It don't take much.

A cheap drunk. A pushover.

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Don't complain about life! Don't complain about life! This book is unfaithful to the latest moments of history. This CD is a boring imitation of real rock. You don't have to justify everything you are going to throw away with a criticism. I'm a super-good person and ... Hey, any spare change?    I don't give money to bums! Get a job! Define 'good'.   I hear that Al Gore was in Lima for COP 20 and I want to hear what he had to say. I used to know how to grab those UN videos - I seem to have forgot but I eventually find a copy posted on YouTube by Julio Ruiz and since there is an embedded email address in it I thank him for taking the time to post it. He responds! Turns out he has a blog with a number of interesting clips from the event. I'm very critical of the UNFCCC generally and severally - to the point of boorish rudeness and well beyond - but not without having read and listened to them. In the process Julio finds this blog and makes some complimentary remarks, praises it. Man! That feels good! And here we are. Oh sure, maybe it's just a flash in the pan and the conversation will languish for some reason I will never know, but in the meantime there's a brief respite at least. Blue-sky-wise it's possible to visualize a 'nuclear fission' model of human psychological flourishing, maybe even a quantum theory if some minimum level of interest or concern can be identified with measurable units. Fraught with value judgements of course - tempting to define 'positive interaction' and so forth; 'flourishing' itself is not quite a neutral term though few would mistake it. Might be interesting to analyse so-called social 'atomization' in this context: Does it promote or inhibit the reaction?

A friend of mine who is in a position to know (or was until he retired) tells me that near-death statements are problematic, not dependable - possibly governed by the psychedelic effects of a failing liver. Not for nothing the Brazilian expression 'desopilar o fígado' (cleanse the liver) for 'cheer up' then eh?

Ademir Paixão's Dilma is deliciously ambiguous. What could she be doing? Blocking her ears so she won't hear? Flossing her ear canal? (To clean out the oil?) Applying a tourniquet? Putting on a mask? 'These people' have all got a serious hitch in their gitalong. Maybe what they need is a ... Double Date (!!!): Couple'a cool rich and powerful dudes with a couple'a hot Brazilian chicks (er ... ). Given the status of 'these people' we'll need a chaperone (from French chaperon 'hood' so possibly related to Brazilian camisinha). Who better than Jacob Zuma? (Although Izabella Teixeira certainly fills the bill as a stereotypical duenna.) I'll leave it to you to figgure out where Kátia Abreu and her stance towards the Código Florestal fits as Minister of Agriculture and what Dilma Rousseff means by appointing her. If I could have found a photograph of them together with Izabella Teixeira the Environment Minister it might begin to look like casting for the opening scene of Macbeth. What happens to people? She was tortured apparently, as a young woman in the 70s. What does that do to you I wonder? Grounds for compassion and easy enough for that to bleed over into a general (but unjustified and unwise) approbation. What Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott and Dilma Rousseff and Kátia Abreu and Izabella Teixeira (and their legion of colleagues around the world) are setting up for is hell on earth. They should be doing more than just cleaning their livers. Dig it! A different kind of double date portrayed by Daniel Espinosa in his film 'Easy Money': Three meditations, reflections, ruminations ... which seem to me to be central to the global environmental catastrophe as it unfolds:

