I. As Descartes had observed, the knowledge I have about myself has a characteristic of certainty. This knowledge is not a set of particular thoughts I assert, but the underlying objective knowledge that I exist; a worldly fact, rather than my perception of it. Kant agreed with this sense of intrinsic knowledge to some extent, but claimed that we can be immediately certain only of the contents of our consciousness, our mental states, not of the 'I' Descartes suggested precedes them. In the subjective sphere, being and seeming collapse into each other, something which Kant felt the extremes of rationalism and empiricism failed to account for. This dual mode of experiencing the world, as we shall see, is a thread that runs throughout Kant’s thought, as well as, later, that of Merleau-Ponty who emphasised the importance of direct experience in understanding the nature of consciousness. II. The pertinent question for Kant became not whether I can have (a priori) knowledge of an objective world (Leibniz's substances and properties, arrived at through reasoned argument, science and common sense, whereby each individual view constitutes a mirror to rational principles of reality), but whether I can have objective knowledge of what this world based on how it seems to me. Hume's empiricism argued that all ideas are acquired through the senses, through our own individual experience, and therefore denied that reason could exist independently of our own ideas. He argued that when we refer to objective reality we are merely saying that "those perceptions exhibit a kind of constancy and coherence that generates the (illusory) idea of independence... the regular succession among experiences...". In other words, that does not exist beyond our experience of it. Kant sought to incorporate the truths of both objective rationalism and Hume’s empiricism to show that neither experience nor reason is alone able to provide knowledge. The former provides content without form, the latter form without content: “In describing my experience I am referring to an ordered perspective of an independent world." This leads to the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge and of the impossibility of divorcing the object known from the perspective of the knower. There are admittedly certain prepositions that cannot be established through experience, since their truth is presupposed in the interpretation of experience, such as mathematics or the idea, for example, that 'every event has a cause.' These things are true universally and necessarily. But our own perspective of the world is in some measure a constituent of our knowledge. And so it is vain to attempt to rise above that perspective and know the world ‘as it is in itself’. We can know the principles in which its nature is anchored, but this knowledge taken on its own is limited. It is only through the synthesis of concept and intuition that judgement is formed. III. In debating Kant’s position on truth and knowledge there is often disagreement among commentators as to whether this “thing-in-itself” exists independently of our concept of it or whether, as Kant seemed to suggest, it and its appearance are in fact two ways to conceptualise what was essentially the same thing. So we have seen that the world of the senses and that of the understanding are separable only in theoretical terms. That’s not to say that such a division is not useful in our analysis of the nature of truth but, as phenomenological philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty pointed out subsequently, such a division does not correspond to the nature of our experience in the world. Kant was eager to assert that, despite this inseparability of object and appearance, appearances must be grounded in a reality that is not itself merely appearance. And yet he acknowledges that we can never know this “world as it is”, unconditioned by experience. To aim to do so would be to aspire beyond the conditions that make knowledge possible. Kant’s idea of pure reason, the highest of our cognitive faculties, does not contradict this supposition, it is grounded therein. It is no more possible for me to make the “I” into the object of consciousness than it is to observe the limits of my own visual field. This “I” is the expression of my perspective, but denotes no item within it. Suggested follow-on reading: Merleau-Ponty “The Visible and the Invisible”
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No way to describe how warm and good her body felt saying goodbye on the steps. That soft belly of wheat. The cold high stars. Already that old lonesome feeling. I walked away, shrouded by the dark. A procession of pale ghosts slouching off to work. Heaviness in my own heart, too. The strange desolation of this being alive.
