No-name progress II.

Soon gonna be Earth Day innit?

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TAKE THE ONLY TREE THAT'S LEFT AND STUFF IT UP THE HOLE IN YOUR CULTURE. On this day of days, I recommend a careful & repeated listening to Leonard Cohen's 1992 album 'The Future' - enough to see (perhaps) the overall shape & pattern of it, the 'order' if you will; or at least that the despair in it is not complete, or not completely in control, and that there is something there that might be called hope (but wouldn't be). In the face of such prescient eloquence we can temporarily overlook his being such a ham, and even forgive the kiss-&-tell on our Janis. 'CAUSE HONEY, THE FUTURE IS NOW. SLAVERY:   Oh, of course there are no more slave ships coming to the Americas from Africa ... but if you happen to be in the South China Sea there are others on the go these days just as desperate. A ubiquitous human behaviour down through the ages. Not to mention wage slaves the world over. ARMENIA, PASSCHENDAELE, GUERNICA, HOLOCAUST, MUSELMANN: In industrialized war, practice makes perfect. Then the pious peek into Auschwitz and their leaders mouth the words "Never again!" but what it means is "Always! Every time!" and they give us Rwanda, Darfur, endless extermination. Aztec, Tupí, Beothuk, Apache. 'Course y'all think this is rhetoric buddit ain't. None of it is clear cut, one could wish it were - see here. ATOMIC BOMBS:   Oh but the cold war is over now isn't it? We're disarming aren't we? Sure we are ... except for slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, and mostly not, and then there're North Korea and Iran. CIVIL RIGHTS:   Are you kidding me? You don't read newspapers. Is that it? THE GREEN REVOLUTION:   Ah! When will Norman Borlaug return his prize and join the ranks of Cecil Rhodes and Nobel himself in well-earned disgrace? GLOBAL WARMING, CLIMATE CHANGE   &c. &c. &c. :   Considering the unfolding environmental catastrophe from the pinnacle (or is it precipice?) of human perfectability is sobering & instructive. Eh? Don't you find? Here's Chris Hedges (from a 2013 Q&A session) on fantasy, discernment, & judgement:         The fact is if we were serious about attempting to extract ourselves from where we are we would declare global warming to be - every country would declare it to be a national emergency. We would shut down the tar sands in a minute. We wouldn't even discuss the XL Pipeline. We know where this is gonna end up. Part of the problem is that those who control the power of popular culture, popular ideas, and popular images have done a really good job of keeping us entranced by fantasy and feeding this mania for hope.         People say you're so pessimistic or you're so dark, but I don't make up climate change reports. I don't make up what Wall Street is doing to the global economy. Those are just realities. Having been a war correspondent for twenty years is a kind of advantage in that we didn't talk about who was a pessimist or an optimist. We coldly calculated what the weapons systems were at the end of that road and how we were going to react and people who had a kind of Pollyanna-ish view about their own immortality are no longer with us. ALAN RUSBRIDGER, 350, AVAAZ, MUSELI: It seems that Alan Rusbridger proceeds approximately without a plan. This is documented (for which one praises his open & forthright character) in a series of podcasts (five so far). The language used is replete with hedged & woolly diplomacy, contingent correctitude, hesitant understatement. It might remind us of perfidious Albion. One distinction is particularly interesting: that the boardroom right-wingers probably don't eat müesli for breakfast while the Guardian left-libs do. What this reveals is that the struggle is seen as being between elites, or factions of the elite class. All good except that it leaves us yobbo whoremongers and dirty old men out in the cold. Reminiscent of Birkenstock & Wellington (the black rubber boots with orange trim) greenies back in the day. The campaign is struggling along. Certain things - a quite open Q&A session, and reaching out via email for feedback & suggestions - seem very positive; as is the intermittent presence of 'Keep It In The Ground' on the Front Page. Some other indications are not so sanguine, particularly the involvement of 350 & Avaaz which are so hobbled by a narcissistic misunderstanding of the Internet - exalted navel-gazing determined to count its way to glory.                 TRENDING ON TWITTER?!   DOH?! Time will tell. An election coming up an'all. "He worships at an altar of a stagnant pool and when he sees his reflection he's fulfilled." (Or she as the case may be.)   MOSTLY 8-LETTER WORDS:                             RELIGION                                                           POLITICS                                                                                         ECONOMICS                                                                                                                             INTERNET Each of them sucks you off in different (and mostly gratifying) ways, but they are all energy-drains - ideologies, patterns without heart. The Internet (standing in for technology which has too many letters) is not alpha & omega, neither be-all nor end-all ... after all. No more than another place to hide, and not even a very good one, and so expensive in so many ways.         My life,                 by Gizélia:         My name is Gizélia - I am made of chalk [giz=chalk]. A magic fairy told me that         if I was clever she would transform me into a real girl ... (These kinds of transformations are seen frequently in Laerte's art.  No mystery in that.)   Consider the English expression 'not by a long chalk'. The OED tells us it alludes to the use of chalk in reckoning & recording bar tabs and keeping score in games (such as billiards & snooker where chalk also has other uses) scoring ‘points’, with citations from the 16th century to the present day. Taking the metaphor (allusion itself used to mean metaphor) as relying on 'long' introduces wholistic tinges: completeness, a sense of 'fresh from the box', even the punchline of a ribald joke "a pas longs" / 'take big steps [Appolon!]'. I come back again and again to the last sentence of the 1972 report 'The Limits to Growth':         The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence. Of course, one presents such images and people immediately assume they are intended to shock; which happens not to be the case in this instance gentle reader. The search for the elusive Green Party of Canada has so far proven fruitless. I say "so far" ... And the famous blue three-point-plan is foundering (I use the present participle but really I think it's a done deal) upon the reefs of 350.org correctitude. It's hard to believe how they turn their backs on me. I used to claim complete ignorance - but I am coming (too late) to savour and appreciate the fear that accompanies this correctitude, which will not, cannot, can never bear scrutiny and so does not permit it.

