Posts tagged "books":
Almodovar | Mishra
(From January 11)
Re-watched with wife last night Almodovar's "Parallel Mothers", which bears a second watch, certainly. It's a wonderful piece of story-telling and a film that is both emotionally engaging, visually beautiful, and packed with meaning.
There's a sub-plot in the film about a dig to exhume victims of fascism, buried in a mass grave at the start of the Spanish civil war. D said, on watching the exhumation of skeletons at the end, that she could not help but be reminded of Gaza.
Map shown in Wikipedia of Spanish Civil War grave sites and those that have been exhumed so far
Wikipedia article on the White Terror in Spain
My day began and ended with stories of genocides, in Congo, Turkey and Spain; but my bedtime reading was in The World After Gaza, where I've reached a point that describes the ways in which the memory of the Shoah has been perpetuated in Israel. And I've just read a quotation that Mishra gives by Susan Sontag:
There is no such thing as collective memory. All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
So it's all about narratives and what we do with them. And it seems to me that even "individual" memory is subject to our past conditioning and present influences, such as thoughts about how other people will see a predicament, which is in turn affected by societal mores, portrayal in the media, proclamations by respected leaders, etc.
Unless we have the courage and unaffected capacilty to truly see or validly experience, how will we have the ability to remember?
“On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I think of Mary Seely Harris and her Kodak brownie again. And then I think of the faked video clips from Minneapolis.
Historical memory and its uses
Mishra (The World After Gaza) has a great deal to say about historical memory, and the way it is "used".
Early on in the book, he includes a quote by Yehuda Elkana, a Holocaust survivor and former director of the Van Leer Institute, who thought that the cruelty of Israel's Occupation of Palestinian territories stemmed from the feeling of victimhood engendered in Israelis from memorialisation of the Shoah and said 'It may be that it is important for the world at large to remember' the shoah… but Israelis 'must learn to forget'.
When I mentioned this idea to my wife she disagreed totally. as she recalled a program she once arranged here in the village on "memory and recognition". Instead of forgetting past traumas (like the Shoah, the Nakba, or the apartheid regime in South Africa), it was suggested there that memory could be a tool for conflict transformation; rather than forgetting, trying to forget, or, heaven forbid, suggesting to the victims than they forget. Through deep acknowledgement of the suffering caused, and honouring its memory, a healing could take place, as well as a deriving of the proper lessons to ensure that the same would not occur again.
An example given in the program was the TRC process that followed the regime change in South Africa, which though not perfect permitted a peaceful turnover of power rather than a bloodbath.
That's what I remember at least from the program. Mishra's description of Germany's holocaust remembrance culture is not described at all charitably by Mishra, even though it has done more than any other country to cultivate such remembrance.
Just as Israel seems to have derived from the Shoah the lesson to develop a strong army so that this would never again happen to Jews, he says that Germany has transitioned (officially at least) from anti-semitism to philo-semitism and unquestioning support for Israel; no matter what the country might actually do. This, however, fails to defeat other forms of racism and does not make the world safe from genocide.
He mentions the very small number of convictions of former Nazis in West Germany (many fewer than in East Germany), the fact that the country continued to be administered by the same people as during the 3rd Reich and Germany's lack of remembrance for other genocides for which Germany, as a colonial power, had been responsible in Africa.
It's Mishra's special position as an "outside observer", who grew up in post-colonial India, but one who is keenly interested in Middle Eastern culture and history, that makes this book so interesting.
The Patterning Instinct
"The Patterning Instinct" by Jeremy Lent, was maybe the best of the books I've been reading lately about our cognitive history and position in reality. Lots of insights into how we got where we are today as a species, speculation upon what could come next, and a recommendation to move beyond the dualistic philosophy that developed from the time of Plato which, he claims, led to our mechanistic interpretation of the universe, to over-exploitation of nature, as well as to our current hyper-capitalism. He suggests that our future, at least one in which we remain recognizably human, may depend upon embracing the insights of systems theory which, he says, align with neo-confucian thought from 12th century China: an understanding that sees the interplay and interconnectedness of all phenomena, rather than their existence in isolation. The last chapter of his book is called "the web of meaning", which is also the title of a more recent book that he has written. I will read that one too. But I'm a slow, minimalistic reader. It will take me a good while to get through Mishra's "The World after Gaza" - which is really excellent, by the way.
Coexistence after Gaza
Wife went yesterday with Noam to a screening in east Jerusalem of Coexistence My Ass, which is one of four films about the Palestine-Israel conflict that have been shortlisted for this year's Oscar in the documentary category.
- https://www.coexistencemyass.com/ Coexistence My Ass (site)
The film is about the standup comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi, who grew up in the village, which is apparently shown quite a bit in the film.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Shuster-Eliassi Noam Shuster Eliasi (Wikipedia)
- https://wasns.org/ Wahat al-Salam - Neve Shalom
The screening was at the Educational Bookshop, one of the best bookstores in the region. So D sent me a photos of the books on display there.
