Keeping markets in their proper place... Moray reinvigorating public discourse
Economics should be seen as a sub-field, as a branch of moral and political philosophy.
What's missing is engaging with big ethical questions. Questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices. So... Why do we shrink from this?
Morally invigorate the terms of public discourse. To overcome the bad habit of outsourcing our moral judgements to markets what we need is a politics of mutual respect that engages with competing views, including competing moral and even spiritual conceptions.
The end of neoliberalism - Reflecting the empirical reality of the economy
"New economics does not accept the orthodox theory that has dominated economics for the past several decades that humans are perfectly rational, markets are perfectly efficient, institutions are optimally designed and economies are self-correcting equilibrium systems that invariably find a state that maximises social welfare. [...] Rather new economics is best characterised as a research programme that encompasses a broad range of theories, empirical work, and methods. It is also highly interdisciplinary, involving not only economists, but psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others across the social and physical sciences."
How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant: here
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life
Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)
"I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking but, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own."
– What Wittgenstein was saying was, "forget all this nonsense about knowledge and uncertainty and all that stuff. What we all believe, to start with, is fine, and that is all there is to it."
Attention seeking
"Curiosity never comes with a guarantee."
"Attention seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."
"One of the child's fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives."
"I was educated in the culture that is being defended here --a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative -- which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one's self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is a coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose."
"What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?."
"psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves."
"Dreams are the counter-culture of culture."
"Psychoanalysis is one way of describing what happens to us despite what we want to happen to us; and a way of describing what we are doing despite what we think we are doing."
"Shame, then, is also a sign of self-deception [...] If you want to know what you want to be, pay attention to what makes you feel ashamed of yourself. It is a revelation, so to speak, of your ego-ideal (who you, in the fullest sense, wish to be: how you would like to look). But it is also, by the same token, a revelation of an assumed self-knowledge (someone who had no idea who they were or wanted to be could not feel shame."
"Behaviour that is in conflict with the super-ego, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, 'evokes guilt, while that which conflicts with the ego-ideal evokes shame.' [...] In the Freudian story, broadly speaking, the super-ego represents the internalised rules of the parents, the ego-ideal the internalised, preferred version of oneself: 'a model to which the subject attempts to conform'. [...] The ego-ideal, that is to say, creates an essential perplexity. Is it safeguarding and sustaining what is best about us -- what we value above all about ourselves, about life -- or is it humiliating us with unattainable ideals? And are we able to talk about the values it promotes, or have we been, as it were, brainwashed or enchanted by our ideals? Are we suffering from our obedience -- our indebtedness -- or for our values? If, for example, we started from the principle that no one owes anyone anything, we could begin to think about what we want to give each other. Are we setting ourselves up to fail, or bringing out the best in ourselves?"
"What Freud is describing is the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want, when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking
Burnt Norton - T. S. Eliot
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden
:T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, read by Jeremy Irons: I. Burnt Norton (extracts of)
"... Eliot's question in Burnt Norton is: what kind of attention – intelligent or otherwise – can we give to distraction." Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 116]
A change of attention is a change of experience
Protect me from what I want / motivated exclusion
"Freud [suggests] that attention is primarily, if not essentially, already thoroughly censored (or selective, as we more blandly say). That looking is a way of stopping us seeing; that talking is a way of stopping us speaking; that listening is a way of stopping ourselves hearing. That what we call attending is a process of motivated exclusion; that we concentrate and focus in order to occlude and temper what we might see.
[...]
"Psychoanalysis tracks what attention wants and doesn't want to omit."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 96]
Zerkalo (The Mirror) 1975 - Second scene
on 'hobby horses' and 'tantrums'
"I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state 'I hurt' or 'I hate' or 'I want'. Or, indeed, 'Look at me'. And I do not go back on this for once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 84]
"For if one is serious, one is rarely a welcome guest. Everything must be converted, somehow, into entertainment."
Anita Brookner, in Look At Me [pg 165]
"What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention we pay to their hobby horses?."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
"Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by a felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences."
Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking [pg 88]
R.E.M. - Everybody Hurts (Official Music Video)
Satisfaction sabotaging desire...
