There's Never Been A Better Time To Be An Anarchist

The Honest Humanist

"Brooding on God, I may become a man."

~Theodore Roethke, "The Marrow."

Old Love Poem

The hay
smelt of how
the sky loved the earth.
You were the pain in my ribs
aching
from the carts unloaded.

The dead
were filling a doorway
with the view beyond.
You were the house
the candle under the plum tree
and my eternity.

~ John Berger, Lilac and Flag.

Once In Europa

I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God. The rest are pigshit.

~ John Berger, Once In Europa, p. 149.

In A Dark Time

Inauguration Day, 2017

They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They’ve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they’re restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row...

The American Imperial Religion: Disneyanity

From Philosophy To Fellahi

The remarkable continuity of peasant experience and the peasant view of the world acquires, as it is threatened with extinction, an unprecedented and unexpected urgency. It is not only the future of peasants which is now involved in this continuity. The forces which in most parts of the world are today eliminating or destroying the peasantry represent the contradiction of most of the hopes once contained in the principle of historical progress. Productivity is not reducing scarcity. The dissemination of knowledge is not leading unequivocally to greater democracy. The advent of leisure--in the industrialized societies--has not brought personal fulfillment but greater mass manipulation. The economic and military unification of the world has not brought peace but genocide. The peasant suspicion of "progress," as it has finally been imposed by the global history of corporate capitalism and by the power of this history even over those seeking an alternative to it, is not altogether misplaced or groundless.

If one looks at the likely future course of world history, envisaging either the further extension and consolidation of corporate capitalism in all its brutalism, or a prolonged, uneven struggle waged against it, a struggle whose victory is not certain, the peasant experience of survival may well be better adapted to this long and harsh perspective than the continually reformed, disappointed, impatient progressive hope of an ultimate victory.

~ John Berger, Pig Earth, xxvi.



"And do they not see that God gives sustenance to those whom He will and measures [it out]? Truly, therein are signs for people with faith! So [you should also] give to one near to you his due, and to the poor and those wandering on the way; that is best for those who yearn for God's face--and they are truly the muflihun." Qur'an 30: 37-38.

Reading & Writing

"Two sides of the same cognitive coin, reading and writing are both processes of self-invention and discovery."

~ Malamati Renegado

Goat Earth

Re-reading John Berger's Pig Earth after 30 years or so, I wonder now how I thought, when I first read it, that the book over-romanticized peasant life. Perhaps I was too citified back then to let myself be charmed by something so elemental as mere survival.

I do love the great cities with their own peculiar logic and madness, but the time I’ve spent in the Anatolian countryside has enabled me to see that you cannot have one without the other. Istanbul’s magnificence is due, in part, to its proximity to Anatolia's “goat earth.”

The Yam Vendor

When philosophy matures as a truly dialectical materialism (or transgressive transcendentalism--two ways of looking at a blackbird), it emerges as a meta-philosophy or "lived poetry" here termed "Mazeppism" or manhaj al-fellahi.

Politics loses it luster--or, rather, becomes limited to the "micro-politics" of the everyday.



Life under empire requires dilatory tactics; "sainthood" belongs to those who prove too slow, deliberative, or unambitious to be of any use when it comes to advancing the Imperial agenda. To be "left behind" under such circumstances is a badge of honor. The saint is a fly in the ointment, a wrench in the works. The savoir-faire of the fellahin seasons all ideological commitments. Irony becomes the predominant mode of public expression.

Silence, exile, cunning, as Joyce wrote. Weapons of the weak.



The yam vendor.

The Gadfly

Malamati Renegado sharpens his pen.

Taboo And Stigma

The dervish launches her holy protest against taboo and stigma; such forms of social control turn honest pilgrims into Renegadoes.

Humanitas

Into their labors...

John Berger

Beauty Is A Pledge

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

~ George Santayana

The Axial Impulse

Five Fast Facts about the Age it spawned.



Absent an Axial impulse--inculcated in those who have been steeped in the literatures of that Age--what passes for other-centered "vision" is typically nothing more than self-aggrandizing ambition. Such is the present Zeitgeist.

The Hanific Alternative

Life under Empire encourages various forms of violence: bigotry, coercion, arrogance, cowardice, and greed. Therefore, in order to fully claim the Abrahamic heritage anew, let us form communities of grace as sites of counter-cultural resistance. There, while chanting litanies of mercy, we shall struggle to produce NOT one-dimensional men and women but rather independent souls comfortable with complexity and difference and dedicated to shared ideals of tolerance, non-violence, humility, courage, and generosity.

Such communities ought not to be monastic outposts, separate and distinct from the Imperial metropoles--for that would only serve to isolate them from the one-dimensional mass so desperately in need of alternative visions. It would also facilitate imperial surveillance and control. In the Age of Cyber-Connectivity, communities of grace can emerge as networks of like-minded individuals and families engaged in sohbet (conversation, communion) whose homes and places of business become "safe houses" for their fellow travelers along the Way.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin!

Hear Robert Pogue Harrison:

"Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must seek out healing or redemptive forces and allow them to grow in us. That is what it means to tend our garden. The pronominal adjective used by Voltaire--notre--points to the world we share in common. This is the world of plurality that takes shape through the power of human action. Notre jardin is never a garden of merely private concerns into which one escapes from the real--it is that plot of soil on the earth, within the self, or amid the social collective, where the cultural, ethical, and civic virtues that save reality from its own worst impulses are cultivated. Those virtues are always ours."

~ R. P. Harrison, Gardens, x.

Life Under Empire

Celebrate the season...



...with the Lord of Misrule.

Citification

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania:





Colorado Springs, Colorado:





Living just enough/Just enough for the city...