Burning Bush: 1968 (August) Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia;   1968 (September) Ryszard Siwiec (7 March 1909 — 12 September 1968) in Poland, aged 59; an accountant with a degree in philosophy, active in the Polish resistance movement, with five children - so ... not a flake;   1969 (January) Jan Palach (11 August 1948 – 19 January 1969) in Wenceslas Square on January 16th, a student, aged 20;   1969 (February) Jan Zajíc (July 3, 1950 – February 25, 1969), a student (railroad engineering), aged 18;   1969 (April) Evžen Plocek (29 October 1929 – 9 April 1969) up-through-the-ranks manufacturing manager and a Communist party member, aged 39;   1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, Glasnost (openness), & Perestroika (restructuring);;   1989 Velvet Revolution, note that this is 20 years later - so even multiple self-immolations cannot be called an effective tactic;   1989-1993 & 1993–2003 Václav Havel;   2003-2013 Václav Klaus. Interesting that he outs himself in 2009 (Copenhagen year) as a climate change denier. :-) ;   1991 documentary film by Polish director Maciej Drygas 'Usłyszcie mój krzyk' / 'Hear My Cry' about Ryszard Siwiec;   2013 Burning Bush a three-part HBO mini-series by Polish director Agnieszka Holland, in Polish;   I've tried to get the Buddhists I know talking about the 'self-immolations' in Tibet (to no avail); and I've tried to get the Toronto climate fasting aficionados to talk about the notion of an actual hunger 'strike' (also to no avail). Mind you this is 'talk about' I'm talking about, discuss, exchange thoughts and ideas. What's so unspeakable? What shibboleth have I tripped over? But ... ... not a (fricken') word! This business of self-immolation must be solitary on several levels. Be that as it may, Theresa Spence's hunger strike on Victoria Island, even though it's object was a share in a diamond mine, showed the power of dramatic personal sacrifice and (it seems to me that) self-immolation falls onto that scale and so should be thought about, considered, not for immediate action or planning purposes but just to see where it fits into the scheme of things.

Samuel Scheffler 'Death and the Afterlife': The library does not have a copy and I am too demoralized to think about asking them to get one. Luckily there is a pirate .pdf floating around so I get to read it. (It was on BookZZ but things come and go over there. If you ask me I will send you a copy by email.) I fall for these philosophers so easily - such a pushover. It was the same with Stephen Gardiner and 'A Perfect Moral Storm' a few years ago. I get right into it, catalogue his (many) typos and send them to him by email for which he thanks me (and the changes are incorporated into the paperback version) but the guy will simply not answer my question about Cuba. How hard could it be to say even just, "Fuck off you know-nothing asshole!"? It would be very easy to tip into "These fuckin' soi-distant careerist American philosophers!" Similar responses from Tim Jackson & Peter Victor & Peter Sale though - so I guess it's nothing to do with either philosophers or America per se. 'Death and the Afterlife' turns out to be another of those 'how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin' exercises conducted under the 'rational' auspices of an avuncular self-effacing and very likeable fellow - he graciously spreads the glory to selected colleagues f'rinstance. I'm glad to be poor and forced to find the pirate version - 200 pages for 40 bucks to buy it, and then I might have felt ... even more like a fool. Nonetheless and all that said - some light is shed upon the poignant quandary of why no one is acting in the face of an overwhelming and quite likely terminal environmental catastrophe (although it is only addressed obliquely). A-and it's just 200 pages, a short read even for washed up old farts with flagging attention-spans. •   provenance: from Adbusters who have obviously read a review but have no idea what the book is about (and are hard pressed to convey even that much gramatically);   •   published by: Oxford University Press / OUP USA and in the OUP blog;   •   a good review: After the Meteor Strike, Amia Srinivasan (pdf) (I mean the review is good), appeared in the LRB where it is securely locked up - the link is to the author's copy;   •   NPR: A Philosopher's 'Afterlife': We May Die, But Others Live On, with a link to an audio interview with the author;   •   YouTube: interview with Harry Kreisler at University of California Television (UCTV) in 2012;   •   bio & contact: blurb at NYU;   •   In the NYT (himself): The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.;   [What hooked me this time (incidentally) is that the situation (at least) - regarding humanity's extinction ('regarding' as a verb) - has personal relevance. Not in terms of regret for the world my children (who have pretty well turned their backs on me) and grandchildren (whom I hardly know) will inherit - sorry to say it but there it is. And no, I don't fear death, just the pain I expect to preceed it. This is no more than bog standard human nature which has no cousciousness nor real knowledge of death itself and cannot possibly have any.]