"... the terrors of some versions of social engineering, in which we are entombed within our supposed preferences and ideals. What is absent in what is called notably Happy Valley is the tension of desiring; the freedom to think about what is missing and what might be missed (the inventiveness born of frustration). [...] 'I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire'"
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pg 82]
... on flow[ting] and diving
"... to what should we give our attention, and to what do we give our attention (and who decides)?
[...] What are we doing when we pay attention to the attention people pay to their hobby horses? Hobby horses [meaning] absorption with a view to the stopping of time; a form of arrested development or arrested attention; a refuge from the future.
[...] Attention becomes the form and the medium of our desire, prompted by the felt lack of something. We attend to our felt absences.
[...] All morality depends upon knowing where and how to pay attention. And to pay attention to morality is also always to pay attention to attention.
[...] Attention nourishes us; distraction depletes us. Attention redeems the time. It makes it feel worth living, and living out. Good attention makes a good life."
Adam Phillips, Attention Seeking [pgs 91, 92, 93]
Creation comes out of vulnerability
Björk to Timothy Morton:
"Hi Timothy,
I wanted to write this letter for a long time.
I have been reading your books for a while and I like them a lot.
Next year there will be a MoMA exhibition on my work including a book.
I was wondering if you’d be interested in taking part in it?
Warmth, Björk.”
Timothy Morton to Björk:
“Dear Björk,
It was very kind of you to write to me, and I’m very touched by your kind words.
I am always quite surprised anyone reads my stuff!
I would be thrilled to be part of the MoMA catalogue.
Your work has been a very deep influence on my way of thinking and life in general.
I like to be given homework in terms of what to write (perpetual student!), so do tell me more about what specifications you might like.
It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness – not just in terms of PR for the science.
I have heard this in your work since I started to listen to it.
Yours, Tim”
The rest is here.
Pecuária e Alterações Climáticas
Dois dos relatórios mais frequentemente citados sobre o contributo da pecuária para a crise ambiental – ‘A Longa Sombra da Pecuária’, da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Alimentação e a Agricultura (FAO), em 2006, e “Pecuária e Alterações Climáticas”, do Worldwatch Institute, em 2009 – propõem dois conjuntos de números distintos sobre o que constitui um dos dados mais importantes de toda a ciência ambiental: a percentagem de emissões de gases com efeito de estufa originadas pelo sector pecuário. Este número é uma espécie de superestatística que incorpora e simplifica uma vasta complexidade, e constitui a razão mais directa por que é tão crucial mudarmos a nossa relação com os alimentos de origem animal.
A ‘Longa Sombra da Pecuária’ foi o primeiro relatório do género a granjear a atenção generalizada e, ao afirmar que a pecuária é a causa de 18% das emissões globais de gases com efeito de estufa, atraiu aplausos e críticas. No entanto, desencadeou sobretudo o alarme: 18% era mais do que todo o sector combinado dos transportes. Foi, portanto, uma surpresa quando, em 2009, o Worldwatch Institute publicou o seu relatório em resposta a ‘A Longa Sombra da Pecuária’, defendendo que a pecuária não era responsável por 18% das emissões mundiais anuais de gases com efeito de estufa mas, na verdade, e no mínimo, de 51%. “Se esta asserção estiver correcta”, declaram os autores na sua introdução, “a conclusão é que a substituição da pecuária por alternativas melhores seria a estratégia preferencial para reverter as alterações climáticas.” Recomendam uma redução em 25% no número de cabeças de gado em todo o mundo que, clarificam, “pode acontecer em locais escolhidos, de modo a que as populações de gado nas comunidades rurais pobres permaneçam totalmente intactas.”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Salvar o Planeta Começa ao Pequeno-Almoço [pg 259]
The Human Crisis
Where economics meet psychology
"Danny [Daniel Kahneman] always used to say that the way to become a general in the Israeli army was to be over confident and lucky. So, you do two foolish things and luck out, and then you become a general. And that's a good way, also, to become a CEO. It also helps if you're quite tall. [...] I know, and my colleagues should know, that interviews are useless at forecasting virtually anything."
