion, its inescapability and its hardness. In all those years people asked themselves, how would it look like, the new.

*****

Donald Weber – Interrogation (2011)

Whetting my appetite still further, Thomas posted a sample that anticipates the thrill of this new publication of Gombrowicz’s diaries.

I do not believe, therefore, that death is man’s real problem or that an art that is entirely permeated by it is completely authentic. Our real issue is growing old, that aspect of death that we experience daily. Perhaps not even growing old but the fact that it is so completely, so terribly cut off from beauty. Our gradual dying does not disturb us, it is rather that the beauty of life becomes inaccessible to us. At the cemetery I spotted a young boy walking among the graves like a being from another world, mysteriously and abundantly blooming while we looked like paupers. It struck me, however, that I did not feel our helplessness as something categorically inevitable.

Jeroen Toirkens’ spectacular photo-book is the accomplishment of twelve years photographing nomadic people across the world.

I find it an extraordinary way of life; I never realised there were so many nomads. What really fascinates me is how people who lived thousands of miles apart still have the same customs. That is because they have the same origins. Their hearts lie in Central Asia, in places like Kyrgyzstan, Altai and Mongolia, from where people moved in a northern direction to Siberia and Lapland and to the East, via the Bering Strait to North America, Canada and Greenland.

Introduced to Toirken’s photography by Sigrun’s post, the book was irresistible. You can see a wider range of the photographs on Nomadslife.

JMW Turner: The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne – Sunrise

*****

Edmund Husserl
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must “once in his life” withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy — wisdom
(sagesse) — is the philosophized quite personal affair. It must
arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim — the
decision that alone can start me on the course of a philosophical
development — I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing. Accordingly the Cartesian Meditations
are not intended to be a merely private concern of the philoso-
pher Descartes, to say nothing of their being merely an im-
pressive literary form in which to present the foundations of his
philosophy. Rather they draw the prototype for any beginning
philosopher’s necessary meditations, the meditations out of
which alone a philosophy can grow originally.

*****

From Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals Vol. 1.

Day cold a warm shelter in the hollies, capriciously
bearing berries. Query : Are the male and female
flowers on separate trees ?

23rd. Bright sunshine, went out at 3 o’clock. The
sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by
the clouds, and tongues or points of sand ; on our
return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The
crescent moon, Jupiter, and Venus. The sound of the
sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we
could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly
to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of
the singing of birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless
noise which lives in the summer air. 1 The villages
marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading
into the mountain road. The scarlet flowers of the moss.

24th. Walked between half-past three and half-past
five. The evening cold and clear. The sea of a sober
grey, streaked by the deeper grey clouds. The half dead
sound of the near sheep-bell, in the hollow of the sloping
coombe, exquisitely soothing.

25th. Went to Poole’s after tea. The sky spread
over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of
the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did
not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth
with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave
asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault.
She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small,
and bright, and sharp. Their brightness seemed con-
centrated, (half-moon).

26th. Walked upon the hill-tops ; followed the sheep
tracks till we overlooked the larger coombe. Sat in the
sunshine. The distant sheep-bells, the sound of the

1 Compare Keats, Miscellaneous Poems

There crept

A little noiseless noise amongst the leaves
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves. ED.

And Coleridge, The AEolian Harp

The stilly murmur of the distant sea

Tells us of silence. ED.

*****

Rare footage of Franco-Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot.

*****

Joseph Brodsky
Letter to an Archaeologist

Citizen, enemy, mama’s boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn’t love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of the pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it’s gentler than what we’ve been told or have said ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don’t reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won’t resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks, and barks.

*****

Last week I began Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place, which is breathtaking, but I felt that my inadequate comprehension of phenomenology was restricting my grasp of the book’s depths. I decided to pause and fill in some gaps before reading further. I’m slowly reading Robert Sokolowski’s Introduction to Phenomenology, a benchmark phenomenology primer. Sokolowski, if one shrugs off infrequent religious allusions, (Sokolowski is a man of the cloth) opens up the subject with remarkable clarity.

