Friday, September 23, 2011
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 310
Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenant's garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 219
They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 178-182
A couple of men were determined to talk physics with him. One of them was well mannered, and Shevek managed to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbearing, and no escape was possible from him; but irritation, Shevek found, made it much easier to talk. The man knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of money. "As I see it," he informed Shevek, "you Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes."
"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls 'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."
"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.
"Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers."
"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!" he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
"But we don't experience the universe only successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?" He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone 'Mr.'
"What's that got to do with it?"
"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return."
"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly. "Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe."
"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?"
There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.
"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time--never of the circle of time."
"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. "Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly--an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises."
"You can't assert two contradictory statements about the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of his superior knowledge. "In other words, one of these 'aspects' is real, the other's simply an illusion."
"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.
"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood."
"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'" Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it."
"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book--that everything really all exists now--then couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"
"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?"
"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior."
"Why not?" said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there mortality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."
"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it. There's no choice, no freedom of action left."
"That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture--you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."
"How--how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . ."
"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Dearri.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.
"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls 'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."
"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.
"Well, we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers."
"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life. Unless it means we can build a time machine!" he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.
"But we don't experience the universe only successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?" He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone 'Mr.'
"What's that got to do with it?"
"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return."
"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly. "Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe."
"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?"
There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.
"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time--never of the circle of time."
"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. "Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly--an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises."
"You can't assert two contradictory statements about the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of his superior knowledge. "In other words, one of these 'aspects' is real, the other's simply an illusion."
"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.
"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to know.
"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty. . . . Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore. . . . If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood."
"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'" Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn't it."
"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book--that everything really all exists now--then couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"
"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?"
"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior."
"Why not?" said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there mortality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."
"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it. There's no choice, no freedom of action left."
"That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture--you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."
"How--how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. . . ."
"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Dearri.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 153-154
When the Moon was in the sky one could make out the coastlines of its continents clearly, under the dazzling while whorls of its clouds.
"Why does it look so beautiful?" Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out... "When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here . . . when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be so happy? I can't look at that radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can't."
Their naked arms and breasts were moonlit. The fine, faint down on Takver's face made a blurring aureole over her features; her hair and the shadows were black. Shevek touched her silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light.
"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon--I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"
"Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!"
"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light--"
"Why does it look so beautiful?" Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out... "When we know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people--when we know they're all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here . . . when we know all that, why does it still look so happy--as if life there must be so happy? I can't look at that radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can't."
Their naked arms and breasts were moonlit. The fine, faint down on Takver's face made a blurring aureole over her features; her hair and the shadows were black. Shevek touched her silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light.
"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."
"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon--I don't want it! But I'm not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, 'O lovely!' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."
"It's nothing to do with eternity," said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, you'll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"
"Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!"
"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light--"
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 106-107
[A]t his request Pae had taken him to Saemtenevia Prospect, the elegant retail street of Nio Esseia, to be fitted by a tailor and a shoemaker.
The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting--all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.
And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed pages 105-106
He must not dismiss as ridiculous what was, after all, of tremendous importance here. He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to a deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed page 52
He went to the windows of the big room and stood looking out. The room was high. He was startled at first and drew back, unused to being in a building of more than one storey. It was like looking down from a dirigible; one felt detached from the ground, dominant, uninvolved.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus pages 377-378
Soullessness! I well know this is at bottom what they mean who apply the word "barbaric" to Adrian's creation. Have they ever, even if only with the reading eye, heard certain lyrical parts--or may I only say moments--of the Apocalypse: song passages accompanied by a chamber orchestra, which could bring tears to the eyes of a man more callous than I am, since they are like a fervid prayer for a soul. I shall be forgiven for an argument more or less into the blue; but to call soullessness the yearning for a soul--the yearning of the little sea-maid--that is what I would characterize as barbarism, as inhumanity!
