Restitution

Restitution

Too often we say the words together:
after-life
as if they denote some place,

what we really mean is
life-after-life:
a conceptual weakness.

For the atheist
there is just this:

after life
molecules
dirt
blood flowing back
into the mix

a perpetual awakening
from the dream of life;

one great long yawn
from this galaxy of cells.

Simon Leake

The Limits of Moral Argument

Can there ever be a law for which all of the human race would stand in agreement? Can any statement be so obviously true that it would be impossible to deny its validity, and contradict it? As an example let's take one of the most famous statements in the western canon by Rene Descartes:

“Therefore from the fact alone that I know that I exist and that, at the same time , I notice absolutely nothing else that belongs to my nature apart from the single fact that I am a thinking thing , I correctly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing.”

 “…it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and that I can exist without it.”

Are you compelled by the first quote but find the second a little hard to accept? The first rests on the second: he has to make an association with the disembodied mind of God to get out of the fix of being deceived by his earthly embodied senses. This idea, roughly diluted to “I think therefore I am!” is a foundation stone of western culture.

Let’s say you disagree with smoking, in fact, to the point that you see it as an absolute evil. Rightly, you would promulgate the argument and argue for its sanction. Already, in making the effort you have to face defeat in that your realisation is not so obviously true in that it requires no argument. It takes Descartes almost sixty pages to attempt to convince us of his.

Let’s say I have a good friend who sees drinking in a similar way. He’s into ‘Straight Edge’ – people who do no drugs of any sort but still go to punk music gigs and the like. Straight Edge, as a movement, seems to me an odd child of the anarchist movement that combines a distrust or hatred for substances such as alcohol and nicotine (seen by them as controlling drugs, like soma in Brave New World, plied to the public by those in power to subdue them) with the libertarian/anarchist principles of having the ‘right’ to live how you wish without pressure to conform to a prescribed method of entertainment. 

Now if we take this from the angle of having a right to be at liberty to do as you wish in so far as it doesn’t affect others then, given we are all different and confronted with different situations simply by the act of living, plus the capacity for change within our environment, the goal of achieving a situation in which we can practice this right is unachievable: the law would not be able to act quick enough.

This is why we have politics and make agreements on ‘to what limit’ interference will be tolerated. We haven’t moved on from the group mentality; we band together with those who share similar habits/interests. A group’s members may find themselves at extreme odds with another group’s habits/interests; or they may share their interests but not their habits! So we have democracy to iron things out.

I fear this is about as good as it gets. Nothing is certain for nothing can be argued for as existing as an absolute, undeniable position.

The language is partly to blame: for it to work we must make distinctions (between this and that; yes and no; yours and mine). Due to the vagaries of human experience opinions differ and different groups are formed: one group eats meat, another eats soya, both are destroying the rainforest, but how much does the rainforest matter and who makes that decision? Did this become a problem just because people like eating meat and soya or was it for other reasons; did problems arise for the rainforest before or after they started doing this?

Too prescriptive and you get Germany in 1939, the Japanese Empire, Communist Russia – they thought they had ‘the one right way’. Too free and you get the holocaust of the American Indians by ‘liberated’ European immigrants. Both lead to the same ends it seems? British democracy has been used to plunder the world of its resources, but in that slow creeping way with lots of incentives to the local populations to ‘get on board’ (see the recent Scottish referendum)! There are more people about, so some people seem to think this global economy has worked? But here it is – space is the real issue: more space less interference; less space more interference.

Well that’s a long winded way of saying I will try and accommodate/can accommodate your desire to be free of smoke but that wouldn’t stop me smoking given the space to myself, because whatever your argument is, it will never be as strong as my experience or not so neatly, I counter Descartes’ claim above.

There are many issues I’d like to resolve such as car pollution, use of nuclear power, the various evils of humankind and the belief that going somewhere faster is necessarily better, but none of these will be resolved without compromise for the very fact that every thought we have is informed by our sensual, embodied experience of the world.

(I’m making a lot of claims of my own here: how am I doing this? Am I not contradicting my own argument? Is it that I’m not making a claim to anything other than the need to make such argument in the first place. Aah – the beauty of language; the allure!)

To end, here is a great quote from Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando:

“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage than the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. […] It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue...”

Simon Leake

Opposite side to the ‘rights are a wrong’ argument

And why it fails (or, don’t worry, be happy (and sad))
Whenever human beings put a name or number to some experience we have, or object we find within our environment, it essentially defines an absolute characteristic or quality of that environment. The more defined these names become the closer we get to this absolute.

The better we are able to arrange these names in sequence the better we understand the environment and the better we are at manipulating it, being as it is not the really real but a collection of names arranged in sequence.

We are special in the universe because only we perform the activity of naming. The goal is to name everything and record all possible sequences of names so that we may master the universe. Once this is achieved there will be no more pain for we will simply eradicate all such sequences from the story we have thus far uncovered.

Imagine a well-managed train station. Materials have been taken from the environment and changed into tracks, rolling stock, a platform, waiting room and ticket booth. Humans have been trained for the various roles of conductor, manager, driver, cleaner, engineer etc.

Once people use the station they become customers. They may form a union to protect their interests, much as the drivers and conductors may do. The special roles and status gained by these people may define them over and above their simple existence as humans (which of course they all secretly still share).

The station will take on special meaning itself as the source from which rules and regulations (laws) are generated. Its very existence may variably be worshipped, protected, feared or honoured.