Question is big art
James Lee Byars - World Question Center from Michael Werner Gallery on Vimeo
"In 1969, the American artist James Lee Byars developed a performance piece entitled The World Question Center. The original idea, which was not brought to fruition, entailed gathering one hundred brilliant minds including thinkers, scientists and artists together in a room, locking them behind closed doors and inviting them to ask each other questions they had been asking themselves. The final version of this project, produced for Belgian Radio and Television, is a performance piece in which Byars contacts all of them by telephone."
– Do you have an affection for questions?
– Did Plato forget questions?
– What's the speed of an idea?
– Which questions have disappeared?
– Is all speech interrogative?
– Do questions require more energy than other sentences?
– Is a single question the synthesis of you?
– What questions are you asking yourself?
The Overview Effect - taking Earth into perspective
"O sentimento de reverência é inspirado por duas coisas: a beleza e a vastidão. É difícil imaginar algo mais transformadoramente belo e vasto do que o planeta visto do espaço, sobretudo sendo enquadrado por uma vacuidade negra aparentemente infinita."
"O Efeito Visão Geral muda as pessoas. Um astronauta da Apolo tornou-se sacerdote depois de regressar à Terra. Outro iniciou-se em meditação transcendental e dedicou-se ao voluntariado. Um, Edgar Mitchell, fundou o Instituto de Ciências Noéticas, que investiga a consciência humana."
Jonathan Safran Foer, in Salvar o Planeta Começa ao Pequeno-Almoço [pag 144]
Quem escreve assim não é gago!
"There, old vicary, congratulate my refuge, the saneside outside sheltering the insane inside: to present the static sane side outside to another outside saneside, to be esteemed for that outsane side while all the while the insaneside attacks your outsane side as though we weren't both playing the same game, and gone dowm Summer Street (singing unchristian songs) the inane sinside, pocketing a cool million wearing the shoutside outside and the doubtside inside, the vileside inside and the violinside outside skipping dancing and foretelling things too come all ye faithful, of thine own give we back to thee."
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [pg 399]
da perspectiva
“O nascimento dá início ao processo de aprendizagem da separação. A separação é difícil de acreditar ou aceitar. Contudo, à medida que a aceitamos, a nossa imaginação desenvolve-se – a imaginação que é a capacidade de religar, de reunir o que está separado. A metáfora encontra vestígios que indicam que tudo é uno. Actos de solidariedade, de compaixão, de auto-sacrifício e generosidade são tentativas de restabelecer – ou ao menos uma recusa em esquecer – uma unidade que já foi conhecida. A morte é a provação mais difícil em que a vida incorre na aceitação da separação.”
John Berger, Porquê Olhar os Animais?
One of the Lives
If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
that had stood empty since some time before I was born
I would not have travelled so far to lie shivering
with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house
nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle
at the window in the rain light of October
I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening
valley with its river sliding past the amber mountains
nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour
thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall
Janitor of lunacy
Janitor of lunacy
Paralyze my infancy
Petrify the empty cradle
Bring hope to them and me
Janitor of tyranny
Testify my vanity
Mortalize my memory
Deceive the devil's deed
Testify my vanity
Mortalize my memory
Deceive the devil's deed
Tolerate my jealousy
Recognize the desperate need
Recognize the desperate need
Janitor of lunacy
Identify my destiny
Revive the living dream
Forgive their begging scream
Identify my destiny
Revive the living dream
Forgive their begging scream
citando
— Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [252]
— Never interrupt people when they're telling you more than they know they are, no matter how mad they make you.
William Gaddis, The Recognitions [253]
The pleasures of being with eachother
"The aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the analyst and the patient to enjoy eachother's company. And so what's analysed are the obstacles to the pleasure of being with eachother. Just that."
Adam Phillips, here
Forbidden pleasures and taking things for granted / Picturing human interactions / on Morality
"When we are most excited and most endangered, we’re likely to feel we’re about to have the realistic experience available to us. In other words, there’s something about something that feels dangerous that’s linked to something that’s forbidden.
So that’s one bit of it.
And I think that’s likely to make us think, not that unforbidden pleasures are so boring, but that they’re just fine. We just don’t think about or talk about them. That’s just what we do.
And then there’s the whole world risk taking and courage and bravery and all that stuff, saying that if you privilege forbidden pleasures, it’s a way of not talking about most of the pleasures we have. Because most of the pleasures most of us have are unforbidden. And again it seems me that (not that everything has to do with childhood), if you look at the origin of this, most of the pleasures of childhood are, actually, unforbidden. And most of our everyday pleasures… How much time can you spend doing unforbidden things? Not that much!