Michael Harris 'The End of Absence': Some related (I think, not having seen Harris' book yet) material from Nicholas Carr: his essay in The Atlantic in 2008; and his 2011 book 'The Shallows' (mentioned here previously). One hums a few bars of Bob: "... and his mind has been mismanaged with great skill." •   provenance: from Tim Lott in The Guardian.   •   at the Toronto Public Library with quite a long waiting list;   •   the author's blog: The End of Absence; and an Interview in the New York Times; and the publisher's blurb from Penguin - just $26.95US;   It's all doubly & triply irritating, frustrating, because as a tool email has such wonderful possibilities. I am such a fool as can still imagine he sees advantages :-) But consider addiction to anodyne, the erosion of memory, takeover by the rentier/rentières ... Look up eutrapely (for the second or third time) and have a look at Ephesians 5:4 in the KJV where one sense of eutrapely is stressed. There's a lot more to be said no doubt - but the central phenomenon, which I have seen in myself and others close to me, is backfilling the genuine authentic interest & concern of real people (now excavated & absent) with the seemingly omnipresent & ever ready Kómputtor. There is a phenomenon in 'Dune' (was it?) where those addicted to artificial cerebral stimulation starve, to death. (No, not in 'Dune' maybe it's in 'Dhalgren' ...) And so ... remembering again my old friend Vincent Bernardus Tieleman Twight (getting misty and sentimental here) who managed to stay about completely away from computers in any form (but who did type a short email to me three or four months before he died - typed it mind you, someone else sent it :-). He said ... ... Oh fuck! It's gone! I've lost the damned email! Nevermind. It was just a few words, one sentence, well thought out and through and through, I remember that much. Oh! You see how this useless technology lets you down eh?! Fuck I miss 'im!

Presentation on the new times: Televisions, telephones, computers.     With so much information it's never been so easy ... ... to be misinformed about this brief and finite existence.

 
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Mere anarchy is loosed?

Today is WORLD DO NOTHING DAY - worthy of red letters to be sure.