 
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Dark fruit cake.

Conspiracy of noise.

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Everyone's heard the expression 'conspiracy of silence'. I'm wondering what a 'conspiracy of noise' might be like? Leonard Cohen's "Getting lost in that hopeless little screen," almost seems to be about TV. Maybe it's also about these solitary computer screens. So many of the threads here appear in his amazing 1992 album 'The Future' that I can't help but try to gather up a few of them: Keith Ecclestone talking (so many years ago) about the 'plenum void' as flip-side alienation (it was the 60s); the 'Always' of my mothers crazy notion of carnal love; Ivan Illich's compassion and Jacques & Raissa Maritain's "l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel," considered as 'amorous array'. I mentioned Chris Hedges' set piece 'The Myth of Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies' most recently delivered in Vancouver a few months ago as 'The Rules of Revolt'. In the Q&A portion of a 2013 reading he says:         Sitting in front of your computer screen, alone in your room typing angry screeds about the government means you're still sitting alone in your room - which is just where they want you. Where they don't want you is out in the street.         The Internet and electronic communications are very good tools for organizing, but very bad tools for creating mechanisms of mass movements that have the ability to actually begin to impede the function of the state. The Internet has created this strange world where those who are hackers have the ability to break down electronic walls and expose the inner workings of power to us, which is why they are being so ruthlessly persecuted, far and beyond anything they do or even might have done.         I think the Occupy Movement showed that we have got to begin to build the kind of large mass movements that I saw - I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe - in Eastern Europe where we were pulling 500 thousand people to Alexander Platz in East Berlin or 500 thousand people into Wenceslas Square in Prague. That's what we've got to do, and we have to use mechanisms like the general strike. These are the mechanisms that are going to save us.         I don't - in that sense, in terms of the ability to actually begin to, other than hacking - see the Internet as particularly useful that way. In fact if you look at Julian Assange's latest book 'Cyber Punks' which he did with Applebaum, he argues that ultimately the digital age is going to make totalitarian control even more efficient." The other thread, an image, a string of images: from Hedges talking about Neitzsche's 'molten pit' and 'the burnt ones' (also the title of Patrick White's first collection of stories); through Cohen's blizzard that "overturns the order of the soul"; Ibsen's boyg in 'Peer Gynt'; the vast whirlpool which I think I first saw in Edgar Allen Poe's 'A Descent into the Maelström'; and coming full circle back to the sinking of the Pequod in Melville's 'Moby Dick' that Hedges also mentions (after a brief diversion through Dante’s Inferno and the myth of Ulysses). He says (this is quite a tangly bit, replete with nonsequiturs, and needs close reading):         It is only those who harness their imagination, and through their imagination find the courage to peer into the molten pit, who can minister to the suffering of those around them. It is only they who can find the physical and psychological strength to resist. Resistance is carried out not for its success, but because by resisting in every way possible we affirm life. And those who resist in the years ahead will be those who are infected with this “sublime madness.” As Hannah Arendt wrote in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism', the only morally reliable people are not those who say 'this is wrong' or 'this should not be done,' but those who say 'I can’t.' They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: 'If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.' And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith." The bit from Kant brings up (again, from the ol' compost heap) the last sentence of 'The Limits to Growth':         The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence. I don't actually think that faith has necessarily to do with it. And ministering to the suffering is not an end in itself. But I can see how Hedges' background might lead him to put it that way. Jesuit rhetorical tricks? Is that it? All of this (gentle reader) makes exactly where I am sitting - viz., alone in my room - more and more unbearable, untenable, silly, wasteful ... and so on. I just hope that the automated text-analysers over at CSIS and the NSA don't interpret these meditations as anything ... dangerous.

 
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No-name progress I.

Is there a Green Party? and
The famous blue Three Point Plan.