So, even though if you were a professional criminal, there’s still going to be a limit.
Most of your day is going to be spent sustaining yourself, hopefully, on unforbidden pleasures.
Because it’s arranged like this, for whatever reason, our conversations or our language about pleasure is severely diminished. There’s lots of exciting language about exciting dangerous pleasures, but there is very little language about most of the ordinary pleasures.
So, for me, it’s partly to do with imagination. Which is, we’ve been induced to imagine forbidden pleasures much more, because they’re forbidden. What else would we be imagining? Whereas the unforbidden pleasures, like having a cup of coffee… Why would you want to think about that... much? But there could be something very immediately and intensively pleasurable about that, that is kind of set aside or taken for granted.
So that’s really THE point. We're being instructed about what to desire, by the forbidders. And I think that's a shame, because it's so limiting."
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips and Chris Oakley: Unforbidden Pleasures
Other stuff in the interview:
“There may always be things we care about more, than the things we care about most.”
This seems to suggest that we never really know what we want. And if we think we do know what we want, we’re, in some way, in error.
So let’s problematize:
I think the point in the sentence is to say: ‘We are, largely out of anxiety and need to survive, we have to be conscious of our pleasures, to some extent’. But we’re likely, I think, to be more unconscious of the pleasures and desires that are more troubling or more conflictual for us. So… we might have a quite rigid sense of what or who we like most. And this is a way of, both, expressing a preference and it’s also a way of narrowing our minds, that it creates a kind of internal security along the lines of ?I know what I want’ (even though I can’t have it) or I know what I like.
So what the sentence holds out for is that there’s an unknown repertoire of things and people we might enjoy that we might be unwilling or we might feel unable to engage in.
It’s like a phobic model of the mind. In which you think, ‘I know exactly what I want and if I stick to that I’ll be fine’. And, in fact, what one’s doing is fundamentally narrowing the repertoire. So it’s like not allowing oneself to be as receptive as one might be, not to the whole world, but (because of our education) to be extremely selective in terms of our attention."
"The most obscene form of desire is doing one's duty"
Slavoj Žižek
"The good is that which is and can be argued about".
Rowen Williams
The thing about obedience is that it's a conversation stopper. That it's as though, at a certain point, the conversation stops and people abide by whatever the rules are taken to be.
"The book in a very ordinary and sort of liberal way, is promoting the idea that it's possible to, in conversation with other people, work out which rules you might want to agree to and consent to and be able to give reasons why that is to somebody who asks you, including yourself, and that this could evolve, so that it's ongoing".
[...]
on SUPER EGO:
Freud’s idea of ‘super ego’ is an attempt to secularize a more religious idea of conscience. In other words, if the question is: where do the internal authorities come from? Well, Freud’s saying they don’t come from God. Freud says the super ego does two things: It punishes you and restricts you and it can also sustain your ideals for you. It gives you a picture of how you ought to be, or of your preferred or better self. In a way, Freud wants the super ego to do too much, because it’s very difficult to, actually, talk lucidly about internal authority, because, of course, you can only imagine it on the basis of external authority.
From here
I think conscience, or our super ego, feeds us our worse lines. I think talking about the super ego can feed us our best lines.
"The extent to which self criticism is a refuge... It's a refusal to think about something. It's a refusal to engage, that looks like a profound engagement."
"We can only recognise in ourselves what we are capable of judging [...] The extreme version of this would be, we've judged ourselves before we found out who we are. So that judgement is privileged over experience, in some way. So that, internally, we're very very quick to judge, criticise, assess, evaluate what's going on inside us or between us and other people, at the cost of or instead of experiencing it. What psychoanalysis does is to invite you to suspend your judgement insofar as you're able to. And it does it for a very interesting reason which is: you don't actually know the value of what you said until you say it. But, of course, the internal censorship says, you know exactly the value of what you said before you say it.
Habit is almost always linked to failure and we should try out other habits.
Desire is inconceivable without imagining it's satisfactions. here.
To want more wanting.
[...]
