Paris, Friday the 13th of November, 2015

Bad luck is such an awful term to pin
To active malice, as the home of art
And beauty, and the soul, is lanced with sin,
Punctured by superstition, torn apart
By things we cannot know, nor hope to win
By ghastly crimes against the human heart.

And yet it seems so preferable to feel
That mankind could not dream up such dark things,
To put it down to chance, lest we reveal
The harshest note a hopeful creature sings,
The crystal maw that bites, the bone that rings.
No prayer will mend the dead, nor time will heal;
As freedom takes flight from its blistered wings
Great bells of grief inexorably peal.

Technical Domination and the Efficient Soul

Infinite space and a finite imagination! The irony! Imagination ought precisely to be that which saturates, supersedes, demolishes the bounds of reality. Today this has been reversed, and this is the node of our despair. We cannot think outside of that which is, and thus we cannot progress. 

I was reading recently of the role of the image (my reading habits are so eclectic and fleeting that I cannot recall the author - possibly Montaigne, but it may be Freud or Baudrillard - perhaps even the dormant author in my mind, for dreams too often taint that over which they nominally appear to have no control). This author claimed that great visual art must be idealistic in that it shows us a possible future world to which we would otherwise have no access. Great pieces of art are windows looking onto unforeseen utopias. My contention is that the category of art has collapsed today because this progressive, radical edge has been eliminated. Great art is divergent, it creates possibilities, it loosens our shackles but for a moment. Crucially, it opens up the space for radical action. Modern art, however, is convergent - we first assume the arbitrary material state of the world and use this to discover the lost remnants of our imagination, which can then be employed in the efficient functioning of existing power structures. It is almost impossible today to find a piece of art which is not a tepid, failed inversion of capitalistic values. Warhol is the high priest of this philosophy. To be quite fair, however, I recognise that art must forever challenge the status quo, whatever it is. My point is simply that capitalism is so utterly perfect at subverting rebellion and turning it to its own advantage. It is as though the Hegelian dialectic has swallowed itself. Can it really be said that religion survived its treatment by Bosch or Blake in the way that capitalism survives that of Basquiat and Banksy?

And yet I naively hope that the laws of probability require an ultimate endpoint of all oppressive systems, and indeed this seems to be in accordance with any sensible view of economics (of course the problem today is that people seldom are sensible - economists are almost bred to believe that the economy is a divine artifact which cannot be meddled with and which knows no senescence. This is true totalitarianism). It may only be at the end of the lifespan of a system that the imagination can be rekindled, reappropriated, resurrected. It may be only after we have been freed that we may free ourselves. 

Two memories make themselves known to me. First, I recall a philosophy lesson at school in which one censorious, prudish girl suggested that philosophy is pointless and that we should all devote our time to more fruitful pursuits such as the attempt to cure cancer. In the oppressive smog of stupidity this averment had produced I could not contain my fury. There is no point whatever in living if we do not have the right to question, it is the foundation of our very civilisation. A cancerless life is a healthier one, a safer one. A thoughtless life is no life at all. She desired, as most do in today's world, an animal life, an unthinking eternity of exploitation and false love. Arbitrary everything. The abrogation of the soul. An uncomfortable life and a comfortable death. The bizarre reasoning of the serially deluded.

I am reminded of a passage by Baudrillard in his book America. I am presently rather obsessed by his ideas and, therefore, this post draws heavily on them, and more still on the exceeding beauty of their expression. Such is my chameleonic, plagiaristic writing style. Besides, life itself is a plagiarism. Nothing can be new, just as energy cannot be destroyed. Rather, ideas can only be better-stolen, reformulated in novel ways. 

'This country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic pacified. The latent, the lacteal, the lethal - life is so liquid, the signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and the cars so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, of orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything here.' 

