extremophile

Holy Emerson! “The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.”

And a friend of mine’s apt critical response: “…as though present/soul must not be burdened and enriched by the sufferings of the past. or maybe i’ve got it all wrong.”

“We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those bygone, foreign states.  The same would be true of this entire journal if it were to be the notation of what I was.  I shall therefore make clear that it is mean to indicate what I am today, ass I write it.  It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life.  It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa.  Let the reader therefore understand that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.”  

— Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal

“True understanding does not tire of interminable dialogue and ‘vicious circles’ because it trusts that imagination will eventually catch at least a glimpse of the always frightening light of truth.”

— Hannah Arendt, “Understanding and Politics,” Partisan Review 20 (July-August, 1953), 392.

The economic roots of the contemporary obsessions with deficit reduction:

 

In his book, Prof Rajan points to domestic political stresses within the US. Related stresses are emerging in western Europe. I think of it as the end of “the deal”. What was that deal? It was the post-second-world-war settlement: in the US, the deal centred on full employment and high individual consumption. In Europe, it centred on state-provided welfare.

In the US, soaring inequality and stagnant real incomes have long threatened this deal. Thus, Prof Rajan notes that “of every dollar of real income growth that was generated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 per cent of households”. This is surely stunning.

“The political response to rising inequality … was to expand lending to households, especially low-income ones.” This led to the financial breakdown. As Prof Rajan notes: “[the financial sector’s] failings in the recent crisis include distorted incentives, hubris, envy, misplaced faith and herd behaviour. But the government helped make those risks look more attractive than they should have been and kept the market from exercising discipline.”

The era of easy credit, much of it backed by housing, is now over (see chart). Meanwhile, in all western countries, the state supports the welfare of the individual. But the fiscal consequences of this crisis – a huge rise in deficits – will interact with pressures from ageing, to make fiscal stringency the theme of policy for decades. The long bear market in shares and prospects for a “jobless recovery”add further to these woes.

— From Martin Wolf, “Three Years and New Fault Lines” (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/39c67712-8eb1-11df-8a67-00144feab49a.html)

So my brother is getting married and he wanted me to read something in the ceremony. I couldn’t find anything that I liked, so I tried to write my own, not expecting anything to come of it. Turns out that my bother liked what I wrote and wants me to read it. But I want to see if I can improve it. I’m no poet; haven’t written a poem since college. So I need input. I thought of posting it here to see if anyone who might read it would have some…constructive criticism. So tell me what you think…but be gentle…I do have to read this in one form or another… I’m locked in. Are there too many cliches here? Does it go on too long? Are some of the images contradictory? Is the underlying logic unclear?

You Said, It’s Okay to be Happy

Happiness: that inhabited silence,
that radiance glancing outwards
near the edge of a shadow, touching
upon the consciousness of others,
alienating complexity .

Some don’t prefer it.

That penumbral space,
into which language does not enter,
since nothing one says, explains.
A beach upon which you see,
but don’t hear, the crashing of waves.
Hear instead sound folded into patterns:
a representation—the most beautiful—
of what you behold.

A proposition of harmony, fleetingly experienced—
Some don’t trust it.

Harmony, they say, is a marriage;
Mixed elements don’t always agree;
have no stable connection.
We must return to a world of contrast:
to the pleasures of complexity,
irony,
rock and roll,
Impermanence.

But it’s ok to be happy, you said.
Count the times it has happened;
count many times, on your fingers;
count that eclipse or partial eclipse;
count that time when you felt,
not your body, but your heart
kind of brimming as though magnetized
A rushing tide.

Or that time you looked through the window,
as the trees batted against each other in the wind,
and heard music.
Or that time, remember? on the bus?
speeding through the lush New England summer,
when there seemed to be an order.
And when, there was also that:

The feeling of the hand of your beloved,
with whom you had just fought,
resting lightly upon your leg.

Since the invasion of Iraq, previous protections for womens’ rights have been cancelled by conservative religious political coalitions intent on abolishing those protections:

In summer 2003, L. Paul Bremer, the top administrator of the US occupation, assembled the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), described by The Washington Post as, “a body that will cooperate with [the occupation] and support policies that are generally in line with US interests.”⁴ The members of the IGC were hand–picked by Bremer, who retained final veto over the Council’s decisions. Among those who Bremer appointed were Islamists who openly declared their intent to restrict women’s rights._⁵ These same men are the architects of Iraq’s civil war. One of the first acts of the US–installed IGC was a harbinger of things to come: the Council replaced Iraq’s observance of International Women’s Day on March 8 with a celebration of the birthday of the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed.

Then, on December 29, 2003, the IGC held a quasi–secret vote to replace Iraq’s 1959 family law—among the most progressive in the region. The family law (also referred to as the personal status law) was enacted in 1959 by the left–leaning government of Abd Al Karim Qasim, who was later overthrown by the Ba’athists (with support from the United States). According to Huibin Amee Chew, “Aspects of the progressive family law persisted until the eve of the US invasion, when Iraq still remained exceptional in the region. Divorce cases were to be heard only in civil courts, polygamy was outlawed unless the first wife consented, and women divorcees had an equal right to custody over their children. Women’s income was recognized as independent from their husbands’.”_⁶ The law also restricted child marriage and granted women and men equal shares of inheritance._⁷

Through Resolution 137, IGC planned to replace the 1959 law with arbitrary interpretations ofSharia, or religious law. In January 2004, MADRE warned that, “If upheld, Resolution 137 could give self–appointed religious clerics the authority to deny women the rights to education, employment, freedom of movement and travel, inheritance, and custody of their children. Forced early marriage, polygamy, compulsory religious dress, and wife beating could all be sanctioned under the Resolution.”_⁸ Iraqi women took to the streets in protest of Resolution 137. Facing mounting pressure from US Congress members and women’s organizations, including MADRE, Bremer chose not to ratify the resolution.

Yet, despite the Bush Administration’s rhetoric about liberating Iraq, occupation authorities consistently undermined Iraqi women’s efforts to secure their human and legal rights. During the first year of US occupation, Iraqi women’s organizations appealed directly to Bremer, demanding that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that he headed train and dispatch security guards to help prevent violence against women and that the CPA prosecute crimes against women. These demands were ignored._⁹ Under Bremer, the US refused to honor a series of demands by women’s organizations, including calls to create a women’s ministry; appoint women to the drafting committee of Iraq’s interim constitution; guarantee that 40 percent of US appointees to Iraq’s new government were women; pass laws codifying women’s rights and criminalizing domestic violence; and uphold UN Security Council Resolution 1325, which mandates that women be included at all levels of decision–making in situations of peacemaking and post–war reconstruction.

“MADRE and other women’s organizations around
the world warned that right-wing, religious extremists
would be the greatest beneficiaries of a US invasion.”

Indeed, rather than support progressive and democratically minded Iraqis, including members of the women’s movement, the US threw its weight behind Iraq’s Shiite Islamists, calculating that these forces, long suppressed by Saddam Hussein, would cooperate with the occupation and deliver the stability needed for the US to implement its policies in Iraq.

“Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble.  Shapr edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an ageing planet.  Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without a trace.  Events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one over the other and suddenly crystallize into a sort of edifice which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history….Henceforth, it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds.  Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between [an authentic life] and myself…”

— Claude Levi-Strauss