Two versions of a dependent self:
— The happily dependent self thinks, 'How wonderful it is to live in a world where other people have different thoughts and feelings than I do'
— The unhappily dependent self thinks, 'Shit. Why couldn't I have thought of that?'
In the first picture you have an open world full of unknowable thoughts and feelings that other people might have that you don't know about.
In the second version you've got a closed system where 'it's all about me' And it's fundamentally all about my envy and all about my depravation.
So the book is on the side of an openness that is not an over anxious, and therefor, violent narrowing of the mind and other peoples minds.
[...]
The Story of the Traffic Lights
In Holland, on a rather complicated roundabout crossing, the oficial view was that it would be necessary to put traffic lights on this crossing. Because traffic lights actually enable the flow of traffic. And a very interesting traffic engineer decided that it would be much better to take away the traffic lights. Because if we do so, people will have to cooperate with each other to make the traffic flow. And that’s exactly what happened.
So there was much less road rage, much less congestion and the traffic flowed better. One of the things this example illustrates is that, if you take away the oficial rule (the red light), people will be much more attentive to each other. It’s more like coreography and less like prison.
Certain kinds of discipline preclude collaboration between people. In fact, they are an attack on people’s capacity to collaborate.
The ‘one forbidden thing’
There’s the one forbidden thing, and then the ‘hero’ goes and does exactly that thing that was forbidden… And the story of Adam & Eve is an excellent example of the one forbidden thing. And if the hero or the heroin does that one forbidden thing, things actually begin to happen and the world is no longer the way it was before. So it’s a very good thing to do the one forbidden thing… And also, the ‘one’ who forbids, if he has any wisdom at all — and we assume that God is full of wisdom — he knew precisely that his one forbidden thing would be broken
https://youtu.be/z1uHQmCn7JQ?t=2898
[...]
The book is all about morality, because pleasure is about morality. About what we want to believe we should be able to do with each other. Why are people so frightened of each other? It's easy to say why we are frightened of each other, but less easy to say why we might not need to be frightened of each other. And I think one of the ways we intimidate each other is through morality. It doesn't mean to say that we have to get rid of morality but it might mean that we need to get less intimidating forms of morality. That seems to be a good project— here
They f*** you up
Philip Larkin "This Be The Verse" - "They f*** you up, your mum and dad" Poem animation
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
A possible explanation, here
Missing out / fields of difference
Adam Phillips & Paul Holdengräber discuss 'Missing Out'
Paul Holdengräber: Jokes are problematic on so many levels because they demand a response. They’re not unlike gifts, which demand a response as well. But a joke also excludes… A joke is also there to humiliate.
Adam Phillips: Jokes are really a test of sociability, because if I tell a joke… If I say to you, ‘I’m going to tell you a great joke’, obviously I can’t tell you a great joke. I can tell you a great joke and you will tell me whether it’s a great joke with your response.
If I were to tell a joke now, it could be excruciatingly embarrassing or a roar in success. But it would be like some love test to the audiance: ‘am I, are we all together in this? Or am I an isolate?’ So it’s a real test of sociability and a real test of one’s relation to the group. The other bit which I think is very interesting (which I think Freud says) is that , ‘we never really know what about a joke amuses us’. And in that sense, jokes are like some tacit communications in the sense of, if we get it we laugh. But what we don’t get is what getting it involves. We don’t actually know what we’ve got. All we know is that we’ve been amused. And Freud makes a lot of this because there is a lot in it. It’s a very strange form of… You never know, with a joke, whether it’s creating a collusion or a collaboration. Whether you’ve got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humour, whether it’s a cult, so to speak, or whether it’s a group of differently minded people. Whether you’re coercing a sort of group by shared sense of humour. And Freud’s obviously very on to this, because he’s wondering what kind of intimacy jokes create… And do they, in a sense, gloss over differences between people or are they a sort of magical act between people?
People will say, ‘we share a sense of humour’, then…
All those things, Freud is suspicious of. Not in a cynical way, but in a genuinely questioning way. Wondering what we’re doing with this stuff.
[…]
Adam Phillips: Any culture that puts so much value on knowing, must be very frightened of not knowing… And it’s very clear that there are limits to knowing.
About Paul Holdengräber"The way we miss our lives is life" - Randall Jarrell
Svalnar / The day cools...