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 357
In fact there is an apocalyptic tradition which hands down to these ecstatics visions and experiences to a certain extent already framed, however odd it may seem, psychologically, that a raving man should rave in the same pattern as another who came before him: that one is ecstatic not independently, so to speak, but by rote.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 352
Ah, I write badly! My eagerness to say everything at once makes my sentences run over, hurries them away from the thought they began by intending to express, and makes them seem to rush on and lose it from sight. I shall do well to take the reproof from the reader's mouth.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus pages 270-271
My general information permitted me to associate a concept, however unprecise, with the words "light-year." It was, of course, a spatial concept and the word meant the span that light puts behind it in the course of a whole earth-year, at a speed peculiar to it, of which I had a vague idea but Adrian had in his head the exact figure of 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year amounted to a round and net figure of six trillion miles, and the eccentricity of our solar system amounted to thirty thousand times as much, while the whole diameter of the galactic hollow ball came to two hundred thousand light-years.
No, it was not immeasurable, but it was in this way that it was to be measured. What is one to say to such an assault upon the human understanding? I confess to being so made that nothing but a resigned if also somewhat contemptuous shoulder-shrug remains to me in face of such ungraspable, such stunning statistics. Enthusiasm for size, being overwhelmed by size--that is no doubt a mental pleasure; but it is only possible in connections which a human being can grasp. The Pyramids are large, Mont Blanc and the inside of the dome of St. Peter's are large, unless one prefer to reserve this attribute of largeness to the mental and moral world, the nobility of the heart and of thought. The data of the cosmic creation are nothing but a deafening bombardment of our intelligence with figures furnished with a comet's tail of a couple of dozen ciphers, and comporting themselves as though they still had something, anything, to do with measurement and understanding. There is in all this monstrousness nothing that could appeal to the likes of me as goodness, beauty, greatness; and I shall never understand the glory-to-God mental attitude which certain temperaments assume when they contemplate the "works of God," meaning by the phrase the physics of the universe. And is a construction to be hailed as "the works of God" when one may just as reasonably say: "Well, what then?" instead of "Glory to the Lord"? The first rather than the second seems to me the right answer to two dozen ciphers after a one or even after a seven, which really adds nothing to it; and I can see no sort of reason to fall in the dust and adore the fifth power of a million.
No, it was not immeasurable, but it was in this way that it was to be measured. What is one to say to such an assault upon the human understanding? I confess to being so made that nothing but a resigned if also somewhat contemptuous shoulder-shrug remains to me in face of such ungraspable, such stunning statistics. Enthusiasm for size, being overwhelmed by size--that is no doubt a mental pleasure; but it is only possible in connections which a human being can grasp. The Pyramids are large, Mont Blanc and the inside of the dome of St. Peter's are large, unless one prefer to reserve this attribute of largeness to the mental and moral world, the nobility of the heart and of thought. The data of the cosmic creation are nothing but a deafening bombardment of our intelligence with figures furnished with a comet's tail of a couple of dozen ciphers, and comporting themselves as though they still had something, anything, to do with measurement and understanding. There is in all this monstrousness nothing that could appeal to the likes of me as goodness, beauty, greatness; and I shall never understand the glory-to-God mental attitude which certain temperaments assume when they contemplate the "works of God," meaning by the phrase the physics of the universe. And is a construction to be hailed as "the works of God" when one may just as reasonably say: "Well, what then?" instead of "Glory to the Lord"? The first rather than the second seems to me the right answer to two dozen ciphers after a one or even after a seven, which really adds nothing to it; and I can see no sort of reason to fall in the dust and adore the fifth power of a million.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus pages 193-194
"You want to put me on my honour as a humanist," said I. "Human reason! And besides, excuse me; 'constellation' is your every other word. But surely it belongs more to astrology. The rationalism you call for has a good deal of superstition about it--of belief in the incomprehensibly and vaguely dæmonic, the kind of thing we have in games of chance, fortune-telling with cards, and shaking dice. Contrary to what you say, your system seems to me more calculated to dissolve human reason in magic."
He carried his closed hand to his brow.
"Reason and magic," said he, "may meet and become one in that which one calls wisdom, initiation; in belief in the stars, in numbers. . . ."
He carried his closed hand to his brow.
"Reason and magic," said he, "may meet and become one in that which one calls wisdom, initiation; in belief in the stars, in numbers. . . ."
