Exhaustion Junkie

'... a sign of silence somehow...'

2012-01-28T20:08:00.004Z

'We know the biblical phrase, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, so the allegorical significance of dust is clear. The other thing is that dust is a sign of silence somehow... There are some people who feel a sense of discomfort in tidy, well-kept, constantly looked-after houses. And I belong to those people. I've always felt it to be difficult to be in a house where this sort of cold order is maintained... By contrast, if I get into a house where the dust has been allowed to settle, I do find that comforting somehow. I remember distinctly that around the time when I wrote the particular passage you are referring to, I visited a publisher in London. He lived in Kensington. He had still some business to attend to when I arrived, and his wife took me up to a sort of library room at the very top of this very tall, very large, terraced house. And the room was all full of books, and there was one chair. And there was dust everywhere; it had settled over many years on all those books, on the carpet, on the windowsill, and only from the door to the chair where you would sit down to read, there was a path, like a path through snow, as it were, you know, worn, where you could see that there wasn't any dust because occasionally somebody would walk up to that chair and sit down and read a book. And I have never spent a more peaceful quarter of an hour than sitting in that particular chair. It was that experience that brought home to me that dust has something very, very peaceful about it.'

From The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Seven Stories Press, 2010), pp.58-59

'The effect was serene, monastic...'

2012-01-27T12:31:00.007Z

'Personally, he was a most amiable presence, tall, with the bearing and the ruddy complexion of an alpine mountaineer, a handsome, boyish face with a sailor's long, greenish, narrowed eyes trained on the far distance. He lived in Ohlfeld, a village near Gmunden-on-the-Traunsee in alpine Austria, in a stately farmhouse with a huge square inner courtyard which had taken six years out of his writing life, he said, to restore singlehanded from the decayed ruin filled with mountains of refuse parked there by the neighbors who, resenting the loss of their garbage dump, had sabotaged his efforts with persistent ingenuity. Inside, he had painted the floors a black lacquer, the walls all white, had installed green-tiled stoves and wall-length book-shelves, a bare table, a few wooden chairs, a bed in the center of the upstairs bedroom that held virtually no other furniture. The tall windows let in much green-tinged light from the surrounding trees. The effect was serene, monastic, and gave the lie to the myth that Bernhard lived in a maze-like mountain cave with blackpainted walls like the minotaur...'

Sophie Wilkins, Afterword to Thomas Bernhard's On The Mountain (Quartet Books, 1993), p. 137

Patience (After Sebald)

2012-01-25T10:12:00.002Z

Russian Ark

2012-01-24T16:12:00.002Z

My morning

2012-01-16T13:49:00.004Z

Sufjan Stevens - Holland

2012-01-16T10:26:00.003Z

'Fall in love and fall apart...'

'... a fear of opening oneself up to the world...'

2012-01-10T08:19:00.017Z

Few topics disturb my sangfroid quite as utterly as British Euro-scepticism. The phrase itself rouses my ire. While 'scepticism' might be an appropriate description of the misgivings felt by some in Britain, it can hardly be said to convey the feelings of the most ardent advocates of British independence. 'Hostility' would be more accurate. Or 'suspicion'. Or plain old 'xenophobia'.

As with most things about this movement, its name is disingenuous: under the banner of scepticism it can claim, as its own, people who, while genuinely sceptical about union with Europe, are no more than sceptical. It can then hide behind these more moderate elements whenever it requires political cover.

The hard-core of Euro-sceptics, whatever they may say publicly, have one central aim: ending immigration. They seek complete British withdrawal from the European Union, not, as they claim, because British sovereignty is threatened by 'faceless, un-elected bureaucrats in Brussels' (the standard mantra), but because, under the terms of EU membership, Britain has to accept economic migrants from other member states.* The only way to prevent this, according to the Euro-sceptics, is to cut all ties with Europe. Few will admit this openly, however, as it is generally understood - among the British population - that Britain needs to continue trading with other European states if it is not to become impoverished: cutting political ties may risk severing economic ones as well.

Instead, we have an argument in stages: each stage concealing a more politically sensitive - that is, unpalatable - stage beneath (just as the term 'Euro-sceptic' conceals the term 'Nationalist'). The final stage is the closing of Britain's borders to all foreigners, followed - I suspect - by the expulsion of any undesirables living within those borders.

The Euro-sceptic reply is invariably the same: that this is alarmist and hyperbolic; that they have no desire to stop immigration completely, let alone expel foreign nationals already living in Britain; that they are not xenophobic; that they accept Britain is a modern, multicultural society; that they simply want to preserve Britain's political independence.

Even if we take them at their word, the fact remains that they are on a slippery slope. As Primo Levi warns:

'Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that 'every stranger is an enemy'. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.'

The conviction that Britain is better off alone, that its independence is paramount, has deep historical and cultural roots. Uncovering those roots is - obviously - beyond the scope of a blog post. But what can perhaps be said is this: that the conviction Levi describes is undoubtedly present among growing numbers of the British public, and most importantly, it is a conviction, not scepticism. Scepticism implies an open mind, a willingness to admit error. Conviction, on the other hand, suggests a mind that seeks to exclude whatever it perceives to be a threat.

The aim of the Euro-sceptics is not to encourage scepticism. They want only to convince.

* If they really cared about British sovereignty they would focus equal attention on the encroachment of American foreign policy (which effectively dictates British foreign policy). Their silence regarding America can be adduced as further proof of an anti-European bias. The prejudice is one of language, primarily. Some foreigners are more foreign than others.

Another reason the sovereignty issue is a red herring: Parliament is not the only body that decides what becomes law. Big business spends millions lobbying politicians and it expects its money's worth. The civil service - faceless, un-elected bureaucrats every bit as faceless, un-elected and bureaucratic as their counterparts in Brussels - also have a say in deciding what is permissible and what is not. No self-respecting political analyst would argue in good conscience that Britain, or any other democracy for that matter, has genuine sovereignty. And while I suspect that notions such as self-respect and a good conscience are entirely alien to the majority of Euro-sceptics, I feel certain that democracy, to them, is an even stranger concept. Given power, the last thing they would do is give it away to the British people.

-

The above comments were prompted by a post on the excellent blog Status Viatoris. The following excerpts are also intended to be a response of sorts.

From The New York Times

The British Euro Farce
By ROGER COHEN

Published: December 12, 2011

LONDON — The British, or rather English, mistrust of what lies beyond the Channel has always been fathomless. W.H. Auden, observing a “cult of salads,” jested that “before very long” the south of England would resemble “the Continong.” There across the sea, on a suspect Continent, lay lands of constitutions, Napoleonic legal codes, defeated armies, imperfect freedom, rabies, wife-swapping and garlic.

Auden, of course, was writing before the birth of the Tory Euro-sceptic, the pinstriped effluence of an ex-imperial nation. This specimen’s ascendancy was reflected in Prime Minister David Cameron’s veto of a Europe-bolstering treaty change to defend the euro through greater fiscal cooperation and tougher sanctions on nations going Greek.

The Euro-sceptic wants less Europe not more. In the place of “ever closer union,” the Euro-sceptic wants ever looser union and, if possible, none whatsoever. In his or her — and it’s overwhelmingly his — heart beats the spirit of Britain’s “finest hour” and the United Kingdom (with a little help from the Yanks) holding out against the Luftwaffe. Only now the object of resistance is Germany’s glum Frau Merkel.

Or so the Tories see it. Since Cameron’s “No,” there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.” Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality. In fact Cameron, playing the wrong chips without partners or preparation, was not so much opposed on grand principle as eyeing an opportunity to extract concessions for the very City of London financial institutions seen as the villains of the 2008 meltdown and its dire aftermath.

That was politically inept — less the fighting spirit of the Normandy hedgerows than the self-regarding hypocrisy of the giant offshore hedge fund that Britain often resembles these days.

Even without an election five months away, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, would have been tempted to avoid shaking Cameron’s hand. With an election the snub for perfidious Albion was too good to pass up. Of course The Sun, the British tabloid whose dislike of Gauls is exceeded only by its disdain for Germans, shot back at Sarko: “Who do you think E.U. are?”

After uncertain mumblings, the deputy prime minister, Nick (“don’t call me a doormat”) Clegg, managed to reach beyond this theater to something approaching strategic reflection. Declaring himself “bitterly disappointed” at Cameron’s decision, he said: “There’s nothing bulldog about Britain hovering somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, not standing tall in Europe, not being taken seriously in Washington.”

There is no Euro-sceptic strategy; at most there’s a tactic for short-term political gain. For a long time the post-Cold-War widening of Europe to 27 members put off the need for deepening. This suited Britain, which was never interested in political union but saw advantage in a borderless European market. Now the euro crisis has exposed the need for a federative push to give the shared currency political backbone. In so doing, it has also exposed the basic British ambivalence that twice caused De Gaulle to say “Non” to U.K. membership.

As Warren Buffett has observed, “It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” The mid-Atlantic, as America pivots to Asia, could prove a lonely place for Britain, whose economy is heavily dependent on the euro zone.

Of course, the fiscal pact Britain rejected still has to be turned from words into reality — and if Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, declines to provide the liquidity to keep European bond and money markets working time could still run out on the euro before reform is enacted.

Still, a watershed has been reached. The air has been cleared. The proposed pact represents a necessary if tardy admission: that the euro was an irrevocable step toward the political and particularly fiscal integration that alone can sustain the currency. Ever closer union means just that. With a touch more finesse and a lot less bombast Britain could have accompanied this process without adopting the euro. Instead, it’s isolated.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Cameron’s veto coincided with a young Euro-sceptic Tory member of Parliament, Aidan Burley, finding himself at a stag party in Val Thorens — a French ski resort with a German-sounding name — along with a bunch of mates dressed up in Nazi SS uniforms and performing Nazi salutes in an atmosphere of great jollity. Burley, who’s had to apologize, footed the bill for the festivities.

Britain’s defiant freedom and independence are real virtues proven over time. The thing about the Euro-sceptics behind Cameron’s Brussels bungling is they turn past glory into posturing theater. Their nostalgia for British greatness is often no more than the trumpeting of a bunch of insular snobs who seem to have a hard time restraining their inner-fascist.

Marx observed that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Having a British prime minister say he’ll only go along with Germany saving the euro if City of London banks get an exemption from a financial transactions tax, while a Tory M.P. parties with Nazi lookalikes, and another Tory boasts of Cameron having “played a blinder,” is about as farcical as it gets.

-

From Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened To Modernism? (Yale University Press, 2011) pp.174-177

'Reading [Julian] Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world... All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue.

How has it come about? I would venture three points. 'Like most Victorian novelists', writes John Bayley, '[Dickens'] sense of other places and people was founded on fear and distrust. The Boz of the Sketches seems to hate and fear almost everything even though it fascinates him.' But this is something that antedates the Victorians. As Linda Colley has shown in her fine book, Britons, from the early eighteenth century on Britons defined themselves in opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not to be taken in evinced by Larkin and Amis in the face of European Modernism, something that reminds me of the Just William books I so enjoyed as a child, it soon begins to pall. Taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.

Second, and paradoxically, ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the 'pretentious', worships the serious and the 'profound', so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a 'majestic sweep', are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.

Finally, ours is the first generation in which High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit joyously welcomed by both parties. When the speakers at major literary festivals are for the most part politicians, television personalities or foreign correspondents; when we are enjoined to buy three books for the price of two in our major bookshops and a serious newspaper like the Independent offers its readers the chance, as a Christmas bonanza, to gatecrash a book launch of their choice with one of the paper's literary critics, we have truly arrived at an age where art and showbiz are one and the same...

As historians, not all Marxist, have been pointing out for rather a long time now, naturally Britain has had a history, but it has preferred to ignore that history. Perhaps the best one can say is that it has had the luxury of not having that history thrust upon it as most of the European nations have.

So many English novelists today confess to wanting to write like Dickens that it might be thought that the difference between England and France and Germany is that we have no great model to look back to, who might give us an understanding of what it might mean to have a European sensibility, that is, to be as English as they come and yet have a real historical awareness. But there is one, as I have suggested: Wordsworth. Unfortunately within English culture he has been consistently misrepresented as either a bucolic poet or a political reactionary. This is a travesty. He occupies the same place in English literary history as, say, Hölderlin and Baudelaire occupy in German and French: someone with all the powers of the Romantic poet at his fingertips but aware of the deep paradoxes of his calling in an age when art itself is in question. Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.'

Aerial M - Lay

2012-01-09T12:23:00.001Z

Isaac Bashevis Singer

2012-01-09T11:06:00.005Z

'Singer was a prominent vegetarian for the last 35 years of his life and often included vegetarian themes in his works. In his short story, The Slaughterer, he described the anguish of an appointed slaughterer trying to reconcile his compassion for animals with his job of killing them. He felt that the ingestion of meat was a denial of all ideals and all religions: "How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood?" When asked if he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, he replied: "I did it for the health of the chickens."

In The Letter Writer, he wrote "In relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka" which became a classical reference in the discussions about the legitimacy of the comparison of animal exploitation with the holocaust.

In the preface to Steven Rosen's "Food for Spirit: Vegetarianism and the World Religions" (1986), Singer wrote, "When a human kills an animal for food, he is neglecting his own hunger for justice. Man prays for mercy, but is unwilling to extend it to others. Why should man then expect mercy from God? It's unfair to expect something that you are not willing to give. It is inconsistent. I can never accept inconsistency or injustice. Even if it comes from God. If there would come a voice from God saying, "I'm against vegetarianism!" I would say, "Well, I am for it!" This is how strongly I feel in this regard." '

Text taken from Wikipedia

Ryan Bingham @ Bonnaroo 2011

2012-01-08T20:30:00.002Z

Zen:

The Killing

2012-01-06T09:30:00.002Z

For any latecomers (like me) this really is as good as everyone says it is.

On a lighter note...

2012-01-05T11:00:00.005Z

I thought I would share the ten books I've enjoyed reading most over the last year. As I tend to alternate fiction and non-fiction when I'm reading I've done the same here.

In no particular order then...

1. Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee features heavily in this list (he featured heavily in my year). Elizabeth Costello is more a series of essays than a novel; a blend of fiction and philosophy, compassion and concentration. More ideas on a single page than most writers have in a lifetime.

2. What Ever Happened To Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici

Again, full of ideas. Stylishly written and argued. It contains one of the most incisive critiques of contemporary English culture I have read. Reveals the shabbiness and complacency of most novels written today.

3. Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig

Zweig's masterpiece. Effortless prose. Almost 500 pages long, yet never feels laboured. Lightness of tone belies the seriousness of the project. Stunning.

4. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman G. Finkelstein

Will make your blood boil. Describes how the very people who claim to be defending the interests of Jewish Holocaust survivors have secretly profited (and continue to do so).

5. Snow, Orhan Pamuk

Slow-moving, snow-softened prose. Needs to be read slowly to appreciate it fully. Exploration of the conflict between Western secularism and Islam, set in a remote Turkish city during a snow storm. No easy answers, just a defence of our basic humanity.

6. Inner Workings: Essays 2000-2005, J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee has read everything. Seriously - everything. Reading this collection of literary essays will leave you wondering what you have spent your life doing. And not only has he read everything, not only does he speak four languages (it may be more), not only is he one of the best fiction writers around, he is also - as this book proves - possibly the best essayist of his generation.

7. Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee

Did I mention he is also an astute political analyst? Tony Blair and John Howard, among others, are exposed for the mendacious hypocrites they are. Great book.

8. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald, Lynn Sharon Schwartz (editor)

Like hearing Sebald's voice from beyond the grave. Strangely fitting. And strangely poignant too.

9. A Heart So White, Javier Marias

One of those very rare books that makes the familiar new. Part fiction, part philosophy, wholly unique.

10. Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee again. More of the same: beautifully written, thoroughly researched, carefully balanced essays. Clear-sighted and compassionate. A testament to the splendour of the open mind.

The Forbiddenness of Forbidden Places

2012-01-03T15:50:00.008Z

I.

In ‘The Problem of Evil’, the sixth chapter of his 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee stages a fictional encounter between his eponymous protagonist and the English writer Paul West. Invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, ‘on the age-old problem of evil’, Elizabeth Costello decides to talk about ‘Witness, Silence and Censorship’, focussing primarily on West’s novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. Unknown to Costello, West has also been invited to the conference. On learning that he will be present at her lecture, Costello, fearful that her remarks will be taken as a personal attack, at first tries to rewrite her lecture, only to realise that this attempted ‘softening’ is an act of self-censorship that she cannot perform with a clear conscience. Resigning herself to possible embarrassment and scandal, Costello decides to read her original text unaltered. Her one precaution is to warn West beforehand. His response – a tenacious silence both before and after the lecture – reminds us not only that West (the real West) has been given no opportunity to defend himself within the space of Coetzee’s narrative, but also that there is no obvious common ground between West and Costello. Their respective attitudes to language are fundamentally different: Costello acknowledges this, West does not. That Costello attempts to understand the nature of this difference while West remains silent underlines the – potentially unbridgeable – gulf between them. Costello cuts short her lecture having realised she has reached the limit of what she can say. West’s response remains unarticulated.

For Costello, the problem with West’s book is its obscenity. In describing the execution of the officers who had plotted to kill Hitler, West, in her opinion, goes too far. The pages in question have an energy that comes, ‘in a certain sense, from West himself.’ It is as though

‘[t]hrough Hitler’s hangman a devil entered Paul West, and in his book West in turn has given that devil his freedom, turned him loose upon the world.’

Costello is aware that ‘[i]neluctably she is arguing herself into the position of the old-fashioned censor.’ To escape this trap she endeavours to justify her reaction to West’s book. It might be nothing more than a consequence of age, she concedes; nevertheless, her attitude to writing – and to obscenity – has changed (her reading of West’s book is also a possible contributing factor, she notes):

‘Once upon a time she would have said, All honour to a writer who undertakes to follow such a story to its darkest recesses. Now she is not so sure...

