Nothing I Can Lose
When I left my father’s house
the sun was halfway up,
my father held it to my chin
like a buttercup.My father was a snake-oil man
a wizard, trickster, liar,
but this was his best trick,
we kissed goodbye in fire.A mile above Niagara Falls
a dove gave me the news
of his death. I didn’t miss a step,
there’s nothing I can lose.Tomorrow I’ll invent a trick
I do not know tonight,
the wind, the pole will tell me what
and the friendly blinding light.
– Leonard Cohen
Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened
– Lawrence Durrell
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men
– George Orwell
NICK: I really fancy Ruth, what shall i do?
TIM: This is what you’ll do.
You’ll go in to where she works.
It’ll be a normal day, and you’re sort of testing yourself by looking for an excuse to talk to her. It’s a nothing day in most ways. You’re thinking about some piece of code your writing, or how to improve your bike. It’s just a nothing day
Then you see her.
And she sees you. And she walks right up to you and takes you by the shoulders with both hands
It’s not an affectionate touch, no. It’s a grip. There’s an anger there, and, yes, passion. It’s full of passion
She looks you in the eyes and you look back and you’ve never seen eyes so blue before. There’s a universe as wide as the sky there, and in the centers spinning stars and planets. Enough vast, empty, space for you to be completely lost
Before you can speak she says
“Nick – this is all there is. Me, and you, and now. This is everything. Just us and this moment. And if we can enjoy this moment, really totally live in this moment right now then we’ve won. We’ll be protected for all time against whatever the rest of life can throw at us, because all that life can do is throw more moments at us. And if we can be totally alive in one moment – precisely because it is just one moment, and because though we know it is passing we also know that we can commit ourselves to it fully – if we can do that then we’ll know how to deal with all the other moments that can ever come.
“Nick”, she’ll say, “i need you to help me suck the juice from life, right now, in this moment”
Then
She
Leans
Closer
Because we also are what we have lost
There was an excellent In Our Time on friendship last week. This quote was in the post-show newsletter
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
Emerson
Alas! what are you, my written and my painted thoughts! Not long ago you were young and malicious and full of thorns and secret spices- you made me sneeze and laugh- and now? You have doffed your novelty, and some of you, I fear, are ready to become truths, so immortal do they look, so tediously honest! And was it ever otherwise? What then do we write and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brush? Alas, only that which is about to fade and lose its scent! Alas, only birds exhausted by flight, which let themselves be caught with our hand! We immortalise things exhausted and mellow! And it is only for your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have many colours; but nobody will divine how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved- wicked thoughts!
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
Jack Kerouac (attrib.)
She used to say, “The only frontier you have left is the world of intangibles. Everything else is sewn up too tight.”
Caged inside too many laws
By intangibles, she meant the Internet, movies, music, stories, art, rumours, computer programs, anything that isn’t real. Virtual realities. Make-believe stuff. The culture
The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it’s only the intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think, she said. The way they see themselves. They way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that’s the only lasting thing you can create.
Besides, at some point, the Mommy used to say, your memories, your stories and adventures, will be the only things you have left.
At her last trial, before this last time she went to jail, the Mommy had sat up next to the judge and said, “My goal is to be an engine of excitement in people’s lives.”
She’d stared straight into the stupid little boy’s eyes and said, “My purpose is to give people glorious stories to tell.”
Chuck Palahnuik, Choke
Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu
Were crossing Hao river
By the dam.Chuang said:
“See how free
The fishes leap and dart:
That is their happiness,”Hui replied:
“Since you are not a fish
How do you know
What makes fishes happy?”Chuang said:
“Since you are not I
How can you possibly know
That I do not know
What makes fishes happy?”Hui argued:
“If I, not being you,
Cannot know what you know
It follows that you
Not being a fish
Cannot know what they know.”Chuang said:
“Wait a minute!
Let us get back
To the orginal question.
What you asked me was
‘How do you know
What makes fishes happy?’
From the terms of your question
You evidently know I know
What makes fishes happy.“I know the joy of fishes
In the river
Through my own joy, as I go walking
Along the same river.”
Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton
The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly coloured and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, “Hey, don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”And we kill those people.
For while there is clearly a mask, there is nothing behind it; it is a surface which conceals nothing but itself, and yet in so far as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as surface
J.L.Baudry (Afterimage, No. 5, Spring 1974, p.27)
quoted in Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising(p.71)
I found this on the wonderfully named onegoodmove.org (with the wonderful subheading ‘I thought these things might be clues’)
There is not sufficient love and goodness in the world to permit us to give some of it away to imaginary beings.