The night before was a pleasant first meeting: dinner, beers, sex. Her name was Dyan. I'd hitchhiked to the city to meet her and brought her fruit from the valley. Figs, lemons, almonds, sour grapes. Then, after all the tender promises and whispers, in the 5am darkness the crazy bitch (lying there with her eyes wide open, sighing through her nose) kicks me out, worried about her deadline in four days' time. No longer interested in sex (she'd come when I squeezed her breasts, not when we fucked), no longer interested in anything but worrying, worrying about her deadline, being left alone to worry. I left without saying a word. I told myself to let it go: in this life you attract what you deserve. She was a honey-skinned girl from Chile with bipolar disorder, vaguely communist ideals and the brightest eyes I ever saw. They had led me back to her place, believing we might fall in love. And then kept me there later, listening to the wind and her sighing in the dark, despite realising we never would. I stood by the big river. The cold water coming down from the hills. I thought of you. Of your eyes when you loved me. Drank a coffee. Wandered around. Bitter food that all tasted the same. Even the water had a taste of misery. I even gave pennies to the beggars; hardly looked at the pretty women passing by; sad clothes hung on the line; rows of yellow teeth biting into little petit four, old faraway eyes, sipping glasses of this or that, asking for the time, shuffling from one doorway to the next, saying words, "que calor, ay que rico, pero que bueno... que hambre, que linda, que lejos, que va..." Recycled love songs on the radio; the kind words of strangers on the bus enough to bring a grown man to despair. I thought of Liz again, perhaps to console myself, and watched the big river, the wide Genil, coming down from the mountains in the rain. My father was a cowardly adulterer fond of money, my mother a failed spiritual seeker. I am a combination of the two. There is nothing for me here. I live in this world, but I am not of it. It's as though I was never really here. Just as I destroyed my life in that tiny corner of the world, so I find it ruins across the earth.
There is nothing I could see or do visit, that I could not just as easily not see or do. Uncertain and afraid, always worrying about my foolish soul, how could I be anything other than unfaithful to women when I’m always unfaithful with myself? Living in a foreign town, I can feel inside and outside of society simultaneously. I can witness the act of speech without understanding what is being said. I can drift in the ether and see shadows walking around, going nowhere, sitting in the sun, waiting in hairdressers, chatting over glasses of this or that, waiting outside banks clutching little pieces of paper, shaking hands, drifting home each night to sleep and going to work each day, like blind ants in a line. The galaxies unfathomably evolving for billions of years and us sat down here on a flea-bitten couch, or in a bar or in the park, worrying about this or that, biting our nails, listening to the echo of the hours, the sound of this being thrown here. Throughout history nothing much has changed. Civilisation still dreams in stone. We still seek to satisfy our hunger for sex and power and deny death by building monuments to those who went before us so the next generation will immortalize us in the same way. There is nothing really sacred anymore. Nothing much to fear or celebrate. Just go about our days meekly, seeking bread and truth and wine and the old stone of a thousand years will hold steady for centuries to come. Like in opulent classical Milan, whose buildings will last millennia just as the thick hair of its women and broad shoulders of its men will hold strong for all of time. They are really experts at passing the time and effortlessly with style. Memory and death and sex still pour from the old stone gargoyles eyes for young poets to weep with because nothing really ever changes, it's all just the will to power, the same drive that throughout Western Europe built empires out of marble and avarice, palaces now occupied by fashion boutiques and quaint little tea-shops, and the marble horse's ass makes no sound and the young girls' sweet smiles more beautiful than the Duomo itself and so the greatness everlasting, made from stone and marble and defies time and therefore also death, is splendid but will crumble too, like the species of love will fall away and leave behind only the dust and wind from whence we came. Meanwhile we photograph ourselves before the king-commissioned horseback sculptures, but they really did believe in greatness whereas now the world is full of lazy tarts and penniless workers who have been living hand to mouth for millennia and even the poets know only the fleeting comforts of high-toned vertical warbling instead of constructing something lasting out of words made of stone.
I’m still perplexed by the simplest of things: how little kids playing hopscotch grow up to be fat women with cataracts and grey hair, talking about the price of milk in doctor's waiting rooms; why so many people spend the majority of their lives doing something they don’t enjoy or understand; why the more people love each other, the less they know who they really are.
