Night of No Moon

Every time you turned the street turned with you:
the languages, distractions, sales, and somewhere
a street band. You turned and the current flowed
around you, through you; kept moving. The window display
was there for you. Streets of bodies eddying, surged.

You still felt their tug in a doorway. Turned, and
lifted away; it fell from you. You rose
quickly and above it all; shop lights far below.
Rose past cornices, pigeon spikes, to colder air;
the smells of fast food, music, muting.

A sudden panic; the city lights indistinguishable –
you were rising faster, ‘How will I breathe?’
Higher, higher to break through to sudden
openness, emptiness,
and strung there
were huge chains of lives, channelled
across darkness — people connected, singly,
as far as sight was possible.

A policemen next to you, his difficult face;
the barrista who snubbed you, the shop assistant
who had seemed distant,  all there together,
connecting.  And listening revealed
high tones, metallic, different timbres. The planets,
ringing in the openness.

Linked lines of lives stretched from planet
to planet and the sun’s radiance. All connected,
attuned  to a vast, opening sense
of awareness, completion.

 

Car Crash Politics

And so world leaders clap as England skips off into political oblivion behind Bojo the Clown.
Like the Pied Piper, maybe, but without his skill or art.

What happened at the UK election?
Did Brexit seal everyone’s fate, both Remain and Leave  supporters?
Did Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the only viable opposition, consign everyone to disaster?
(The Green Party conspicuous by their absence.)

Tell me, the much vaunted soundbite of being sick and tired of the Brexit rigmarole, was that the reason so many voted against their long held beliefs?

And so, Jeremy Corbyn et al wander back into the 1970s, which he never really left – his Manifesto was pure 1970s – with period PLO affiliations having morphed into unambiguous anti-Semitism. And to leave the vulnerable of society, and huge new abundance of impoverished, to further foodbanks, malnutrition, to a NHS that’s on the point of having to charge for admission to A and E, for general medical care (these last divulged  to us by a desperate NHS worker). And how many more Austerity-related deaths?
Thanks for that.

In the middle of our Austerity, when everyone was jumpy and panicky, our then PM David Cameron pulled out a bill from the European Union saying the UK owed £billions. ‘Look at this!, he said
He did not mention it was he who had withheld the yearly payments, so that the debt built up… and ‘Look at this!’
The result was the Brexit mess.

         Timing is all, of course; and politics is theatre. Here was proof of that.

There is a cartoon in the UK satirical magazine Private Eye, showing Boris Johnson with a mop – the caption: Only we can clean up the mess that we have made.
Which captures it all rather nicely.
Many populist politicians create a chaos to upset everyone, and then to solve, saying, See how good I am!
Needlessly upsetting everyone; just for their own poll ratings.

I wrote of the UK, but isn’t it really just England? And hasn’t it been just England for quite some time now?
I first became disgusted with the main political parties at the last Scottish Independence referendum – their attitude to Scotland, and patronising manner, was so open at last. And ever since, virtually everything that has come out of Scotland has been openly ignored.
Take this example: Glasgow has had a very successful programme for dealing with knife crime. Why not adopt it in England?
No, said Javid.
Consign everyone to further deaths and injury, out of sheer arrogance.

The Irish border – and deeper behind that let’s look, for example there, at the criminal proceedings for prosecution for the Bloody Sunday massacre: 13 unarmed killed, by British troops. And the English court Now will allow only 1 prosecution. How generous, how understanding – this crumb of regard from the great English table.

And, so, Wales – the heartland holds firm but the traditionally Englished areas of the south west, the borders (Monmouth, Radnor etc), fall-in with the big and more powerful English. Anglesey, though,  so dependent on finance from England….

Get Brexit Done – and let us get back to how we were.
Ah, no, sorry; none of that from now on.

Will vacuity be the new norm: heads-in-the-sand, fingers in ears, eyes tight shut?
‘What brave new world….’

Of course it suits President Trump mightily to have the UK split from Europe: weak, dependent, and no longer a player on the world markets.