‘... she no longer believes that storytelling is good in itself, whereas for West, or at least for West as he was when he wrote the Stauffenberg book, the question does not seem to arise. If she, as she is nowadays, had to choose between telling a story and doing good, she would rather, she thinks, do good.’

This uncertainty about the true value of writing leads her to the conclusion that there is a limit to what can be said, to what should be said; it leads, in other words, to her conception of the obscene. She dares utter what for many writers is a heresy: the suspicion that people are not always ‘improved by what they read.’

‘Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing...

‘Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.’

As she states in her lecture:

‘... I take seriously the forbiddenness of forbidden places. The cellar in which the July 1944 plotters were hanged is one such forbidden place. I do not believe we should go into that cellar, any of us. I do not believe Mr West should go there; and, if he chooses to go nevertheless, I believe we should not follow.’

To follow Mr West – as Costello has done, almost in spite of herself – is to consent to an act of violence perpetrated against ourselves. We harm our own humanity by sharing in the violation of what should remain hidden.

‘Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West (except that she did not know Paul West then, he was just a name on the cover of a book). Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him.’

In this context, Costello recalls an incident from her past. As a young woman she was violently assaulted: ‘it was her first brush with evil.’ Rather than write about her experience, rather than make use of it, she keeps it to herself:

‘For half a century the memory has rested inside her like an egg, an egg of stone, one that will never crack open, never give birth. She finds it good, it pleases her, this silence of hers, a silence she hopes to preserve to the grave.

It is some equivalent reticence that she is demanding of West.’

This call for reticence is greeted, as Costello anticipates, with mingled unease and hostility. One (male) audience member, at the end of her lecture, accuses her of being ‘a weak vessel’, and of attributing her weakness to everyone else. Other people may read West’s book and not feel violated, the audience member asserts. West himself may have emerged unscathed; it is not for Costello to say. Surely it is better to know the world’s horrors intimately and to learn from them, than to close one’s eyes.

Typically, Costello/ Coetzee can only admit helplessness when attempting to answer this. Rather than insist on a degree of reticence among writers and readers, Costello/Coetzee can only recommend it. There is no ‘third alternative’, at least none that is obvious. We can either choose to follow West - and writers like him – into forbidden places, or we can choose not to.

II.

Two novels that choose to enter the forbidden places Coetzee describes are Jose Saramago’s Blindness (1995) and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005). Both are bestselling novels; both have been made into films (two film versions in the case of Larsson’s book); both contain scenes of violent rape; both reveal – in these scenes - an ambiguity bordering on prurience.

Doubtless there are numerous other examples of books that flirt with the sort of obscenity Coetzee describes; however, the popularity of these two novels gives them a certain prominence. In comparing the depiction of rape in these two novels to Coetzee’s treatment of rape in his 2000 novel Disgrace, we see most clearly the problematic nature of language and storytelling alluded to in Elizabeth Costello. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate this, we have to follow both Saramago and Larsson ‘into the room’.

In Saramago’s novel an unnamed city is struck by an epidemic of ‘white blindness’. Those suffering from this unexplained affliction are quarantined by the authorities, locked in an asylum, and effectively left to fend for themselves. As order deteriorates, violence and savagery become the rule. The women in the asylum are now at the mercy of the men. Gang-rape inevitably (according to the novel’s logic) follows.

We see events through the eyes of a female character – ‘the doctor’s wife’ – who, for some again unexplained reason, is not afflicted by blindness (she keeps quiet about this in order to protect herself and her husband). In a lengthy passage, we follow her and several other women into ‘ward 3’ where they are then raped. The leader of the gang of rapists – the ‘king’ of ward 3 – chooses the doctor’s wife and another young woman for himself. After raping the young woman he passes her to his fellow gang-members; he then turns his attention to the doctor’s wife, forcing her at gunpoint to perform fellatio. Only after these two acts are described does Saramago end the scene. Morning comes and the women are finally allowed to leave. Saramago, however, feels the need to reiterate what has happened during the night:

‘For hours they had passed from one man to another, from humiliation to humiliation, from outrage to outrage, exposed to everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive.’

The rhythm and repetition in this sentence – its rhetorical, almost lyrical cadence – is deeply disturbing. Not only is the sentence unnecessary in terms of plot development and atmosphere, it also suggests – by dint of its ornamental quality – that Saramago has written it not from a sense of urgency, but from a sense of enjoyment: he has written it merely because it sounds good. A summation of sorts, it confirms that he knows what he is talking about, that he has described fully what he intended to describe. In other words, his choice of language is unproblematic.

We sense a similar narrative confidence in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Here, the protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is first of all forced to perform fellatio on her guardian Nils Bjurman, then, later, she is tied to his bed and raped. The long, rhythmic sentences of Saramago’s narrative are replaced here by short, declarative sentences; succinct descriptions of what is taking place. There is no doubt in the reader’s mind of the horrifying nature of the assault. Lisbeth is ‘completely vulnerable’ we are told. She can ‘hardly breathe’ and feels ‘excruciating pain’.

Larsson then cuts away from the scene (throughout he has been interweaving two narratives – that of Lisbeth and that of the novel’s other protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist) in order – ostensibly - to spare us the rest of the ordeal. However, he then cuts back to reiterate – as Saramago does – that Lisbeth has undergone something deeply traumatic. The fact that he cuts away from the rape only after letting us know – explicitly – what has happened to Lisbeth, then returns after the rape has finished to make her trauma even more explicit, reveals that in fact he wishes to spare us nothing. Like Saramago, he makes sure we know exactly what he is talking about. Neither writer relents, although both pretend to do so. Neither trusts the reader to imagine what happens (which suggests that the narrative confidence both men display is largely illusory: the desire to describe everything revealing a fundamental insecurity).

For Coetzee, on the other hand, remaining ‘outside the room’ – choosing not to describe the physical act of rape – means it is up to the reader to imagine what happens. The result is just as disturbing as the effects created by Saramago and Larsson, but - essentially - not in the same way. Whereas both Saramago and Larsson allow themselves to become caught up in the description – doubtless because neither wants to risk disrupting the narrative flow of their texts and thereby disappointing their readers – Coetzee, crucially, refuses to be dragged along. He confounds the reader’s expectations, even the logic of the narrative itself, by leaving the details of the rape unrecorded. We remain with the novel’s protagonist David Lurie, locked in a bathroom, while in the bedroom his daughter is being raped. Afterwards, despite Lurie’s attempts to talk about what happened, his daughter resists him. ‘In his embrace she is stiff as a pole, yielding nothing’ we are told. The experience – Coetzee suggests – cannot be spoken about. Or possibly, should not be spoken about. It is language itself that is viewed with suspicion.

Saramago and Larsson undoubtedly have good intentions. Both try to convey a sense of the horror of rape; yet for some reason both veer dangerously close to prurience. In Coetzee’s phrase, both ‘excite’ us to read. In order to maintain tension, both writers choose to enter forbidden places, to show us in detail what is happening. Yet in this description there is something unsettling – a hint of the obscenity Coetzee describes. Although in both Blindness and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, we ostensibly see things from the point of view of female characters, in fact we are looking through the additional filter of an unnamed third-person narrator who is unmistakably male. The language used is an already eroticised one: it has a sadistic, voyeuristic quality. That both the doctor’s wife and Lisbeth Salander are forced to perform fellatio reveals the male presence behind the language: a female writer, arguably, would not have focussed on this particular act. That in Saramago’s text the raped women are ‘exposed to everything that can be done to a woman’, and that in Larsson’s text Lisbeth is sodomized, further suggests that for both writers vaginal rape is not enough: it has to be compounded by other acts of violation. Just as Costello/Coetzee detects in Paul West an additional ‘energy’ above and beyond the requirements of his subject matter, so it is possible to see in Saramago and Larsson an energy in their writing that might be called enjoyment.

Coetzee’s Disgrace maintains a narrative tension – and elicits a sense of horror – without having to rely on the erotic energy of an essentially voyeuristic language. In doing so, it demonstrates that a ‘third alternative’ perhaps exists after all. By acknowledging the problematic nature of language, by respecting the forbiddenness of forbidden places, the text paradoxically says far more than it might otherwise be able to do. We are spared a description of the horror, but we are not spared the horror itself. Without being told, we know what has happened – or at least, we know enough. David Lurie’s daughter is raped, but she is spared the additional humiliation of having us watch.

More Ryan Bingham, or Proof That Life Really Isn't Fair

2011-12-23T10:46:00.002Z

Dan Auerbach - When The Night Comes

2011-12-22T23:22:00.003Z

Ryan Bingham - Junky Star

2011-12-22T22:54:00.004Z

To Hitch

2011-12-16T11:03:00.002Z

Christopher Hitchens, 13/4/49 - 15/12/11

39 things you probably didn't need to know about me...

2011-12-15T07:27:00.012Z

1. Why did you sign up for a blog?
Vanity. I thought I had something to say (how wrong I was!)

2. What does your blog name mean?
It's perverse, I know, but I like the feeling of exhaustion - the sense of elation you get just before you collapse (for a teetotaler it's one of the few times you feel drunk). The blog was intended, originally, to reflect that feeling of imminent collapse - writing about limit experiences, about music, books etc that go as far as they can - but it quickly became something else. Basically, I was exhausted as soon as I began.

3. What do you do online when you're not blogging?
I spend a lot of time on Youtube. It's like hunting through an old attic, opening boxes, having no idea what you'll find, often being pleasantly surprised, often disappointed. Also, I use it to further my education. There are some really great lectures and interviews on there. I can watch Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens for hours. There's really no excuse for stupidity.

4. How about when you're not on the computer in your spare time?
I read mostly. Or watch DVDs (usually box sets). I can't watch TV any more.

5. What do you wish people who read your blog knew about you?
I'm happy maintaining a certain distance from others - I think it's best for all concerned!

6. What is your favourite community in the blogosphere?
I like anything with integrity - blogs where the enthusiasm or anger is genuine.

7. What is your philosophy on your blog layout?
Quietism?

8. Tell me about the picture you use to represent you on your blog.
Slow, heavy, covered in dust - a metaphor for my brain.

9. Do you have any unique interests that you have never shared before?
I make vegan cookies. I also grow a lot of my own vegetables.

10. Do you think your blog has fans?
Highly doubtful.

11. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?
J. M. Coetzee. I only discovered him recently. In my usual obsessive-compulsive way, I bought all his books and read them back-to-back. Possibly the most important body of writing by any living author.

12. What are you glad you did but haven't really had a chance to boast about?
I used to renovate houses. I built an extension on my house that I am ridiculously proud of. It's possibly the only thing I've made that will outlast me.

13. What don't you talk about here, either because it's too personal or because you don't have the energy?
I can't say. It's too personal and I don't have the energy.

14. Have you ever lost a blogging friendship and regretted it?
Never having had one, I have never lost one.

15. Have you ever lost a blogging friendship and thought "Was that overdue!"?
Ditto.

16. If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?
Er...

17. If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?
J. M. Coetzee, for the reasons mentioned above.

18. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you going?
I hate to fly, so I would have to trade the ticket for a boat ride. I would probably choose the Democratic Republic of Congo. Slightly weird choice, I realise, but I've been reading a lot about it recently. It's one of the most ravaged places on earth (thanks to the West). I would like to meet some of the people, sit down and talk, find out what it means to live there.

19. What do you think about most?
Writing. Relationships. Writing about relationships.

20. You have the opportunity to spend a romantic night with the music celebrity of your choice. Who would it be?
Pass.

21. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?
Any time I was mean or petty. Oh, and every exam I had to sit.

22. What's your strangest talent?
I'm a qualified barista. I make a pretty decent cup of coffee.

23. What would be a question you'd be afraid to tell the truth on?
Anything where the answer would be hurtful. I'm a big coward when it comes to wounding people's feelings.

24. Ever had a poem or song written about you?
Only self-indulgent gibberish written by myself.

25. Do you have any strange phobias?
Flying, as I already mentioned. Basically any situation where I'm trapped and reliant on someone else to let me out.

26. What's your religion?
I like many aspects of Zen and Taoism, but religion in general depresses me. The human race needs to emerge from its infancy.

27. What is your current desktop picture?
A grainy black-and-white photograph of Jakob Wassermann. I like it because he seems to be dissolving into the background. He was an extraordinary writer, now almost completely forgotten. In a way, the photo captures that.

28. When you are outside, what are you most likely doing?
Walking my dog, listening to my ipod, avoiding humans.

29. What's the last song you listened to?
'The End of Faith' by Pernice Brothers. It's from an album I haven't really listened to. The first time I played it I was unimpressed and since then I've neglected it. But that song came on my ipod and I was stunned. Simplicity is always best.

30. Simple but extremely complex. Favourite band?
Songs: Ohia. Really on the strength of two albums, 'The Lioness' and 'Didn't It Rain'. Jason Molina, one day - probably long after he is gone - will be acknowledged for the genius he is. The fact that he has been reduced to asking fans for help to pay his medical bills says it all. The world doesn't deserve him.

31. What was the last lie you told?
I probably lied in an earlier answer. Who knows?

32. Do you believe in karma?
As Frank Zappa says, 'The meek shall inherit nothing.' Anything else is a lie.

33. What is a saying you say a lot?
Sorry.

34. What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength?
Doubt.

35. Who is your celebrity crush?
Emmanuelle Beart. What can I say? French women make me weak at the knees. It's the accent.

36. Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word: heart?
Attack.

37. How do you vent your anger?
Lots of swearing.

38. Do you have a collection of anything?
Only books. I daren't start collecting anything else - I'm far too obsessive.

39. What is your favourite word?
Flabbergasted - because I can't imagine the etymology, and I can't imagine the first time it was used. Also, it sums up my state of mind most of the time.

-

Thanks to Camp Fustian for this excuse to expose myself in public.

The End of Growth

2011-12-13T13:41:00.004Z

'Of all the academic disciplines, economics is perhaps the most influentially at odds with the problems of growth and human overpopulation. In the current scheme, growth is integral to economics, which seeks to build trade and aid development. The goal of every commercial enterprise is to sell more. To do that, either there must be more consumers, or consumers must consume more per capita. In the current version of capitalism we are bombarded with the message that growth is good...

Most of us have heard the phrase "sustainable growth," yet few know what it refers to. As authors Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend point out in their 1993 book Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, sustainable growth is both "an economic oxymoron" and "an impossibility theorem." In a finite system (exhibit A: planet Earth), sustainable growth is as unattainable as perpetual motion; it violates basic laws of physics. It has been calculated that if twentieth-century rates of human population increase continued for the next thousand years, a mass of humanity would cover the earth shoulder to shoulder more than a million deep; another thousand years on and the mountain of humanity would be approaching the edge of the known universe, traveling outward at the speed of light.

This imaginary scenario illustrates the inevitable link between economic growth and ecological sustainability. It also shows that any link between growth and a higher quality of (human) life is tenuous, and at best temporary. As long as economic systems are defined by growth in consumption, ecosystems will increasingly feel the strain...

We can be certain that with more humans there will be fewer animals living free in the world. Animals need wild places to live, and we continue to take them away...

In terms of pure numbers, we have reached the nadir of our relationship with animals because - as the editors of a 2006 volume titled Killing Animals point out, we kill more of them today than ever in our history. We are also sending them to the oblivion of extinction at higher rates than before...

Few people yet realize that what they put on their plates has more environmental impact than how much they fly or drive. Animal husbandry takes up more land than any other activity by humans, and it accounts for 70 percent of all human consumption of fresh water. Meat production causes more greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere than does all global human transportation combined - 18 percent compared to 13.5 percent, according to recent estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO also estimates that animal agriculture is responsible for over two-thirds of all human caused nitrous oxide and methane emissions. As climate-warming compounds, these gases are respectively 265 times and 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide...

Meat-eating... accounts for the destruction of far more plants than does a plant-based diet. The animals we eat must consume large amounts of plant matter to grow their bodies. It takes many pounds of plants to build a pound of herbivore muscle. It takes between three and twelve pounds of feed protein to produce a pound of meat, egg, or milk protein. Protein is protein - the molecules are the same and one is not superior to the other. Consider our largest primate cousin, the mountain gorilla, whose males grow to 450 pounds of brawn on a vegan diet...'

From Jonathan Balcombe, Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

Charles Ferguson's Inside Job

2011-12-08T10:33:00.003Z

If you want to know who is really responsible for the current global economic crisis you should watch Charles Ferguson's documentary Inside Job. It is available to watch - for a short time - for free. Click here.

Bill Callahan

2011-11-29T20:47:00.001Z

Agnes Obel - Just So

2011-11-21T14:36:00.000Z

Ilan Pappe

2011-11-08T16:38:00.004Z

Immediately prior to watching the above interview I watched the 2009 film American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein. The similarities between Finkelstein's experience after publishing The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering and Ilan Pappe's experience after publishing his historical research (most notably in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine) are striking. Both men have effectively been scapegoated for expressing opinions at odds with prevailing pro-Israel and pro-Israeli discourse. Yet the way in which they have reacted to this scapegoating is markedly different. Whereas Finkelstein has become more vociferous in his opposition, increasing the rhetoric of his attacks, and increasingly resembling thereby the very people he sees as enemies - thus unwittingly demonstrating the validity of Rene Girard's theory of mimetic violence - Pappe, as the interview shows, has maintained a remarkable degree of equanimity. This absence of resentment or rancour is in itself a compelling argument: a refusal, on the one hand, to be drawn into the spiral of reciprocal aggression, and on the other, a willingness to allow his work to speak for itself.

-

A related video, also worth watching:

Christopher Hitchens and Mason Crumpacker

2011-10-13T10:25:00.005+01:00

If you are in need of something to restore a little faith in humanity - and in humanism - you might like to read this blog post from whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.