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 180
In a work there is much seeming and sham, one could go further and say that as "a work" it is seeming in and for itself. Its ambition is to make one believe that it is not made, but born, like Pallas Athene in full fig and embossed armour from Jupiter's head. But that is a delusion. Never did a work come like that. It is work: art-work for appearance's sake--and now the question is whether at the present stage of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stands in any legitimate relation to the complete insecurity, problematic conditions, and lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not become a lie.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 83
What is freedom? Only the neutral is free. The characteristic is never free, it is stamped, determined, bound.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus page 36
This was a practical, rational modern town. --Yet no, it was not modern, it was old; and age is past as presentness, a past merely overlaid with presentness.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 223-224
There is still another reason why feminists must insist on the centrality of the change in the sexual division of labour. Our analysis of the socialist countries has shown that the maintenance, or the creation, of the bourgeois, patriarchal, sexual division of labour and of the nuclear family is the apparently insignificant gate through which reactionary forces can again find entry into a society which tried to free itself from the clutches of imperialism and capitalism. As long as the sexual division of labour is not changed within the context of an alternative economy, capitalism will not be abolished. For the time being, however, feminists in the underdeveloped and the overdeveloped societies do well to keep their scepticism and critical sense. They must insist, again and again, that there will be no liberation for women unless there is also an end to the exploitation of nature and other peoples. On the other hand, they must also insist that there will be no true national liberation unless there is women's liberation and an end to the destruction of nature, or that there cannot be a true ecological society without a change in the sexual and international division of labour.
It is precisely by putting one of these contradictions into the limelight and by pushing the others into the darkness that capitalist patriarchy has been able to build up and maintain its dominance.
It is precisely by putting one of these contradictions into the limelight and by pushing the others into the darkness that capitalist patriarchy has been able to build up and maintain its dominance.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 222-223
A change in the sexual division of labour would have the same effect on the level of the individuals which the change in the international division of labour would have on the level of whole regions or nations. A political decision in the overdeveloped countries, to de-link their economies from the exploitative world-market system and to establish self-sufficiency in the main areas, will pave the way for autarkic economic development in the underdeveloped countries. Similarly, a conscious decision on the part of the 'overdeveloped' men to forego building up their ego and identity on the exploitation and violent subordination of women, and to accept their share of the unpaid work for the creation and preservation of life will make it easier for women to establish autonomy over their lives and bodies and to come to a new definition of what woman's identity is.
These processes of liberation are interrelated. It is not possible for women in our societies to break out of the cages of patriarchal relations, unless the men begin a movement in the same direction. A men's movement against patriarchy should not be motivated by benevolent paternalism, but by the desire to restore to themselves a sense of human dignity and respect. How can men respect themselves if they have no respect for women? In the same way, the overdeveloped peoples have to start rejecting and transcending the economic paradigm of ever-increasing commodity production and consumption as a model of progress for the under-developed economies.
These processes of liberation are interrelated. It is not possible for women in our societies to break out of the cages of patriarchal relations, unless the men begin a movement in the same direction. A men's movement against patriarchy should not be motivated by benevolent paternalism, but by the desire to restore to themselves a sense of human dignity and respect. How can men respect themselves if they have no respect for women? In the same way, the overdeveloped peoples have to start rejecting and transcending the economic paradigm of ever-increasing commodity production and consumption as a model of progress for the under-developed economies.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 221-222
A feminist conception of an alternative economy will include all that has previously been said about autarky and decentralization. But it will place the transformation of the existing sexual division of labour (based on the breadwinner-housewife model) at the centre of the whole restructuring process. This is not mere narcissistic self-indulgence of women, but the result of our historical research as well as our analysis of the functioning of capitalist patriarchy. Feminists do not start with the external ecology, economy and politics, but with the social ecology, the centre of which is the relation between men and women. Autonomy over our bodies and lives is, therefore, the first and most fundamental demand of the international feminist movement. Any search for ecological, economic and political autarky must start with the respect for the autonomy of women's bodies, their productive capacity to create new life, their productive capacity to maintain life through work, their sexuality. A change in the existing sexual division of labour would imply first and foremost that the violence that characterizes capitalist-patriarchal man-woman relations worldwide will be abolished not by women, but by men. Men have to refuse to define themselves any longer as Man-the-Hunter. Men have to start movements against violence against women if they want to preserve the essence of their own humanity.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 216-219
Towards a feminist concept of labour
It is obvious...that the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy--the realm of freedom--can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter.