- https://educationalbookshop.com The Educational Bookshop
Among them I chose The World After Gaza, by Pankaj Mishra, a brilliant Indian writer, who writes from a post-colonial perspective. His writings are always superbly researched and I had been wanting to read this important book.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_After_Gaza The World After Gaza
"Once I let go of what was expected of me..."
"… I began to paint like this."*
artist Hiam Mustafa, at the opening of a new exhibition "Us and Them", in our village the other day. She's a Druze artist from Daliat al-Carmel.
*her words, approximately.
"Empire" meets "The Dawn of Everything"
Before going to sleep, listened to another podcast of the excellent "Empire" series of William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. This was the first of a new series on the subject of slavery, and the episode featured, as guest speaker, David Wengrow, author of The Dawn of Everything.
I was interested in this one because I recently finished this book and think it is brilliant - one of the freshest and most original approaches to human history that one can read. Among other things, it reveals the endless possibilities for human governance, and the range of possible alternative frameworks, once we free our minds of rigid pre-conceived ideas.
Actually, I think this wasn't one of the best Empire podcasts. Anand and Dalrymple are more susceptible to our human tendency to look for heroes and create value judgements about different societies - in this case, mainly the Sumerians and the Egyptians. Wengrow resists these tendencies, both because his approach is more frank and scientific, and because he's keenly aware of the lenses through which we look at past civilizations. So in the podcast he was like a slippery fish they can never quite catch.
Two Kids a Day (film)
This is a documentary about the detention of Palestinian children. The title, Two Kids a Day reflects the arrest of 12 - 14 year olds by Israeli soldiers. The statistic is quoted by one of the protagonists, a settler in the Civil Administration to say, as it were, "hey, that's not so many." (the true statistic is about 1,000 kids per year.)
Minors are arrested from the streets or from their homes in night raids, usually on suspicion of throwing stones. Twelve to fourteen year olds, under the rules of the Civil Authority, may be detained for 6 months at a stretch, in clear violation of the Geneva conventions to which Israel is signatory. They are interrogated under threats of violence (or worse) and pressured into betraying their friends. Many of them are imprisoned more than once, and some of the boys interviewed in the film, who have now reached the age of 16-18, have spent a total of 3 years in detention.
Links
Ancient Britons built Stonehenge – then vanished. Is science closing in on their killers?
This is wonderful. The oldest-found human in Britain was dark-skinned, had black hair and blue-green eyes. But Stonehenge was probably built by later immigrants who had olive skin and may be related to the Basques. But plague may have reduced the population, making them vulnerable to an incursion by modern Brits, who were descended from fair haired invaders from the Asian steppes.
All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats.
The Book of Arkovia
It may well be just a combination of poor editing and poor translation that makes me feel that this book I bought on the beachfront is unreadable. Although I'm in favour of everything indie, traditional publishers try to make sure that what reaches our eyes has some integrity, either by refusing to publish something, or by making sure that if they do decide to take a risk with it, it is properly edited.
I don't doubt that there's a grain of a good story hiding in this novel, but what's there makes me shudder and cringe, and then I feel too lazy to go on reading it. Too bad.
The Web of Meaning, by Jeremy Lent
Instead, started to read this.
Links
Alan Rusbridger (former editor of the Guardian): "Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/edward-snowden-state-spying-guardian-alan-rusbridger
Even now the British government, in hastily revising the laws around official secrecy, is trying to ensure that any editor who behaved as I did 10 years ago would face up to 14 years in prison. Lamentably, the Labour party is not joining a cross-party coalition that would allow whistleblowers and journalists the right to mount a public interest defence.
Operation Chastise - Wikipedia
The times were different, but the present conflict was not the first in which a dam was targeted. In this earlier attack on six German dams, some 1,600 civilians were killed by the flooding (a thousand of them labourers, mainly Soviet, enslaved by Germany). Movies present this as an act of bravery and genius, rather than as a war crime.
The Ukrainians are blaming Russia for the attack on the Khakhovka dam and calling it "ecocide". But a similar accusation could be leveled at Ukraine, if the "Discord Leaks" report appearing in the Washington Post is correct, according to which Ukraine was responsible for the attack on the Nordsream II pipeline last year.
Street names; Dorab; Astravakra Gita
Street names
The current issue in the village is street names. We never decided on any. There are house numbers, and that's all we need for most issues.
But sometimes there are companies that demand actual street names. Recently there was a supermarket chain suggested to make me a member of their loyalty club, but I couldn't sign up because their website demanded a street name, which it checked against a national database, so I couldn't make something up.
Then there are large foundations, such as those connected to the US Government, whose SAM.gov system depends upon NATO's N-CAGE for address verification. And N-CAGE too demands a street name for our association. Without a street name, no registration. I wonder how they deal with Japan, which doesn't use street names hardly at all, even in large cities like Tokyo?