To move into the phenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge or another, but to become a philosopher.

Though I understood the premise of phenomenology as ‘the study of human experience and of the way things present themselves to us in and through such experience,’ I had failed to fully appreciate phenomenology as an (the?) alternative to Descartes’ attempt to initiate ‘philosophy by making a “once in a lifetime” decision to doubt all the judgements’ he held as true. This understanding, and a dissatisfaction with the Cartesian approach, galvanises my wish to go deeper.

The following passage deals with the belief that we have in the world as a whole, the Ur-doxa. I hope it demonstrates the vitality of the writing.

We cannot start off in the egocentric predicament; our world belief is there from the start, even before we are born, as far back as we go. Even the most rudimentary sense of self could not arise except on the basis of world belief. Similarly, even if we discover that we were wrong about very many things, our world belief remains untouched and the world is still there, no matter how ragged and tattered, unless perhaps we lost our sense of self entirely and fell into a kind of autistic isolation; but even there, some sense of what there is would surely remain, if there is awareness at all. The suffering that must exist in autism is there precisely because the world belief is still at work; if it were not, there would be no awareness at all and no sense of self.

Since we live in the paradoxical condition of both having the world and yet being part of it, we know that when we die the world will still go on, since we are only part of the world, but in another sense the world that is there for me, behind all the things I know, will be extinguished when I am no longer part of it. Such an extinction is part of the loss we suffer when a close friend dies; it is not just that he is no longer there, but the way the world was for him has also been lost for us. The world has lost a way of being given, one that had been built over a lifetime.

Phenomenology is likely to remain an idée fixe for some time. I bought Dermot Moran’s comprehensive Introduction to Philosophy as a complement, principally because it delves deeper into the work of phenomenology’s most famous thinkers.

1. Wanderlust – Rebecca Solnit
2. A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
3. Wildwood - Roger Deakin
4. The Wild Places – Robert Macfarlane
5. The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
6. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
7. Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways - Phil Smith
8. A Field Guide to Getting Lost  - Rebecca Solnit
9. Psychogeography by Will Self
10. The Lost Art of Walking - Geoff Nicholson

I’ll also point you to Paul K. Lyons’ compelling straight line walk across London, which some enterprising publisher ought to pick up.

Please make suggestions of any books that ought to expand this list.

Josef Koudelka (b. January 10, 1938 in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia)
‘Hound’

*****

Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar
Czeslaw Milosz
Exiles

Rhythm is at the core of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and distoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.

*****

The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of The Uncanny
Dylan Trigg
Side Effects blog

Throughout the book, a central theme-and one I shall return to-concerns how our bodily identity is shape through being touched by the past. What does this complex theme signify? The phrase “touched by the past” signifies more than being merely affected or in casual contact with the past. What does this complex theme signify? The phrase “touched by the past” brings us into a region of memory and temporality that elicits the moment personal identity is marked in either an affirmative or disruptive manner by the experience of memory itself. Coupled with this exposure to the formation of identity, the inclusion of “touch” reinforces the bind between temporality and materiality. Being “touched by the past,” sets in place the centrality of place itself, implying a kinaesthetic and sensual recollection of the past. The result of this bind between identity and materiality is a challenge to the idea that memory and identity are solely temporal phenomena.

*****

Artificer
Czeslaw Milosz

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children’s cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother’s skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.

*****

*****

Mary Ruefle
Perfect Reader

I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:
I throw my arms around a tree, I kiss the pink
and peeling bark, its dead skin, and the papery
feel of its fucked-up beauty arouses me, lends my life
a certain gait, like the stout man walking to work
who sees a peony in his neighbor’s yard and thinks ah,
there is a subject of white interpolation, and then
the petals fall apart for a long time, as long as it takes
summer to turn to snow, and I go home at the end and watch
the news about the homeless couple who met in the park,
and then the weather, to see how they will feel tomorrow.

*****

Art and the Aesthete

Ethel Spowers (1890-1947)
‘Wet Afternoon’ (1929)