1. If we take as our model of a 'worker' not the white male industrial wage-worker..., but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead. Even when children turn out to be a disappointment for the mother, when they eventually leave her or feel contempt for her--as in fact many do in our society--the pain she suffers at all this is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis-à-vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes.
The same unity of work as a burden and work as enjoyment can be found among peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market. The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only 'a curse'. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everyone--mother, children, father--and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction... Anyone who has had an opportunity to observe the work-process of people involved in non-market oriented subsistence production will have found this interplay of work as necessity and burden, and work as a basic source of enjoyment and self-expression.
The same is true for the work of the artisan or in handicrafts production, as long as this work is not yet fully subsumed under the compulsions of the market.
The main characteristics of the work-processes described above is that they are all connected with the direct production of life or of use values. A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and of wealth..., of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work.
2. ...[A] feminist concept of labour cannot be based on the Marxist (and capitalist) economics of time. The shortening of the daily labour time or of the labour time within a life span cannot be a method for the realization of a feminist utopia. Women have by now realized that the reduction of time spent in commodity production does not lead to more freedom for women, but rather to more housework, more non-wage work in household production, more relationship or emotional work, more consumption work. The vision of a society in which almost all time is leisure time and labour time is reduced to a minimum is for women in many respects a vision of horror, not only because housework and non-wage work have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines, but also because it will be women who have to restore to the then idle men a sense of reality, meaning and life.
A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organization of time prevail, the length of the working-day is no longer very relevant. Thus, a long working-day and even a lifetime full of work, will not then be felt as a curse but as a source of human fulfilment and happiness.
Such a new concept of time cannot, of course, be brought about unless the existing sexual division of labour is abolished. Such a change, however, will not come, as some women expect, by a reduction of the working-day or week through rationalization and automation. The men whose weekly or daily or life labour time has already been shortened through modern technology do not share more of the housework, but rather engage in more drinking, more TV-watching, or in other male leisure time activities... The whole reduction of the work-day since the times of Marx and Engels has nowhere resulted in a change in the sexual division of labour, has not resulted in men feeling more responsible for housework, children, or the production of life.
3. The third element which has to be stressed in a feminist concept of labour is the maintenance of work as a direct and sensual interaction with nature, with organic matter and living organisms. In the Marxist concept of labour, this sensual, bodily interaction with nature--human nature as well as external nature--is largely eliminated because more and more machines are inserted between the human body and nature. These machines are, of course, supposed to give man dominance and power over 'wild' 'blind' nature, but at the same time they reduce his own sensuality. With the elimination of labour as necessity and burden, the potential of the human body for enjoyment, for sensuality and for erotic and sexual satisfaction, is also eliminated. As our body will ever be the base for our enjoyment and happiness, the destruction of sensuality, resulting from the interaction with machines rather than with living organisms, will only result in a pathological search for an idealized 'nature'. In a desperate effort to restore this lost sensuality to the (male) body, the female body is mystified as both 'pure or base nature' and as the goal of fulfilment of all desires...
4. Direct and sensual interaction with nature in the work process is not yet sufficient, however. This could also be realized through some sport or hobby. And, indeed, the architects of modern society are visualizing an increase of such physical activities as a kind of therapy for people who have been made redundant as workers through automation. But how long will hobbies and sports provide a sense of purpose and meaning to people, even if their daily requirements are provided for by the welfare state?
A feminist concept of labour has to maintain that work retains its sense of purpose, its character of being useful and necessary for the people who do it and those around them. This also means that the products of this labour are useful and necessary, and not just some luxuries or superfluous trash as are most of the handicrafts made today by women in 'income-generating activities' in Third World countries.
5. This sense of usefulness, necessity and purpose with regard to work and its products, however, can only be restored as the division and the distance between production and consumption are gradually abolished. Today, the division and alienation are, as we have seen, global. Third World women produce what they do not know, and First World women consume what they do not know.