Astavakra Gita
Translator's preface to the Ashtavakra Gita (Bart Marshall)
In Vietnam when I was twenty-one a hand grenade or mortar round–the circumstances made it difficult to determine which–blew me into a clear and brilliant blackness. For the next thirty-seven years that glimpse of infinite emptiness, so intimate, so familiar, kept me looking almost obsessively in esoteric books and far corners for an explanation of myself. Then, “suddenly,” the veil, as they say, was lifted.
A few months after that occurrence, as my interest in reading began to slowly return, I found myself drawn mainly to the sayings and writings of old masters. What did Buddha have to say? What did Christ? Lao Tsu? Patanjali? I wanted to read them with new eyes.
Oddly, in those thirty-seven years of seeking, I had never read the Ashtavakra Gita, and indeed was barely aware of its existence. Then recently, as I sat at the bedside of a dying friend and teacher, another friend placed it in my hands. I opened it and was astonished. Here, in one concise volume, was all that needed to be said.
Dorab Framji
I learned yesterday of the death of Dorab Framji of Tiruvannamalai at the age of 92. A Parsi (Zoroastrian) from Bombay, he was one of the few living disciples of the advaitic sage Sri Ramana Maharshi (who left the world in 1950).
Dorab accompanied his father on visits to see Ramana as a child. He moved to Tiru permanently when he grew older. His home was five minutes walk from the ashram, just next to the Osbornes.
He had the reputation of being gruff and grumpy to strangers but was exceedingly kind to friends. I was privileged to stay with him for a month in 2019 and, in retrospect, am sorry that I did not take up the invitation to spend more time with him. (Maybe I should have stayed till he himself would throw me out, and not run off to visit Madurai and Kerala?)
His moving story is told in the ashram newsletter, Saranagathi.
Links
Misguided by the stars
I recently read the novel, "Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead" (and then saw the 2017 film adaptation, "Spoor"). This is the first I've read by the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. The novel kept my attention, though I did not feel any great endearment towards the story or its themes. The novel could be said to revolve around a couple of main motifs: the question of freewill vs. determinism, and the question of how much importance to give to non-human lives. Because I had already made up my mind with regard to these themes, it was not so meaningful for me to revisit them.
With regard to determinism, this has been thrashed out extensively by eastern thinkers. The “law of karma” is informed by greater intelligence than anything in astrology, because it assigns a significant role to free will; so it neatly wraps both determinism and free will into it. But even so, sages advise to put it aside. The "I Ching" too is a bit more than an “oracle” because in casting the yarrow sticks, the idea is to allow the universe to intervene at the time of consultation; and the interpretation itself is a dialogue that takes place with the subconscious. It is less about interpreting a pattern that has been hard coded at the time of birth, than about learning and interpreting signs, understanding natural cycles and our relation to them - there's a whole practical philosophy behind the book, so working with the I Ching is more about getting into the spirit of correct and timely action than about being told what to expect by an oracle. The I Ching is perhaps just a tool for acquiring intimacy with the book's philosophical underpinnings.
With regard to the novel's other major theme - the relative importance of nature - it is increasingly clear that we place ourselves above nature only to our peril. We exist with all of nature in a state of interbeing. There is no way to separate or disentangle ourselves from nature or the universe. But interbeing is based on something deeper and more integral than the character's emotional bondage. Placing oneself in the position of guardian angel or ambassador for the natural world is just as misguided as believing one is either its master or steward. To place oneself in any of these roles is to adopt just another form of separation. In doing so, the character additionally separates herself from her community.
Gregory David Roberts
I started to watch Shantaram, which I found surprisingly good - it captures the atmosphere and feel of the novel and the casting is brilliant. I read the novel in 2009 and loved it, of course, like everyone I know. But I didn't read The Mountain Shadow, Roberts's second novel, because I read a couple of negative reviews when it came out. I sort of passed him off as a "one book" writer. Someone introduced me to that term when describing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writer Annie Dillard; though I actually enjoyed a couple of her other books.
Anyway, after watching the first episode of "Shantaram" I had a look to see what Roberts has been doing since. I was delighted to see that he didn't stop with those two books, but has both continued writing and has been re-inventing himself as a musician. He's also studied under an Indian guru and become a devotee of Kali. He has an amazing look, with a red tikka down his forehead, goes shirtless, and is adorned with beads, necklaces and rings. He lives in Jamaica, which he says is a great place to produce music. He's also been writing new novellas and a graphic novel and recording YouTube films and podcasts about philosophy, spirituality, his books and his writing techniques. At age 70 he's wonderfully lively and creative. An inspiration.
Kfar Hittim
Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din's forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It's said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.
In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.
An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod's forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.
The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.
The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters - and the lake itself well below sea level. It's a small part of the Syrian-African rift - a feature that goes all the way down to Africa's great lake system. A great tear in the earth's crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two "Horns" of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.
The Climate Book
I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.
Villa Triste
I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader's French dictionary. I like his particular style of "auto-fiction" and will probably read more of his books.
Lupin
A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It's quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit - a mistake, no doubt.