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I learned about the word 'mere' from Pierre Trudeau's 'mere tribalism' speech. A comparable kind of endearing arrogance can be found in one of Brian Mulrooney's stump speeches: "We are adjusting our perceptions." Also considered calling this "Gravity, entropy, is kickin' in," but mere won. It is a yin/yang kind of anarchy I am thinkin' of: one axis engineered by H. grædum & 'The Davos Class' and executed by Black Bloc, Anonymous, Occupy; another in personal moral turpitude - turpytude? - and economic incontinence (since everything human could be said to ultimately boil down to individuals and their various personal decision matrices); and the whole physical/chemical/gravitational cosmos ... many axes, even up to Higgs Boson [Higgs' Boson?] - visions of a new Jacob's ladder. But closer to home and quite recently there's Obama's SOTU speech: No disrespect is intended here to Cory Remsburg. That he has been so cynically used does not discredit him though it is disturbing. Looking closely at the symbolism and hysterical responding applause it becomes even more disturbing. "But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact." [Applause.] "And when our children's children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did." [Applause.] So says Barack Obama in a 30 second slot in the (forgettable) just-before-the-middle assigned to the issue, even less than a mere 1% of his 2014 State of the Union speech. Oh, really Barack? Will we be able to say that? Really? You sound like Bill Clinton talking about the Rwanda genocide. How long has it taken for so called externalities to become even marginally, peripherally, considered by economists? I remember first hearing of it from E.F. Schumacher in the early 70's. 40+ years and the penny has still not properly dropped. I will deal with William Nordhaus on this subject later on when I have finished his most recent book 'The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World'. How long will it take for the (resulting) environmental apocalypse to register with the U.S. State Department? They don’t even raise the possibility that the Keystone pipeline should be stopped in order to keep a lid on the total amount of unconventional fossil fuels burned around the world. Doh? Erm? Wha? On the other hand, 'big green' Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC thinks our Barack did one heck of a wonn'erful job: Obama Reaffirms Commitment to Climate Action in State of the Union.   Those more cynical than Obama by orders of magnitude can read the writing on the wall - or can see the Looney-Tunes Road Runner plot unfolding. The real state of affairs is more like this: Times are tough when the cartoonists don't even get it. Must be the cold winter huh? And rock stars not really 'where it's at' either: Bud the Spud he ain't. Out on the highway in his ethanol car, proselytizing agri-business and building diamond mines. OK ... it's a life. Maybe the last good rock star politician was wazzername's ex ... Sonny something ... Sonny Bono was it? (Sonny & Cher, you remember.) Times were simpler back then eh? Who knew we'd be facing extinction?                                                                                         William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? O Segundo Advento Girando e girando em voltas mais amplas O falcão não pode ouvir o falcoeiro; As coisas se desfazem; não se mantém o centro; Pura anarquia espalha-se mundo adentro, A maré obscurecida de sangue se espalha, e em todo lugar A cerimônia da inocência é afogada; Aos melhores falta toda convicção, e os piores Estão cheios de intensidade apaixonada. Certamente alguma revelação está próxima; Certamente o Segundo Advento está próximo. O Segundo Advento! Mal proferidas estas palavras Quando uma vasta imagem vinda do Spiritus Mundi Ofusca minha visão: nalgum lugar, nas areias do deserto Uma forma com corpo de leão e cabeça de homem, Um olhar fixo e impiedoso como o sol Está movendo as lentas coxas, enquanto sobre ela Oscilam sombras de pássaros do deserto indignados. A escuridão cai novamente; mas agora sei Que vinte séculos dum sono profundo Irromperam-se em pesadelo por um berço oscilante. E a besta fera, sua hora enfim chegada, Se arrasta até Belém para nascer? 1919   With possible analogues at the white end of Pynchon's rainbow: Blicero, Weissmann ... Oh! I know it's sophomoric fer gawd'sake! Still, it was one of the first poems I thought I understood. So. I lived for a while right across the street from this rock. Thanks to Brent & Peter for the photo. The text is a quote from a poem 'Life's Mirror' by Madeline S Bridges/Mary Ainge De Vere (1844-1920). Treacle & nonsense - the Golden Rule doesn't work like that, it's not that kind of prescription. We must love one another or die. W.H. Auden, 'September 1, 1939'. There is an empirical measure of love - time spent. My friend Georges used to call it 'human coin'. Combine this with Pierre Reverdy's aphorism: "There is no love, there are only proofs of love;" and a 'general theory' begins to emerge from the murk.   :-) As well, if you are inclined not to throw the baby out with the bath, there are (oblique but tantalizing) clues in Christian scripture not requiring any kind of faith or belief to appreciate; just a few examples: Matthew 18: Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. First Corinthians 13: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. A-and obscure messages about The Good Samaritan from Ivan Illich ... and so on ...   Comics for the 10's: First I understood that each one has an opinion. Then I invented the Internet. The reference to gravity at the top: ... I noticed my electric watch losing time over the last six months or so, and then a few days ago it stopped. For $6.90 a kind man (with pen knife expertise) in a little jewellery shop put a new battery in. The hard drive on this laptop is exhibiting analagous slowdown and making noises. I know it's only a matter of time - but there is no money left for a new laptop. A-and anyway, this computer/Internet thing that I have been at, man and boy, for almost fifty years is wearing thin. It is a salutary zen exercise to know it may stop at any moment with no warning. One of the very last things Vince said to me was to remember me telling him, many years ago, that computers catch on because they give you their entire attention (however meagre) whenever and for as long as you want it. As direct intercourse of any kind between humans becomes more and more problematic ... well, you catch my drift eh? Mere anarchy? Is that a bad thing? Time for this moth to crawl out of its chrysalis perhaps. Who knows what that may entail? Let's go out with a listen to the Incredible String Band and Cousin Caterpillar. Murray and I were backstage at Place des Arts that night. Be well gentle reader.

 
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Suicide, sedition, or ... grace?

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The best bench in Kew Gardens park:

The bench is dedicated to Mary Nearing & Dorothy Peacock (no idea who they were) - and presumably maintained either by their friends and relations or an annuity cuz it ain't the city bureaucrats and it ain't the fricken union.

Suicide, sedition & grace occupy (in some order) the positive axis of a number-line around responses to the environmental apocalypse. On the negative side are the great variety of un-knowing & denial, half-measures, pretence & dissembling. The zero-point is getting a bit crowded. :-)


He was a great intellectual, a friend of books. / Above all he was a dedicated and generous father. / He fought the dictatorship and was horribly tortured. / He never bowed his head to the powerful. / ... and he only came with prostate massage.

[Thanks to Robert.]

 
Poster on a telephone pole:



Hiroshi Watanabe (either the photographer or the builder or both - not sure), tensegrity structure in Arbolito Park, Quito, Ecuador.

Trees make themselves (mostly) ... from air. I used to think of a tremendous springtime uplifting of matter into leaves - water of course is lifted so the idea is simply incomplete. The structure though, all comes from air - from the C in CO₂ that is .