Anyway, the second incident occurred rather later, and I let it pass unchided (unchidden?). The kind of scientific, almost mechanical person who makes these statements is interesting to note. The faces change but the dead soul within is everlasting. In this instance I was being told that it was a great shame that we were born so soon, because in the future we may develop the technology to live forever. What imbecile could desire such a fate? This is the promise of modernity - infinite everything, unceasing juvenescence, a world of smiles. To me, this can only lead to gross upset: artificial intelligence, for example, will likely be the end of the human race. Radicalism in such a world is precisely to renounce the gift, or rather to render it inert and redundant. Such offers could not be made in a better world. They should seem at odds with the very air. I admire the Green Party in their attempts to move us toward a zero-growth economy, for example - it is clear that we cannot ravage the planet indefinitely. The rasping maws of humanity will not cease to snap until everything has been destroyed, and then they shall turn upon their owner. Such is the terror of group logic. 

Infinite meaning, infinite commutativity, the endless imposition of arbitrary happiness. Such is man's fate. Today death is dead, and life itself is its own negation. A false welkin of blazing ideology, a spectacle of passivity. Indentured boringness. 

Scylla, Charybdis and a Dead Lion

For me, the argument against the consumption of meat in developed countries can be summarised as follows: it is fundamentally wrong to kill for one's own enjoyment.

There has recently been much noise about the killing of a lion in Zimbabwe. I felt the need to convey my irritation at the fact that many of those most upset are meat-eaters. They denounce the killing of a lion whilst killing hundreds of animals over their own lifetime. More than this, they cravenly commission these killings, like some kind of deity above - at least this man shot the lion himself. I will argue that, whilst the killing of a lion is of course immoral, it is not appreciably worse than killing an animal which has spent its life in the dank squalor of a factory-farm. I cannot shake my belief that this cognitive dissonance is a result of our anthropocentric view of the world: farm animals are useful - productive - dead, lions are productive alive. Safari trips tend to be less attractive when all the animals are inanimate.

It is, at most, a difference of magnitude, but not of category. In fact, this magnitude argument, founded on the idea that a lion's life is somehow more sacred than a cow's, crumbles when one considers that millions of cows are killed on an annual basis, compared to - who knows - hundreds of lions. The fact is that there is no difference between the elevated individual enjoyment of destroying a real lion over a target dummy than there is in consuming real meat over meat substitutes.

One rather comedic and I must imagine unintentional logical fallacy committed by the Tartuffe defenders of this lion goes as follows (and rather disentangles their web of equivocation): 'What could possibly be wrong with eating meat? The lion did it all the time!' Having made such a statement, and suggesting the equivalence of human and animal moral duty, one is forced into an impasse. The strange conclusion of such a chain of reasoning is as follows: it was absolutely wrong to kill the lion, unless its corpse was consumed. In which case, the death of the lion would have been moral.

I read something by Baudrillard recently, in which he claimed that a woman in a dress is far more sexual than a woman in the nude. Nudity is is almost too nude, too extreme, too perfect, and for Baudrillard this feeds into the idea of hyperreality, the destruction of meaning by its own mass-production. Yet is this not also true of death? We cannot bear the extremity of sheer deadness, it must be tainted with some purfling of life, whether that be in consumption or nostalgic tributes. Perhaps it is believed that to eat the dead lion is to transfer its energy, to deny its death, but to leave it to bacteria and lower creatures is - to human eyes, which regard those beyond its interest as blots of nothingness - to brazenly display it.

This certainly cannot be a sound argument: the illegality, the immorality of taking life cannot be mitigated by individual teleological concerns. We would never accept the murder of a human, however much we had been assured that their corpse nourished the flowers of their grave.

This is not to say that every human can or should renounce meat (but a great deal - morally - ought to). There are many billions so poverty-stricken, so consumed by exploitation that they must eat meat on pain of death, lest they starve. In such cases, as I will explain in the following paragraph, the elevated human faculties of knowing, sympathising and perhaps suffering ought to be considered. Where no alternative to meat is available, it would cause more suffering to starve oneself than to quickly destroy life. But this is a mere anomaly in the developed world.