The writer Christopher Hitchens, in Texas to receive the Dawkins Award, was asked by an eight-year-old girl, Mason Crumpacker, to recommend books he thought she should read. Hitchens, who has more reason than most to be selfish with his time (he is suffering from late-stage oesophageal cancer), sat down with the girl and discussed the subject at some length.

An account of this discussion, together with a copy of Hitchens' reading list, promptly found their way on to the internet. Unsurprisingly, this then provoked a backlash from several 'christians', one of whom, in a youtube video, suggested a reading list of his own.

Mason Crumpacker's parents - sagely, as it turned out - allowed their daughter to respond, thereby demonstrating that an eight-year-old with an open mind can defeat even the most dyed-in-the-wool bigot.

Bombay Bicycle Club - Lights Out, Words Gone

2011-10-10T15:21:00.001+01:00

South of Lincoln - Man Pt. 1

2011-09-26T10:48:00.004+01:00

Maxwell Beardsley Holmquist, a.k.a. South of Lincoln.

Thanks to Rebecca Sherman for drawing my attention...

Appeals To Unreason: J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals

2011-09-20T16:48:00.016+01:00

In October 1997, on the 15th and 16th of that month, J. M. Coetzee gave two lectures at Princeton University. He had been invited to contribute to the ongoing ‘Tanner Lectures on Human Values’. Coetzee’s decision to talk about 'The Lives of Animals' in the context of ‘human values’ was deliberately provocative. As was the form he chose. Rather than present a straightforward exposition of his subject, he read a novella – a blend of fiction, polemic and philosophy - in which an ageing novelist, Elizabeth Costello, gives two lectures at the prestigious Appleton College on the subject of animals:

‘On the basis of her reputation as a novelist, this fleshy, white-haired lady has been invited to Appleton to speak on any subject she elects; and she has responded by electing to speak, not about herself and her fiction, as her sponsors would no doubt like, but about a hobbyhorse of hers, animals.’

This ironic doubling appears, first and foremost, to be a defensive strategy: Coetzee, too, risks incurring the displeasure of his sponsors and his audience by talking about a personal hobbyhorse rather than himself and his work. However, as the text soon makes clear, the use of fiction is also essential to the argument Coetzee – through Costello - wishes to make. Without fiction, without the physicality of its language, without the opportunities it presents for a sympathetic identification with others, we are limited to reason, constrained by a discourse that - when talking about animals - proves inadequate.

To talk meaningfully about the lives of animals we have to recognise, and somehow overcome, our anthropocentrism. Animals are excluded from rational discourse, therefore, in order to understand them, we must also – temporarily - exclude ourselves.

Coetzee’s/ Costello’s arguments are appeals to unreason, to an understanding beyond rational thought, to something poetic, embodied, immediate. We must do violence to ourselves (that is, to our rational inhibitions) if we are to cease doing violence to animals.

Around the two lectures given by Elizabeth Costello is a narrative framework every bit as important and integral as the lectures themselves. Costello’s son, John Bernard, is ‘assistant professor of physics and astronomy’ at Appleton College. Preferring to ‘make his own way in the world’ rather than trade on his mother’s name, John has, until the start of the novella, concealed the connection from his colleagues. When Costello agrees to lecture at Appleton, the connection is revealed – to John’s dismay and against his will. John’s wife, Norma, is likewise discomfited by the visit of her mother-in-law. The two women have never got on. When John collects his mother from the airport (Costello lives in Australia) and returns with her to his home ‘in suburban Waltham’, Norma is waiting... waiting for the inevitable confrontation:

‘Hostilities are renewed almost at once. Norma has prepared a light supper. His mother notices that only three places have been set. “Aren’t the children eating with us?” she asks.

“No,” says Norma, “they are eating in the playroom.”

“Why?”

The question is not necessary, since she knows the answer. The children are eating separately because Elizabeth does not like to see meat on the table, while Norma refuses to change the children’s diet to suit what she calls “your mother’s delicate sensibilities.”’

This might seem like little more than padding – minor details and incidents thrown in to develop context – yet the details in themselves are significant. For both John and Norma, Costello is an inconvenience. More than that, she poses a threat: to John’s sense of self as an academic making his own way in the world (Costello now threatens to overshadow him), and to Norma’s sense of herself as a mother (Norma believes she knows what is best for her children, yet still feels she must physically separate them from Costello).

We learn that Norma, too, is an academic – she ‘holds a Ph.D. in philosophy with a specialism in the philosophy of mind’ – yet so far ‘has been unable to find a teaching position.’ Her insecurity is thereby hinted at; both she and John are challenged by the more successful Costello, and must find ways of belittling her.

The subjects in which they specialise are also anything but incidental: John teaches ‘physics and astronomy’; Norma, presumably, would teach – if she could – ‘philosophy of the mind’; both disciplines place a heavy emphasis on knowledge, certainty and reason. They seem, therefore, to have been carefully selected. (Even the name ‘Norma’ seems too close to ‘normal’ to be entirely accidental.)

John and Norma – in different ways - are figures of defensiveness and resistance. They represent two attitudes against which Costello must argue. They are, in effect, two hostile ‘readers’ of the text, as anticipated by Coetzee.

The narrative framework around Costello’s two lectures thus becomes an additional site of contention, with Coetzee subtly undermining not only these two characters but also anyone who might share their opinions.

As a narrative strategy – the first of many Coetzee employs – it works to increase our sympathy for Costello before any overt appeal has been made.

Thus, when the first lecture begins, we are already disposed to side with Costello. She is an ageing woman whose son cannot wait for her to leave so that ‘he will be able to get back to his work’, and whose daughter-in-law treats her with barely-disguised disdain, finding ‘her opinions on animals, animal consciousness, and ethical relations with animals’ to be ‘jejune and sentimental’. Our sympathy with Costello is not only virtually guaranteed, but also integral to the argument. If we can sympathise with her, a fictional character, then we can also – potentially – sympathise with animals (a point Costello herself makes later in the text).

Costello begins the first lecture -‘The Philosophers and the Animals’ - with some remarks about a short story of Kafka’s:

‘“Ladies and gentlemen,” she begins. “It is two years since I last spoke in the United States. In the lecture I then gave, I had reason to refer to the great fabulist Franz Kafka, and in particular to his story ‘Report to an Academy,’ about an educated ape, Red Peter, who stands before the members of a learned society telling the story of his life – of his ascent from beast to something approaching man. On that occasion I felt a little like Red Peter myself, and said so. Today that feeling is even stronger, for reasons that I hope will become clearer to you.

“Lectures often begin with lighthearted remarks whose purpose is to set the audience at ease. The comparison I have just drawn between myself and Kafka’s ape might be taken as such a lighthearted remark... that is to say, ironically.

“I want to say at the outset that that was not how my remark... was intended. I did not intend it ironically. It means what it says. I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have time any longer to say things I do not mean.”’

These preliminary remarks – the rejection of lightheartedness and irony as little more than time wasting – prepare us for what is to follow. Costello’s attitude is confrontational – wearily so. She seems to expect little success from her lectures, but must nevertheless say what she has to say, if only because she has little time left in which to say it (again, this is a rhetorical device meant to drive home the importance of her argument).

‘“In addressing you on the subject of animals,” she continues, “I will pay you the honor of skipping a recital of the horrors of their lives and deaths ... I will take it that you concede me the rhetorical power to evoke these horrors and bring them home to you with adequate force and leave it at that, reminding you only that the horrors I here omit are nevertheless at the centre of this lecture.”’

She then goes on to talk about Nazi concentration camps, about ‘numbers that numb the mind’, about ‘more horrors by far than one could afford to know, for one’s own sake’, and about ‘a certain willed ignorance’ on the part of people living near the camps and – more widely - among a generation of Germans who, for that reason, have ‘lost their humanity, in our eyes.’

Should her audience be in any doubt about the comparison she intends to draw, Costello then spells out her meaning:

‘“I was taken on a drive around Waltham this morning. It seems a pleasant enough town. I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here. They must be. They simply do not advertise themselves. They are all around us as I speak, only we do not, in a certain sense, know about them.

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

“And to split hairs, to claim that there is no comparison, that Treblinka was so to speak a metaphysical enterprise dedicated to nothing but death and annihilation while the meat industry is ultimately devoted to life... is as little consolation to those victims as it would have been – pardon the tastelessness of the following – to ask the dead of Treblinka to excuse their killers because their body-fat was needed to make soap and their hair to stuff mattresses with.”’

The parallel – as Costello acknowledges - is a deliberately shocking, deliberately provocative, but most significantly, a deliberately unreasonable one. It is designed to elicit an emotional, physical response; to break down the intellectual resistance of her audience. Comparing present-day slaughterhouses to Nazi death camps is – as Stanley Cavell has argued – completely ‘inordinate’. No such comparison is possible within the bounds of reason. Yet what we need to remember is that Costello – and through her, Coetzee – understands the impossibility of this argument, but persists in it anyway; because to concede this point is to lose the argument entirely.

The language of reason, ‘ “the language of Aristotle and Porphyry, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Descartes and Bentham, of, in our day, Mary Midgley and Tom Regan... a philosophical language in which we can discuss and debate what kind of souls animals have”’ is inherently, unavoidably, biased against animals: it is the language of anthropocentrism; the language of the victor rather than the victim. And this is Costello’s/ Coetzee’s dilemma: how to be reasonable without having recourse to reason; how to use a language against itself, against the victor in favour of the victim:

‘“Both reason and seven decades of life-experience tell me that reason is neither the being of the universe nor the being of God. On the contrary, reason looks to me suspiciously like the being of human thought; worse than that, like the being of one tendency in human thought. Reason is the being of a certain spectrum of human thinking. And if this is so, if that is what I believe, then why should I bow to reason this afternoon and content myself with embroidering on the discourse of the old philosophers?

“I ask the question, and then answer it for you. Or rather, I allow Red Peter, Kafka’s Red Peter, to answer it for you. Now that I am here, says Red Peter, in my tuxedo and bowtie and my black pants with a hole cut in the seat for my tail to poke through... now that I am here, what is there for me to do? Do I in fact have a choice? If I do not subject my discourse to reason, whatever that is, what is left for me but to gibber and emote and knock over my water-glass and generally make a monkey of myself?

“... although I see that the best way to win acceptance from this learned gathering would be for me to join myself, like a tributary stream running into a great river, to the great Western discourse of man versus beast, of reason versus unreason, something in me resists, foreseeing in that step the concession of the entire battle.

“For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology.”

This then becomes Costello’s task: to see reason from the outside, to become a being who is alien – an animal in other words. Like Red Peter, she is ‘a branded, marked, wounded animal’ presenting herself ‘as speaking testimony to a gathering of scholars... exhibiting yet not exhibiting... a wound, which I cover up under my clothes but touch on in every word I speak.’ This wound – inflicted by reason – marks her as a victim; and it is perhaps in victimhood, or through victimhood, that sympathy becomes possible.

Setting herself in opposition to reason – alienating herself - inevitably entails alienating others. Her remarks on the Nazi death camps lead one member of her audience – Abraham Stern, a poet, ‘quite well-respected’, who has been at Appleton College ‘donkey’s years’ – to shun her. In a letter explaining his actions, Stern writes:

‘“You took over for your own purposes the familiar comparison between the murdered Jews of Europe and slaughtered cattle. The Jews died like cattle, therefore cattle die like Jews, you say. That is a trick with words which I will not accept. You misunderstand the nature of likenesses; I would even say you misunderstand wilfully, to the point of blasphemy... The inversion insults the memory of the dead. It also trades on the horrors of the camps in a cheap way.”’

Costello’s response to this letter – nothing more than a sigh – is supremely eloquent. The ironies are so many that a reply becomes almost impossible. She knows she has used the comparison for her own purposes; she knows she has played a trick with words; she has misunderstood wilfully; and she has blasphemed – against the god of reason. Even the cheapness Stern accuses her of is something she herself has already acknowledged. What can she do but accept his censure? He has failed to see her point, failed to sympathise with her.

Likewise, John and Norma, during and after the lecture, continue to be dismissive. Affronted by Costello’s remarks, Norma raises her hand to ask Costello a question. John only just manages to dissuade her.

‘“I have a right!” whispers Norma into his ear.

“You have a right, just don’t exercise it, it’s not a good idea!” he whispers back.

“She can’t just be allowed to get away with it! She’s confused!”

“She’s old, she’s my mother. Please!”

This exchange – superficial as it perhaps seems – reveals just how disturbed both John and Norma are by Costello’s words. The urge to rectify and overrule on Norma’s part, and the effort to justify on John’s, hints at the threat they both feel. If Costello/ Coetzee has succeeded up to this point, then the hostile reader presumably feels a similar mix of awkwardness, self-consciousness and anger. The lecture is designed to unsettle and antagonise in order to provoke self-examination.

Particularly challenging is Costello’s insistence that we can get outside of our own individual consciousness and experience being something ‘other’:

‘“For instants at a time... I know what it is like to be a corpse. The knowledge repels me. It fills me with terror; I shy away from it, refuse to entertain it.

“All of us have such moments, particularly as we grow older. The knowledge we have is not abstract – ‘All human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal’ – but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can.

“When I know, with this knowledge, that I am going to die, what is it... that I know? Do I know what it is like for me to be a corpse or do I know what it is like for a corpse to be a corpse? The distinction seems to me trivial. What I know is what a corpse cannot know: that it is extinct, that it knows nothing and will never know anything anymore. For an instant, before my whole structure of knowledge collapses in panic, I am alive inside that contradiction, dead and alive at the same time.’”

Such moments, Costello hints, provide the clue to an understanding of the lives of animals. If we can bear to live inside the contradiction, ‘if we press ourselves or are pressed’, we can experience, simultaneously, what it is to be ourselves and another; not just in an abstract sense, but physically, bodily:

‘“To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal – and we are all animals – is an embodied soul. This is precisely what Descartes saw and, for his own reasons, chose to deny. An animal lives, said Descartes, as a machine lives. An animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul, it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery, to give it the spark that gets it going; but the animal is not an embodied soul, and the quality of its being is not joy.

“‘Cogito ergo sum,’ he famously said. It is a formula I have always been uncomfortable with. It implies that a living being that does not do what we call thinking is somehow second-class. To thinking, cogitation, I oppose fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation – of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts starkly with Descartes’s key state, which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell.

“... I return to the death camps. The particular horror of the camps, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else... In other words, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. Sympathy has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the object... There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.

“... there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination... If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.’

I quote this passage at length because I think it forms the heart of Coetzee’s argument. The first lecture ends shortly afterwards with Costello answering ‘one or two questions from the floor.’ When pressed to clarify her remarks, to state in concrete terms what she is proposing, Costello appears reluctant. ‘“I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles,” she admits:

‘“If principles are what you want to take away from this talk, I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says... I have never been much interested in proscriptions, dietary or otherwise. Proscription, laws. I am more interested in what lies behind them.”’

And again, I take this to be Coetzee’s own position. The indirect approach he employs in The Lives of Animals, the use of a fictional device, attests to his belief that the answer cannot be stated directly, that proscriptions, as such, are pointless.

That evening, following the first lecture, a dinner is given in Costello’s honour. She again seems reluctant to engage with others, as if the philosophical debate they are keen to initiate – Norma among them – is, for her, nothing more than a trap. Her wariness – and weariness – are interpreted by John as tiredness and confusion, and the dinner is brought to a premature end. (This is not to suggest that the dinner is somehow just an interlude – quite the contrary: a number of significant points are made, not the least of which is Costello’s scepticism about the value of academic debate. If I skip over it it is only to move on more quickly to the second part of Coetzee’s argument.)

In the second lecture – ‘The Poets and the Animals’ – Costello attempts to find ways in which humans can share the being of nonhumans. Poetry, for her, is one such way. She contrasts Rilke’s poem ‘The Panther’ with ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ by Ted Hughes. Whereas for Rilke the panther is ‘there as a stand-in for something else’, for Hughes – ‘writing against Rilke’ – the jaguar leaves him ‘entranced, horrified and overwhelmed’. Attempting to convey this experience, Hughes must feel ‘his way toward a different kind of being-in-the-world, one which is not entirely foreign to us, since the experience before the cage seems to belong to dream-experience’:

‘ “In these poems we know the jaguar not from the way he seems but from the way he moves. The body is as the body moves, or as the currents of life move within it. The poem asks us to imagine our way into that way of moving, to inhabit that body.

“With Hughes, it is a matter – I emphasize – not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body... poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead the record of an engagement with him.

“... By bodying forth the jaguar Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals – by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has explained and no one ever will.”’

It is not difficult to see here Coetzee’s own motivation for blending fiction and polemic: argument, on its own, is not enough; it remains too abstract. In order to combine breath and sense an element of poetry has to be included. And this element is what subverts the discourse of reason. Poetic language – of the kind employed by Hughes – has a physicality that alters the reading experience, allowing us to sympathise – bodily – with another. (It is no coincidence that Costello has become famous after writing a novel about Marion Bloom, the wife of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses. The final chapter of Joyce’s novel effectively becomes the breathing language of Molly Bloom – it cannot simply be understood as words on a page, it has to be heard as words and breath, as embodied writing.)

When Costello is later challenged, during a debate, to explain the practical efficacy of her argument - how it could close slaughterhouses – she answers by relating a story about Camus:

‘“When Albert Camus was a young boy in Algeria, his grandmother told him to bring her one of the hens from the cage in their back yard. He obeyed, then watched her cut off its head with a kitchen knife, catching its blood in a bowl so that the floor would not be dirtied.

“The death-cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?”’

The obliqueness of the answer, the obliqueness of the story related, and the obliqueness of not only Costello’s but Coetzee’s approach, is all part of the polemic. Costello, again, avoids proscriptions, but nevertheless shows that there is potential to subvert reason. If, like Camus, we hear the death-cry of an animal – if it imprints itself hauntingly on our memory – then who knows what the result will be?