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The guy on the left was already well on the way down and out when the photograph was taken in 2010. A-and, truth be told, this here 'one-plus-three-point' plan is most likely a foregone conclusion too - a shell game with the pea being a miracle. His friend gives 'im a telephone, boughten not bespoke, paid-for. It is not a perfect transaction but he is trying to be kind. What he don't didn't, doesn't, can't, won't see is the reason it was ever got rid of - simply that it (almost) never rang. Now it (almost) never rings. Nothing is changed. As the denominator comes closer and closer to (almost) never it's a cusp and out pop limits and calculus and all the sweet (predictable) music of the revolving spheres. But I am one who looks at the crescent moon to see if she still holds water cupped in her hands. Beyond limits is Heisenberg's uncertainty around position and momentum which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to ... the far more satisfying quantum conclusion that either the universe is ... or is not, never was. ... A way a lone a last a loved a long the Einstein sez "God don't play dice," but it seems to me like ... if He was He might.   Green Party: Round 1: (March 2) Go out to hear Elizabeth May and she sure seems to be telling the truth. Decide to follow it up. (March 7.) Leave a message for the one person I remember from the last time I tried it on with the Greens in this riding. Find a website with an email address and send one. Leave a message on the main Green Party site. Nadinha! Zilch! Round 2: (March 20.) Remember that Charlie Halpern was once kind. Leave a message on his site; he responds immediately and forwards the question; the person I was thinking of answers and promises to include me in the next riding meeting. (March 23.)   Three Point Plan: 1) TSP / Trinity St. Paul's: (March 22.) Visit TSB for Sunday service and meet Bob Fugere who promises to inform me of their next monthly meeting. (March 26.) He follows up with a gracious email explaining that the meeting hasn't been scheduled yet and he will tell me when it is. 2) Beaches United: I am blocked on this somehow. I keep formulating plans to go over, or telephone, or email - and then just don't do it. An open item then. 3) UofT: The divestment appears to be in the hands of 350 - a project on the go since 2013. Two hundred and eighty seven pages of 'Brief' and growing. (March 24.) Go to their scheduled weekly meeting. It is evident that their focus is raising money. Someone promises to send me the minutes. (March 26.) The lovely young Executive Assistant follows through, not with the minutes but with membership on the list. (March 28.) Go along to the Green Show. A bust. If there is a less gracious way to accomplish anything you'll find it first in Toronto. The 350 guy gives me the brush off. At least I manage to get rid of a big bag of e-waste. (March 30.) Sure enough, there is list email - interesting stuff too it is. [TO BE CONTINUED ...]

Emily is 12 years old. Sharie is her mother. Emily has been competing in beauty pagents since she was 4 years old. The photographs come from a recent NYT article based in turn on the latest project of Ilana Panich-Linsman (unfortunately the site does not work very well, for me at least).

Correctitude: It's not all bad. To begin meetings with a salute to the 'First Nations' is a good reminder that this is all, always has been, stolen land. As long as one is also mindful of corrupt band councils, and aware of large mammal extinctions before the coming of the 'white man' and so on. Or ... Laerte, a transsexual (with a double 'ss'), Patrick White, Rimbaud (from an era when sexual activity was determined by anal inspection carried out by licensed professionals). Re-reading Patrick White: 'Riders in the Chariot' (1961), 'The Solid Mandala' (1966), and 'A Fringe of Leaves' (1976). So many occasions when his words seem to be coming straight through the aether. No mistake that a number of deep friendships develop during the brief weeks reading 'Riders' at MUN so many years ago. (Of course we imagine ourselves a skein of Zaddiks - mensch being beyond our grasp.) And yet, also replete with pettiness - eloquent AND petty.   :-) I'll actually exist? You will.                                       I exist? You Exist. It's not just some kind of illusion? No. It's not that. I'm really going to turn into                                       Wow! I feel much better.    If I'd known I'd have a woman? You are.                                                 So you say.                     switched years ago. The machine didn't exist back then.   Alan Rusbridger's Guardian initiative has hit a few wrinkles. Notably financial links from the purveyors of fossil fuel into The Guardian's own coffers. What is evident now is that he really is playing by ear. And likely (also) hoping for a miracle. This is good. On the other hand, he is playing so openly and so transparently that this ... confusion (let's call it) comes off positively. It mirrors almost perfectly the ambiguous complicity around this issue in the heart of everyman. What he needs now is some small victory: possibly convincing his own colleagues - in the Guardian Media Group (GMG) & Scott Trust - to divest; or a softer target such as the Anglican Church; something - even a huge jump in the petition signers, from 140,000 to millions could conceivably turn the tide. Keeping in mind that this is the third-last stanza out of twenty five, four lines out of a hundred. Taken from Le Bateau Ivre, 1883, and an English translation by Oliver Bernard, 1962. Of course it's well worth going to the library and having a look at Samuel Beckett's translation (which is not available anywhere on-line that I can find).

Mais, vrai, j'ai trop pleuré! Les Aubes sont navrantes. Toute lune est atroce et tout soleil amer: L'âcre amour m'a gonflé de torpeurs enivrantes. O que ma quille éclate! O que j'aille à la mer!

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours. O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

She's having a ball. Who could object? And yet these images and the story (or the parts of the story that are not told) disturb, upset, sadden; and the wondering about this girl, her mother, and the photographer, just carries on ... Chris Hedges fulminates about violence to women, pornography, prostitution. What do you call whatever it is that is happening to Emily then?

 
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