As an aside, it is interesting to consider the arguments of many vegetarians and vegans. They often claim that humans are not substantively different to animals, and that animal exploitation therefore constitutes an act of 'speciesism' on the part of humans. I do not necessarily dispute the validity of the term 'speciesism' (there may well be some acts of cruelty which stem not from any rational core but simply the salience of species) but such an argument bears dangerous consequences: if we assume that a human life is equal to that of, say, an elephant, then what about a rhinoceros? A cheetah? An eagle? A flamingo? A Komodo dragon? An adder? A tarantula? A house spider? An earwig? An amoeba? An atom? Nothing? My point is that this rapid dégringolade derogates the individual such that he actually has no rights whatever, which jars with the very concept of society. A human has an awareness, a network of friends and so on which do make a human death substantively more calamitous in terms of incurred suffering. Moreover, it would not be terribly unreasonable to be outraged if one were to be moved down the social housing waiting list by a beleaguered amoeba (it is my understanding that such organisms can produce thousands of benefits-sapping children in but an hour).

At the same time, this argument is similarly unsettling. If we accept that all life is qualitatively different on the basis of intelligence, it appears that a great intellect should take absolute precedence over lesser ones. Such an idea will likely disgust any modern mind, including my own, but it is not rationally indefensible. And indeed, it is as a direct consequence of the application of such ideas that much human life has been extinguished. Seemingly, the only resolution to such a problem is to say: all animals are ranked on capacity to suffer, except individual humans. Which again creates the problem of speciesism. It is tempting to believe that this problem can be tackled in chunks, each species morally ranked by average intelligence, but this is completely inappropriate as death is individual. Indeed, an adult pig has an intelligence surpassing that of a human baby. It appears that a solution is challenging.

This bifurcation, this choice between Scylla and Charybdis, is to me the most challenging problem of moral vegetarianism. Perhaps my reasoning is unsound, perhaps there is a clear solution, but I cannot discern it.

Surrender

It seems that a large portion of these blog posts is devoted to the lamentation of my own ineptitude, and this mass of text is no exception. The only novelty is that I now know the root, the black root, of my inarticulacy. I no longer wish to write, I wish to be a writer. I want solitude, reclusion, the life of a writer. I cannot sincerely tell myself that I want to produce beauty. This is the peculiar tragedy of modernity: we want instantaneous pleasure, shallow competence, a simulacrum of the thing itself. It is a precarious tangle of desire - were we to apprehend the content, the precondition, for that which we desire, the desire would collapse instantly. The very fact that one pines for fame is the surest mark that one does not warrant it (if indeed anything warrants the gross excess of 'celebrity'). Today we want to have fame in the way that we might have a refrigerator. The idea that we cannot touch and trample everything is an inexorcisable woe.

My incarceration at university has mercifully expired, and what follows will undoubtedly take the form of something far worse. My unsuitability to absolutely any job is such that I see nothing ahead but death and decay. This is not hyperbole: I have spent much of the past year reasoning that taking a 'proactive approach' to the problem of employment was unwise because I would simply be dead beyond university. It has therefore come as rather a shock that I am alive, terribly alive.

People - fools - often console me, 'I think it will all turn out fine for you, you will get a good job in the end,' entirely misinterpreting every monad of my constitution. My fear is precisely this life of respectability, mediocrity, banality. That everything should fall beneath a sea of petty feuds, dull competition, the ache of unimportance. What monster can devote his life to tax returns, bureaucracy, accountancy and such without recourse to suicide? It seems to me that this is entirely preferable to a life of slow despair, a life in which one's powers - whate'er they be - are turned on their host. Depleted by one's own life force, set on by the parasite of one's idealism, this is the most painful suicide of all. And the greatest man builds the most exquisite cage.

Under the Wall

To play the game, to dance the tune,
To give up for a ghastly boon
The sweetness of the soul which wore
The lineaments of dread before.

They smile yet cannot feel, their hearts
Replaced with facts and trading-charts,
And in their brains, where once was joy,
There's avarice and things that cloy.

They're lied to, they're deceived each day,
They live as though it's fair to say,
'You've but one life, now sell these jeans,
You need not know what all this means.'