Costello’s argument offers no real consolation. At the end of her first lecture she rejects the idea that the guilty – those who have caused suffering to others – will necessarily be punished. ‘“The evidence points in the opposite direction,”’ she admits: ‘“that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment.”’

Her second lecture ends with a re-iterated refusal to engage with ‘the long philosophical tradition’ of reason. This is no longer common ground, she concludes, and she is now only prepared to talk to those who are genuinely willing to listen.

Her visit to the college ends on a note of ‘acrimony, hostility, bitterness.’

With Norma, likewise, there is still no common ground. As John admits apologetically, while driving Costello to the airport: ‘“I don’t think she was in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one could say the same for me. It’s been such a short visit, I haven’t had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about the animal business.”’

Costello then replies:

‘“A better explanation... is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.

“It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money... Am I dreaming, I say to myself?... Yet I am not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human-kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?”’

She breaks down into tears. John pulls over, stops the car, holds her in his arms.

‘He inhales the smell of cold cream, of old flesh. “There, there,” he whispers in her ear. “There, there. It will soon be over.”’

The novella ends on this ambiguous note, with mother and son in one another’s arms. Does John finally feel sympathy, or does he want only to console her? Will he still drive her to the airport then carry on with his life as before, or has something changed? And when he says “it will soon be over” does he mean her distress or her life? Coetzee deliberately leaves this unclear.

What is clear is that – at this moment – Costello is in genuine pain. Her final words are an admission of suffering, an appeal for help; almost a death-cry. But whether anyone hears this cry is a question the text will not, or cannot, answer.

The full text of Coetzee's novella The Lives of Animals is available to read here.

Micah P. Hinson - For Your Eyes

2011-09-19T15:52:00.001+01:00

The Four Horsemen

2011-09-16T09:47:00.003+01:00

I know that from time to time I beg a little too much of my readers' indulgence. However, it's always with good - or at least honest - intentions, and it's always, I hope, in the form of a suggestion rather than an importunity. You don't have to spend two hours of your time watching the following. But if you have nothing better to do I strongly recommend it. Four intelligent, serious men, talking intelligently and seriously about atheism. A dose of sanity to ward off the madness of religion.

Lepidoptera

2011-09-15T09:58:00.008+01:00

'The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ('Don't eat me - I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected'). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmoth-like manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. 'Natural selection,' in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.'

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

'During the day, said Alphonso, they slept safely hidden under stones, or in cracks in the rock, in leaf litter on the ground or among foliage. Most of them are in a death-like state when you find them, and have to coax and quiver themselves back to life, crawling over the ground and jerkily moving their wings and legs before they are ready for flight. Their body temperature will then be thirty-six degrees, like that of mammals, and of dolphins and tunny fish swimming at full speed. Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magical threshold, and it had sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind's misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves...

'In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draught of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.'

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Believe!

2011-09-13T19:37:00.003+01:00

A.A. Bondy released his third solo album Believers today. On 12th December I'm going to see him play live. I am a happy man.

Christopher Hitchens on 'The Cult of Death'

2011-09-12T15:06:00.003+01:00

... and on dying...

Sufjan Stevens - All The Trees Of The Field Will Clap Their Hands

2011-09-06T09:19:00.003+01:00

The Room of the Withered Flowers

2011-09-06T08:48:00.003+01:00

'Eberhard rose and signed to Daniel to follow him. They went along a narrow passage and ascended a tiny staircase. On the landing Eberhard opened the door of the attic.

An overpowering smell of decay assailed their nostrils. Daniel recoiled involuntarily, but the Baron pointed in silence to the walls.

“What’s all this? What does it mean?” gasped Daniel.

The four walls were completely covered with bouquets, garlands and wreaths of withered flowers. From most of the blooms the petals had long since fallen, and now lay strewn about the floor. The green leaves had become brown and wrinkled, the grasses were reduced to threads, the stems had rotted. Many of the bouquets and wreaths were bound with ribbons of faded red or blue; many had golden threads on which the rust had set its mark; many, like the engraving downstairs, were illumined by the setting sun, in whose ruddy beams danced a thick stream of dust.

It was a floral burial vault, a mortuary of dead memories. Daniel guessed the explanation. His tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, a shiver ran down his back, and his eyes swam with burning tears as Eberhard began to speak.

“These flowers were plucked and arranged by her hands, by Lenore’s hands,” said Eberhard. Then, after a pause: “She made the wreaths for a florist, and I bought them all, without her knowledge.” That was all he had to say.

Daniel looked back over his life, as from a pinnacle up which he had been dragged by an invisible hand. He looked, and his soul was filled with dismay and anguish and remorse.

What was left to him now? Two graves were left; and a broken harp; and withered flowers; and a plaster mask.

He saw the dead stalks and the mouldering blooms. Once Lenore’s fingers had touched them all, and, like ghosts, her fingers hovered still about the lifeless blossoms. The dusty cobwebs harboured the wasted hours, the omitted words of kindness, of consolation, encouragement, and sympathy; the missed opportunities of happiness. Oh, this neglect of the present, of a living life, of the wonderful day, the breathing hour! This stumbling, falling, weltering in the night of desire and delusion! This vain, this criminally vain discontent! Oh, angel, angel, where are you now, and how can one invoke you?'

From Jakob Wassermann, The Goose-Man,(George, Allen & Unwin, 1934)

Steve McQueen, Shame

2011-09-05T20:04:00.009+01:00

Steve McQueen's second feature Shame just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. No official trailer yet. However...

McQueen is responsible for one of the greatest scenes ever filmed (and one of the best films ever made):

Songs: Ohia - The Gray Tower

2011-08-27T16:57:00.001+01:00

Feuerbach

2011-08-27T14:35:00.000+01:00

The Baptism of Solitude

2011-08-25T17:24:00.004+01:00

An-echoic, meaning non-echoing or echo-free

The quietest place on Earth, according to Guinness World Records, is an anechoic chamber in Minnesota. The chamber is a room within a room within a room. The outer room is made from concrete; the walls and ceiling panels are 12 inches thick. The two inner rooms are made from double wall steel – that is, two steel skins with insulation between. The larger of the two inner rooms is a five-sided construction, encasing a smaller, six-sided room. Inside this inner inner chamber there are fibreglass acoustic wedges measuring 3.3 feet in thickness. The chamber ‘floats’ on top of springs. The sound within the chamber – if such an absence can be described as sound – has been measured at minus 9.4dB(A). According to anecdotal evidence – from engineers and from various visitors to the chamber – the experience of such profound silence, even after a few minutes, is deeply unsettling. The only noise that can be heard comes from oneself: one’s breathing, one’s heartbeat, one’s eardrums. With the lights inside the chamber turned off the experience becomes even more intolerable. Such extreme sensory deprivation, and/or such immediate, inescapable self-awareness, leads to a sense of panic. True isolation – it seems – proves almost impossible to bear.

~

‘It is a unique sensation and has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. A strange and by no means pleasant process of reintegration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course.’
- Paul Bowles, The Baptism of Solitude

~

~

Damien Jurado - Sheets

2011-08-04T11:48:00.001+01:00

Samuel Beckett, Play

2011-08-03T10:57:00.003+01:00

Picasso

2011-08-03T09:24:00.002+01:00

Van Gogh

2011-08-03T09:22:00.002+01:00

Keith Harmon Snow

2011-08-02T10:49:00.007+01:00

www.allthingspass.com

Beckett, Cezanne, Coetzee

2011-08-02T10:04:00.006+01:00

'His guide here is Cézanne, who came to see the natural landscape as “unapproachably alien,” an “unintelligible arrangement of atoms,” and had the wisdom not to intrude himself into its alienness. In Cézanne “there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make,” Beckett writes. A week later he pushes the insight further: Cézanne has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but—on the evidence of his self-portraits—with “the life…operative in himself.” Herewith the first authentic note of Beckett’s mature, post-humanist phase is struck.'

From J. M. Coetzee, The Making of Samuel Beckett, The New York Review of Books, April 30 2009. Read the whole review here.

Micah P. Hinson - You Lost Sight On Me / The Possibilities

2011-08-01T13:50:00.004+01:00

His politics are way off; his music is spot-on.

Rwanda: The Truth About The 'Genocide'

2011-07-29T10:31:00.006+01:00

For anyone who is interested: Robin Philpot's extraordinary book Rwanda 1994: Colonialism Dies Hard is available online to read for free. Click here for the link.

The book describes in detail how the 'genocide' in Rwanda, far from being a one-sided slaughter of one ethnic group by another, was in fact an explosion of violence on both sides, following an attempted coup d'etat by Ugandan-backed rebels covertly supported by Britain and America.

What has happened in Rwanda since - revenge masquerading as justice - and the subsequent invasion of Congo by Rwandan forces eager to appropriate Congo's vast mineral wealth, is a damning indictment of Western colonial greed and of our own complacent consumerism.

Perhaps inevitably, any attempt to question the use of the word 'genocide' immediately attracts accusations of revisionism. No serious person, as Philpot argues, could possibly deny that hundreds of thousands - some estimate a million - Tutsis were killed by Hutus: only the designation 'genocide' is called into question. When the word is used to inhibit debate and prohibit dissent then its power is abused. According to Philpot, 'Its continued blind use will do more to perpetuate war than to render justice' - a prediction which, tragically, is being borne out today.

Coltan, Cassiterite and The Democratic Republic of Congo

2011-07-28T11:58:00.005+01:00

The following is an article by Johann Hari, published in The Independent on Friday 5th May 2006, entitled Congo's Tragedy: The War The World Forgot. It's worth reading to get some understanding of what has been happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent years. Though I would take exception to some of the points Hari makes, the article is nevertheless a remarkable piece of journalism - one that places the blame for the ongoing atrocities firmly where it belongs: with the so-called developed nations; with us, in other words.

We should also bear in mind that this article is five years old. All that has changed since then is that more people have died.

'This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series Lost, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.

This war has been dismissed as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain's. No, this is not only a story about them. This - the tale of a short journey into the long Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded - is a story about you.

I Rapes Within Rapes

It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in eastern Congo. Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. "Around 10 per cent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them," he says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. "We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a long process."

We walk out into the courtyard and he begins to explain - in the national language, French - the secret history of this hospital. "We started with a catastrophe we just couldn't understand," he says softly. One day early in the war, the Unicef medical van he was using was looted. Coincidentally, a few days later, a woman was carried here on her grandmother's back after an eight-hour trek. "I had never seen anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no medicine."

She was only the first. "We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn't take in what these women had suffered." The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates that 45,000 women were raped last year alone. "It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society," he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret - the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. He became an Oskar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes.

As we walk down to watch 200 rape victims being taught to sew under a large, dark bridge, he tells me what they can expect now. "When the rapes begin, the husbands and fathers often just scarper and never come back. The women never hear anything from them again. Other times, the men blame the women and shun them. It's very hard for us to persuade the women to leave the hospital, because where are they going to go?"

He introduces me to Aileen, who is 18 but looks much younger. She holds her hands tightly in her lap. Her story is stark, the details sparse. Her village was raided by a militia on 10 October, and "they beheaded people in the central square". Her voice is high-pitched; she is almost squeaking. She was seized and taken back out into the forest by the militia where they kept her for six months. "I was raped every night. The first night my body really ached and hurt because I was a virgin," she says. She would be passed on from one man to the next. It is only as she speaks that I notice the large protruding bump sagging into her lap. The baby is going to be born next month. She says she has spoken to her family, but Dr Mukwege tells me later this is a fantasy. "What," she asks me with wide eyes as we leave, "do you think I should do? Where can I go?"

It is coldly appropriate to start here. The rape of Aileen and the rape of the thousands of women who stagger into the Panzi hospital are, I soon discover, merely part of a larger rape - the rape of Congo.

II The Last of the Belgian Colonialists

Bukavu is a cratered, shattered shack-city in eastern Congo that lies on the edge of Lake Kivu. In the street markets, people trade scraps of food for Congolese notes worth a few pence. In the houses, they stagger along without water or electricity. Wandering through this cacophony, I find a lone white woman, a lingering remnant of the origins of this war. She can reveal how all this began.

As we sit over lunch, Tina Van Malderen says, skimming the menu: "I don't drink water - only wine." Her hair is greying but her smile is warm. "I came to Bukavu as a little girl in 1951 when my father came to work for the Belgian administration," she explains. "It was paradise. There were only Europeans then. No Africans. Black people lived in the surrounding areas. It wasn't like South Africa, they weren't forced. They didn't want to live with us. They came into the town to work. They had their own market." She speaks of the days of the Belgian empire with a soft-focus sepia longing. "I have four sisters, and we would swim in the lake all day. It was like a non-stop holiday."

Her family owned a chain of shops, and the only castle in Congo. She is incredulous when I ask if there was any cruelty towards black people back then. "Absolutely not. We loved our blacks. When they had children, we gave them gifts." Perhaps sensing my scepticism, she adds: "Maybe on the plantations they were a little bit rude to them." The Belgians unified Congo in the first great holocaust of the 20th century, a programme of slavery and tyranny that killed 13 million people. King Leopold II - bragging about his humanitarian goals, of course - seized Congo and turned it into a slave colony geared to extracting rubber, the coltan and cassiterite of its day. The "natives" who failed to gather enough rubber would have their hands chopped off, with the Belgian administrators receiving and carefully counting hundreds of baskets of hands a day.

This system of forced cultivation continued until the Belgians withdrew in 1960, when Patrice Lumumba became the first and only elected leader of Congo. "He was a stupid man," Tina says swiftly. "On the first day of independence, he said we had beaten and humiliated the blacks. He signed his death warrant by doing that."

She's right - he did. Lumumba claimed to be a democratic socialist who wanted to overcome Congo's ethnic divisions. We will never know if he could have fulfilled this dream, because the CIA decided he was a "mad dog" who had to be put down. Before long, one of its agents was driving around Kinshasa with the elected leader's tortured corpse in the boot, and the CIA's man - Mobutu Sese Seko - was in power and in the money. Tina's family sold their castle to the dictator as he renamed the country Zaire. "People always ask if he paid. Of course he paid!" she laughs. Mobutu became another Leopold, using the state to rob and murder the Congolese people.

Tina's family started to worry in the 1970s when he announced a programme of "Zaireanisation" - a Mugabe-style transfer of the resources of foreigners to his cronies. "My mother arrived at work one day and there was a black man come to take possession of everything, including her car. She had to walk home," Tina says, glugging red wine.

"Everything began to fail after that. The food became disgusting. Even our dog didn't want to eat it." This is Tina's first visit home - she still calls it that - since they fled. "I saw the house we lived in. From outside it still looked nice but when I went inside..." she shakes her head. "The black people cannot live properly. If I had to compare Congo, I must say it hasn't changed at all. They are not naked any more, but they are still savages." Tina's countrymen established the nation-state in the Congo, and they designed it to be a vampire-state. The only change over the decades has been the resource snatched for Western consumption - rubber under the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and cassiterite today. "Cheers," Tina says, downing her wine.

III The War for Games Consoles

If you want to glimpse what all this death has been for, you have cross Lake Kivu and drive for four hours, on pocked and broken roller-coaster roads, until you reach a place called Kalehe. Scarring the lush green hills are what seem to be large red scabs that glisten in the sun. The term for these open wounds in the earth is "artisinal mines", but this dry terminology conjures up images of technical digs with machines and lights and helmets. In reality, they are immense holes in the ground, in which men, women and children - lots of children - pick desperately with makeshift hammers or their bare hands at the red earth, hoping to find some coltan or cassiterite to set on the long conveyor belt to your house, or mine. Coltan is a metal that conducts heat unusually brilliantly. It is contained in your mobile, your lap-top, your son's PlayStation - and 80 per cent of the world's supplies sit beneath the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As I crawl down into the mine - its cool, damp darkness is a strange contrast to the raging Congolese sun - the miners laugh. The idea of a muzungu - a white man - in their mine seems to them impossibly comic. But they soon get back to picking away at a roof that looks like it could collapse at any moment. Ingo Mbale, 51, explains how the West's hunger for coltan is fed. "We were enslaved three years ago," he says. "An RCD captain [from one of the militias] arrived and forced us to mine for them at gunpoint. They gave us no money, it was slave labour. There is nothing left in many of these shafts now, they exhausted them. They killed many people. Our gold and coltan and cassiterite went out to the world via Rwanda."

Watching these men, the shape of Congo's recent history becomes clear. There is an official story about the war in Congo, and then there is the reality, uncovered by a trilogy of bomb-blast reports from the UN Panel of Experts on the DRC. The official story is convoluted and hard to follow, because it does not ultimately make sense. But its first chapter is true enough, and goes something like this. In 1996, a Maoist with an eye for money called Laurent-Désiré Kabila grew tired of simply running his little fiefdom in eastern Zaire, where he peddled ivory and gold with a nice sideline in kidnapping Westerners. Kabila decided to depose Mobutu, the omnipresent and omni-incompetent tyrant, and seize power for himself. He cobbled together a ragtag army of child soldiers known as the Kadogo and, with the support of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, the edifice of Mobutuism collapsed even before their tinny, tiny advance. Kabila installed himself as another Leopold-alike, banning political parties and bathing in corruption.

But then in 1998 Kabila asked the Rwandans and Ugandans to withdraw their troops from Congo - so long, and thanks for the armies - and the official story begins to drift away from reality. The Rwandans pulled back for a fortnight, but then mounted a massive invasion of Congo, seizing a third of the country. The public reason for this assault sounds reasonable. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - a slaughter that made even Auschwitz look slow-paced - tens of thousands of the Hutu Power machete-wielders fled across the border to Congo and set up long-term bases. How could any country rest with its murderers armed and crazed on its borders? "We must prevent the génocidaires from regrouping," said Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, with the supportive Ugandan military following in tow.

