Time Magazine on the Big Fix

 You’ve seen Time magazine’s article on ‘The Big Fix’, I suppose, though if you live in google world you'll only have seen just it and very little commentary from left or right.  On qwant.com (French search engine) there’s lots from the conservative blogosphere on the front page.

the big fix

 We were jokingly informed of shenanigans or sportive rascality but this is different.  The extent and depth of it is like a Hollywood scenario, ‘Parallax View’, but more so. (Tag Line: There is no Conspiracy just Twelve People Dead)  To get the Chamber of Commerce on your side talk to them about Anitfa and BLM.  ‘They are not reliable and they get carried away’, capeesh.  In the end that may not be so smart if you remember how the Taliban were used to get rid of the Russians.

Why reveal now but, as the Dubbilin man said?  Marking your territory like Jack Nicholson in ‘Wolf’. (Tag Line: The Animal is Out).  Straois mada (dog’s smirk), irresistable gloat or the feeling that Trump won’t be impeached and is wise to keep off the stand.  If you annoy him enough but, he might utter a tirade.  Maybe and then there’s the final fix.  I hope he’s well protected.

When You have Time.

Let’s call them time stutterers for now. They go forward and can’t find the clarification they seek. The only thing to do then is to go back and examine the starting point of their argument, the ur-thought, what might be called the undifferentiated cognitional continuum or in demotic, the first thought. Such a one is Irad Kimhi
thinking and being
who cannot come to terms with a conclusion. He has to keep moving around should it be noticed that he is not getting any older. That is not quite correct, he ages in starts and then he goes back in time by way of a wormhole that he bought second hand in the Foreigner’s Market in Tashkent. It’s a very delicate thing which he touches only with gloved hands. “If this breaks”, he said, “a great many great minds who have received seed thoughts from me will be unable to progress". The apparatus is the size of a creepie stool which I surmise he places over his head. It seems ancient but it’s hard to tell with brass. However, when he left for a moment I tried to lift it but couldn’t. Was it fixed to the floor? “You tried to lift it didn’t you, of course you couldn’t know that the object you are looking at is merely the emerging node of the great Wahad”.

It’s perfectly obvious to me that Rivka Galchen has met with one of these Cartonauts who fret without the security of a clear and distinct idea.
region of unlikeness
In nursery terms it’s the little square of blue flannel blanket we call a ‘wubbi’. Revka planted that hoax in the N.Y.T. which refers on to her own fiction if you can call it that. It’s unfinished, hesitant, provisional, abounding in possibility, scorning closure, reluctant and quaintly shy.

Irad will be back.

Louis MacNeice and Henri Bergson

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly
Has whisked away the foam of may and elder
And I realise how now, as every year before,
Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame
Tomb-like around each little world of a day;
We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow
The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down
Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,
I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us
Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,
Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace
You and me and the stone god in the garden
And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,
Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings
Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,
For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Time and Chakras

Are we moving through time or is time moving through us? Or is time only decay as the early clocks symbolised with the burning down, emptying, running out of material? Human duration is our lived time which continues to build via memory or localised consciousness. At death we have a shape which the great traditions say is passed on to another life. In yogic meditation or the cittavritti nirodha/the elimination of mind forms, the ideal is to sense only the open ports. These are the chakras which regulate the possibilities of experience. Ramana Maharshi places the seat of the self on the opposite side of the body to the Heart Chakra and relates how when life was returning to his body after a death experience, it spread through him from that physical spot, a fingers breadth above the right nipple.
heart
Feeling the world through that point or leaving an element of my consciousness there as though it were a spot of benign pain changes my experience towards harmony, order and pattern. It is like being in the presence of a painting when there is a pause and duration not time is lived.

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.