And then they wonder why it seems
Mankind today pines, weeps and dreams
But that some facile love should bloom
Out of quick fame, to kill the gloom.

For nothing changes, days pass by,
The promises rotate, things die,
And everywhere, in every face,
Woe rankles in a silent place.

We're chasing will-o-wisps, one fades
And five more come - out in the glades
Of purposeless ambition, where
The dullest soul seems the most fair.

The dome of life explodes, glass falls,
Blood flows in crimson waterfalls,
And finally the cheated see
The smiling face of Trickery.

They've come for me, they've come to take
The only thing they could not break,
You must not let them call again -
Wake up! Wake up, and break the chain!

Fragment on Politics

A year or so ago I fancied a career in writing, I entertained gross notions of immense delusion by which I would transcend the dull shells we inhabit. Yet I am no longer a believer, and why should I be? It is not just a matter of ability but appetite. I realise that I used to write with no expectations, I used to really channel my innermost spirit without wishing to mask it in verbosity. Now I refrain from writing lest I produce some abomination. Yet the following was a necessary creation, it rankled with me. 

Whenever I explain that I am studying politics, I am invariably met with the idiotic rejoinder of, 'Ah, going to be a politician then?' which remark upsets me in a way words cannot quite support. The implication is that politics is somehow reserved only for politicians - in many ways the word 'politician' is a terrible name for the profession. It should be 'executor' or 'servant', for they are the administrators and curators of the public will. They do not - or should not - dictate. Then this plague of questioning is almost diametrically incorrect - politicians are the last people who should have political opinions. As individuals, of course they deserve the same right to partiality which we all exercise. Yet as a class, an unbelievably privileged minority, their beliefs should be of no significance. They should not blot the public will one iota, and yet they evidently do. Politics is for the people, it is a mode of self-governance, it is the last bastion of freedom in a shattered world. That it has been reduced to a selfish, cabalistic golf club is a matter for deep repine. We vote for an increasingly homogenous group of parties, and then the victors tyrannise us for five years. Such thinking as, 'Ah, going to be a politician then?' has hollowed out democracy, it has destroyed self-determination. It is these fools who wear the manacles of oppression not just irrevocably but willingly. It is they who have allowed horrific injustice to roam unchallenged, they who would chain the stars to one another if it meant they might be better relieved of the terrible weight of individualism.

I like to tell myself that, beneath a coarse veneer of intolerance, of cold-heartedness and spite, I harbour some humanity, some hope, some idealism. Yet I venture still further and find but another level of blight. This world is so unbelievably, inconceivably broken as to be almost beyond repair. I used to enjoy writing of our collective plight, but it now merely depresses me. I have been made to understand why young writers are the real Writers, the real Poets of the world. They recognise the hideous nature of this place, yet they do it wide-eyed and hopeful. They bear a kind of indomitable hubris - yet hubris without the hubris. It is something unique. They simultaneously see themselves as fit to assay the world whilst maintaining that we are all dirt, even themselves. The old, they bear real hubris, a real vested interest in sustaining a vile state of affairs. The young have a similar arrogance, but it is a sincere arrogance for which I do not believe a word exists.

A Poetic Fragment

I've wanted to post this, well, this collection of poetic fragments which congeal into a grotesque totality, for a month or so now. The word 'scherzo' would be apt if it was not quite so bleak. I once thought Spenserian stanzas pompous and bloated, but masterful works such as Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Adonais and The Revolt of Islam have convinced me otherwise. It is a difficult verse form, and I have not wholly - or even mostly - succeeded in its application, but I lack the resolve to edit beyond a few words per stanza. This piece excepted, I have never written in Spenserian stanzas, and the experiment bears all the idiosyncrasy of a first attempt, but I will at least defend the subject matter (and the chronically indolent must resign themselves to a life of subject matter before implementation - the former requires curiosity and the latter requires a monstrous assiduity).