The day cools...
I
The day cools towards the evening...
Drink the warmth from my hand
my hand has the same blood as the spring
Take my hand, take my white arm
take my thin shoulders' yearning...
It would be curious to feel,
a single night, a night like this
your heavy head against my breast.
II
You threw your love’s red rose
in my white womb
I hold in my hot hands
your love’s red rose soon to wither
Oh you lord with cold eyes
I take the crown you offer me
which bends my head down to my heart…
III
I saw my master for the first time today,
trembling I recognised him at once.
Now I feel his heavy hand on my light arm…
Where is my singing virginal laugh,
my emancipation with head held high?
Now I feel his firm hold over my quivering body,
now I hear reality’s hard sound
against my frail frail dreams
IV
You sought a flower
and found a fruit.
You sought a well
and found an ocean.
You sought a woman
and found a soul -
You are disappointed.
Edith Södergran 1916
Protect me from what I want / dos homens que odiavam as mulheres
"Porque é que ele me humilhava desta maneira? Creio que não foi, como acontece muitas vezes, porque as qualidades que o inicialmente encantaram – a minha vivacidade, a minha liberdade, o meu sentido de igualdade com os homens – acabassem por o irritar.
[...]
Ele tinha medo de mim: é a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo de mim da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhes todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente. Vou contar-lhe o que, no meu íntimo, acredito: que para Gustave, de um modo que ele não apreendia totalmente, eu representava a vida, e que me rejeitava ainda mais violentamente porque isso lhe criava a mais profunda vergonha. E eu tenho alguma culpa? Eu amava-o; há alguma coisa mais natural do que eu querer dar-lhe a oportunidade de ele me amar a mim?
[...]
É verdade que era um homem difícil de amar. O seu coração estava distante, afastado; tinha vergonha dele e muito cuidado com ele. O verdadeiro amor sobrevive à ausência, à morte e à infidelidade, disse-me ele uma vez; os verdadeiros amantes podem passar dez anos sem se verem. (Não fiquei impressionada por estas observações; limitei-me a concluir que ele se sentiria mais à vontade se eu estivesse ausente, se fosse infiel ou se morresse.)
Gabava-se de estar apaixonado por mim; mas nunca vi um amor tão impaciente. "A minha vida é como andar a cavalo", escreveu-me ele uma vez. "Dantes gostava de ir a galope; agora gosto de ir a passo". Quando escreveu isto ainda não tinha trinta anos; já tinha decidido ser velho antes do tempo. Enquanto eu... o galope! O cabelo ao vento, a gargalhada que vem de dentro, do fundo dos pulmões!
A sua vaidade lisonjeava-se com a ideia de estar apaixonado por mim; creio que também lhe dava um prazer não assumido o desejar constantemente o meu corpo e, no entanto, proibir-se de o ter: negar-se o prazer era tão excitante como ceder. Costumava dizer-me que eu era menos mulher do que a maioria das mulheres; que era uma mulher na carne, mas um homem no espírito; que eu era um hermaphrodite nouveau, um terceiro sexo. Afirmou-me muitas vezes esta teoria louca, mas na realidade estava só a afirmá-la a si próprio: quanto menos mulher ele me fazia, menos amante ele precisava de ser."
Julian Barnes, O Papagaio de Flaubert [pg 172, 173, 174]
The problem of men writing about sex
Emasculated — The problem of men writing about sex
"... and what a relief we might assume the reader to feel when this kind man imagines things from her perspective – that she has the right to find him physically repellent – and when he proposes a platonic friendship instead. The darkness is dispelled and the protagonist’s decency is rewarded in the next page by the young woman’s eventual erotic desire for him, his kindness overriding all."
"We’ve had to listen to men’s accounts of desire for a long time; now it’s women’s turn. Men are always reducing women to minor characters. Why should we listen to them exalting their lust? Isn’t this the cultural noise that allows a man like Weinstein to make his moves? Aren’t you embarrassed to be making the case you’re making?"
Aqui
Cupid and Psyche
"Ele tinha medo de mim: é essa a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem.. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhe todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Ele era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente."
Julian Barnes, O Papagaio de Flaubert [pg 172]
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost
Attention Seeking - Perguntar não ofende
Adam Phillips on 'Attention Seeking'
Q: Is criticism always shaming or does it have a useful function?