Within a feminist perspective, production of life is the main goal of human activity. This necessitates that the processes of production of necessary things and processes of consumption are again brought together. Because only by consuming the things which we produce can we judge whether they are useful, meaningful and wholesome, whether they are necessary or superfluous. And only by producing what we consume can we know how much time is really necessary for the things we want to consume, what skills are necessary, what knowledge is necessary and what technology is necessary.
The abolition of the wide division between production and consumption, does not mean, of course, that every individual, or even every small community, must produce all they need and have to find everything in their ecological surroundings. But it does imply that the production of life is based on a certain autarkic relation of a certain community of people to a specific region, the size of which has to be determined on the basis of the principles spelt out at the beginning of this section. Goods and services imported into such a region should be the result of non-exploitative relations to nature, women and other peoples. The tendential bringing together of production and consumption will drastically reduce the possibilities for this exploitation, and largely increase the potential for resistance to economic and political blackmail and coercion.
It is obvious...that the development of a feminist concept of labour has to begin with a rejection of the distinction between socially necessary labour and leisure, and the Marxist view that self-realization, human happiness, freedom, autonomy--the realm of freedom--can be achieved only outside the sphere of necessity and of necessary labour, and by a reduction (or abolition) of the latter.
1. If we take as our model of a 'worker' not the white male industrial wage-worker..., but a mother, we can immediately see that her work does not fit into the Marxian concept. For her, work is always both: a burden as well as a source of enjoyment, self-fulfilment, and happiness. Children may give her a lot of work and trouble, but this work is never totally alienated or dead. Even when children turn out to be a disappointment for the mother, when they eventually leave her or feel contempt for her--as in fact many do in our society--the pain she suffers at all this is still more human than the cold indifference of the industrial worker or engineer vis-à-vis his products, the commodities he produces and consumes.
The same unity of work as a burden and work as enjoyment can be found among peasants whose production is not yet totally subsumed under commodity production and the compulsions of the market. The peasants who have to work from dawn to dusk during the harvesting season, for instance, feel the burden of work more than anybody else in their bodies and in their muscles. But in spite of the hardship of this work, it is never only 'a curse'. I remember the times of haymaking or harvesting on our small subsistence farm in my childhood as times of extreme labour intensity for everyone--mother, children, father--and as times of the greatest excitement, enjoyment, social interaction... Anyone who has had an opportunity to observe the work-process of people involved in non-market oriented subsistence production will have found this interplay of work as necessity and burden, and work as a basic source of enjoyment and self-expression.
The same is true for the work of the artisan or in handicrafts production, as long as this work is not yet fully subsumed under the compulsions of the market.
The main characteristics of the work-processes described above is that they are all connected with the direct production of life or of use values. A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and of wealth..., of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work.
2. ...[A] feminist concept of labour cannot be based on the Marxist (and capitalist) economics of time. The shortening of the daily labour time or of the labour time within a life span cannot be a method for the realization of a feminist utopia. Women have by now realized that the reduction of time spent in commodity production does not lead to more freedom for women, but rather to more housework, more non-wage work in household production, more relationship or emotional work, more consumption work. The vision of a society in which almost all time is leisure time and labour time is reduced to a minimum is for women in many respects a vision of horror, not only because housework and non-wage work have never been included in the labour that is supposed to be reduced by machines, but also because it will be women who have to restore to the then idle men a sense of reality, meaning and life.
A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest and enjoyment are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organization of time prevail, the length of the working-day is no longer very relevant. Thus, a long working-day and even a lifetime full of work, will not then be felt as a curse but as a source of human fulfilment and happiness.
Such a new concept of time cannot, of course, be brought about unless the existing sexual division of labour is abolished. Such a change, however, will not come, as some women expect, by a reduction of the working-day or week through rationalization and automation. The men whose weekly or daily or life labour time has already been shortened through modern technology do not share more of the housework, but rather engage in more drinking, more TV-watching, or in other male leisure time activities... The whole reduction of the work-day since the times of Marx and Engels has nowhere resulted in a change in the sexual division of labour, has not resulted in men feeling more responsible for housework, children, or the production of life.