Put simply, the form consists of nine lines - eight in iambic pentameter, with a final line of iambic hexameter - and a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC, which actually works rather better than its complexity suggests it might. The real irritant is in fact the line of hexameter, which I have always found a particularly graceless beast. Strangely, though, iambic heptameter can work brilliantly, perhaps because it seems to naturally dissolve into two phrases rather than one enormous one. Pope was famously critical of hexametric - or alexandrine - lines, writing that:

'A needless alexandrine ends the song
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.'

But enough arcane nonsense - the aim of poetry should be to free us of such factitious boundaries. This is the first poem of my own writing which I've added to the blog - I hate to stoop to the worst kind of nepotism, which is of course nepotism unto oneself. It is doubly selfish - somehow invoking charity and self-service simultaneously. Perhaps I will add more poems, but it will only be in the knowledge that nobody reads this blog regardless. 

I regret to say that no narrative will be found in the writing below. This does not grieve me too keenly - all narrative is illusion: a kebab of individual events pierced with the skewer of human vanity. It is in some way dismissive of the reader to provide a narrative. The reader should either construct his own narrative or deem such a construct beneath his intellect. 

*

I

Black monsters stalked the earth and stole the stars -

 They cleaved a sky that scarcely could contain

The anguish of the world - a sea of scars

 Which bled imagined agony as rain,

 A deathly venom, that it could retain

Its decomposing empire, for those who die

 Die in unfavourable framing, all in vain

Is life to him whom life gives no reply -

How foul the world when friendlier seems Eternity!

II

And first they'll take the breath from out your dreams,

 The sustenance which lends on life its wit,

By cruel gradation, till this planet seems

 A mechanism for destruction; it

 Welcomes only the obedient ones who fit,

Without resistance, in its sterile mould

 And leaves the rest to rankle in a pit

Alien to passion's grace, where chains of gold

Ensnare with lies the human heart which would be bold.

III

And then they'll take your mind, you're made to feel

 That love is mortal sickness, that distrust

And animosity are much more real -

 That lenity and kindness surely must

 Be aberrations in nature's disgust,

Things that avail us naught; if we embrace

 It is to gain mere favour; if we lust

We graft the mask of love upon its face -

Impunity of hatred! Man knows no disgrace!

IV

And last they'll take your heart, they'll cut it out

 With scrutiny's cold scalpel, not to kill

But to defame, to build a black redoubt

 Within the breast, immune to beauty's trill,

 A rock which recognises only ill

And smiles on misery, thinks how to sell

 Some potion of abatement, some foul pill

To keep man in despair, or to impel

Him to an occupation he deems living hell.

V

When spring returns, and flowers of tincture bloom -

 Roseate, purpureal, multifarious hues                                  

In fields of mounting elegance, scarce room

 For observation's glare, where to find use

 Is but to kill, is grossly to abuse,

The man of modern times will bring device,

 He'll clutch his iron breast and he will choose

To sell whate'er he can, to put a price

On myth, and all the while convert it to a vice.

VI

The pangs which cleave this heart cannot divide                          

 My soul from those of idiots - those who crush,

With brittle laughs and smiles, that which would hide                 

 For fear of seeming strange; this heart would blush

 And face the hordes unarmed sooner than gush

With its unbounded power - I have been blind

 In mortal life to spheres beaming and lush,

Free and benign, such as dwell in my mind -

And where I'm trapped I have not found one of my kind.

VII

A view of life which, if resigned, is full,

 And self-aware, unwilling to bring harm

Where'er its bearing falls, which would annul

 Gross malice with a brand of fierce alarm,

 Disgust for feeble tyrants who would charm

With nonsenses the men on whom they tread;

 An ideology with hopes to arm

Mankind against deception - in his head

'Tis better that the bud of love should bloom instead.

VIII

And know that in this world 'tis those who have

 That realise their purpose - who by power                   

Extraneous to their own can hope to save

 Their souls from that great force which would devour

 With an unfeeling vice - they tend a flower

Planted by someone else, centuries ago,

 In harsh injustice, at a dismal hour,

When conquerors forged currency from woe

And tyrants tore from hands the scraps they would bestow.                         