A: We're encouraged to believe that we should be good at taking criticism. That's a really impressive thing to be able to do. It certainly isn't my experience. I'd much rather be praised. Occasionally people say critical things that engage me and I'm struck by them, but I often feel got at. Now... that's me... I'm not saying that that's true to all of us (laughter). But I do think that there's something, that the risk is that criticism becomes the wish to shame. On one end there's a wish to modify, or a genuine question, and on the other end there's a wish to humiliate and it would seem to me much better if we stopped humiliating people and start asking them questions.
"The object is defined by the distractions to which it leads".
Devorah Baum
Espelho: o símbolo da vaidade das mulheres
No entanto, a hipocrisia masculina é igualmente evidente. Pinta uma mulher nua porque dá-lhe prazer olhar para ela. Coloca-lhe um espelho na mão e intitula a pintura de 'Vaidade'. Deste modo, condenando moralmente a mulher cuja nudez retratou, para o seu próprio prazer.
Não fazendo mais senão repetir o exemplo bíblico de culpar a mulher.
 |
| Aqui |
of restlessness
With the things you could do
You won't but you might
The potential you'll be
That you'll never see
The promises you'll only make
Drink up with me now
And forget all about
The pressure of days
Do what I say
And I'll make you okay
And drive them away
The images stuck in your head
People you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still
Drink up baby, look at the stars
I'll kiss you again between the bars
Where I'm seeing you there
With your hands in the air
Waiting to finally be caught
Drink up one more time
And I'll make you mine
Keep you apart,
Deep in my heart
Separate from the rest,
Where I like you the best
And keep the things you forgot
The people you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still
Fakery and Stony Truths
"Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money."
"Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough."
Aqui
Chance / uma martelada na meritocracia
“Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature,” White writes, “and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.” It doesn’t seem like coincidence that White played poker.
Aqui
“Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.”
Shakespeare
Recognitions / repetition / resonations
"As fantasias sempre estão ao serviço de algo, de uma posição que desejamos manter. Não somos objectos. Somos sujeitos que organizam as próprias fantasias. A situação em que me encontro é a situação na qual eu me coloco".
Jacques Sedat
William Gaddis by William Gaddis
 |
| Hans Memling - Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh, c. 1480 |
"... I guess it's both the force and the flaw of those paintings, the thoroughness with which they recreate the atmosphere, and the, I mean a painter like Memling who isn't long on suggestion and inferences but piles up perfection layer by layer. But, well it's like a writer who can't help devoting as much care to a moment as to an hour".
The Recogntions, by William Gaddis [pg 124]
I have this big question... / Breaking out of echo chambres
The Future of Education - Yuval Noah Harari & Russell Brand - Penguin Talks
"I have this big question and I'm on a quest, following it wherever it leads me"
... We need to walk the last mile by ourselves.
Black Lives Matter / Cops / Where is the love?
"Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?"
"I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us. [...] Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty"
"Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel."
"We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization."
Here
19th century Jesuit hip hop poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins - To Seem a Stranger -Everyman - documentary
Official website
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
- (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
- The Leaden Echo
- How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
- known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch
- or catch or key to keep
- Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing
- away?
- Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,
- Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still
- messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
- No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
- Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
- Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
- And wisdom is early to despair:
- Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
- To keep at bay
- Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
- Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
- sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
- So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
- O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
- Be beginning to despair, to despair,
- Despair, despair, despair, despair.
- The Golden Echo
- Spare!
- There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
- Only not within seeing of the sun,
- Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
- Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air.
- Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
- Óne. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
- Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s
- fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
- swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
- Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and
- dangerously sweet
- Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
- The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
- Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
- To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-
- lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
- Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear,
- gallantry and gaiety and grace,
- Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks,
- loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant,
- girlgrace–
- Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them
- with breath,
- And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
- Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before
- death
- Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s
- self and beauty’s giver.
- See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
- Is, hair of the head, numbered.
- Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
- Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind
- what while we slept,
- This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
- What while we, while we slumbered.
- O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so
- haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,
- so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
- When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
- Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
- Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
- A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.–
- Yonder.–What high as that! We follow, now we follow.–
- Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
- Yonder.
Richard Burton reads Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo'.