From his palace in Kinshasa, Kabila appealed to his friends for help resisting this Rwandan-Ugandan attack. Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola obligingly sent armies marching into Congo to fight back, and Africa's First World War began. The armies and militias marauding across Congo then became rebels without a cause, fighting each other because they were there and because pulling out would be a humiliating concession of defeat. In this version, the war in Congo is a mess, started with the best of intentions - the Rwandans' desire to track down génocidaires - only to spiral out of control. It presents the mass slaughter as a giant cock-up, a cosmic mistake. This is strangely reassuring. It is also a lie.

Once the Congo was drenched in death, the UN commissioned a panel of international statesmen to travel the country and uncover the reasons behind the war. They found that the Rwandan government's story hid a much darker truth. The Rwandans had a clear intention, right from the beginning: to seize Congo's massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan mine I am standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel away from the news of this war with our coltan-filled remote control. The other countries came in not because they believed in repelling aggression, but because they wanted a piece of the Congolese cake. The country was ravaged by "armies of business", commanded by men who "carefully planned the redrawing of the regional map to redistribute wealth," the UN declared.

The UN experts knew this because the Rwandan troops did not head for the areas where the génocidaires were hiding out. They headed straight for the mines like this one in Kalehe, and they swiftly enslaved the populations to dig for them. They did not clear out the génocidaires - they teamed up with them to rape Congo. Jean-Pierre Ondekane, the chief of the Rwandan forces in Goma, urged his units to maintain good relations "with our Interhamwe [génocidaires] brothers." They set up a Congo Desk that whisked billions out of the country and into Rwandan bank accounts - and they fought to stay and pillage some more. The UN found that a Who's Who of British, American and Belgian companies were involved in the illegal exploitation of Congolese resources. The ones they recommended for further investigation included Anglo-American PLC, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers. The British Government - while boasting of its humanitarian goals in Africa - barely followed up the report, publicly acquitting a few corporations like Anglo-American whose subisidary AngloGold Ashanti has been shown by Human Rights Watch to have developed links with a murderous armed group in the region, and leaving others like De Beers in an "unresolved" category.

Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive popularity of coltan-filled Sony PlayStations. While Sony itself does not use Congolese coltan, its sudden need for vast amounts of the metal drove up the price - which intensified the war. As Oona King, one of the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel together for a few days: "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."

As I climb back out into the hard sunshine, the miners turn to me. "Could you send us a hammer? We really need one. The militias took all our equipment."

IV The Tyrant's Jeer

On the long journey in an armoured UN vehicle, the questions seem so obvious, so trite. How could a government led by genocide victims suddenly commit its own epic crime against humanity, for nothing more than money? The answer lies across the border, through the rainforest, towards Kigali. I meet Charles Muligande, the Rwandan foreign minister, on the top floor of the Hotel Des Milles Collines, the real Hotel Rwanda. This is where hundreds of Tutsis hid out the holocaust while their brothers and sons were hacked to pieces on the streets outside.

Muligande has a strange combination of a youthful, unlined face and graying hair (with matching moustache), and he carries with him the unimpeachable moral stature of the victim. The sadness around the eyes, the haltingly recounted story of being driven across the border to Burundi as a child refugee, the relatives slaughtered in the genocide - they are all cruelly present. How can I challenge him? He speaks softly about the trauma counselling that is happening in Rwanda, and the fragile attempts at reconciliation. And then it comes - the chuckle.

I ask him about Congo's future, and he lets out a strange, hard-to-place laugh. "The DRC is a country that for the last 45 years has had pockets outside the control of central government," he says. "Even on the eve of the election, there will by places that are beyond the control of central government. This shouldn't be a cause for concern." And again with the chuckle.

What about the people who pay the price of the instability he waves away so casually? How does he sleep at night, knowing Rwanda has inflicted on its neighbours suffering akin to the horrors he and his family endured? He chuckles harder now, almost coughing. "This is rubbish. If we do a balance sheet, we incurred a lot of losses in fighting that war."

He says it with such airy conviction I have to grope in my mind for the right response. Why then does the UN's report say that Rwanda's pillage was "systematic" and "deliberate"? "That is an invention," he snaps. By the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch? "Yes. It doesn't become true just because it is repeated. If you have such a blind faith in Amnesty International," - he spits the words - "and the UN and Human Rights Watch, there is nothing I can tell you. It is like you are asking me to believe Jesus Christ is not my saviour come to change my soul. It is a faith-based position." No amount of probing will shift him. When he talks about the genocide, he is compassionate, honest, brave. When he talks about his own country's crimes against Congo, he sneers. Their trauma, it seems, is worth nothing. As he speaks, I wonder - does he believe this, or does he, in midnight sweats, think about the children driven from their homes just like a baby Muligande was all those years ago?

The more I probe, the more his face contorts into the tyrant's jeer. I have seen this before, in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine - the furrowed brow and the rote claim that the evil UN and Amnesty have it in for us. Blood? What blood?

V Thomas Hobbes was Right

The victims of the war - of that laugh - are scattered everywhere in eastern Congo. By the roadside the next morning, I find the living remnants of Ramba village, a home to 15,000. They make up a clump of 400 starving people building a makeshift camp by the roadside. Maneno Mutagemba Justin, their chief - a young man with sore, reddish eyes - explains what happened. "The Interahamwe came into our village. They killed and they raped our women. Now they have stolen our houses and told us never to come back." People fled in all directions, losing their husbands or children. Nobody is quite sure how many relatives they have lost forever. "We have no food here, and we left everything behind. We have no pots, no pans, no water." These people live a long drawn-out postscript to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher who warned that in the absence of a state, life will be: "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Yet the most piercing image of pain I see in Congo is not in places like this. It is not in the pygmy village where children with sweet distended bellies sleep with their families in the tea-bushes because they are terrified of being beheaded by the militias. It is not even in the eyes of the man Oona King and I see being casually beaten to death by a mob on the road one moody afternoon, another unrecorded Congolese write-off that we swiftly speed away from. No, it is the women carrying more than their own bodyweight in wood or coal or sand, all day, every day. By every Congolese roadside, there are women with ropes tearing into their foreheads as they bind a massive load on to their backs. With so few horses, so few cars and so few roads, starving women are used here as pack-horses, transporting anything that needs to be moved on their backs for 50p a day. They are given the quaint title of "porters".

Francine Chacopawa is 30 but she looks much older, her faced lined and cratered in a complex topography of pain. Her spine is curved, her skin is rough and broken, her hands calloused. When she laboriously puts down the wood she is carrying, she has a red canyon in her forehead where the rope was, rimmed with sores that weep from the rubbing. "This is the rope that keeps my household alive," she says. It is the war that has reduced her to this state. "Since the war started, you can't farm in peace, and the children are starving, so I prefer to die in this work... My husband cannot get a job, so this is what I have to do. I leave at five o'clock in the morning and get back at seven o'clock at night. I am worried my children are running away to look for food, because we only get to eat once a day. When I get home, my husband gets angry and asks why I have been away so long. We have suffered so much. The children we bring into the world are forced to be porters as well. We are the most unhappy people in the world."

She tells me the pack she is carrying weighs 200lb, and I write this off as understandable hyperbole. Then my translator and the UN driver load her pack on to my back (with great difficulty). I immediately fall to my knees. I stagger up and manage to stumble a few feet before falling over again. I am almost crying in pain; my back aches for weeks. This is Francine's life. She does not even stop on Sundays. "How can I? We must eat," she says. Portering has made her miscarry twice, and Francine says she has seen women die by the side of the road, buckled under their loads. I ask her when she will stop portering. She shrugs, and says nothing. Her eyes say: "When I die." The wood is heaved back on to her back, and she staggers away, the rope rubbing against her sores.

VI The Head of State Without a State

Joseph Kabila is surrounded by crocodiles. We are standing by the back wall of the White House, the slimline presidential palace in Kinshasa, and the rippling, reptile-infested Congo river rings around us. His house looks like a well-kept municipal library in an American town, a world away from the psycho-kitsch of the Mobutu era. The President's eyes have narrowed. "How long have you been here, to think you can write about Congo?" he asks, unsmiling. I say I have been here a fortnight. He nods slightly. "Then that's OK."

Kabila does not like talking to journalists. Indeed, he does not like talking to anyone - he has conspicuously failed to turn up at his own election rallies over the past few months. I have been smuggled in at the end of his meeting with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region, a collection of decent British politicians who have come to try to erode the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by inches. "I want to see some quick wins [for the Congolese people] from the presidential election," he says, assuming he will win the looming polls - the first in Congo since 1960. He then rattles off a list of improvements he hopes to implement to prove that democracy works - better water supplies, better schooling.

He offers up these platitudes in absent English, his handsome face covered with a light sprinkling of stubble that seems to be greying in the sun. He became President at the age of 29 when his father was pinned down and executed in a failed coup in 2001. At that moment the reluctant son of the Big Man was thrust from a life of army drills and watching martial arts movies to being in a charge of the world's biggest war zone. Neckless and nervous, he says his two minutes' worth of stump speech now and then closes up. He signals to his Versace-suited security guards that it is time for him to leave. My five minutes of questions - more than any other journalist gets - have been greeted with a polite stonewall of banality.

The White House has a feel of unreality. It is a hologram of power, the simulacrum of a functioning country. Kabila is in the surreal position of being head of state without a state, President of the Democratic Vacuum of Congo. He has no levers of power to pull. As I discovered later in my journey, he has no army worthy of the name, he has no police force, he cannot guard his own borders or build his own schools. From the sealed calm of the palace, I look over a wall and see the real Congo walking past - people slumped against walls or busy doing nothing or frantically fending off hunger any way they can. The fantasy of a functioning country dies outside his own brickwork.

Since his father died, Kabila has been trying to glue together a nation from the shattered fragments. In 2002, he negotiated the Lusaka Accords, in which the invading countries promised to remove their armies. The global price of coltan had collapsed, so Rwanda's interest was waning. Besides, the withdrawing countries realised they could suck the mineral marrow from Congo without the costly business of occupation, simply by setting up Congolese militias as their proxies on their way out the door. Kabila tried to out-bribe powerful militia leaders by offering them a place at the heart of government. That's why, of his four vice presidents, three have their own private armies. To watch over this "peace process", the UN sent in 17,000 peacekeepers for a country the size of Western Europe.

At the core of Kabila's project to make Congo into one nation with one government is brassage - the integration of the militias. At squalid camps across the country, the militiamen who have been raping and murdering are invited to hand in their weapons and join the new national army. I head for Camp Saio, a camp outside Bukavu where men with Samuel L Jackson sunglasses and cheekbones that could cut butter are milling and mulling as they wait for "reintegration". Places like this are the key to Congo's future. The country's success stands or falls on whether the militiamen can be coaxed to come here and slowly build a state. Dr Adolphe Tumba, the head of the camp, takes me trudging through the mud on a tour.

In the first room I see, there are nine stinking beds. Men are sitting, rotting plaster covering their wounds. In the corner is a soldier shivering in his bed, his face covered with the lesions that come with the final stages of Aids. He opens his eyes - they recoil, wounded by the light. They close again as he curls wearily into a tight ball. I ask the men what life was like on the front line. "We ate. We had food there," they snap back. I ask again, assuming they misunderstood. "We had food at the front line. It was better. Why did you come here without something for us to eat?" They last ate two days ago. They have not received their $5-a-month wages for 40 days. They are starving.

A UN source warned me: "The people in that camp are going out and rampaging into the nearby villages. They do it for survival. They steal to get by. Yesterday they killed a man, the day before they killed a woman and some kids. It's all done by men in uniform coming out of that camp." Joseph, a 22-year-old, tells me he joined up when he was a teenager because his village was attacked by the Rwandans. "They killed my father, my grandfather and my little sister. So I decided to join Mai-Mai [a Congolese militia]. I can't count how many people I killed. I did it for six years."

His friends gather round, and some of them are more eager to brag about their kill rates. They remind me of kids on some estates I have visited, bragging about their Asbos. Are they telling the truth, or is this teenage display? As they become more and more animated describing their killing sprees, as their eyes become wider and their stories more vivid, our UN escort begins to panic and tells us we must leave. "Quickly!" he calls.

As we drive away, I realise it is not enough that our greed for resources started this war - it is vandalising any chance of bringing it to an end. While these state-building camps can offer only starvation and a sometimes-never $5 wage, Unicef says the militias are offering the same men $60 a month to carry on seizing and raping and killing. They can afford it because they still control most of the coltan, gold and diamond mines, and Western and Chinese companies are still snapping up the sparklers they offer. So long as the militias can continue to use our money to outbid the national government, there will never be a unified state in Congo, and life will continue to be a live-action replay of Thomas Hobbes' bleakest descriptions.

And yet, even the best case scenario - effective brassage, a unified army, a coherent state - carries with it blood-drenched risks. What if once Kabila gets control of the country, he morphs into a Mobutu or a Mugabe? Then all this nation-building will turn out to have been an exercise in capacity-building for a murderer. Who is this man with a neckless, nervous gaze? A rogue source at the British Embassy who has high-level dealings with the regime ponders over dinner: "There are essential two theories about Kabila," he says. "The first is that he is a good man surrounded by shits. The second is that he is one of the shits. Let's assume the first is true - what difference does it make? He is surrounded by Rumsfelds and Cheneys, friends of the father who would kill him if he stepped out of line. There is a large group around him whose finances and even their impunity from charges in the Hague depend on him staying in power. Would they allow him to lose power, or even to share it too much? Really?"

At times, it seems Congo is lost in a fog of moral ambiguity. Everybody agrees the state needs to be unified, and there seems to be only one state on offer - Kabila's - given the near-certainty he will win the election. An aid agency head says: "In this country, all you can ask about a politician is - is this person corrupt and self-seeking and doesn't give a damn about Congo, or is this person corrupt and self-seeking but wants what's best for Congo too? Of course Kabila's circle is corrupt. To have power in this country you must be corrupt. It's a corrupt system." The best hope, it seems, is to drag Congo up from being a broken stateless war zone where millions die to a bog-standard corrupt state. To the starving soldiers of Camp Saio, watching open-mouthed and hungry as we drive away, even this sunken ambition seems optimistic.

VII Spiritual Warfare

The coven of witches is dancing and cackling in the water. They have a hose-pipe and they are spraying each other's naked bodies, squealing and laughing. One of them comes up to me, wearing a worn-out Barney the dinosaur T-shirt, and splashes some water at my face. I am in a children's home, Chez Mama Coco, an hour's drive from Kinshasa, and the place is filled with starved witch-children who have been thrown out by their parents for displaying signs of being under the influence of Satan. Some have been burned and slashed, and some mutilated. One of the workers introduces me to a child - they do not know his name because he has not spoken since he arrived, but they call him Fidel - and tugs down his trousers. Where his penis once was, there is nothing but an angry red scab. "His mother cut it off during the exorcism," he says.

This is another consequence of our war. Herve Cheuzeville, the outgoing Head of Mission for Warchild, explains: "The idea of withcraft has always existed in Congo, but it is new to accuse children of it. It never happened before. It is a result of the terrible traumas of the past six years."

The Combat Spirituel church in Bukavu consists of an immense veranda filled with benches, with a neat white building attached. These churches have been pioneers of Congo's 21st-century witch-hunts, and when I arrive at their Sunday service, they greet me with whoops and hallelujahs. The evangelical preacher at the podium has a kind of Christian Pan's People dancing behind him, and he exclaims: "We salute God by dancing!" The congregation contains over 1,000 people, and they look more like the crowd at a football match than at a dreary Church of England ceremony. They blow whistles, jump up and down, and dance wildly. A man with a miraculous story about how he was cured of Aids through the power of prayer takes to the platform. I am told that if I want to talk witchcraft, however, I need to return late on Thursday, when the purgings and exorcisms happen.

I come back, and Papa Enoch Boonga - the "spiritual co-ordinator" - is waiting for me with a 14-year-old witch. I am led into the little house. The lights are switched off, and Papa Enoch produces a lantern that lights his face and casts a long shadow. In his slow, rhythmic French, he begins to tell me how: "Satan is waging war on the Congolese people. He comes to kill and hate. The answer to Satan's campaign against us is spiritual combat." That is his cue to drag out Clarice. She is a small girl wrapped in a big woollen cardigan. In a low, blank rote, her eyes cast down, she says: "I was taught sorcery when I was 12. My grandmother turned me into a witch by giving me a doughnut to eat."

Enoch looks at me triumphantly. "This is how it works! They give evil food!" He takes over from Clarice's halting speech. "Then the grandmother came at night in spiritual form and said, 'I gave you the doughnut to eat, now you must give me your little sister to eat.' She was so frightened she said, 'OK, OK,' and the next day her little sister fell ill and died. Then her grandmother demanded she break the leg of her mother, so when he mother was out gathering wood, she fell and broke her leg. Now the girl started to feel the power of sorcery and began to transform herself into a dog or a cat."

I keep looking at Clarice in disbelief, but then I realise she thinks I am glaring in condemnation and I look away. As Enoch speaks, the chanting behind us from the main service is getting louder and louder - "Out Satan, out!" hundreds of people cry, clawing at invisible demons in the air. He continues, "Her father is an artisinal miner and he stopped being able to find anything because of her sorcery. They fell into poverty."

I have to interrupt. I ask Clarice, softly: "Do you really think it is your fault your little sister died?" "Yes," she says. Her eyes remain fixed on the floor. "It was actually her parents who realised she was a witch," Enoch says. "They were very worried about their lives going bad, and they went to church and prayed and God told them what the problem was." He says they conducted an exorcism of Clarice, and, yes, it was tough. "When you cast Satan out, you almost destroy the person, but they come back with Jesus Christ in their heart."

As I look into Clarice's downcast eyes, I realise it is not only the physical landscape of Congo that lies in ruins. The psychological landscape has been trashed. The war has left girls like her in a society littered with superstition landmines that will not be cleared away for decades. She limps away, back to a life soaked in self-hate.

