The truth is rarely pure and never simple

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…..Journalists justify their treachery according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist- who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things- never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.
(Janet Malcolm)

I am a strange, vainglorious, loop

According to Douglas Hoffstadter:
the more sophisticated a system’s self referential capabilities, the more soulful it is, the more robust its selfhood and existence as an ‘I’.
A snail probably has no conception of itself, and to that extent is soulless.

Mark test for the soulful elite:
The scientist puts a mark on test subject’s forehead. Said subject wipes it off at the nearest mirror. Exclusive membership belongs to asian elephants, chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, orangutans and humans older than 18 months.

There is probably a kind of awareness that only adult humans have, representing the pinnacle of soulfulness.

The ancients believed a self emerged from the activity of the heart.

Hoffstadter agrees self is an ‘emergent’ object, likening it to a thick stack of envelopes which seem to contain a marble where the V’s has built up.

Self is a reliable production.
When an appearance is produced reliably and persistently under many different conditions and for many different observers, we start taking it seriously.

Too young to know much

Dog’s Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

(John Updike)

Confounded faces

By and large, or so it seemed at the Golden Bowl, the relatives you ended up with were a disapointment: not at all what one had dreamed of when young. They were usually a great deal plainer than one had hoped; the good genes were so easily diluted, while the bad ran riot. The bride’s handsome husband turned out to be an anomoly in a family as plain as the back of the bus, and it was only apparent at the wedding. It took only one son to marry a dim girl with big teeth in a small jaw, and you’d produce a whole race of descendents in need of orthodontics, but not the wit or the will to afford them. If the boy hadn’t gone to that particular party on that particular night- and fallen for an ambitious girl with small teeth in a big jaw-how different the room full of descendants would look, how much greater the sum of their income. The old easily grew sulky, seeing how much of life was chance, how little due to intent. Unfair! Unfair! It’s the familiar cry of the small child; only between the extremes of age do we have the impression there’s anything we can do about anything.

(Fay Weldon, Rhode Island Blues)

Night deepened; sleep held living things

Humbles

If you have hit a deer on the road at dusk;
climbed, shivering, out of your car
with curses to investigate the damage
done, and found it split apart and steaming
far flung in the nettle bed, utterly beyond repair
then you have seen what is not meant to be seen
is packed in cannily, coiled like parachute silks,
but unputbackable, out for the world
to witness; the looping slicked up cockspring
flesh’s pink, mauve arterial red,
and there a still pulsing web of royal veins
bearing the bad news back to the heart;
something broken, something hard, black,
the burst bowel fowling the meat
exposed for what it is, found out as Judas
ripped from groin to gizzard, was found
at dawn on the elder tree, still tethered to earth
by all the ropes and anchors of his life.

(Frances Leviston)

The Importance of Looking Closely

Wabi: Originally meant the misery of living alone in nature, away from society.
Lonliness, desolation, rustic simplicity, quiet taste, gentle affection for antique, unostentatious, and rather melancholy refinement.

Sabi: Originally meant ‘chill’ ‘lean’ withered.
Things whose beauty stems from age.

Shibui: Beauty with inner implications.

Wabi is the quality of rustic yet refined solitary beauty. Sabi is the trait of age, be it the green corosion of bronze, or the pattern of moss and lichen on wood.

It is about the minor and the hidden, tentative and ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes. It is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

It is not a beauty displayed before the viewer by its creator, but one that leads the viewer to draw beauty out for themselves. The world may abound with different aspects of beauty. Each person will feel a special affinity to one or another aspect. But when their taste grows more refined, they will necessarily arrive at beauty that is shibui.

-The closer things get to non-existent, the more exquisite and evocative they become.
-Its simplicity is best described as a state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence.
-Remove what is unnecessary and the imposition will be strengthened.

How to keep oneself undefiled by the world:

Just as Christianity detests adultery, murder, theft and everything else that can defile a person, it knows yet another defilement: cowardly sagacity and flabby sensibleness.

Despicable thraldom in probability is perhaps the most dangerous defilement. What is probable so I can believe it? The probable impartially blends in itself familiarity with good and evil, and even if these clearly seem to be probable, in truth it never does become clear.

Christianity detests as a defilement what the world esteems as supreme: continually to act sagaciously.

But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres has not become a forgetful hearer but a doer of a work; he shall be blessed in his life.

To become sober is to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinately unconditionally engaged. His life was on the other side of probability: there he lived, there he breathed, there he ventured in reliance upon God.

(Soren Kierkegaard)

Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?

Young Woman at a Window

She sits with
tears on

her cheek
her cheek on

her hand
the child

in her lap
his nose

pressed
to the glass.

(William Carlos Williams)

Born Under a Wandering Star

Talking to Myself

You are sitting in the shade of lindens, by the dried up well;
I recognize it all, the un-manned halt, the single track,
steppe grass smouldering sullenly. I still have that plaid jacket,
that rucksack, that coin you have in your pocket: a single rouble
cast in the year I, or should I say we, were born,
given to us as a parting gift, for luck.

A cobbler in Kharkov thought me mad when I paid him
to make a hole in it. He threaded wire through
and soldered a loop just big enough to take the bootlace
he let me have for three cigarettes. He even helped me
tie it round my neck. Some days its power is strong
but it is not to be relied on.

Kissed frogs stay frogs. We catch hepatitis in Pskov. Dare I tell you
we never have a baby? You look up as if you heard me,
smile at yourself for thinking the unthinkable – no,
at garrulous sparrows bathing in the dust. You will regret
your disregard for clothes, regret cutting your own hair.
At dinner parties you will make people glad

they secured a house and family. At christenings
they will take your silver, but seat you far enough away
not to breathe wanderlust on their child. Not to tell its siblings
of the ten hot hours waited here, then two days
on a hard-class seat; how you noticed wolves and hovering
hawks in a view famous for being oppressive, unchanging.

(Sue Butler)

Laws to live by

C. Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993)

1. PARKINSON’S LAW: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
The number of administrators in an organization will grow at a steady rate irrespective of how much work that organization needs to do.
An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals;
Officials make work for each other by supervising each other’s efforts, holding meetings etc.

2. SECOND LAW: Expenditure rises to meet income.

3. THIRD LAW: Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay:
The most effective size for any meeting is five. But committees inevitably expand in stages to 20, at which point “the Coefficient of Inefficiency” takes over: conversation will break out at either end of the table, members will stand to make themselves heard and then start giving speeches. The handful of useful members are forced to make later lunch plans in order to settle pressing issues.

4. THE LAW OF DELAY: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

5. THE LAW OF TRIVIALITY: The time spent on any item of a committee’s agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.
Expensive decisions are reviewed less thoroughly than small ones because they tend to be embarrassingly technical.

INJELITANCE: A vital Parkinson contribution was his diagnosis of why certain organizations suddenly deteriorate. The rise to authority of individuals with unusually high combinations of incompetence and jealousy- which he coined injelitence.
“The injelitant individual is easily recognizable from the persistence with which he struggles to eject all those abler than himself. He dare not say, ‘Mr. Asterisk is too able,’ so he says, ‘Asterisk? Clever perhaps–but is he sound?’ The organization gradually fills up with people more stupid than the chairman.

PARKINSON QUOTES:
In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.