Strange and beautiful morning of drowsy back-alley conversations and musings in the dust and slow passing echo of the hours, men shuffling around eternity, handshakes, sadness, another day of life. Devi and Dede were taking a truckload of plants to Bogor, and offered me a lift. They went the back way, high up in the hills, through small villages, laughing kids waving and shouting “mister” at the car. Strange and beautiful and humbling scenes in the evening fields and little wooden shacks there.
England really is a wasteland. Everyone’s so infantile and pale and awkward in their flesh. I was called an “ignorant cunt” for not walking fast enough down the street and then later someone fearfully apologised for walking vaguely near to me. This place is dripping with neuroses. This is still Lowry’s England. Millions of stick-figures sat dying in living rooms, in hairdressers, in cold little churches. Hollow-eyed, sex-starved empty suits, shuffling around mumbling inane nonsense and worrying about every little self-conscious pedantic triviality, uncomfortable in their own bodies, uncertain and afraid, faces etched with apologetic little conciliatory smiles of fear.
Las Vegas. The Rodeo’s in town this weekend. A perverse gathering of cowboys, hobos, sex-starved housewives and lonely blue-collar workers blowing their kids’ college funds in a single weekend.
It's a giddily stroll down the strip, wearing ten gallon hats, bloodshot eyes that sentence you with a glance, mini skirts and pink stilettos - the warm dregs of last night’s margaritas still gripped tightly in their hands. They have all gathered here to lay mounds of ten dollar bills at the flashing neon altar of the God of the American Bad-Dream. The good ol’ boys are here too, plaid cotton shirts and cheap sunglasses, they let out a yeehaw, high five and go looking for topless bars while their Texan housewives, cotton candy curls spilling down over their ageing cleavage, giggle like hyenas and offend the western desert night with their dizzy southern drawl. It’s a truly twisted pilgrimage: millions of smartly-dressed hyenas handing over thousands of dollars at the Altar of the Flashing Lights. They are defined by a deadly combination of blind optimism, a large disposable income and the constant craving for cheap thrills. Some believe they will see The Light and hit the jackpot, take home the big prize and live happily ever after amen. But most are just in it for the kicks - sensation junkies, big kids in expensive suits, rolls of blubber stuffed into their Levi’s, hogs on barstools devouring Jack Daniels at long neon troughs, they gamble away their savings thousands of dollars at a time and laugh it off with a shrug. Everything is bigger in America. The roads, the misery, the meals, the open land, the payouts. Even the night itself seems larger in America. Were you hit at a traffic stop? Want 5 litres for the price of 4? Need your palm reading? Want a chance to win the trip of a life time? Do you experience pain when urinating? Want to be ready for the Second Coming of Jesus? All you have to do is call this number. But to those of us who live in the shadows of the mind and not in the world; those of us who joy has left in its wake; those of us who were born into endless night; those of us with shoulders frayed by the moonlight; those of us whose souls are defined by longing, it is one long desolation row from sea to shining sea. It is still Walt Whitman’s America. It is still a working man’s world. We are still dwarfed by the smokestacks and cut off from the land by the plough, slaves to loans and mediocrity, going nowhere in a hurry, living very ordinary lives but not very simple ones. The world is not a dream. All of this is not all for nothing. But we let it pass us by as though we were dreaming. We cling onto passing things. We climb the ladder and don’t look down. We have forgotten how to ground ourselves in the simple things, in the ecstasies and rhythms of the earth itself. Los Angeles. Skid Row ain’t no joke. Hustlers, drunks, schizophrenics on the corners fighting over a few pennies, a few mouthfuls to survive another day of life. But among the desolation there are little flickers of that pura alegria, the sensuality and humour of the Latina America I was a fool to leave behind and am aching to return to. All night pressed together dancing sweating laughing drinking until dawn... salvaje y borracho in Santa Marta, fuegito blanco de mi corazón. Puerto Rico can keep it despacito! I want la chica with the voz sensual, la quemona, huepaje, el baile de tau! Everyone swaying in paired rhythm in the shadows by the beach. Ay si que rico, ay vente pa’ca, así que bueno, que deli, que bendito, que