SynapsesJacques Rousseau teaches critical thinking and ethics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is the founder and director of the Free Society Institute, a non-profit organisation promoting secular humanism and scientific reasoning.
More from Larkin
Talking In Bed
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
by Philip Larkin
Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it saidHe walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
Had some warthog at SB’s house tonight. Some good wine and conversation, and reaffirmation that all the things I want to say to you are worth saying, if only for myself. It’s strange to now know – to understand, to be more accurate – the multiple ways in which one has sabotaged one’s own existence, along with those of others, and to not be able to explore the issues with the relevant person. The astonishment at one’s own blindness is so striking that it’s equally astonishing that one could have been so blind.
Reading Raymond Carver tonight. This is his:
Hummingbird
Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.
Another borrowing from someone who expresses things far better than I’ve ever been able to:
Paul Auster – from the essay “White Spaces”
A man sets out on a journey to a place he has never been before. Another man comes back. A man comes to a place that has no name, that has no landmarks to tell him where he is. Another man decides to come back. A man writes letters from nowhere, from the white space that has opened up in his mind. The letters are never received. The letters are never sent. Another man sets out on a journey in search of the first man. This second man becomes more and more like the first man, until he, too, is swallowed up by the whiteness. A third man sets out on a journey with no hope of ever getting anywhere. He wanders. He continues to wander. For as long as he remains in the realm of the naked eye, he continues to wander.
Despite appearances to the contrary, this is – to me, at least – a rather cheerful sentiment.
by Paul Auster
Not even the sky.
But a memory of sky,
and the blue of the earth
in your lungs.Earth
less earth: to watch
how the sky will enclose you, grow vast
with the words
you leave unsaid – and nothing
will be lost.I am your distress, the seam
in the wall
that opens to the wind
and its stammering, storm
in the plural – this other name
you give your world: exile
in the rooms of home.Dawn folds, fathers
witness,
the aspen and the ash
that fall. I come back to you
through this fire, a remnant
of the season to come,
and will be to you
as dust, as air,
as nothing
that will not haunt you.
In the place before breath
we feel our shadows cross.
Steven Pinker offers a solid overview of the current thinking around consciousness, both from a philosophical and neurological viewpoint. The gap between those two viewpoints has been closing for some time now, and it’s good to see that “idle” speculation has again pointed in a useful direction. Of course, this doesn’t redeem philosophy (in the completely armchair sense) in that critics could always – and probably correctly – assert that for every one good idea, we’ve wasted thousands of person-hours on very bad ones. Which, I suppose, is why at least one of my colleagues will no longer have anything to do with philosophy that’s unconnected with actually poking a stick at something, to see how it responds.
Towards the end of the piece, Pinker mentions a typically perceptive thought from Colin McGinn: even if all the evidence is in, and we begin to understand how simple (in one sense, because it’s clearly not simple at all) we are, we’d probably not be able to believe it, or live with that belief. There may well be a drug that can fix you, and me, whatever our afflictions are, but would we want to take them? Or is this the wrong question, because if we do take them, would we not be glad we had?
He picks his words like he picks his teeth – clumsily, noisily, and with no regard for the comfort of others.
Michael Hofmann – Nights in the Iron Hotel, Faber & Faber 1983
Nights in the Iron Hotel
Our beds are at a hospital distance.
I push them together. Straw matting
on the walls produces a Palm Beach effect:
long drinks made with rum in tropical bars.
The position of mirror and wardrobe
recalls a room I once lived in happily.
Our feelings are shorter and faster now.
You confess a new infidelity. This time,
a trombone player. His tender mercies…
All night, we talk about separating.
The radio wakes us with its muzak.
In a sinister way, you call it lulling.
We are fascinated by our own anaesthesia,
our inability to function. Sex is a luxury,
an export of healthy physical economies.
The TV stays switched on all the time.
Dizzying social realism for the drunks.
A gymnast swings like a hooked fish.
Courtesy of Jerry Fodor. Posted because I’m bored of seeing the previous post at the top of the page…
Once upon a time, a visiting scholar presented a lecture on the topic: ‘How many philosophical positions are there in principle?’ ‘In principle,’ he began, ‘there are exactly 12 philosophical positions.’ A voice called from the audience: ‘Thirteen.’ ‘There are,’ the lecturer repeated, ‘exactly 12 possible philosophical positions; not one less and not one more.’ ‘Thirteen,’ the voice from the audience called again. ‘Very well, then,’ said the lecturer, now perceptibly irked, ‘I shall proceed to enumerate the 12 possible philosophical positions. The first is sometimes called “naive realism”. It is the view according to which things are, by and large, very much the way that they seem to be.’ ‘Oh,’ said the voice from the audience. ‘Fourteen!’