IX

Little has changed, but now we work for shades,

 Inconstant despots with no throne to claim,

Composed of greed, spanning perhaps decades,

 Passed on as some fell virus which would maim

 All hope of savour in this world - with shame

We chase material goods, as if they held

 Some truth beyond themselves, and in this game

There are no winners, everything is felled

And lost - by silent spectres to the grave impelled.

X

'Just one more hour, just one more thing to ask,

 This one last chore and freedom will be yours,'

A spirit speaks, and all take to the task,

 No thought for that utopia which implores

 To reason - that is silenced by the claws

Of an unwinding monster which defends

 This world from beauty. Fields of hellebores

Begird the soul of him whose thrall extends -

And though it's ending every day, it never ends.

XI

Authority is poison - we would take

 The virtue of the world and tread it down

For individual greed and gain - we make,

 When crushing fellow men, a world unknown

 To Death's domain, for even Death would own

That all men are born equal, and in Death

 There is at least equality - we're mown

In equal strikes, each man must sink beneath -

Where rich and poor, in common woe, give up their breath.

XII

How foul a world when men must go to die

 To gain what this our life could not provide -

An uncorrupted fairness: those who lie

 In fields beneath, 'tis they who have espied

 A shallow glimpse of justice; as they died

They must have wept to know that parity grows

 Precisely where it cannot be applied -

Then disobey, and heap disdain on those

Who would enslave us, seize the world that they oppose!

XIII

And of their pain nobody would dare speak

 For someone's always worse off, someone's died

Or lost an arm to bandits, or made weak

 By some unpleasant illness - we elide

 The choicest anguish of the heart to hide

From gross comparison, which might declare

 Our own be trifling hardship, we must bide

And nurture our negation till a bare

And soulless creature stumbles out of its despair.

XIV

Thus, like the hydra, many-headed woe

 Broods in each heart and chains it to its tune,

It blights us with its monody - we know

 But dare not speak of that which must lie strewn

 'Midst everything we look on, and the boon

Of ignorance is such a fragile thing

 Which plagues us here and there, and as the moon

Casts but a dim reflection of a being

Far greater than itself, so it would hide its sting.

XV

Then treat me as a churl, a serf, a knave -

 I have descended from the spring of life

And found the fountain brackish, and could save                

 No fragment of attention for the rife

 Contenders for our interests, but with strife

Have put each hope to rest that we could gain

 Something to fill the void which, like a knife,

Cleaves this heart into shards - I think again

On how we are as slaves who cannot break the chain.

XVI

Reality, that common thing we feel

 Yet cannot understand, then set to work

To found all reason on it - would we reel

 If we could view the spectres which must lurk

 Beyond the veil of life, the which we shirk

Not for dispassion but for want of power,

 Which, as a host of angels made berserk

With lashing fire and lightning, would devour

Philosophy in one embrace, and kill the hour.

XVII

Is madness knowledge? He who views the world

 In all its morbid hues, is he not wise?

It is as though the universe unfurled

 Its terrible laws and man sought to devise

 A contract with no hint of compromise,

Then took to his dull life without a thought

 Toward the spectral bars which would comprise              

The boundaries of his senses, such that naught                 

Of care for life's in him that he's not gone and bought.

XVIII

I have been mad at times, when massy gates                                     

 Which guard each heart from cauterising flame

And deathly knowledge (whose mere glance creates

 A sense of desolation naught can tame)

 Have felt themselves riven by reason's aim,                        

Crushed with a ghastly malady of spirit

 Akin to horror, dread or mortal shame,

Such that the fire of life raged, and to hear it

Bred the most monstrous fear, which no man should inherit.

XIX

It eats into itself as some strange beacon

 Which burns only that it might burn anew,

And fire is painful to behold - we weaken

 In its corrosive glare, yet know how few

 Have sat at its black monstrance - all that's true

Is there to witness, but the gates are hard,

 Colossal shields of the most sable hue

Whose surfaces most will not even regard -

Perhaps they are the wise, those who remain unmarred.