"Lupin" itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don't know if it will continue to hold my interest.
India
During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I'm not sure that it's true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.
They can apparently now afford to forget all about the "realities of life", and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.
Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It's less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.
Journal
Fediverse
I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.
My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well :-)
I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It's also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.
The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.
Video
We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I'm bored I won't watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven't watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching "The Worst Person in the World", but it didn't hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in "The House of Dragon". But without great enthusiasm.
Music
I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn't possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn't available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn't possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I'm amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It's like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.
Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.
Books
I'm reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I'm reading in French on the Kobo. It's helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano's books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I'm a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano's prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.
Links of the day
The stories that most interested me were:
The revelation of Liz Truss's influences though I haven't been able to verify the facts of that story.
Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade
Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.
Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds
It isn't a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.
Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime
When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.
Walks, thoughts
It being the eve of the Day of Atonement, when the roads become quiet and the sounds of nature come to the forefront, I enjoyed my afternoon walk through the woods and fields, without the distant roar of traffic.
Earlier I had seen part of an episode of The House of the Dragon series and read the final chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future . Probably these influences were in the background of my thoughts. The Dragon series is about in-family rivalry over the struggle for the throne and dynastic succession - itself rather a boring plot-concept, but one that is well-rooted in our history and culture. One of the characters, thinking of his legacy, says that history remembers "name" rather than "blood[line]". The interest in how one will be remembered is, according to vedantic thought, a projection of sat (existence), and the longing to live forever; the instinctive wish for immortality.
The Ministry of the Future also circles around these ideas of mortality and legacy; of the meaning and possible influence of a single human life and of the survival of the species in the time of the climate crisis. Taking the risk of venturing into new-agey territory it celebrates nature and urges human self-restraint in terms of population growth, resource use and territorial expansion.
I already feel like I've lived a long life and when I die can hope to be forgotten. But most likely I will go on living for awhile, so I sometimes feel a need to assess the use of my time. Influenced by yoga and eastern philosophies, I have always understood life and human evolution as the striving for the attainment or rediscovery of our true nature. Besides the aspect of sat (existence) mentioned above, this is said to include also chit (consciousness) and ananda (bliss, or joy). We have a voracious interest in acquiring knowledge and experience on account of sat and chit, and a hunger for pleasure on account of ananda. All three of these basic instincts are infinitely insatiable. So we want to live forever, accrue knowledge, experience, money, material goods and sensual gratification, while fearing suffering and our mortality.
Indian philosophy says that the only way to "quench / to extinguish" these drives is through inner/integral (not solely intellectual) understanding of our true nature as already immortal, omniscient and joyful. Thereupon, according to both Buddhism and yoga, we attain nirvana (which means literally the action of extinguishing).
So how to do that? Not, I think, by denial of these instincts (asceticism). That has no meaning. Not by diminishment. As we approach death, we experience the extenuation of the physical and mental faculties. This morning I read that dear old Shraddhavan recently died at the age of 80. This English woman was one of the founders of Auroville and for years and years held study circles on the meaning of Sri Aurobindo's poem Savitri. The obituary said that since the end of last year, she began gradually to "fade away". Whether or not that is true I do not know, but my hope is that this was just how it looked. My hope is that, rather than diminishing, we grow, i.e. expand into the cosmic, the universal, the infinite. From the outside, this can also look as if we are "fading" because the attention has shifted.
In the final pages of The Ministry of the Future Robinson mentions the statue of Ganymede and the eagle on the lake shore of Zürich. His character surmises that the bird may really be the phoenix, which constantly rises from its own ashes, and that the bronze human statue is making an offering of himself, and all that is, to it, for the sake of immortality.
At the end of the day, we die. The atoms that made up our bodies, our brains and the wisps of consciousness that gave meaning to our lives, seep out into the ether. They are carried on the cosmic wind, to recombine and make new bodies, new souls. We may hope to leave a legacy, to live on through our children or our good deeds. But the fear of death and the longing to continue at all costs, even with senses and bodily functions impaired, seem to express doubt.
If we want to die instead with an intimation of our immortality, with awareness of the universal, and with the feeling of deep joy that are our birthright and inner-nature, we need to consecrate our lives to expansion, rather than fear extinction. But why wait for death, if we can seek to do this already? That's the purport of vedantic philosophy.
This still does not really answer the how. On my walk, perhaps with Robinson's Ministry resonating still in me, I began to think that one approach could be to live more closely to nature. From the perspective of climate action, this is a little counter-intuitive. The best arrangement for humans is to inhabit small to mid-sized communities or towns that provide most of their needs within walking or cycling distance, without the need to commute or import. Ideally goods would be shared rather than owned. If we are fortunate to live in a place where heating and air-conditioning are less necessary, the carbon footprint can be further reduced.
But there are communities that fulfill these requirements while still being close to nature. That's why I looked again at Auroville (and discovered Shradhavan's death). From their newsletter I also learned about the latest developments regarding the internal strife that they have been experiencing within the last year. But like the Aurovillians themselves, I believe they will eventually overcome those difficulties, since their lives there really depend upon that.
