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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the afternoon I picked up from the local junction a Glaswegian photographer and sangha member doing a project over here (she sent the photo below from the bus stop at Latroun to make sure she was at the right one)
She joined us for lunch, while our grandchildren’s TV programs blared out from different screens. Then D took her to Hares (West Bank village) – a bunch of Israelis, most of them Buddhist practitioners, went there to join Palestinians for the evening iftar meal. They do this every year. It was kind of the last moment in Ramadan, since the moon has been sighted and Eid al-Fitr will begin tomorrow. I decided not to go this time – I generally feel uncomfortable on such occasions, for some reason that I don’t fully understand myself. I also didn’t go for the iftar celebrations here in our village. This was one:
Instead I went for a long late afternoon walk in the woods and fields.
On my walk I continued listening to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”, which I find really interesting. A completely different look at some of the same history and pre-history covered by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.
(wild mustard flowers growing by side of the dirt road going down the hill)
I covered a lot of ground, both in the book and on my feet, and arrived home after dark at around 8:30, eating the leftovers from lunch time instead of the rich iftar fare: bit of salad, broccoli florets, half a pita, ball of labaneh with za’atar, and beetroot soup.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Figure 1: Ganymede statue, Zürich (Wikipedia)
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.
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.
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.
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.
