Futuro: Why hasn’t he turned up?

In a stranger’s house I look in a mirror

it hangs over a sideboard     whose sideboard?

a cloth in a sink    ragged featured

that is the face of the stranger I see

who is not who I imagined

*

The Future: here we are but where is it?

The tang of zebra stripes evapourates.

This is a sort of island surrounded by mist.

A befogged candle-lit dinner.  The roses gleam.

And brushing through the air like feathers: the bus.

And a mind shrunk to the margins of a wood.

“The story that’s emerging is there is no story!”

*

And a man who jumped down the stairs when he was ten.

And at dawn the orange bowl and it is full of fruits

that find their echo in how I once shouted at a wall

and it is full of blue apples     the stripes of a zebra fish

are splashed again

with the effect of the moth torn curtains.

Evolution and its loopholes

A mouse that can purr like a cat - is that an item ’nature’ produces?  The alteration of a creature’s genetic make up - if that is shaped by human concerns - that would seem to be a product of the human imagination rather than of ‘genes seeking to reproduce themselves’.   A genetically engineered ‘human’ - exhibiting whatever characteristics one likes - a tiger’s strength, a moth’s resilience, cold blood, and so on - the possibilities seem endless - how is that a product of Nature?  The observer of evolution - the human being - seems not to be part of the process whereby the creature evolves in nature.

Everything points to the homelessness of human beings. 

The Importance of Geography

Two things are important to Pere Ubu, intellectually.

 The cliche; and geography.

 These ideas decide everything else.

Relocating the Argument

It is no good where we are.  Not at all.   The argument needs relocating.  Just a few blades of grass survive, if that.  Sticking out of the cracks between the broken paving. 

Rhetoric: our final homelessness

The Greeks emphased the learning of rhetoric … Its importance for public life is obvious.   That the troops should be pulled out of Iraq is eloquently argued by one party; that they should stay is equally eloquently argued by another.  A bewildering situation.  The question arises if there is, or was, not some other position - prior to its tragedy - some other stance that should have been taken initially in order to forgo the need for this eloquence; so that in the end, what we are listening to, the arguments, these are just laments about spilt milk.  The decisive moment has long since passed.

It reminds me of the argument about God; if he does, if he does not, exist.  Equal quantities of eloquence are expended on both sides in order to ‘try and decide the case’.  One can’t help wondering if the decisive moment doesn’t stand elsewhere, somewhere far different.  Dawkins: “I am arguing from fact …”  But is he?  There is something peculiar about his constant advocacy.  As if his own arguments don’t really satisfy him, as if he doesn’t really feel at home with them, and they just increase his thirst, what they are intended to quench.  We get lost in rhetoric.  Brilliant, dazzling, persuasive - but somehow empty at the same time.  So: the reasonable.

What is Reasonable - ?

Modern human culture stands in constant retreat from the ‘reasonable’.  Each plateaux is overturned by events. 

Each ‘reasonable’ fails.  But that is only taught by force. 

So for example one thing that the ‘reasonable’ overlooked is the environment.  A great castastrophe is upon us, but we see it through the perspective of the ‘reasonable’.   We don’t ‘fit’ the world but it is only reasonable that it should ‘fit’ us.   Neither fits the other.  (”But hasn’t nature somehow taken these kinds of things into account?”)  We have to be taught by force - by catastrophe - that the reasonable isn’t reasonable.

…. “But you can’t say that human beings don’t fit into the world!  Look at how successful they are at living in it!”  It’s true, successful yes, yet we seem about to disappear.   

Details (5)

Hold before your attention the idea that we don’t ‘fit’ the world.  Clear everything else away.  Forget all else.

This, I am saying, is the discovery.  And that it is not a ‘reasonable’ discovery.  It is not reasonable that we don’t fit the world.  This is neither God nor Nature.  It is simply experience.  The grief of human reality, if you will.

 It is precisely this which keeps disappearing from view.

The infinity of life.  Thus, do we unmask infinity.

(It is ‘unmasked’ as the human clay of need.)

We (think we) unmask it by dressing it up in ordinariness, but it disappears - into time and space.  Into the experience of homelessness that our persistent fears invoke.

Details (4)

God didn’t drop the atom bomb; but neither did Nature.

We are surrounded by the unfathomable; but we turn that into a routine.  We change infinity into a tube ticket.  That is the human condition.  We are ignorant that we are ignorant.  Then comes the blow, war, which demonstrates this ignorance by its discovery of absence.  How neither God nor Nature is present.

I am saying that this is the human condition; that this is what we keep confronting in human affairs; that this is the precipitate of human experience; that this is the substance of our history as a species: the slow but persistent repeated discovery that we don’t ‘fit’ anywhere.  That we are not made to fit anywhere somehow.  Each new political order is predicated on the idea that we are but that (natural) hubris is preordained to fail, to discover our smallness, our insignificance, our meaninglessness, again.

What is a human being therefore?

Details (3)

Think of the idea for instance that “Nature arranged things this way” … “Nature arranged it so that …”  “Nature has made sure that, in order to …”  And so on and so forth.  One finds this in Dawkins as much as anywhere else; just as one might find in a religious text the words “God so ordained it that …”

That this collection of words can’t be ‘true’ is as true here as it is for the ‘truth’ that God is looking after us.  (Never mind if he exists or not for a moment.)   Unless you want to extend it - as it should be extendable - into situations like the First World War.  “Nature so ordained it that the industrial slaughter of human beings would take place over a reasonable period of five years …”  Nature suddenly goes misssing.

What was Nature doing in the Somme?

To get round all this illogic we invoke our routines.  “That is just a manner of speaking.”   ”Nature isn’t moral!” Etc.

We overlook how nature isn’t at work at all.  Nothing is.

Details (2)

And then something comes along that destroys these routines.  You get in a fight on the tube.  Someone punches you.  Flat, hard on your knees, scuffed, while tides of people push past you and gaze down indifferent, remote, other.  The world takes on a cold new alien cast.  How suddenly empty it is!   The depth of that shock!  Empty!  You walk around for a breath of air, and it is as if you have never seen it before, this heartless, mercantilist and self-centred place. You have never really actually been in these ‘familiar’ circumstances before, not in full awareness, not in reality.  You have never up to now realised how blank things are; how invisible and insignificant life is; actually.  How thin the distinction between you and the street beggar, diffidently holding out his hand.  A fleck in this greater scene in which existence could just as easily be a non-existence - and counts for nothing.   You no longer fit in.