As human beings in our world community, the lives of our children and grandchildren depend upon overcoming the enormous challenges of our era. It's the dire necessity of doing so that underlies the optimism in Ministry of the Future. As Robinson says, "we will cope no matter how stupid things get" and "the only catastrophe that can't be undone is extinction."
I would add that something of ourselves survives even extinction. Matter, energy and consciousness are never truly destroyed - they simply recycle to make something new. Seeing this can lead to an understanding of the inseparable interdependence between ourselves and our biosphere. If as a species, we begin to get, to really grok, this interdependence, we will surely take all the steps that are necessary to safeguard our planetary home.
The Ministry for the Future
Enjoying this book by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's less a novel than New York 2140, or Aurora, the only other books of his that I've read.
A science fiction novel rooted in non-fiction
More like an amalgam of random various texts - some scientific, some philosophical, some journalistic, some anecdotal - with a bit of a storyline and a few characters to hold it together. But, in so far as presenting a possible future history of climate change, and climate action, in the mid-21st century, the formula works. And, more importantly, it fulfills the promise of serious speculative science fiction, of getting us to think about the future that we are making for ourselves, right now.
I thought about that today, when spending the afternoon with my grandchildren. I considered their own hopes and dreams, and how some of these might be stymied by the increasing devastation of the planet.
I just came back from flights overseas - flights that took me to Portugal via Belgium: looking at that absurd right-angle on the map makes me feel ridiculous. Like the times I reached Delhi via Moscow. I think in future, if I fly to Europe it will be to the city nearest to my intended destination - then overland, somehow. But, when I check the possibilities, the costs of such travel far exceeds that of plane tickets, unfortunately. In a better world, governments would be doing more to reduce the costs of overland public transport. There's still no real way to get from Israel to Europe or the rest of Asia other than by flying. The ferries of yesteryear, that plied the routes between Palestine, Greece and Italy, are no more, and the uncertainties of travel in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan prevents passage through those countries to further east. The world is less open today, and travel is more dependent upon airplanes, than when I was young.
Links: Food
Gates-Funded 'Green Revolution' in Africa Has Failed, Critics Say
Critics say the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, founded in 2006 with money from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations, has promoted an industrial model of agriculture that poisons soils with chemicals and encourages farmers to go into debt by buying expensive seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. As a result of that debt, some farmers have had to sell their land or household goods like stoves and TVs, said Celestine Otieno and Anne Maina, both active with organizations in Kenya advocating for ecologically friendly practices. "I think it's the second phase of colonization," Otieno said.
Journal
I'm enjoying PKD's The Man in the High Castle. It's one of his more coherent books - it would be a good introduction to his writing.
Links
Israeli forces raid offices of six Palestinian human rights groups | Palestinian territories | The Guardian I'm lost for words here. But Israel couldn't get away with this sort of thing if, say, Europe actually cared. There no longer seems to be any leverage in use. It always seems to me that Israel is testing the waters in such cases. Everyone should bear in mind that it would like to do much worse. To the extent that it's policies are ignored, it feels free to do more.
Salman Rushdie
I read about the attempt on the author's life and his wounding in the attack. I've read only one of his books - Shalimar the Clown, and a couple of short stories, which I enjoyed. Satanic Verses I once tried to read, but it didn't hold my interest. I find something irritatingly affected about the man that keeps me at a distance. Maybe more than other authors, his personality seems to infuse itself into the writing. But my judgment is only cursory - I can't really claim to understand Rushdie from reading one novel and listening to a few interviews. And it's just a personal bias. Still, I obviously know him better than his would-be assassin - I suppose religion was the motivating factor and Rushdie was just a symbolic target. What an idiot, what a presumption, by an ignorant 24-year old, to harm one of the great writers of our era.
I think the irony at the heart of all religions is that real religion is not something that one can "follow". Every religious tradition has its geniuses, but the greatness of most of them stems from the fact that they themselves weren't followers. They were people who put their lives on the line, searched for truth, tried to go to the heart of existence and made a direct connection with the divine. In their boldness, uniqueness, and willingness to escape convention, they had more in common with Rushdie than with those who revile him and want him dead.
A good guide to religion and ideology is that wherever there are attempts to trap us in prescribed practices and ritual, such as prayer or meditation at regular intervals, we need to reject them. Whenever they take away our power to think for ourselves, require us to differentiate ourselves from others, wear identifying clothing or symbols, we should reject them. True religion is about freedom of mind and vision: we can't understand any of the secrets at the heart of existence as long as we subscribe to set rules of behaviour or thinking.
It's a funny thing; the religious geniuses were themselves, by the standards of ordinary 21st century society, crazy fanatics - they had to be - it's just that they weren't followers.