VIII - Packing Out the Albert Hall

The last time there was a holocaust in Congo, British and American people reacted with a great national revulsion. Books like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Crime of the Congo topped the bestseller lists, millions petitioned parliament to act, and the Royal Albert Hall was packed out with mass meetings detailing the Congo's long nightmare. A century on, the words and analyses of that great campaign still ring true. Joseph Conrad called it "the vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the human conscience" - words that would make a perfect introduction to the reports of the UN Panel of Experts now.

But today, these four million people have died in the dark, unnoticed and unmourned. The generations living in the West today have said nothing while the country has been reduced to near-Leopoldian levels of desperation by the scramble for loot, conducted on our behalf and for our benefit. The average life-expectancy in Congo is 43 and falling. I did not see any elderly people on my journey; they do not exist. In a country where the war is laughably referred to as "winding down", a World Trade Center-full of people is butchered every two days, and in the lost rural areas I could not reach, bubonic plague has made a triumphant come-back. A health minister says in despair: "I have been told by the UN to prepare a plan for avian flu. I had to write back and say I am powerless to deal with the plague, so what am I supposed to do about chickens?"

This war was launched by nations that sensed - rightly - that our desire for coltan and diamonds and gold far outweighed our concern for the lives of black people. They knew that we would keep on buying, long after the UN had told us time and again that people were dying to provide our mobiles and games consoles and a girl's best friend. Today, we still buy, and the British Government - along with the rest of the democratic world - obstructs any attempt to introduce legally enforceable regulations to stop corporations trading in Congolese blood. They ignore the UN's warnings that: "Without the wealth generated by the illegal exploitation of natural resources arms cannot be bought, hence the conflict cannot be perpetuated," and insist that voluntary regulations - asking corporations to be nice to Africans - is "the most effective route".

In Bukavu, a 29-year-old human rights campaigner called Bertrand Bisimwa summarised his country's situation for me with cruel concision. "Since the 19th century, when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an inconvenience." As he speaks, I picture the raped women with bullets burying through their intestines and try to weigh them against the piles of blood-soaked electronic goods sitting beneath my Christmas tree with their little chunks of Congolese metal whirring inside. Bertrand smiles and says, "Tell me - who are the savages? Us, or you?"'

~

The following radio interview with Keith Harmon Snow is also worth the trouble.

Micah P Hinson - Beneath the Rose

2011-07-18T15:58:00.002+01:00

'Safe to say that I'll never be found...'

The Maurizius Case, a screenplay

2011-07-18T15:04:00.001+01:00

I suspect most people, when reading The Maurizius Case, think to themselves 'this would make a great film'. Henry Miller certainly thought so. He planned to write a screenplay for Hollywood; but whether that screenplay was ever finished - and if it was, what has since become of it - remains unclear.

A French film version - directed by Julien Duvivier - was released in 1954; and a German TV mini-series was made in 1981; but to date no English-language version has been made.

A few months ago I started a screenplay of my own. Anyone who is interested can read it here. Whether or not it would make a great film, or even a good one, is not for me to say. All I can say is that I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoy reading it. I have tried to do Wassermann's extraordinary novel justice, but - understandably, given the novel's subject - I feel justice, in this case, could never be adequately served.

2011-07-13T10:11:00.002+01:00

Stanley Cavell, "Thinking About and Eating Animals"

2011-07-11T17:00:00.009+01:00

Stanley Cavell, via J. M. Coetzee, Cora Diamond and Henry David Thoreau (among others), discusses the possibility of a philosophical justification for vegetarianism. Along the way, Cavell examines two arguments sometimes used by the defenders of animal rights: the likening of slaughterhouses to Nazi death camps, and the notion that animals can be companions. Both notions he dismisses as un-philosophical, in the sense that both are 'inordinate'; that is, unreasonable and exaggerated. Rather than clarify thought, he argues, such notions confuse it.

While Cavell's investigation is a serious one, and his motives appear to be genuine, his conclusion - that there is no convincing reason compelling him to become a vegetarian - seems like an abdication. He hints at a sense of shame, yet excuses this by arguing that he is only human. Abstinence, for him, can never be more than a compromise. We can never reach the state of moral purity required for a consistent relationship with non-human animals; in other words, no matter how careful we are, something we do will have a harmful impact.

Cavell uses this reservation - together with the familiar argument that how we interact with human animals is more important than how we interact with non-human animals - as a reason to discontinue his efforts. To use metaphors he discusses elsewhere in the lecture, he neither wants to build a bridge nor take a leap. This stopping short is a curiously incurious attitude for a philosopher. Likewise, his introduction of the idea of an unattainable purity seems to have a less than philosophical motivation: why is it introduced at all, if not to justify defeat? It suggests that for Cavell, abstinence is simply too inconvenient.

If anything is lacking, it isn't the philosophical basis for vegetarianism - Cavell glides past a perfectly legitimate justification (Wittgenstein's idea of 'our real need'); rather, it is clear-sightedness. Discussing vegetarianism and the slaughtering of animals, without having exposed oneself to the realities of the slaughterhouse, is an act of deliberate avoidance. This inadequacy of exposure leads Cavell to the insipidity of the 'only human' defence. He doesn't feel an inner compulsion because he doesn't see the blood on his hands. In fact, he hardly mentions blood at all. Yet if you stand in a slaughterhouse blood is all you see, all you smell, all you taste.

Seeing something for what it is surely involves actually looking.

Herbert Marcuse on the Frankfurt School

2011-07-11T16:20:00.006+01:00

It's hard to imagine anything like this being shown on TV today: an indication of how low public discourse has sunk. The suits might be dated - along with the hairstyles, the sofas, the TV studio backdrop - but the ideas still have some life in them.

Derrida on '9/11'

2011-06-29T09:59:00.001+01:00

"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

This is the first, indisputable effect of what occurred (whether it was calculated, well calculated, or not), precisely on September 11, not far from here: we repeat this, we must repeat it, and it is all the more necessary to repeat it insofar as we do not really know what is being named in this way, as if to exorcise two times at one go: on the one hand, to conjure away, as if by magic, the "thing" itself, the fear or the terror it inspires (for repetition always protects by neutralizing, deadening, distancing a traumatism, and this is true for the repetition of the televised images we will speak of later), and, on the other hand, to deny, as close as possible to this act of language and this enunciation, our powerlessness to name in an appropriate fashion, to characterize, to think the thing in question, to get beyond the mere deictic of the date: something terrible took place on September 11, and in the end we don't know what. For however outraged we might be at the violence, however much we might genuinely deplore—as I do, along with everyone else—the number of dead, no one will really be convinced that this is, in the end, what it's all about. I will come back to this later; for the moment we are simply preparing ourselves to say something about it.

I've been in New York for three weeks now. Not only is it impossible not to speak on this subject, but you feel or are made to feel that it is actually forbidden, that you do not have the right, to begin speaking of anything, especially in public, without ceding to this obligation, without making an always somewhat blind reference to this date (and this was already the case in China, where I was on September 11, and then in Frankfurt on September 22). I gave in regularly to this injunction, I admit; and in a certain sense I am doing so again by taking part in this friendly interview with you, though trying always, beyond the commotion and the most sincere compassion, to appeal to questions and to a "thought" (among other things, a real political thought) of what, it seems, has just taken place on September 11, just a few steps from here, in Manhattan or, not too far away, in Washington, D.C.

I believe always in the necessity of being attentive first of all to this phenomenon of language, naming, and dating, to this repetition compulsion (at once rhetorical, magical, and poetic). To what this compulsion signifies, translates, or betrays. Not in order to isolate ourselves in language, as people in too much of a rush would like us to believe, but on the contrary, in order to try to understand what is going on precisely beyond language and what is pushing us to repeat endlessly and without knowing what we are talking about, precisely there where language and the concept come up against their limits: "September 11, September 11, le 11 septembre, 9/11."

We must try to know more, to take our time and hold onto our freedom so as to begin to think this first effect of the so-called event: From where does this menacing injunction itself come to us? How is it being forced upon us? Who or what gives us this threatening order (others would already say this terrorizing if not terrorist imperative): name, repeat, rename "September 11," "le 11 septembre," even when you do not yet know what you are saying and are not yet thinking what you refer to in this way. I agree with you: without any doubt, this "thing," "September 11," "gave us the impression of being a major event." But what is an impression in this case? And an event? And especially a "major event"? Taking your word—or words—for it, I will underscore more than one precaution. I will do so in a seemingly "empiricist" style, though aiming beyond empiricism. It cannot be denied, as an empiricist of the eighteenth century would quite literally say, that there was an "impression" there, and the impression of what you call in English—and this is not fortuitous—a "major event." I insist here on the English because it is the language we speak here in New York, even though it is neither your language nor mine; but I also insist because the injunction comes first of all from a place where English predominates. I am not saying this only because the United States was targeted, hit, or violated on its own soil for the first time in almost two centuries—since 1812 to be exact—but because the world order that felt itself targeted through this violence is dominated largely by the Anglo-American idiom, an idiom that is indissociably linked to the political discourse that dominates the world stage, to international law, diplomatic institutions, the media, and the greatest technoscientific, capitalist, and military power. And it is very much a question of the still enigmatic but also critical essence of this hegemony. By critical, I mean at once decisive, potentially decisionary, decision-making, and in crisis: today more vulnerable and threatened than ever.

Whether this "impression" is justified or not, it is in itself an event, let us never forget it, especially when it is, though in quite different ways, a properly global effect. The "impression" cannot be dissociated from all the affects, interpretations, and rhetoric that have at once reflected, communicated, and "globalized" it from everything that also and first of all formed, produced, and made it possible. The "impression" thus resembles "the very thing" that produced it. Even if the so-called "thing" cannot be reduced to it. Even if, therefore, the event itself cannot be reduced to it. The event is made up of the "thing" itself (that which happens or comes) and the impression (itself at once "spontaneous" and "controlled") that is given, left, or made by the so-called "thing." We could say that the impression is "informed," in both senses of the word: a predominant system gave it form, and this form then gets run through an organized information machine (language, communication, rhetoric, image, media, and so on). This informational apparatus is from the very outset political, technical, economic. But we can and, I believe, must (and this duty is at once philosophical and political) distinguish between the supposedly brute fact, the "impression," and the interpretation. It is of course just about impossible, I realize, to distinguish the "brute" fact from the system that produces the "information" about it. But it is necessary to push the analysis as far as possible. To produce a "major event," it is, sad to say, not enough, and this has been true for some time now, to cause the deaths of some four thousand people, and especially "civilians," in just a few seconds by means of so-called advanced technology. Many examples could be given from the world wars (for you specified that this event appears even more important to those who "have never lived through a world war") but also from after these wars, examples of quasi-instantaneous mass murders that were not recorded, interpreted, felt, and presented as "major events." They did not give the "impression," at least not to everyone, of being unforgettable catastrophes.

We must thus ask why this is the case and distinguish between two "impressions." On the one hand, compassion for the victims and indignation over the killings; our sadness and condemnation should be without limits, unconditional, unimpeachable; they are responding to an undeniable "event," beyond all simulacra and all possible virtualization; they respond with what might be called the heart and they go straight to the heart of the event. On the other hand, the interpreted, interpretative, informed impression, the conditional evaluation that makes us believe that this is a "major event." Belief, the phenomenon of credit and of accreditation,, constitutes an essential dimension of the evaluation, of the dating, indeed, of the compulsive inflation of which we've been speaking. By distinguishing impression from belief, I continue to make as if I were privileging this language of English empiricism, which we would be wrong to resist here. All the philosophical questions remain open, unless they are opening up again in a perhaps new and original way: what is an impression? What is a belief? But especially: what is an event worthy of this name? And a "major" event, that is, one that is actually more of an "event," more actually an "event," than ever? An event that would bear witness, in an exemplary or hyperbolic fashion, to the very essence of an event or even to an event beyond essence? For could an event that still conforms to an essence, to a law or to a truth, indeed to a concept of the event, ever be a major event? A major event should be so unforeseeable and irruptive that it disturbs even the horizon of the concept or essence on the basis of which we believe we recognize an event as such. That is why all the "philosophical" questions remain open, perhaps even beyond philosophy itself, as soon as it is a matter of thinking the event.

Borradori: Whether or not September 11 is an event of major importance, what role do you see for philosophy? Can philosophy help us to understand what has happened?

Derrida: Such an "event" surely calls for a philosophical response. Better, a response that calls into question, at their most fundamental level, the most deep-seated conceptual presuppositions in philosophical discourse. The concepts with which this "event" has most often been described, named, categorized, are the products of a "dogmatic slumber" from which only a new philosophical reflection can awaken us, a reflection on philosophy, most notably on political philosophy and its heritage. The prevailing discourse, that of the media and of the official rhetoric, relies too readily on received concepts like "war" or "terrorism" (national or international).

A critical reading of Schmitt, for example, would thus prove very useful. On the one hand, so as to follow Schmitt as far as possible in distinguishing classical war (a direct and declared confrontation between two enemy states, according to the long tradition of European law) from "civil war" and "partisan war" (in its modern forms, even though it appears, Schmitt acknowledges, as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century). But, on the other hand, we would also have to recognize, against Schmitt, that the violence that has now been unleashed is not the result of "war" (the expression "war on terrorism" thus being one of the most confused, and we must analyze this confusion and the interests such an abuse of rhetoric actually serve). Bush speaks of "war," but he is in fact incapable of identifying the enemy against whom he declares that he has declared war. It is said over and over that neither the civilian population of Afghanistan nor its armies are the enemies of the United States. Assuming that "bin Laden" is here the sovereign decision-maker, everyone knows that he is not Afghan, that he has been disavowed by his own country (by every "country" and state, in fact, almost without exception), that his training owes much to the United States and that, of course, he is not alone. The states that help him indirectly do not do so as states. No state as such supports him publicly. As for states that "harbor" terrorist networks, it is difficult to identify them as such. The United States and Europe, London and Berlin, are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the "terrorists" of the world. No geography, no "territorial" determination, is thus pertinent any longer for locating the seat of these new technologies of transmission or aggression. To say it all too quickly and in passing, to amplify and clarify just a bit what I said earlier about an absolute threat whose origin is anonymous and not related to any state, such "terrorist" attacks already no longer need planes, bombs, or kamikazes: it is enough to infiltrate a strategically important computer system and introduce a virus or some other disruptive element to paralyze the economic, military, and political resources of an entire country or continent. And this can be attempted from just about anywhere on earth, at very little expense and with minimal means. The relationship between earth, terra territory, and terror has changed, and it is necessary to know that this is because of knowledge, that is, because of technoscience. It is technoscience that blurs the distinction between war and terrorism. In this regard, when compared to the possibilities for destruction and chaotic disorder that are in reserve, for the future, in the computerized networks of the world, "September 11" is still part of the archaic theater of violence aimed at striking the imagination. One will be able to do even worse tomorrow, invisibly, in silence, more quickly and without any bloodshed, by attacking the computer and informational networks on which the entire life (social, economic, military, and so on) of a "great nation," of the greatest power on earth, depends. One day it might be said: "September 11"—those were the ("good") old days of the last war. Things were still of the order of the gigantic: visible and enormous! What size, what height! There has been worse since. Nanotechnologies of all sorts are so much more powerful and invisible, uncontrollable, capable of creeping in everywhere. They are the micrological rivals of microbes and bacteria. Yet our unconscious is already aware of this; it already knows it, and that's what's scary.

If this violence is not a "war" between states, it is not a "civil war" either, or a "partisan war," in Schmitt's sense, insofar as it does not involve, like most such wars, a national insurrection or liberation movement aimed at taking power on the ground of a nation-state (even if one of the aims, whether secondary or primary, of the "bin Laden" network is to destabilize Saudi Arabia, an ambiguous ally of the United States, and put a new state power in place). Even if one were to insist on speaking here of "terrorism," this appellation now covers a new concept and new distinctions.

Copyright notice: From pages 25-30, 33-4, 85-90, 100-02 of Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori, published by the University of Chicago Press. ©2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press and of the author.

Matt Bauer, The Jessamine County Book Of The Living

2011-06-28T16:57:00.010+01:00

Take a tall, bald banjo-player with a big beard, a soft voice and a knack for writing great lyrics. Add a ten-piece orchestra, a host of backing vocalists – including Jolie Holland, Mariee Sioux and Angel Deradoorian. Throw in a dash of Appalachian folk. Mix in a tablespoon of Southern Gothic, a sprinkling of Paganism, maybe a pinch of something Celtic and – voila - you have the new Matt Bauer album.

The Jessamine County Book of the Living sounds, on paper, like a disaster waiting to happen: a mishmash of styles and influences. The title, too, seems to be a reference to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Another influence? Surely not. Surely it can’t all hold together. And yet, strangely, magically, it does. The result is – dare I say it – unique. It manages to be dark and brooding – almost sinister on occasion – yet at the same time it’s endowed with grace and delicacy and intermittent flashes of humour.

Lyrically – as he did on his previous album The Island Moved In The Storm – Bauer stays away from familiar love song territory, opting to explore new ground. The stories and conversations we hear have something elliptical and indeterminate about them – who is saying what to whom is rarely clear. Nevertheless it works: the meaning of the songs remains elusive and open to interpretation, which allows the listener a greater imaginative involvement. Our minds are free to wander around (listen in a darkened room and you’ll see what I mean).

The experience is immersive – deliberately so. We‘re meant to get a sense of Jessamine County, of Kentucky, beyond mere ‘local colour’. This album is more than a few snapshots – it’s a guide to the history, heart, spirit of a place, to plants, minerals, animals. On the second track ‘When I was a Mockingbird’ we see from the perspective of a mockingbird, a painted horse, a starling, a worm, an ant, a fox: the song’s narrator transmigrates through each one (hence, I imagine, the allusion to The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Bauer seems to be saying ‘I’m in them, just as they’re in me’ – everything, large and small, is connected; it all has a place in the Book of the Living.