Nietzsche
People just ain’t no good
I think that’s well understood
You can see it everywhere you look
People just ain’t no good…
It ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad
They can comfort you, some even try
They nurse you when you’re ill of health
They bury you when you go and die
It ain’t that in their hearts they’re bad
They’d stick by you if they could
But that’s just bullshit
People just ain’t no goodPeople they ain’t no good
People they ain’t no good
People they ain’t no good
People they ain’t no good at all
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ‘People Ain’t No Good’
David Hume
I don’t know how this blog survived so long without this quote making an appearence:
here’s to the few
Who forgive what you do
And the fewer who don’t even careLeonard Cohen, in Night Comes On
The beginning of wisdom is in the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to resolve
Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Proletariat
It may be futile, but it’s not pointless
“So, from a certain point of view, economics is all about reaching global consensus on what’s the ‘general good’…From another point of view, it’s a technocratic elite building a global dictatorship of profound depth and subtlety.”
Dan, 7/12/05
The policies of the eighties and nineties…were based, John Gray argued in his book False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), on ‘the theory that market freedoms are natural and political restraints on markets are artifical. The truth is that free markets are creatures of state power, and persist only so long as the state is able to prevent human needs for security and the control of economic risk from finding political expression.’
…
Just as the late twentieth century grasped the fact that there was a crisis of environmental sustainability, the twenty-first century is beginning to grasp the dimensions of a comparable crisis, this time of human sustainability – a scarcity of the conditions which nurture resilient, secure individuals, familities, friendships and communities.
Madeleine Bunting. Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruling our lives (2004). p. xx-xxi
Why does this strike such a nerve? Because so many of us (not only authors) love books. In their combination of mortal, physical embodiment with immortal, disembodied knowledge, books are the mirror of ourselves. Books are not mere physical objects. They have a life of their own. Wholesale scanning, we fear, will strip our books of their souls. Works that were sewn together by hand, one chapter at a time, should not be unbound page by page and distributed click by click. Talk about “snippets” makes authors flinch.
George Dyson on Edge.org
So the biosphere appears to be doing something that we cannot describe beforehand – not because of quantum indeterminacy of chaotic dynamic behavior but because we don’t have the concepts ahead of time.
That, in turn, means that the space of relevant possibilities of the biosphere – its phase space – cannot be prestated. Thus the biosphere is creative in a way we cannot prestate. And that stands in marked contrast to what Newton brilliantly showed us how to do: In physics, in general, one can prestate the set of all possibilities – that is, the phase space – the consult the laws and the initial boundary conditions and calculate the forward trajectory of the particle in its phase space.
I suspect we cannot state the phase space, the space of possibilities, in the biosphere. You might, if you are a physicist, say, “Well, if you treat the system classically, there is always the classical n-dimensional phase space of all the positions and velocities of the particles in the [somehow isolated] system.” That may be true, but then you do not yet know how to pick out the relevant collective variables (the wings of Gertrude) as the variables that will matter to the unfolding of the biosphere. So we seem to confront a limitation on knowledge that we had not recognized before. The evolving biosphere is doing something cannot be foretold; we do not have the categories. The same, I think, applies to technological evolution: No one foresaw the Internet a century ago.
Interestingly, the fact that we cannot prestate technological possibilities, if true, cuts the core out of the contemporary reigning theory in economics: “competitive general equilibrium,” which begins with the assumption that one can prestate all possible goods and services, then proves that markets clear – that is, all goods are sold to buyers at the contracted price. But we cannot state ahead of time all the possible good and services, so the reigning theory is wrong at the outset.
Stuart Kauffman (2002). What is life? In J. Brockman (Ed.), The next fifty years, pp. 126-141. New York: Vintage
people don’t do what they believe in, they just do what’s most convenient, then they repent
Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl
Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush . . . In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives — he called them enemies! — hidden out of sight somewhere.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902
True radicalism consists of making hope seem possible, not in making despair seem convincing
(I don’t know who said this, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t me. I found it in my notes and can’t source it.)
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and the thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picknicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothingEzra Pound
No matter, try again, fail again, fail better
Samuel Beckett, quoted in this guardian article about 365 ways to improve the world
I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Supulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherant in the concept of committed literture because of the regression of society. But Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox, not merely the one of how to react to it…
…by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’
If no word which enters a literary work ever wholly frees itself from its meaning in ordinary speech, so no literary work, not even the traditional novel, leaves these meanings unaltered, as they were outside it. Even an ordinary ‘was’, in a report of something that was not, acquires a new formal quality from the fact that it was not so. The same process occurs in the higher levels of meaning of a work, all the way up to what once used to be called its ‘Idea’
Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’
All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out
I.F. Stone, In a Time of Torment: 1961-1967 (Nonconformist History of Our Times), p. 317 [thanks Will]