George R. R. Martin
Having finished reading all five volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire now, I began to read a bit about the author. Apparently he composed all his books - at least up to 2011 and maybe till today - on a DOS computer and in WordStar. There's something inspiring about that simple fact: One of the most successful and prolific writers of our time requires nothing more than what most people regard as antequated software. He evidently rejected all the bells and whistles of modern word processors in favor of an old and trusted tool. As to technique, he says that he writes in a sort of daydream, though obviously he needs to be extremely systematic in order to keep all the threads of his epic together. I wonder how he compiles and catalogues the enormous amount data that he is working with? Software also as simple as WordStar? OrgMode could naturally handle both the writing and the data collection, and would be a perfect tool. When I write my epic, that's what I'll use.
2022-05-24
Blog backlog up to date
I have successfully passed all of the home-spun html entries from recent months into org-static-blog, meaning that I now have a continuous archive for the last three years. The ones from before that time can be found on WordPress. I don't plan to move more of them.
A website should be more that a blog, however - I would like to add new features as time goes by. My biggest dilemma is whether to bother with adding some sort of fediverse or social networking to the site; it's somewhat of a distraction, and it isn't really possible to do it in basic html like the rest of the site. The simplest format is Bob Mottram's Epicyon, if I want to get that working. But it looks like it would be necessary to add NGINX to the server. That's possible too, it seems: one can have more than a single web servre protocol running on a server.
A Life Full of Holes, by Paul Bowles
I finished that today. It isn't really clear to me whether he wrote the book under a fictional pseudonym, or whether the Magrebi storyteller was for real. Anyway, it's a great book, written in a very original style. I could easily imagine a Bedouin shepherd relating the story. It's poignant and creates great sympathy for the narrator. Usually a book like this, written by a western writer would be suspect of disguised racism, condescension or orientalism, but it's not what I feel here. He doesn't paint a pretty picture of the westerners, "the Nazarenes", who appear in the book, and doesn't romanticize the locals - mainly you think that he's telling it like it is. I think it most reminded me of a Nectar in a Sieve, a book by the Indian writer Kamala Markandaya that I read years ago, though A Life Full of Holes is less tragic.
Bad News
The Guardian brings today terrible stories of Ukraine, of Uyghurs, of Sudan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The world is full of sorrow. So let's party?
That wouldn't be for me to say, since troubles are more likely to make me turn inward. But either way, this is not the "Let's fix things" mentality that we probably need.
2022-04-13 Ibn Arabi
Reflections after reading a paragraph of Ismail Hakki Bursevi's translation and commentary upon Ibn Arabi's "Kernel of the Kernel"
" That is to say, if he has not… drunk the glass of love, and has not found annihilation in the ipseity of God, when he says "He", he will be speaking according to his own conjecture, imagination, understanding and relativity. He brings the Being of God into imagination, and gives it a form. Because he has not divested himself of being and reached Absoluteness. Consequently, he puts God under a condition, according to his conjecture and imagination and draws around him a limit; thereby he will have immanenced Him and invented Him. And thereby he has worshipped a creator which he himself has originated."
This is a perfectly vedantic commmentary, relating to the dangers of false understanding and imagination of the Absolute, and the need for complete self-annihilation (nirvana) before approaching or presuming to be absorbed in the divine essence.
Yesterday I watched the documentary, "The Pirate Bay - Away from Keyboard". The latter phrase is the way, according to Peter Sunde, of saying "in real life", because for those who spend their lives on the internet, the internet is real life. Well, of course it is. But is playing a game real life? Being immersed in a novel, or in TV, like the character in "Being There", or in a hallucinatory drugged state? Or in a psychosis?
It is, actually, just in the same way as what we call reality is engineered by our imagination. Reality is there, but it is warped into something different. For example, we could say that, from a position of higher understanding, the universe is all in sync; in harmony; in a state of cooperation. Whereas, in the consciousness of an ordinary, conditioned individual, there is instead, competition and rivalry. The big fish eat the little fish; entailing the necessity for constant defence against adversity. This is not just a matter of seeing the world a little differently. It is a fundamental difference; a night-and-day difference. So yes, by the measure of reality, it is likely that we are in a state of psychosis. And a person who sees the world according to a different paradigm from our mundane perception of it would be labeled psychotic. And who can say who is right? We only know that owing to the strict behavioural rules of society and of the human-created world, it is difficult for a person who perceives and understands in a completely different way to function.
In such a world, where one has little chance of ever seeing the real outside of our human-created mould, we might just as well live in a fantasy that is provided by television, by the internet, by the game-makers, or psycho-active drugs; so long as is does not interfere too much with our ability to function, for part of the day, in the "away from keyboard" world constructed by human society for the purpose of eking out a livelihood, consuming, procreating, etc.
There is, however, the unfortunate fact that our human activities are destroying the biosphere. Here again, we find that humans have found a way of incorporating concern for the biosphere into their carefully constructed world of illusion. They believe that if they live according to certain constraints, they will minimize the damage. Thus the founders of the Pirate Bay, despite their disregard for other human conventions, incorporated vegetarianism into their lifestyle. It is fairly easy to integrate "environmental awareness" and other values into our carefully constructed fantasy world.