It will begin to take the shape of a reality for those who now depend on it yet underwriting it all is the same basic environment which must be now be managed as just another resource required by the station: the station is still a product of the natural environment and not a self-reproducing environment in-its-self. 

The station grows and requires more of the basic reality. What must be denied is difference or any other form of reality that can challenge the stations existence. Change must be halted and all matter given over to the stations perpetuation. This can be accomplished through language – through the naming of things: a tree becomes a resource for coffee stirrers. Humans become customers and managers and the two differentiate themselves by these titles over and above what they share in common.

The question is: at the point at which the station accomplishes its goal and no evil can challenge its benevolence in providing all these people with meaning and purpose in their lives; with nothing to measure the station against but faded memories, how can we tell, any longer, whether it is good?

The station (language) becomes the reality, all is aligned to its needs and anything that is ‘other’ disappears. The universe crystallises into a substrate of inert data. The story is complete.

There is no possibility of argument against it. It is justified and western civilisation cheers! Unfortunately it ends in inertia by denying the very possibility that brought it about: it ceases to function.

The universe is not a complete sentence but an open dialogue.

Simon Leake

Breeze

Without a face

Without a body

You can see

Its expression

Always through

What it touches:

Ripples on the pond;

Leaves clapping limply

In the tree.

For us, embodied souls

This will also be the case

In these words

I am writing

The effluence, the impression

This echo of love.


Simon Leake

Stories

From the pond they call life,

the fame they make believe,

seven billion lives ascend

asleep in their own dreams,

with the weight of life upon them,

trying their best to make amends

forever beyond their reach.

Conjecture: The moral dilemma of when/if it is right to kill another only arises in a society where the sheer weight of its population guarantees the act of murder. Conversely, the smaller the population, the less likely it is that murder will occur and hence the need for its moral argument, as it would seem absurd to kill in an environment where every individual is required to work with the group in order that the group survives.

Where the population is great, hegemony ensconced, resource capture and distribution industrialised and an economy of self-created scarcity in motion, then it will follow that the life of the individual, in such a programmed mass, is of little consequence to the whole and murder, whether by the state or an individual, will be more likely for this fact.

People will need to be convinced of the immorality (or morality when the state is the perpetrator) of the act of murder and laws imposed to control those who see through this ‘story’ and attempt it all the same.

The story given will omit any mention of population as a cause and instead will divert the reader’s attention to powers outside of their normal perception: a God, a form or an ideal. The reason for this is that the makers of the law must never be threatened, or their laws brought into question, by values arising from our direct physical relation to the world/environment about us, experiences of which are rudimentary and within the grasp of all.

When such values are realised the structure of power/control crumbles and is most likely to be replaced by another hegemony once a better ‘story’ is found, and so we witness the succession of philosophies, religions and political ism’s.

Given this set of circumstances we can use pragmatism in our daily lives to work our way through, however, we are often simply responding to ever new structures of power rather than ‘realising’ our actual relationship to our environment: our actual ‘being-in-the-world’. To put it another way: while we are busy fighting the spectacle and creating our own stories, like the one I am telling you now, we forget that we are animals preoccupied mostly with eating, defecating, sleeping, procreating and dreaming, and it is here we find the essence, eternally sought yet never to be found, hidden by ourselves.

Simon Leake

Perspectives

1.

Of being placed within being

of existence within existence

the point of reference is self-referential.

(A hall of mirrors in which our observations return only what we observe:

a kind of sense of ourselves observing from which we assume meaning.)

Of being conscious of being

our situation necessitates structure

in order to navigate the possibilities.

(If we see ourselves as prisoners then our endeavours to understand

are merely the yearnings to become the prison in order to establish why we are prisoners.)

2.

In our lazy wealth we chatter,

drowning in vacuous gossip.

Our infinite technological horizons

invite us to stand still and gawp.

Our potential to dream

is routed down optic cables.

Others wait outside

but they do not partake:

they see nothing worth sharing.

They wait – visions are fleeting.

3.

Sometimes the frame through which we look

is more interesting than the picture framed.

Simon Leake

Revolutions

ice warms to become

water evaporates to become

vapour condenses to become

water cools to become ice

a line is drawn in the sand

to show where the water is

a photograph is taken of the line

the work of art is hung in a gallery

a child is born on earth

matures, consumes, defecates

converses, sleeps, dreams

procreates, nurtures, dies

there is no competition

or vying for position

just infinite forms feeling

their way into the world

Simon Leake

Hands

 

Hands (plural),

my hands (also plural);

there’s two of them:

extensions from the same one trunk,

but also not hands,

also skin, hair

and bones I can’t see,

and blood I infer

from the swollen veins

of a languid summer tryst.

Hands but also tools

to tie, press, grasp, hold;

moving tools; climbing tools;

tools to turn things over

and make sense.

Hands but symbols also:

semaphores for the deaf,

a thumbs up and a clap.

Instruments for appreciative sounds,

together,

for anger slapped down

on a hard wood table.

 

Hands but also roots

for digging into the world;

lines of communication

for my sense, perception.

Digits on which I count

1, 2, 3, 4…

Palms on which I rest the coconut.

Hands but also evidence

of time:

of ageing, eating, that last cigarette

lingers on the fingers

Hands but also biographies:

the one broken page book of our lives;

an afterthought of DNA.

We say hands

but know the language fails us

and leaves us wanting

for imprecision,

so when I take your hand in mine

know, it makes so much more

than simply hands.

Simon Leake

Hands by Harry Wareham