Looks like Gilmar has been thinking about trees lately too:

Strange wrinkles appear ... then you have the feeling of walking sort of twisted ...
You stay longer stopped in one place ...

This tree looks like a person!

 
Han-shan:
        My heart is like the autumn moon
        pure as a blue-green pool.
        No, this comparison sucks.
        How can I explain?

In Korean it looks sort'a like a bird flying into a wall.

 





There is much speculation about what happens 'in camera', in secret meetings of the elected representatives of Bifaland. Wild orgies?
Human sacrifice? Satanic rituals?

The truth is that it is a meeting like any other: Nothing happens.

 

Let's begin the courtesy competition.
You start. Don't even think of it - you start. You. You.

It's going to get tangled ...

 

We are ready to begin the misunderstanding competition.
Competition of misunder-what?
Competition of craziness?

What? What what? Sigh.

 

Are we ready to begin the lying competition?
I am. Me too.
You start. I'm not ready. But you said ...

It was a lie.

 

God is a myth!     ZAP!   ZOP!   ZUP!     And he doesn't accept criticism!

---

Suicide bears thinking about: (a fully realized bottom line as it were)

Did Godard's Pierrot Le Fou change his mind at the last instant? Maybe. He seemed to. Who knows?

Like Bob says, "It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to."

(What is the name of that Brigette Bardot movie where she finds the guy in the hotel trying to kill himself at the beginning?)

The information 'out there' is pricey and not very good: Philip Nitschke & Fiona Stewart's 'The Peaceful Pill Handbook'; and Chris Docker's 'Five Last Acts'. They appear to be self-elected experts, consultants lookin' to make a buck on a boomer trend. Price and access alone make it a bourgeois phenomenon.

The anally retentive Toronto Public Library doesn't carry them - There IS no suicide in 'Toronto the Good' eh?

Some useful clues in: 'Suicide by Ligature Strangulation - Three Case Reports', Demirci et al (Am J Forensic Med Pathol 2009;30: 369–372) which is here-and-there on-line; and the realization that some number of sex-maniacs regularly do it by accident (so the level of discomfort is obviously not high). Turns out to be easily doable - a nylon stocking and a chopstick. Worth comparing with notions of a 'Peaceful Pill' or handgun in terms of technology.

Or possibly a bottle of Island Park and a frosty night down on the beach.

An observation of spiritual foundedness:   It is not difficult to conjure a vision of a Christian facing extreme difficulty with equanimity through faith - lots of examples ... Androcles? (Daniel was it? :-). What does come with good information is a kind of anything-but-Christian equanimity. Simply knowing that one can end it when one wants, quickly and without interference or pain.

Handguns are mostly not permitted here. On the up-side this avoids the collateral violence of guns but introduces the (important) idea of 'duration of resolve'. I'll leave that one with you.

Secular spiritual strength. Imagine!

Does the Golden Rule apply?   (Albeit in a fractured fashion.) Can one recommend suicide to one's fellow citizens? To one's children? "What man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?" as he says in Matthew 7:9. Is it a cop-out or an example? Is there any good in Kurt Vonnegut's answer? Hamlet's? Is the structure around 'nobler' possibly lop-sided somehow? Is 'nobler' quite the right word? (The text is here.)

Worthwhile meditations all.

---

The gentlest sedition:
All positive: can't hardly even be started in on without personal connections, then achievement & reinforcement kick in and you've got a virtuous cycle. Made in the Shade!

The only person I know of who even comes close is Crowbird over at Occupation Apple Tree; I would join 'im if I were able.

What and where sedition is not:

The dogs of war: What's the matter with the boy General Hudson?
The trauma of a whole generation. No one commented on his blog, Colonel.

 
Otherwise of course you can't talk about it on the Internet. Nothing will happen anyway - you will never find any interest - BUT the thought-police will probably add you to their database and help you reinvent Kafka.

---

Grace is relatively easier (but non-trivial):
 
'Je me fous du monde entier' correctly translated is 'I don't care about the world'; but for those neither French speaking nor Quebeckers there could be a large measure of 'the world drives me crazy' in there too eh? That makes it 'polysemous' I think (with just a hint of semen).

Trouble with asking questions is you may not like some of the answers. Might seem better not to ask. Probably is. Slow learner I guess.

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