Whatever the outcome of the environmental crisis we are facing, it is likely that the omnipotent and omniscient pan-consciousness behind the world of appearances has long ago taken human activity into account, and that all of our actions take place against the background of this consciousness.
The real question for us, for human beings, is whether we must reconcile ourselves to living always and forever in illusion, or whether we can follow Ibn Arabi in seeking a reality that is not conditioned by imagination?
2021-11-23-reading-links
What I’m reading
"Son Visage et le Tien", a long essay by Jenni Alexis. Interesting, so far. The English Wikipedia article about him references an article in the Atlantic, “When does a writer become a writer“[1]. Alexis, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Margaret Duras and so many others that the article doesn’t mention, has a daytime job. Winning the Goncourt prize came as a big surprise for him. It’s the kind of attainment that so many aspiring writers dream about.
Links
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/11/when-does-a-writer-become-a-writer/248945/
Despite all the predictions that the Pegasus affair would be all forgotten after a few weeks, no, the company’s woes seem only to be accumulating. Blacklisted by the US gov’t, half a billion dollars in debt, and now being sued by Apple.
NSO was about to sell hacking tools to France. Now the Israeli spyware company is in crisis. | MIT Technology Review https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/23/1040509/france-macron-nso-in-crisis-sanctions/
Apple Sues NSO Group For Hacking Its Users https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kbvyb/apple-sues-nso-group-for-hacking-its-users
"For the experts and activists who have been accusing NSO Group of enabling authoritarian abuse for years, it’s a victory that is long overdue."
2021-11-22-news-feeds-paywalls-books
Organizing some news feeds under Vivaldi
I put some of my RSS Newsfeeds in order in Vivaldi. My idea is to use it for blogs, rather than busy news sources. For that reason I first added RMS’s political notes, and then removed it. Because if I want to use it as what Dave Winer calls “a river of news”, RMS dominates too much. But the links are good. It would be better if Vivaldi made it possible to use sub-folders for different areas (and hence sub-rivers – by being able to click on the top folder that includes each set of feeds).
It’s a little disappointing to see many of the bloggers whom I bookmarked falling silent for months on end. Many people invest a lot of time in producing a nice looking blog, and then forget to use it.
Paywalled systems
I had a look at Glenn Greenwald’s website (http://glenngreenwald.net). It’s an outdated mess, with stuff requiring Flash player. His website doesn’t mention that he is now on Substack, (greenwald.substack.com) of which I was already aware. I can’t afford to subscribe to him on Substack, any more than I can afford to pay for other news sources. For now, I support the Guardian with a monthly donation, but can’t afford to do that for every web journal I visit. Steve Winer, who is wealthier than I am, has written about this problem. If enough websites gang up on me and offer a subscription model that works more like the music streaming services, offering a monthly subscription that allows me to read, say, 50 or 100 articles a month, across different journals, maybe I would pay for it. I think that the only real solution to paywalls is a model similar to the music streaming services, with a flat monthly subscription similar to that of Medium. But Medium reminds me a little of the gig economy; there are a few top earners, but even they are not getting paid so much. For bloggers and independent writers, what would work best would be to get together and create a “writers guild” or cooperative, working as a non-profit, so that the writers themselves don’t get cheated.
I don’t mind the presence of ads, only the nasty ones and trackers.
Open Library
I was delighted, then disappointed, to find https://openlibrary.org, where one can “borrow” books for a limited time. The problem is that the presentation makes them not very readable. Might be okay for students, but not really for readers. Someone put in a considerable amount of work in making the books available, but didn’t go the full route. At minimum there should be a phone application enabling comfortable reading of the books. The project belongs to archive.org, the internet archive, and uses the same login for both.
Links
India hovers over the Pause button for Big Tech’s march onto one hundred million farms • The Register https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/22/india_agristack/
happiness
Flight to Tel Aviv: I have been reading Sapiens, and reached almost the of the book now. I have just finished reading his discussion of happiness; in which he writes particularly of the Buddhist understanding of the concept. It is close to the one I find in Yoga philosophy, though I would phrase it differently. I think that happiness is the state normally found when consciousness rests in the present moment and is not in a condition of resistance to it. In other words, the mind is at peace. In a moment that we are caught off-guard by beauty, such as when one opens the curtains to behold a golden sunrise, the mind is "enraptured", if only for a moment, perhaps. Something comes between our thoughts of the past, our memories, regrets; and our plans hopes and desires for the future, so that we know peace, for a fleeting moment.
Similarly, when we satisfy a desire or fulfill a dream, we touch on our peace by being focused on the pleasure, rather than thinking of the past or the future. Conversely, if the present moment is full of pain, and we resist the pain, we amplify it. But if, on the other hand, we are able to feel pain but also accept it, then we can still be at peace. Buddhists would say that we should simply observe the comings and goings of painful and pleasurable thoughts. The issue I have with this is that it then becomes a mental process, and is based on the division of subject and object. But here there is a problem. Except through an analytical process, it is not possible to achieve true equanimity while there is this rational discrimination.