3. The third element which has to be stressed in a feminist concept of labour is the maintenance of work as a direct and sensual interaction with nature, with organic matter and living organisms. In the Marxist concept of labour, this sensual, bodily interaction with nature--human nature as well as external nature--is largely eliminated because more and more machines are inserted between the human body and nature. These machines are, of course, supposed to give man dominance and power over 'wild' 'blind' nature, but at the same time they reduce his own sensuality. With the elimination of labour as necessity and burden, the potential of the human body for enjoyment, for sensuality and for erotic and sexual satisfaction, is also eliminated. As our body will ever be the base for our enjoyment and happiness, the destruction of sensuality, resulting from the interaction with machines rather than with living organisms, will only result in a pathological search for an idealized 'nature'. In a desperate effort to restore this lost sensuality to the (male) body, the female body is mystified as both 'pure or base nature' and as the goal of fulfilment of all desires...
4. Direct and sensual interaction with nature in the work process is not yet sufficient, however. This could also be realized through some sport or hobby. And, indeed, the architects of modern society are visualizing an increase of such physical activities as a kind of therapy for people who have been made redundant as workers through automation. But how long will hobbies and sports provide a sense of purpose and meaning to people, even if their daily requirements are provided for by the welfare state?
A feminist concept of labour has to maintain that work retains its sense of purpose, its character of being useful and necessary for the people who do it and those around them. This also means that the products of this labour are useful and necessary, and not just some luxuries or superfluous trash as are most of the handicrafts made today by women in 'income-generating activities' in Third World countries.
5. This sense of usefulness, necessity and purpose with regard to work and its products, however, can only be restored as the division and the distance between production and consumption are gradually abolished. Today, the division and alienation are, as we have seen, global. Third World women produce what they do not know, and First World women consume what they do not know.
Within a feminist perspective, production of life is the main goal of human activity. This necessitates that the processes of production of necessary things and processes of consumption are again brought together. Because only by consuming the things which we produce can we judge whether they are useful, meaningful and wholesome, whether they are necessary or superfluous. And only by producing what we consume can we know how much time is really necessary for the things we want to consume, what skills are necessary, what knowledge is necessary and what technology is necessary.
The abolition of the wide division between production and consumption, does not mean, of course, that every individual, or even every small community, must produce all they need and have to find everything in their ecological surroundings. But it does imply that the production of life is based on a certain autarkic relation of a certain community of people to a specific region, the size of which has to be determined on the basis of the principles spelt out at the beginning of this section. Goods and services imported into such a region should be the result of non-exploitative relations to nature, women and other peoples. The tendential bringing together of production and consumption will drastically reduce the possibilities for this exploitation, and largely increase the potential for resistance to economic and political blackmail and coercion.
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 211-212
[A] feminist perspective has to start with some basic principles, which can guide political action at all levels. The following seem to me the most basic:
- Rejection and abolition of the principle of colonizing dualistic divisions (between men and women, different peoples and classes, man and nature, spirit and matter) based on exploitation for the sake of ever-expanding commodity production and capital accumulation.
- This implies the creation of non-exploitative, non-hierarchical, reciprocal relationships between parts of our body; people and nature; women and men; different sections and classes of one society; different peoples.
- A necessary consequence of non-exploitative relations with ourselves, nature, other human beings and other peoples or nations will be the regaining of autonomy over our bodies and our lives. This autonomy means, first and foremost, that we cannot be blackmailed, or forced to do things which are against human dignity in exchange for the means of our subsistence or our life. Autonomy in this sense should not be understood individualistically and idealistically--as it often is by feminists--because no single woman in our atomized society is able to preserve her autonomy. Indeed, it is the antithesis of autonomy if it is understood in this narrow egotistic sense. Because the enslavement of the consumers under capitalist conditions of generalized commodity production is brought about precisely by the illusion that each individual can buy her or his independence from other human beings and social relations by the purchase of commodities.
Autonomy understood as freedom from coercion and blackmail regarding our lives and bodies, can be brought about only by collective effort in a decentralized, non-hierarchical way. - A rejection of the idea of infinite progress and acceptance of the idea that our human universe is finite, our body is finite, the earth is finite.
- The aim of all work and human endeavour is not a never-ending expansion of wealth and commodities, but human happiness (as the early socialists had seen it), or the production of life itself.
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