me abrazas hasta la madrugada acostados en la playa con la brisa sobrepasando nuestros cuerpos casi soñando... “Where they make a desert, they call it peace” Tacitus, The Agricola c.AD 98 I. Suffering economic depression since the 2011 ousting of Hosni Mubarak, Cairo is a dusty sprawl of stern faces, backstreet rubble, incessant exhaust fumes. Quiet despair waits on a million street corners; on the corners of a million hungry mouths: men and women who simply have nothing to do each day, nowhere to go. An uncertain silence hangs over every dusk and dawn. There is nothing new. Only a bitter silence - then bickering, the Adhan, a car horn stirring the dead air, then silence again, dust and bickering and silence. After Mohammad built Cairo he saw what he had done and wept the Nile. On the corners, stray cats scratch Faiyumi bones. And weary young men eat dust under heavy shrouds, packing it into their mouths, mumbling thanks to Allah for the fruits and virgins of the afterlife. Dust and bone and the sour bread of the night. Al-Qahirah, where laughter is forbidden. Al-Qahirah, where the women’s voices bare a furious forlorn sound. Al-Qahirah, where even the water has a taste of misery. Al-Qahirah, who destroyed your life in that corner of the world, so that now you find it in ruins everywhere you go? Dust-shrouded sun. Cold nights of dust and bone and withered teats. A chorus of kneeding mouths. Grapes that died on the vine. Dust and bone, ground for the unleavened daily bread. On earth, as if there were a heaven. Give us this day of life and allow us to trespass and trick those who conspire against us. Dust and bone of a sterile wind, crossing the dry plains north, east from Giza, Imbabah, Kirdasa; hollow wind, whose shadows lift a dead song out from under the sea. Al-Qahirah! Strange sea of your eyes, dead but for the smoke and misery. Mouths sealed with rust and spittle. Faded minarets where cockroaches crawl among a wasteland of broken splendours. Heavy-eyed merchants, wringing their hands like flies on a turd! Al-Qahirah, what will be left of you? The old ghosts of departed lovers, hungry and bereft they leant helpless into the cold dark night and fled to Alexandria, Mansoura, Damietta, where they prayed to a pale empty sky, cursed the Fellahin ruins of time, left you to shiver in the dust, in the shadow of the old north wind alone. Al-Qahirah, land of endless waiting; land of faded grandeur and hungry ghosts; land of destitution and bitter winds; land of wretched husks and an ancient restless agony; land of broken spirits where nothing reaches the senses for days; where, finally, a sorrowful sound catches the ear: the sadness at the dark heart of the sun, each generation consuming the last, like a serpent consuming its own tail for eternity and calling it love. It's all the same thing: the echo of a lonesome song from a horse-cart; a violin rising from a backstreet basement window; an old man sighing on the corner; that thing that makes bakers rise earlier than monks and makes the stray cats fight all night - all the calls and cries and conversations pass me by like a distant murmur on the cold north wind of time. II. Laying there, anaesthetised on her heavy black breast, she tells you harshly "sleep now" with that same mother-in-waiting tenderness of all African women everywhere - the sound of it almost reaches the shoreline of your dream. Lying there for hours in each other's arms, having found the sweetest most delicious thing in life together, stranded within one another like lambs curled up beneath the sheets of time and, later, still warm with it, you walk out through the cold subterranean dust, the midnight streets alone, passing the neon cafes blurred conversations of all the world's night-weary heaven-going street-dwelling beat-up old desolate angels of time. And the air in old al-Qahirah so bitter and strange you feel it could be any city anywhere in the world, littered with a million husks of lovelorn lovesick love-bedraggled flesh; dreaming of handshakes and riches and the taste of tomorrow's unleavened dust; dreaming of papers and appointments and this tiresome Fellahin sorrow that all of mankind is shuffling through vaulted in this old brown earth alone. III. Yet you know that it's not all wasted – that, like the earth itself, we have our seasons, our rhythms, that we are afforded the chance of reprieve, hope, human endeavour, call it what you will. But after living in Cairo for 40 days and 40 nights, desolation is all Abraham saw, nothing that does not speak with the same empty voice of bitter dust and defaced firmament. So you become indifferent. You walk close by to life, and at the same time elsewhere. Your heart shies from the sorrow. You remember your thrownness. Pointless tears knot your throat. Moonlight frays your corduroy shoulders. You see misery in every ruined face, in every desperate word, on every fecund corner of this living ruin - it's there plain to see, in the way people look, sentencing you with a single gaze. It's all the same: a loaf of bread is a grain of sand: old Al-Qahirah, where there is only the sound of sorrow when people appear to be making love: hungry ghosts whose ex-static cries are the cries of sorrow itself - it never ends. The wind carries the sound of it out towards Jerusalem. And sometimes it’s as though everything else is just a veil for what that sound means. 