July 1, 2020
Well, it is subtle. I'm not sure that the Buddhist attitude is so different. There is a slight difference in attitude between saying that the self (or anything) is "empty of a separate existence" and saying that "the (individual) self (atman) is the self of everything (brahman)". My axe to grind is that our observation is flawed, because it fails to take into account that there is a substratum in which the existence of one "thing" is the existence of the whole, so that the objects or separate selves are only superficially separate. And so our observation of the universe is flawed at the most fundamental level: it does not take into account the most important factor. So even Sapiens, as a book, though it speaks of our speciesism and our failure to take into account the environmental concerns, does not see as a basic truth that it is simply impossible not to take into account the connection between the self and the other.
It is not exactly that the self (me) and the table are "connected" or (heaven forbid) one and the same, but that we share a common basis, a common existence, that gives "life" to both of us. The table is "illusory", so long as I do not take into account the observational fallacy and the underlying common existence; because otherwise what I see is only part of the truth, and part of the truth equals a total lie. Not practically, because I am in fact using the table in order to rest this notebook on and write these words, but philosophically, existentially. Existentially, it changes everything: my stance, my attitute, but also, something much more fundamental and beyond our subjectivity. It is the way in which the universe functions. A universe of separate objects would never actually work, could not exist.
Harari speaks, for example, of the absence of an intelligent designer.He speaks of a lack of purpose behind the universe. This is inaccurate. There is no designer who stands outside of it - that's true, but there is, absolutely, intelligence and good design in the universe. The universe is a manifestation of intelligence. A human who tries to design a better variety of corn, or an automobile, will fail miserably if he is unable to take into account the natural "laws" of physics, chemistry, or biology, which are his palette. And, anyway, to the extent that he fails to take into account the full environmental impact of his "creation", he will cast a fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works, of the total design.
Harari is right that environmental "destruction" is a misnomer. It is actually "change", but, in so far as this species is concerned, destruction of the biosphere will be the end of the road. Some other species may come along, perhaps, to take our place, and the place of countless other species that we have made extinct. Or not. The real universe, that which exists behind this one, is like a child's magnetic toy that constantly recombines in new ways. You knock down the cathedral you have so carefully constructed, and the pieces recombine to make a spaceship. Nothing is destroyed, but conditions are changed. Does it matter? It matters greatly to homo sapiens. The species can only function within a certain habitat.
Our failure is in not understanding how to coexist within our habitat in a sustainable way. We don't have to worry about the universe not being able to put right any mistakes that we make. It will, but not necessarily in a way that is favourable to our species. Since, despite our bluster and self-importance, the universe will go on anyway without us. Not entirely without us, because we will continue. Just not in a form that is recognisable to us.
The question is whether or not our progress towards self-destruction (or change) is inevitable? It may be inevitable according to our nature as human beings. But Harari points out that civilization is cultural. The culture can be changed. The energies that drive us can be harnessed in completely different ways. We can change the way in which we live on the planet if we want to, so the apocalpyse is not inevitable.
The Sheltering Sky
Reading The Sheltering Sky of Paul Bowles. It’s interesting and well-written. The characters are racist and sexist, of course; I haven’t a clue whether that reflects the views of the author, because we aren’t intended to admire them.
Gene Wolfe on literature's mainstream
“Incidentally, I’d argue that SF represents literature’s real mainstream. What we now normally consider the mainstream—so called realistic fiction—is a small literary genre, fairly recent in origin, which is likely to be relatively short lived. When I look back at the foundations of literature, I see literary figures who, if they were alive today, would probably be members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Homer? He would certain belong to the SFWA. So would Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare. That tradition is literature’s mainstream, and it has been what has grown out of that tradition which has been labeled SF or whatever label you want to use.”
Larry McCaffery interview with writer Gene Wolfe.
Gun Island
The novel is true to Ghosh’s more recent swashbuckling style, as well as to his concerns, while at the same time preserving his scholarly core. He has found a way to offer serious ideas in a popular style, and he has always been a magician at storytelling. The product probably wouldn’t work if he took himself too seriously.
Sebald's "The Emigrants"
Sebald’s The Emigrants is the only book, fiction or nonfiction, that I’ve managed to read from beginning to end in recent months. His books always grip me like thrillers, though ostensibly they meander in the most leisurely way, and it’s hard to classify them as either fiction or nonfiction. I suppose they are a kind of artful rendering of the real world.. i know nothing of literary genres, but surely his style is unique.
Sebald's early death was such a cruel tragedy, but somehow reminds me of the stories and anecdotes he writes about:
“Sebald [aged 57] died while driving near Norwich in December 2001. The coroner’s report, released some six months later, stated that Sebald had suffered an aneurysm and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an oncoming lorry.” (Wikipedia)