Similarly, all the disparate elements that make up the music have a part to play – nothing is wasted or redundant. A flute might suddenly appear out of nowhere, but as soon as you hear it you know it was always meant to be there, that no other instrument would work as well.

There are highlights – certain tracks which are more immediate than others; ‘Blacklight Horses’ being the most notable. But really every track holds its own; some just take longer to reveal themselves. The overall feel – one of sombre beauty - remains untroubled throughout, in spite of all the different elements, in spite of the brighter moments (‘Morning Stars’) and the really dark ones (‘I Want To Start Again’). A sort of average is achieved in an album that is anything but.

I bought The Jessamine County Book Of The Living the same week I bought Bon Iver’s self-titled second LP. Although I think Bon Iver is a great record I’ve hardly listened to it: I’ve been too busy listening to Matt Bauer. The sheer novelty of the music – together with the depth and quality - keeps drawing me back. Album of 2011 without a doubt.

Sufjan Stevens - Romulus

2011-06-28T14:41:00.002+01:00

The Language of Leather

2011-06-28T11:41:00.015+01:00

The real man - the rebel, the genuinely free spirit - wears leather. Leather signifies his bravery and toughness. In the image of the much-worn, beaten-up leather jacket, the real man reveals his scars, displaying them for others to see. The leather jacket becomes a second skin (myth and reality meet) on which it is possible to read the real man's nature: his animality and wildness of spirit; his sexual potency.

For the sexually confident woman, leather is likewise the ideal choice. Knee-high leather boots, long associated with dominance and control, represent both challenge and invitation: the second skin encases and protects, while the long zipper hints at an opening, a peeling apart, a reward for the brave.

Leather means empowerment. It allows the feminine to compete with the masculine. It blurs the boundary between them; gives rise to the delicious uncertainty of the sexual tussle, in which conquest becomes surrender, only to be reversed the next moment. Whatever the outcome of this combat, leather signifies a willingness to take part: it suggests readiness, awareness, and the promise of softer flesh beneath.

The language of leather is a deliberately deceptive one: it speaks of sex and desire, restlessness and freedom, but remains silent about its origin. It (re)assures us that leather cannot possibly come from something trapped, helpless, herded: it can only be the product of a long pursuit, a fierce fight, a noble death.

Nor is leather mass-produced according to this language: it is individual, one-of-a-kind, the very symbol of non-conformity... anything to distract from the image of a creature waiting in line to die.

Tron: Legacy - A Judaeo-Christian Fantasy

2011-06-27T14:07:00.021+01:00

The allegorical dimension of Tron: Legacy - its unmistakable religious symbolism - has already generated a considerable amount of comment. The film invites a certain sort of reading. However, it does so in order to conceal or naturalise a deeper level of signification.

Kevin Flynn, the absent father, is a God of sorts. CLU, his creation, the once-beloved-now-betrayer, is Satan. Their world - the Grid - represents Heaven, albeit a Heaven in which God now takes refuge.

Locked in a stalemate, God and Satan wait for the other to make a move. God is fearful of jeopardising the status quo and chooses not to act. Satan passes the time by watching bouts of gladiatorial combat between other fallen angels (Tron being the angel who has fallen furthest).

Meanwhile, on Earth, the Son (Sam Flynn) waits in vain for his father's return. Disillusioned by what he sees - the weak at the mercy of the strong, the righteous preyed upon by the wicked ('selfish' capitalism) - he too abstains from responsibility.

In such a condition he is vulnerable to the temptations of Satan. Lured by the latter to Heaven, the Son now becomes another piece on the board. God is forced to act. He can no longer sit and meditate, but must intervene (rejection of Buddhism, Eastern religion in general).

God and Satan fight. Since one cannot exist without the other, both are destroyed. The Son - reassured of his father's love - returns to Earth, ready to assume his rightful place as King (that is, majority shareholder of a 'Fortune 500' company). Now willing to accept his destiny as Messiah he will improve the world (through responsible capitalism, as opposed to the more bare-faced kind).

And there the film ends.

One element seems to have escaped notice, however - presumably because that element appears in attractive female form.

Quorra belongs to a strange race known as 'ISOs' - isomorphic algorithms. One day, as if in answer to the call of God, the ISOs appear from the desert. They are alien, not really 'from anywhere'; 'flowers in the wasteland'; 'profoundly naive, unimaginably wise'; they symbolise imperfection. They have shaved heads, marks on their arms. The marks seem reminiscent of a more familiar - perhaps ancient - language; or perhaps they are numbers.

God recognises the ISOs as his true children and intends them to be his 'gift to the world'. Satan, however, hates imperfection and decides to destroy the ISO's. There follows a 'purge' - a 'genocide' - in which all but one are killed.

We see this purge as an attack by flying objects on a tower built by the ISOs. As the tower collapses to the ground we see, in the background, a second, identical tower. We are left in no doubt that this second tower will shortly be destroyed.

Quorra - the sole survivor of the purge - has until now lived with God. She is bookish yet unworldly; fierce yet vulnerable. She, too, waits. When the Son of God at last arrives it is clear they are meant for each other. Her covenant with God is effectively superseded. The Son will take her back to Earth, where she will be redeemed: her 'gift' finally acknowledged, her power realised. Together, she and the Son will remake the world.

Quorra - if we haven't already guessed - is a Jew. In the film's mythology Jews and Christians are reconciled: the 'otherworldly' nature of the Jew now accepted by the Christian, in return for which the Christian Son of God is recognised as the true Messiah.

Heaven on Earth is equated with a belief in Jesus and with conscientious capitalism. All those who oppose this are on the side of Satan. Good and evil are thus clearly delineated.

The final confirmation of this is the repentance shown by Tron. First good, then evil - thanks to the corrupting power of Satan - Tron at last sees the error of his ways and reverts to his first allegiance. Like Tron, we are meant to undergo a change of heart - if we haven't already done so. We are meant to side with God, to reaffirm our loyalty.

To side with Satan is to approve of 'the purge', to approve of his attacks on the two towers, to become one of the faceless, regimented mass, who might be Nazis, or Communists, or Muslims. God, on the other hand, is freedom and imperfection (meaning, the freedom to consume and obey, the imperfection of being merely ourselves - flawed, unthinking, uncritical, lazy).

The Western, bourgeois, Judaeo-Christian worldview is legitimised; everything else is condemned.

Derrida On Animals

2011-06-21T22:53:00.001+01:00

J. Krishnamurti - World Suffering

2011-06-21T22:30:00.001+01:00

Magnolia Electric Co. - Texas 71

2011-06-20T22:07:00.001+01:00

Dana Falconberry and Matt Bauer - Waiting For Your Shadow To Fall

2011-06-20T22:06:00.001+01:00

Jon Hopkins - 'Monsters' Theme

2011-06-20T17:25:00.003+01:00

'...to retreat ahead of it...'

2011-06-15T09:41:00.004+01:00

'... fashion, as we understand it today, has no individual motives but only a social motive, and it is an accurate perception of this social motive that determines the full appreciation of fashion's essence. This motive is the effort to distinguish the higher classes of society from the lower, or more especially from the middle classes... Fashion is the barrier - continually raised anew because continually torn down - by which the fashionable world seeks to segregate itself from the middle region of society; it is the mad pursuit of that class vanity through which a single phenomenon endlessly repeats itself: the endeavour of one group to establish a lead, however minimal, over its pursuers, and the endeavour of the other group to make up the distance by immediately adopting the newest fashions of the leaders... Fashion moves from top to bottom, not vice versa... An attempt by the middle classes to introduce a new fashion would... never succeed, though nothing would suit the upper classes better than to see the former with their own set of fashions... Hence the unceasing variation of fashion. No sooner have the middle classes adopted a newly introduced fashion than it... loses its value for the upper classes...'

- Rudolph von Jhering

'One of the surest and most deplorable symptoms of that weakness and frivolity of character which marked the Romantic age was the childish and fatal notion of rejecting the deepest understanding of technical procedures... the consciously sustained and orderly carrying through of a work... - all for the sake of the spontaneous impulses of the individual sensibility. The idea of creating works of lasting value lost force and gave way, in most minds, to the desire to astonish; art was condemned to a whole series of breaks with the past. There arose an automatic audacity, which became as obligatory as tradition had been. Finally, that switching - at high frequency - of the tastes of a given public, which is called Fashion, replaced with its essential changeableness the old habit of slowly forming styles, schools, and reputations. To say that Fashion took over the destinies of the fine arts is as much to say that commercial interests were creeping in.'

- Paul Valery

'Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don't calculate; if clothing's producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation.'

'The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, new items, but always the same meaning.'

'The New is not a fashion, it is a value.'

'There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.'

- Roland Barthes

Images: Eugene Atget

In Orbit

2011-06-14T20:35:00.005+01:00

Thanks to Kinesthetic Thoughts for posting this. Restful!

Gareth Edwards' Monsters

2011-06-13T10:54:00.009+01:00

Few films leave you hungry. Most leave you sated. Producers, marketing men, film company executives have a vested interest in identifying, stimulating and satisfying appetite. The notion of leaving an audience unsatisfied is unthinkable to them; it's anathema to an industry based on giving us what we want (whether we like it or not). What makes Gareth Edwards' Monsters such a refreshing departure from the norm is that it seems specifically designed to create unrest. We want more from life after watching it. Like the two central characters, we don't want to return home. The idea of going back to what we know - to routine, to domesticity, to safety - seems suddenly abhorrent. Monsters is unusually radical in this sense: more than just an allegory about the threat of the 'other', the alien outside our borders; it identifies a deeper fear: the fear of freedom.

Forced by circumstances into a confrontation with the unknown, into closer proximity to danger, the protagonists discover they are happier away from safety. Together in a strange country, with unseen threats all around them, they realise that the monsters they have been taught to fear are really nothing of the sort; in fact, they are mysterious, beautiful creatures who simply want to be left alone. Under these conditions love not only becomes possible, it becomes inevitable. A clumsy kiss; a moment of happiness before the world once again asserts itself. A love story between a skinny guy and a girl with scars on her face. There is hope, but a hope devoid of the usual consolations. Throughout the film nothing much happens - just two people connecting. Yet the effect is stunning.

Matt Bauer

2011-06-13T09:11:00.009+01:00

For a while now - on Amazon and itunes - I've been seeing the cover of Matt Bauer's 2008 album The Island Moved In The Storm. It's a striking cover...

... and he's a striking guy

... so it's probably no wonder he's stayed in my mind.

The album is regularly recommended to me, based on other things I've bought. Yet till now I've felt an unaccountable reluctance to take an interest. My thought-process has been something like: Do I really need another brilliant, bearded, American songsmith in my life? I've already got Sam Beam, J. Tillman, Gregory Alan Isakov (heavy stubble, but it counts), William Fitzsimmons, David Bazan, Doug Burr - surely that's enough? Surely, I should be broadening my musical horizons, reaching out into other genres?

Apparently not. It seems I do need another hirsute, somewhat melancholy troubadour to lull me into a state of reverie. My tolerance for gentle acoustic folksy Americana is seemingly boundless.

I can attribute this (no doubt unhealthy) preoccupation to several things: the approach of middle age (I can't seem to stomach anything too loud any more); a natural inclination to melancholy; an inability to grow a convincing beard of my own; the secret longing to be held by a big hairy bloke (just kidding!). But really, I like to think it's because this music - for all its apparent sedateness - is really the most 'alive' at this point in time (meaning the most vital, the most relevant).

I've written elsewhere on this blog that I think the current flowering of talent among American songwriters is a major cultural renaissance - one that won't be fully appreciated for a number of years. Matt Bauer, in my eyes, is simply further proof of that.

His new album The Jessamine County Book Of The Living has just been released. I'm off to buy it, along with everything else of his I can get my hands on. For now, hope you enjoy...

Gregory Alan Isakov @ Salisbury Arts Centre

2011-06-13T07:50:00.013+01:00

Usually I try to avoid meeting people I admire: partly because I'm afraid they'll turn out to be less than I imagined, but mostly because I'm shy and I lose my composure when I get nervous. On Saturday I met Gregory Alan Isakov, and I'm happy to report: he's a nice guy, certainly no less than I imagined; plus, I didn't lose my composure (well, not entirely). So, all in all, not a bad result.

The gig itself rates as one of the most surreal I've ever been to. It was free admission - part of a 'live lunch' at Salisbury Arts Centre.

Anticipating a large crowd of fans, my wife and I got there an hour early. To our surprise the place was almost empty, except for one or two families. Slightly bemused, we sat at a table right at the front.

As we waited we kept looking around for other fans to arrive. None did. Or at least, none we could see. Instead, we were joined by a small number of locals, some of whom were there for the free music, but most of whom - I suspect - were there simply to eat lunch.

There were young children running around, people reading newspapers, as well as a rather high proportion of pensioners doubtless ready to shake their heads in disapproval at whatever 'noise' they were about to be subjected to.

However, when Isakov walked onstage (joined by Ramaya Soskin) the audience - by and large - observed a respectful hush. As the music got underway, feet could be seen to tap, heads were nodding, and at the end of each song there was genuine, if brief, applause.

It's testament to Isakov's onstage presence - and to the quality of his music - that he managed to win over such a diverse crowd. After the concert had finished, several people went up to him to thank him, and several bought CDs. When he found out my wife and I had driven from the Midlands to see him, he seemed genuinely touched. Like I said: a nice guy.

He played two new songs (see below) both of which - hopefully - will be on his new album, which - hopefully - will be released later this year.

Ramaya Soskin was really good too:

Waiting for your shadow to fall

2011-06-10T12:36:00.003+01:00

A summer dress, bare shoulders... 'the point of desire is where clothing touches skin' (I can't remember who said that - Barthes, maybe?)

Matt Bauer & Dana Falconberry - Blacklight Horses

2011-06-10T09:23:00.005+01:00

Surprising what certain sounds and images call to mind. An outcropping of rock somewhere near Berkeley in California. A girl I was in love with who didn't love me; a girl who sometimes wore her hair the same way as the woman in the video. Our duet wasn't quite as pretty: she and I never sang in tune. Sixteen years ago and it feels like...

Dr. Ian Noble

2011-06-06T09:25:00.010+01:00

It's hardly surprising, given the 'lock em up and throw away the key' agenda of so many media outlets, that this story didn't receive wider coverage. In October 2010 Ian Noble, a 26 year-old doctor, was knocked off his scooter and killed by 32 year-old plumber Everton Wright. Wright was arrested and charged. In court he admitted causing death by careless driving. He was spared a prison sentence, however, when the family of Ian Noble asked the judge to show leniency, arguing that Noble wouldn't have wanted Wright to serve time in prison. Wright, instead, was sentenced to 150 hours' community service.

Nothing shames or punishes quite like compassion: something the media are loath to acknowledge. Similarly, the humanity of the criminal is only reluctantly admitted. Wright, the court heard, showed a 'clear integrity'; immediately jumping out of his car after the accident and calling for help; he even asked to go with Ian Noble to the hospital.

What happened to Ian Noble - and what happened to Everton Wright - could happen to anyone. Which doesn't lessen the tragedy in any way. Rather, it makes it more immediate. A timely reminder to be mindful.

Gotye - Heart's A Mess

2011-06-06T08:48:00.002+01:00

Jaymay

2011-05-25T11:16:00.003+01:00

Adam Curtis - All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

2011-05-24T11:00:00.002+01:00

For anyone who missed this - it was extraordinary. TV at its best. Ayn Rand = psycho bitch from hell. Capitalism exposed for the racket it really is. Clinton as clueless fuckwit. Alan Greenspan as lucky fuckwit. The IMF as paid thugs, strong-arming America's economic rivals. Commodification of self via the internet. And that was just episode one!

Page torn from A Lover's Discourse

2011-05-20T12:29:00.004+01:00

Tenderness

tendresse / tenderness

Bliss, but also a disturbing evaluation of the loved object's tender gestures, insofar as the subject realizes that he is not their privileged recipient.

1. There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join. The tender gesture says: ask me anything that can put your body to sleep, but also do not forget that I desire you - a little, lightly, without trying to seize anything right away.

Sexual pleasure is not metonymic: once taken, it is cut off: it was the Feast, always terminated and instituted only by a temporary, supervised lifting of prohibition. Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy; the gesture, the episode of tenderness (the delicious harmony of an evening) can only be interrupted with laceration: everything seems called into question once again: return of rhythm - vritti - disappearance of nirvana.

2. If I receive the tender gesture within the field of demand, I am fulfilled: is this gesture not a kind of miraculous crystallization of presence? But if I receive it (and this can be simultaneous) within the field of desire, I am disturbed: tenderness, by rights, is not exclusive, hence I must admit that what I receive, others receive as well (sometimes I am even afforded the spectacle of this). Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

("L was stupefied to see A give the waitress in the Bavarian restaurant, while ordering his schnitzel, the same tender look, the same angelic expression that moved him so when these expressions were addressed to him.")

From Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Jonathan Cape, 1979)

2011-05-19T10:27:00.000+01:00

Papa M - Untitled

2011-05-17T14:48:00.003+01:00

Lovely...

More Horse Feathers - Belly of June

2011-05-16T21:21:00.003+01:00

Every band should have at least one moustache-sporting violinist, as well as a banjo player in a tight-fitting cardigan.

Ikkyu

2011-05-16T21:13:00.003+01:00

'Having no destination, I am never lost.'

Horse Feathers - Thistled Spring

2011-05-15T20:19:00.001+01:00

Earthlings

2011-05-15T16:08:00.004+01:00

Open your eyes - I dare you!

Pixies

2011-05-15T14:08:00.005+01:00

New ears please.

