Geometry

Anyone can draw a line.

Suppose,

A = < B = ^ C = >

D and E = some further mystical substance:

What makes X?

I draw.

Wrong order. Not too squiggly, not too spindly, straight through the axis. Use a ruler if you like.

Did you know Euclid constructed a theory of parallel lines?

The thing is, I can draw a line. I know it. Just the other day I had this discussion with the good Dr Smalling about the very subject. I even surprised myself with the sophistication of the regression, the erudition of analysis, as taut as someone who’d not only drawn a thousand lines, but who could imbed them in several meta-theoretical frameworks simultaneously.

In the end, we wait for the solidity to fashion itself from the distilled air hovering about the office.

That night I dream I trace a line to the moon, erasing it on the way down for some mad witness to consign it to the realm of myth, while I hoard it – in my distant tower like a bald man falling upon the secret to Rapunzel’s hair or – under my curved hat like a monk.

By the time I receive his next directive to send him a mock up of what we discussed, the steam has dissipated and the page is swollen with what looks to be a fetid standing pool of water.

I look for a reason. Maybe it’s because Dad used to tie my left hand behind my back. Maybe it’s more unconscious than that.

This must be what judgment is like. At the gates, the flames licking me perversely from behind, thinking the whole time I’m a shoe in for sure, my foot already in the door.

Now I administer lines, witnessing every single person attain glory out of the most self-evident incredulity, dreaming of vengeance like a sans-culotte.

Mom says certain people are fortunate enough to have the time and money and guidance to hammer out their youthful fetish for oriental trapezoids and Arabian triangles into something functional.

I say it’s the worst kind of dictatorship.

She doesn’t understand.

Walking in the sand, I come across a heaving cuttlefish.

I take my pocket knife and run it through until the black ink seeps over my hand like a broken oil rig.

Then I draw my masterpiece. I send it to him.

A magic wand.

Plain Colour

Threading through the litany of anti-totalitarian tropes that have, since the 1930s, reconfigured our very epistemic wall – Hayek’s economics, Arendt’s politics, Popper’s journalism – runs the thematic stitch of absurd Fate. For these theorists, Fate, defined in its original incarnation as a predetermined misfortune precipitated by an ambiguous and uncontrollable external force, is given an additional twist. At first, to someone like William Faulkner, whose body of work is drawn with the myths of the lost and collapsing American South, and thus predisposed toward Fate’s Grecian meaning – where lack or death is attributed to a transcendental entity – this modern understanding is incomprehensible. Fatalism is, as they say, inscribed in a Southerner’s very being. It can be said, and done so convincingly by Bertram Wyatt-Brown in his Southern Honour, that I, and I include my forebears in that letter, am historically subject to a passive totalitarianism, one ascribed to the whims of Nature or to God. When I endure some insufferable calamity, the end is out of my hands. Of course, to outsiders it could be viewed as very much in my hands – if I were born of certain stock or position (what Alain Badiou terms a part of no part) my very hands could be seen as the arbiters of my misery. Even still, Fate is written into my existence.

To totalitarianism’s active subjects, God doesn’t work in mysterious ways…man does. Defining something as Kafka-esque has come to signify the paradox of modern Fate. In The Trial, for example, Josef K suffers lamentably at the hands of a vile bureaucracy, which subsequently convinces him to search out his own guilt. Such too was the fate of many victims of Mao’s purges, faceless and often putatively innocent, yet singled out by the ravenous and philosophically convoluted conjurings of a dictator. In each case, the end is out of their hands and in someone else’s. Beyond the unreason involved in each character’s belief in a blackly magical State, without a technologically-sophisticated surveillance facility at its disposal, there exists for the doomed protagonist the additional psychological dementia that his/her fate is designed especially for them. Among many of the injustices befalling the sufferers in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita are decapitation, prison, madness, eye-gouging, public nudity, and lost love. What is at work then, is an appearance, for the subject involved, of a one to one relationship between the individual and his tormentors. This type of Fate is much worse, since not only is our freedom usurped by an unjust oppressor, but we also start believing we have committed some, unconscious, crime. In addition, we lose the deflecting comfort that the ancient conception of Fate supplies. Whereas I may have been justified in saying, upon learning of the destruction of my entire family or community by war or natural disaster, “Life is cruel!”, it would seem perverse if a victim of totalitarianism, locked in a cell awaiting torture or death, excused their plight in the same casual way.

Astute as they are, one suspects something is still missing in these tales of total government. But what exactly could this be? We are told by Zizek (and Marx and Freud) that the secret to fetishism lay not in a mystical substance behind the object, but instead, within the process of the object’s construction. The truth of totalitarianism is for its subjects only. Yet when narrating such abstract matters, authors tend to leave out an external, real dimension, a space outside the totality - the place, to turn Marx on his head, behind the process. Indeed, in these scenarios the characters are trapped, along with their compatriots, in a single world. They busy themselves so much in the inner recesses that they never conceive of the potentiality of a third world. There may often be some latent notion of the outside or the West as a symbol of freedom but there is rarely mention of the conscious other side. And here is where the third and cruellest twist of Fate emerges. Instead of occurring within the bounds of a closed society, this once literary conception of totalitarianism is now an established by-product of the consolidation of national-democratic regimes. After all, even “K. lived in a country with a legal constitution, there was universal peace, all the laws were in force.” It is for immigrants in Britain where this all too terrifying reality trumps 20th Century fiction.

In Weimar

Surely we have seen this anti-government hedonism, good clean family populism before. Maybe where the fascists went wrong was being so damned overtly violent. In desperate times of immigration and big (black) government, nothing is more threatening, then an Eisenhower-era, middle America family portrait.

Why Communism is good for Capitalism!

From everything I have been reading lately - namely, Niall Ferguson and Rachel Hope Cleve's Reign of Terror in America - I can only gather that the historical threat of revolution has been a great aid to the consolidation of democracy, humanitarianism and capitalism. It is clear then that what small d- democrats need in the run up to the British election is a good dose of secular atheistic violence. We need a real Bulgakovian devil threatening disappearance or land redistribution. Otherwise, we may continue with this voting parody and end up watching it all collapse on itself. And then what? Badiou says possibility, I say nightmare!

War Journal Day 2957

Henry V

My king so great and grand
of Norman blood and Saxon heart
who crossed the channel into France
to save us from ourselves.

I beg of you one more task
to reforge your glorious sword
and lay it in the heathen's mask
Far beyond dear Agincourt.

Two more reasons to love the New York Times

1. "Yessir! Perpetual War" or 'WE can't handle the truth!'

"The New York Times learned of the operation on Thursday, but delayed reporting it at the request of White House officials, who contended that making it public would end a hugely successful intelligence-gathering effort. The officials said that the group’s leaders had been unaware of Mullah Baradar’s capture and that if it became public they might cover their tracks and become more careful about communicating with each other."

2. Lookout! Democracy

Tea Party Movement Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

One can think of more than a few autocrats who would love to have such a friendly fourth estate.

Songs that no one will hear

My Dear,

There always the good life
away
scrawled in ash
alone amongst the fawns
a breath finely drawn.

"I hope you find Old Mexico but I can't show you the way.
It's darker and treacherous right here at home but...
And surely you must see
the fortune before me
For that alone I make my way."