2018 IV. Wringing their hands like flies in the market, rows replace reason, life one long negotiation, a series of power games on the streets in the marketplace bartering exhorting shaking hands, disguised for a few moments by the opening gambit of pious mumblings, then it all starts up again: the endless clamour of negotiating confrontation explaining imploring, everything treated with suspicion and mistrust, as it should be… dark eyes weary from years of consternation, pleading gestures of anger, crazed heavy eyes, imploring threats, it never stops no pause for breath, time, acceptance. Despite placing such a high value on civil order, it is also their downfall: unable as a society to separate tradition from superstition, culture from obsolete behaviours, antiques from ciphers. It is impossible, entirely pointless, to try and engage such a person in conversation about religion or culture or anything else, as they are unwilling to listen, unable to process new ideas, and above all obstinately uninterested in change. 2021 Alfredo doesn't wish you good morning. You hear his voice in the dark: "traer la carretilla" "-bring the wheelbarrow". The cock is crowing and the church bells ring six times.
I'm out sweating within ten minutes and we keep going - me mixing the cement, Alfredo laying the bricks and pipes - until lunch time, then again until sunset. Alfredo says it takes 200 batches until you get the mix just right, but I feel like after thirty I could probably, in fact sometimes do, mix cement in my sleep. My lower back is strong as an iron rod. I wish I'd been taught all this at school. Common sense you can't teach, though, so sometimes Alfredo will walk over and knock something loose with one blow I'd been scratching away at for twenty minutes. We don't speak while we work. Rarely after. All I hear is the work, the occasional thump of lemons falling from the tree and Alfredo calling out "dame mescla" "- give me cement". Once he advised me to buy a mirror so I could comb my hair. "But I can't really brush my thick hair," I told him "it's much too," "…ridiculous" he interjected. I laughed, but it wasn't a joke. Alfredo doesn't tell jokes. He's a simple kind of man who shouts instead of talking. He has an army crewcut done by his wife, a chipped front tooth and calls me his peon, which suits me just fine. His eyes lit up one afternoon when I told him I'd been to Colombia: "Are they really like this...?" he asked, gesturing with his hands. It was the first time I'd seen him smile - it took him quite a while to stop. And, yes, to see it just one more time, that dark smile from a Samaria’s bright eyes, I swear I’d rip out my heart and hold it above a flame. By the time the sun goes down I'm so drained that, after two beers, I'm more or less gone. A cool breeze rolls in down over the hills and sitting in the plaza the old men play cards and dominos and talk about whose cousin that is walking by and whose father is in the hospital and what their daughter-in-law's making for dinner tomorrow and who and what and did and will. The old ladies bring me tomatoes and oranges and inspect my house. By evening everyone in the plaza's asking me where I got the stove, the bedsheets. They struggle to walk upright, some of the old ladies, but wash their clothes in the old stone lavados five times faster than I can. I feel at home here in the valley. Surrounded by the hills and honest people, working hard myself. I'd like to write a poem about the workers, rising earlier than monks; how they take themselves less seriously and drink Gran Duque for breakfast and sweat it out in the fields later; and how this is the real work, the real way to integrate body and mind; I'd like to know the history of the valley and write about how the bread arrives at the table, to put the the gravel-sound of the spade on paper, and the pointlessness of doing anything other than living it. |
AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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