Elisee Reclus

2011-05-15T12:38:00.004+01:00

'...moderate in tone but revolutionary in substance...' (Kropotkin)

'A secret harmony exists between the earth and the people whom it nourishes, and when imprudent societies let themselves violate this harmony, they always end up regretting it.' (1860)

'But whether it is a question of small or large groups of human beings, it is always through solidarity, through the association of spontaneous, coordinated forces, that progress is made... The historian, the judge who evokes the centuries... shows us how the law of the blind and brutal struggle for existence, so extolled by the admirers of success, is subordinated to a second law, that of the grouping of weak individuals into more developed organisms, learning to defend themselves against enemy forces and to recognise natural resources, even to create new ones. We know that if our descendants are to achieve science and liberty, they will owe it to... constant collaboration, to this mutual aid from which brotherhood grows little by little.' (1889)

'In the history of the world all the armies of a Napoleon are not worth so much as one word of a Darwin, fruit of a life of work and thought.' (1892)

'Force reigns, say the advocates of social inequality; force reigns, proclaims modern industry... But why shouldn't revolutionists talk like economists and merchants? The law of the strongest will not always and necessarily work for the benefit of commerce. "Might surpasses right," said Bismarck, echoing many others; but perhaps we should prepare for the day when might is at the service of right.' (1884)

'It matters little whether we succeed; at least we shall have interpreted the internal voice.' (1878)

'Reclus explained the "natural" order represented by anarchy. The relationship between individual and society he compared to that of cell and body: each existing independently but completely dependent on the other. Sociology provided anarchists with two primordial facts, he said; each person is interdependent and perishes in isolation, and social progress is accomplished by the force of individual wills. To conform to the first "law" was to become collectivist; to the second, anarchist. People must conform to both in order to be true to their nature - that is, to be free. Submission to nature was liberation, and Reclus differentiated it from the forced obedience to the laws of the state... Anarchy, wrote Reclus, was "life without masters".'

'If it is true, as I believe it is, that the product of common work ought to be common property, it is not a call to violence to demand one's share. If it is true, as I believe it is, that no one has the right to deprive another of his freedom, then he who rebels is completely within his rights.' (1883)

From Marie Fleming, The Geography of Freedom, (Black Rose Books, 1988)

Business Nightmares

2011-05-09T20:42:00.014+01:00

BBC 2 just aired a programme called Business Nightmares, in which presenter Evan Davis 'uncovers the inside stories of the world's biggest business mistakes.' The programme began with the so-called 'soap war' between Unilever and Procter & Gamble, the companies who produce the leading brands of washing detergent in the UK: Persil and Ariel. The programme neglected to mention that Unilever and Proctor & Gamble, despite their long-standing commercial rivalry, have something in common:

The nightmare - so the programme would have us believe - is that one of these companies, Unilever, once lost a lot of money (money it later recouped with interest from consumers). The methods employed by these companies, on the other hand, have nothing nightmarish about them, or so we are left to infer.

Stain removal courtesy of the BBC.

Nadar

2011-05-09T11:31:00.015+01:00

Gaspard-Felix Tournachon (1 April 1820 - 23 March 1910)

A visionary...

above ground...

and below...

Roberta Flack - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (1972)

2011-05-09T09:56:00.005+01:00

With all the subsequent versions (mutilations!) it's easy to forget how amazing this is. Written by Ewan MacColl for his girlfriend Peggy Seeger: no wonder she later married him.

'I knew our joy would fill the Earth/ And last till the end of time'

First law of thermodynamics.

Sarah Jaffe - Stay With Me

2011-05-06T08:52:00.001+01:00

Alan Watts

2011-05-05T11:58:00.001+01:00

Wittgenstein by way of Watts

2011-05-05T11:52:00.003+01:00

Alan W. Watts (Obi Wan Kenobi) reading Wittgenstein. 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.' East and West meet.

'... perhaps the invisible stars are shaken by it...'

2011-05-05T10:56:00.003+01:00

'Well, let us turn the pages, a summer afternoon, heat which parches one's lungs, the mazes of the stockyards; the sky a curious reddish yellow, the air sticky and thick enough to cut. Passages miles long, wooden tunnels, labyrinths of tunnels crossing the streets, the death-bridge for the animals which are to be slaughtered. A dull bellowing, oxen and calves in endless trains, a quiet fateful stamping. At a particular place the hammer falls upon them, in a minute hundreds die and fall into the pit. It is oppressive to be there, so close to countless creatures about to die; I see them stepping forward, shoving and shoved, the necks of the rear ones resting upon the flanks of those in front, from morning till night, day in, day out, year after year, with big brown eyes full of foreboding and wonder, their distressed lowing resounds through the air; perhaps the invisible stars are shaken by it; the pillars tremble with the heavy bodies; the sweetish smell of blood rises from the tremendous halls and warehouses, a constant cloud of blood hangs over the whole city; the people's clothes smell of blood, their beds, their churches, their rooms, their food, their wines, their kisses. It is all so tremendous, so unbearably immense, the individual scarcely has a name any longer, the separate thing nothing, nothing to differentiate it. Numbered streets, why not numbered people, perhaps numbered according to the dollars they earn with the blood of cattle, with the soul of the world?'

Jakob Wassermann, The Maurizius Case

The internet, too, shall pass...

2011-05-03T11:14:00.000+01:00

On Promenade, Doug Burr

2011-05-01T14:09:00.007+01:00

This is an extraordinary album, one of the best of recent years. The fact that it isn’t better known beggars belief. The fact that Doug Burr is still struggling to make his living as a musician (as far as I know, he still works a day job to support his family, and only writes, plays and records music in his spare time) is likewise a travesty. Perhaps worst of all, however, is that this sort of neglect – while hundreds of lesser artists are feted – no longer arouses any sort of surprise. We almost expect great artists to remain commercially overshadowed. The idea that mediocrity grabs – and somehow deserves - the limelight is now widely accepted. Fans may take a perverse sort of pleasure in joining their neglected favourites in the shadows; but this probably offers little consolation to the artists themselves, who would doubtless rather be pursuing their art full-time.

I’m not suggesting we treat artists like charity cases; I just think we should help and support them whenever we can. Which is why you should buy this album. It contains three of the most beautiful, stop-you-in-your-tracks ballads you will ever hear: ‘Graniteville’; ‘Thing About Trouble’; and ‘Blood Runs Downhill’. And the other eight songs are all nearly as good: certainly far better than most of the music being released nowadays.

The album starts – pleasantly and sedately enough – with ‘Slow Southern Home’, which gently builds into, well, a slow southern home (if I’m going to use architectural metaphors). Burr’s voice – all soft Texan hospitality – invites us in, shows us around, encourages us to take a seat. Acoustic guitars appear, joined shortly afterwards by an harmonica and a keyboard, while in a back room someone’s playing an electric guitar (quietly, so as not to annoy the neighbours).

The second track, ‘Come To My Senses’, is similarly laid-back. More ‘country’ than the first, like somebody opened a window and let in the warm Texas air.

The album could continue in this vein, and it would still be a great record, albeit a little less arresting; but then the third track ‘Graniteville’ begins and you know that something has changed. The song is instantly familiar – one of those tracks that immediately moves into your head and never leaves. The story behind it – the collision of two trains in Graniteville, South Carolina on January 6th 2005, in which one of the train cars, loaded with chlorine gas, ruptured, releasing 60 tonnes of the gas, killing nine people (eight while they slept) - adds a tragic dimension to the song. Narrated by a husband, who tries to rouse his sleeping wife, it has a poignancy and bitterness that’s only made bearable by the sweetness of the music:

‘There’s a black train rolling through the middle of the night/ If it finds us here well there’s nowhere to hide/ And if we ever wake up in Graniteville/ You know how much I love you and I always will... Wake up baby, there’s a train a coming/ Don’t you leave me or forsake me... Wake up baby, hear the screaming/ Whole town dies while it’s still sleeping.’

The fourth track ‘Whippoorwill’ is lighter – necessarily – but still manages to retain some of the gravity of the preceding track in its suggestion of transience and mortality. The whippoorwill appears in the Spring, ‘to wake you up and tuck you in’, but disappears again in the Winter. The song is a child-like lullaby about how fleeting life is.

‘How Can The Lark (My Dear Theo)’ and ‘Should’ve Known’ both reference the Van Gogh family: the letters between Vincent and his brother Theo in the first track; the murder of Theo Van Gogh in 2004 (great-grandson of his namesake) in the second. Vincent’s famous act of self-mutilation and the murder of Theo Van Gogh are not entirely unrelated, Burr has suggested:

‘I thought it interesting that Vincent had apparently gone insane, sending his severed ear to a lady for whom he had feelings, as if to say “Stop, and listen to me”. Was it coincidence that his descendant was stabbed in broad daylight... for making a documentary that seemed to say “stop and listen”?’(Source: holidayatthesea.com)

Both men were trying to draw attention to something other people didn’t want to acknowledge. Whether it be personal suffering or the persecution of women, the uncomfortable response provoked by saying ‘stop and listen’ seems to be, for Burr, one of the functions, even responsibilities, of art. This isn’t done didactically: we can just sit back and enjoy the music, or we can dig a little deeper if we choose to; it’s up to us.

‘In the Garden’ is the loudest track on the album – an invigorating blast of fresh air, and an effective contrast to the album’s soft, plaintive masterpiece ‘Thing About Trouble’. Voice, music, and lyrics magically combine to form something truly extraordinary – a sum greater than its parts; the sort of song most singers would kill for.

The album then slowly subsides through two more tracks – ‘Last Promenade’ and ‘Always Travel Light’ – before the sun finally sets with ‘Blood Runs Downhill’.

We step out into the mild night air knowing we’ve just experienced something great. The world we’ve known dissolves, if only briefly, into glimpses of ghosts, fleeting memories, sweet regrets and thoughtful silence:

‘And I see you tonight/ You’re dressed in white/ Moving through the dark/ And the way you say my name/ I can’t explain/ Everything is falling apart.’

Misery Endures (Thankfully)

2011-05-01T10:29:00.004+01:00

It's ironic that the only music from the 80's that hasn't aged and in fact still seems relevant is the music that was condemned for being too serious when it was first released. The miserabilists endured; the crowd-pleasers disappeared without a trace. Of course, the miserabilists were really nothing of the sort: they were the wittiest bands around; whereas the apparently frivolous crowd-pleasers were really self-important poseurs. It was simply - as always - that genuine lightness was - and is - wilfully misunderstood: it poses a threat to the spurious lightness of the outwardly cheerful, and for that reason has to be dismissed.

Snow

2011-05-01T10:24:00.001+01:00

Thirty-seven years on this planet and I didn't know until a week ago how snow is made. I just assumed it was frozen water. The depths of what I don't know!

Doug Burr @ Club Dada

2011-05-01T10:08:00.002+01:00

At the risk of labouring the point: this is Doug Burr, from Denton, Texas; he's really good.

'...So you are turned - a Someone...'

2011-04-29T11:23:00.003+01:00

So you are turned - a Someone
As I had never known -
Your heart a drum that summons
Through Land where Wells once flowed

Where no Mouth drink - and nothing
Will cleave where Shadows form -
Where Water wells to Seeming
And Seeming falls - to Foam

You rise in every Wellspring -
Through every Seeming - run
You've conjured up a Playing
That begs - Oblivion

From Poppy and Memory, in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, (Norton, 2001, trans., John Felstiner)

Celan was such a consummate poet even his book titles read like phrases from some larger poem:

Poppy and Memory
From Threshold to Threshold
Speech-Grille
The No-One's-Rose
Breathturn
Threadsuns
Light-Compulsion
Snow-Part
Homestead of Time

Sarah Jaffe

2011-04-27T22:39:00.004+01:00

O Ye Devastator, Doug Burr

2011-04-27T12:30:00.008+01:00

Any album that begins with a song called ‘A Black Wave Is Comin’’, features a cover photo of a worried-looking bride, and carries the title O Ye Devastator, probably won’t appeal to everyone. That it immediately appealed to me no doubt says a lot about my outlook. A healthy sense of pessimism, vague forebodings bordering on paranoia, deep distrust of the direction the world seems to be taking – all appear perfectly natural to me. In fact, I’m wary of people who don’t feel the same way. Without a sense of menace - I would argue - there is no real appreciation of freedom. Happiness without an underlying sense of sadness is just frivolity, the refuge of the wilfully unaware. If you want to live lightly you first have to explore the darkness – and that seems to be the general idea behind this album.

I’m reluctant to describe O Ye Devastator as a concept album – the phrase often seems pejorative – however, there is certainly a lot more going on with this record than with most. There seem to be two main themes running through the songs – one societal, the other personal. Our current love affair with technology is likened to the early honeymoon stage of a relationship. Everything seems rosy, full of possibilities; the future promises unimagined happiness. We can’t – or won’t - see that a black wave is coming. The marriage we’ve entered into with digital technology is about to go sour. The ‘possibilities’ are for greater repression; the future is a dystopian one. Unchecked developments in technology bring the end of days a step nearer; our marriage partner could very easily devastate our lives.

If all this sounds like heavy going and you’re thinking that your first instincts were right and you shouldn’t bother with this record – hang on! Despite its subject matter, O Ye Devastator will bring a smile to your face. It will have you tapping your feet and singing along (particularly on the glorious, banjo-driven 'Red, Red'). It will also leave an impression far more lasting and significant – precisely because of its darker elements – than something which aims merely to entertain. It accomplishes that very rare feat of appealing to both the heart and the mind.

The album’s second track – ‘Chief Of Police In Chicago’ – is set in the near future, where babies are tested at birth to see if they have 'criminal' genes. The song – narrated by the Chief of Police – relates a conversation in which a mother is told that her child has just tested positive. That Doug Burr makes this story convincing is impressive enough. That he makes it sound beautiful is extraordinary. Even singing a line like ‘I’m Chief of Police in Chicago’, he makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. The song really shouldn’t work. Nor, for that matter, should the album. Yet somehow it does. Stunningly.

I’ve read in interviews that Doug Burr had the idea for ‘Chief Of Police In Chicago’ – and presumably for the broader concept behind the album – while working at his day job: he works as a systems analyst, and saw in the databases he was helping to create an obvious and immediate threat to liberty. His – entirely justifiable – concern was apparently increased by the recent birth of a child. The thought that the technology of today could one day be used to control and pre-judge the generation of tomorrow – and the realisation that he was involved in this - clearly unsettled him.

The narrative that begins in ‘Chief Of Police In Chicago’ carries on, two songs later, in ‘You’ve Been A Suspect All Your Life’ (and is then reprised, three songs later, in the instrumental 'All Our Lives'). The child – a suspect all its life – has now grown up, seemingly unaware of its status as a potential criminal. This time the conversation – I think – is between the mother and her child, though it may be only the mother’s thoughts we hear:

‘And I don’t have the heart to tell you now/ There’s no way that you’re gonna turn this around/ ... O you are the apple of my eye/ No exoneration until you die...’

The child is condemned for life, despite doing nothing wrong, and the mother is powerless to change things. All she can offer is her sympathy and understanding. By the end of the song she basically says ‘we’re in this together’: ‘Together suspects all our lives/ Forever suspects all our lives/ Together/ Forever.’ Clearly, we are meant to grasp the wider significance of this. On the surface, the song is about a Minority Report-style future, but there is a religious element also – the idea that man exists in a fallen state, punished for original sin. That Doug Burr – an avowed Christian - seems to be challenging this idea is a sign of the intellectual honesty that makes his Christianity – for an atheist like me – far more palatable than the efforts of those who wish merely to proselytise. For Burr, as far as I can gather, we are all born innocent; and it is what happens to us later, at the hands of society, that constitutes the real sin. In any case, as with ‘Chief Of Police In Chicago’, ‘You’ve Been A Suspect’ is an implausibly beautiful song – one of the highlights, if not the highlight, of the album.

Interweaved with this religious/technological theme – as I’ve mentioned - is another kind of marriage (the more conventional kind, albeit unconventionally treated). And just as the one narrative stream breaks off then reappears, so this second stream – which begins ‘At The Public Dance’ - later resumes with ‘I Got This Fever/ O Ye Devastator’ which is basically the same song, played at a faster speed, with different lyrics. Why the repetition, the looping back to an earlier track? I’d be lying if I said I understood it. I don’t. Nor do I want to attribute a coherence to this record that it perhaps doesn’t have. Nevertheless, there is definitely something going on here: two songs separate ‘Chief Of Police’ and ‘You’ve Been A Suspect’; likewise, two songs separate ‘At The Public Dance’ and ‘I Got This Fever’. Just a coincidence? Possibly. Intentional design? More likely.

Similarly, images recur from song to song, which suggests that the ‘marriage’ narrative – although elliptical and disjointed and possibly several narratives intertwined – still has a continuity. The girl dancing at the public dance has ribbons in her hair; these ribbons reappear ‘drenched in red’ in ‘I Got This Fever’. The precise meaning of these images – and the meaning of the songs themselves - remains unclear. There is ambiguity and indeterminacy throughout – as in a lot of relationships. ‘Love ain’t love if it don’t hate’ Burr sings at one point in ‘I Got This Fever’ – and really this seems to be the central idea. Every romance – every relationship - contains the seed of its own destruction. The fact that some relationships survive while others end in devastation is down to the people involved and how they choose to act (listen to the song ‘Do You Hear Wedding Bells? ’ for instance, and tell me if that song is naive – as some reviewers have said – or if it is all about self-deception, and is actually quite cynical). Likewise, on a broader level, how we use technology – how we employ our scientific discoveries in general – is also up to us: it can be used to bring us closer together, or to keep us apart. Again, I might be reading more into this album than it actually warrants, but that’s how I see it – at least for now.

The great strength and beauty of O Ye Devastator comes from its mix of complexity and simplicity – stories of love and death that work on an immediate surface level, yet yield more and more over time. Personally, I feel as though I’ve barely scratched its surface. It’s intriguing, and difficult, and captivating all at the same time – and there are very few albums about which you can say that.

Worrying Man-Crush

2011-04-25T10:12:00.004+01:00

Space Dust

2011-04-25T10:10:00.003+01:00