Reblog:Book Review – The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe

The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe, by Richard Scholar, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 9780199274406

Richard Scholar is Fellow and Tutor in French, at Oriel College, Oxford.

In the realm of Philosophy ours has been called the age of the method. That is, method as the chosen vehicle with which we locate and explore our understanding of our position in the world.

What is the je ne sais quois? It is the inexpressible, the ‘I do not know what’ of a situation, event, and even, as Richard Scholar shows with Montaigne, of a relationship. Or, if you prefer, it is the ‘I know not what.’ In English there is the phrase he uses as subtitle of the book: a certain something – The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi – Encounters with a Certain Something. This phrase pales against the French, though.

How can we know the je ne sais quoi? We can hunt out its provenance… this, after all, is accepted method. The phrase can be traced back to origins in the Cicero’s example of his use of the expression nescio quid: I do not know what. Richard Scholar qualifies, however: It owns its literary prestige partly to its Latin ancestor and its Romance cousins, but, unlike them, it goes on to establish itself as a vogue-word and an organising topic. (Page 25)

And there we have the tone and tenor of the book. We can trace the literary prestige of the phrase more easily than the vernacular usage. How prevalent was the phrase in ordinary/everyday usage? We would need to see how and if it was used in each and every instance in context, time, speech, manuscript, and print. And so he restricts his search to early modern Europe, examining its use in Montaigne, Corneille, Moliere, Descartes, Pascal, even Shakespeare.

Take those Englishings, above: the ‘I do not know what…’, and the ‘I know not what.’ The second is more succinct, comfortable; is more self-contained-seeming through its use of form. To our ears it has a sound-bite quality to it. The first seems more exploratory, more open, questing. The first expresses a vulnerability towards knowledge, self-knowledge – therefore a vulnerability before a greater, omniscient knowledge. In this way can we extrapolate therefore, a more theistic quality to it, whereas the latter has a more renaissance quality: more au-fait with classical rhetorical forms?
For me this gets to the heart of the question. I use the phrase ‘sound-bite’ etc – it is a contemporary journalistic phrase. Hopefully it will not be known in ten year’s time, as it was not say, twenty years’ ago. It limits. My worry is: do we limit our thinking to what we can only express in words, language? That would be a grievous error. I posit thought as experienced event, full of multiplying connections, and not as ordered and expressible formulation of the event.

Read the excerpt I gave above again; take, for instance, the need of the super-defining Latin writers of the phrase, nescio quid. Something even escapes their forensic practice. In fact, quite a lot did, And this is the fate of so much of our, Europe’s, early heritage, circumscribed by Latin thought, expression, and the vicissitudes of transmission.

In the sixteenth century France, Richard Scholar comments, the phrase became vogue; as with the later vogue for conversatione (see Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation, Cornell University paperbacks,1993:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Conversation-Peter-Burke/)
it spread throughout Western Europe. It changed costume, definition, commercial value, as it crossed cultures.

David M Possner, Chicago University: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/212681, writes: The first part of the book presents itself as a word history: using Starobinski’s notion of the tripartite life cycle of a word — from its emergence as a lexical entity, through a period of currency, to its demise in what Merleau-Ponty calls sedimentation….

And so we have the burgeoning of the great dictionaries at the turn of the seventeenth century. The phrase cannot be so restricted, we find: it retains its ability to disturb, disrupt, by remaining indefinable. And so ‘society’ fights back. We have what is called a parlour game of polite conversation, where the new philosophical writing becomes a polite topic. The game is of nescioquiddity, of applying the phrase to ‘cultured’ phenomena, the world of gentility.

The move from ‘I know not what’, to ‘a certain something’ is a very definite, provocative one. Kant and the Age of Reason are taken wholesale, you might say, and produce their own particular paradigms for conceptualising the essence of the relationship of self and the world.

The phrase throws into relief our relationship with knowledge of the world, of self knowledge, and the relationship between: our basic epistemology.

With this book, and his next, Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking (Past in the Present): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Montaigne-Art-Free-Thinking-Past-Present/
Scholar enrolled himself in the realm of histoire des mentalites, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mentalities
of cultural history’s  investigations.