Palm Sunday today. A few rooms are empty at the place. On a crucifix in one of them, a dry twig of boxwood. The television is on, with ads for soaps, cars, promises of health and wealth. We eat, talk a bit, walk, sit, touch. Hosanna filio David.

Désenchantement du monde et disparition des dieux: Hölderlin mieux que Schiller préfigurerait un mouvement général à étudier en détail (et j’espère que c’est déjà fait). Je pense aux mouvements de l’âme de l’enfant qui, au retour de la messe du dimanche des Rameaux, plantait ses brins de buis bénit dans la mousse des talus à l’entrée des champs. Se les réappropriait-on ainsi, quel que fût le régime de propriété? La terre fumée retournée par la charrue luisante et toute belle dans sa nouvelle peau en tirait sa force pour une autre année. Les talus n’existent plus, les poteaux de granite gris sont devenus des bancs ou des supports de palissade autour de maisons trop neuves, le buis n’est que haie, les bois sculptés objets de commerce.

Une belle pelouse au pied d’un petit phare-musée descend vers la mer et rappelle aux amoureux de surfing, de pêche et de navigation, et aux amoureux tout court, que la terre derrière eux est cultivée, semée, exploitée, jusqu’aux falaises les plus sauvages, selon le désir. Nous sommes tous venus là au détour d’une μηχανή, ruse ou intrigue mais aussi moyen.

A propos de la nature et ajoutai-je des Rameaux, j’avais lu ceci dans le chapitre “les dieux de la Grèce” du livre de Pierre Hadot, Le voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de Nature (Paris: Gallimard, 2004):

«Ne faire qu’un avec toutes choses vivantes, retourner, par un radieux oubli de soi, dans le Tout de la Nature.» C’est en ces termes que l’Hypérion de Hölderlin exprime l’extase rousseauiste. Hölderlin est ainsi, finalement, lui aussi, un témoin de cette modification de la perception de la nature, qui s’effectue au temps de Goethe et de Schelling et dont nous reparlerons plus loin. Au début du xixe siècle, la métaphore des voiles et des secrets de la nature s’efface de plus en plus, pour faire place à l’émerveillement devant une Nature sans voile, devenue désormais, selon l’expression de Goethe, «mystérieuse au grand jour», dans la nudité de sa présence. À la représentation polythéiste de la poésie traditionnelle se substitue le sentiment panthéistique d’une Nature qui, nous aurons à le redire, remplit l’homme d’un frisson sacré. (pp. 100–101)

A flock of pigeons searches the heavenly lexicon, flips incomprehensibly and alights on the wires. Bachelard is my safety as I walk under these sage, whiffling incarnations of flight on the guano-pocked sidewalk. The air and its dreams suspend materiality and I hang far below cement, beyond safe ways, by a gleaming stream.

In another unreflective and pro-war article, Letting women reach women in Afghan War, the NYT illustrates how army managers and think tanks related to the Pentagon are now using all our human capacities for empathy, including women’s traditional roles, in order to achieve means that are *power*-related. It is the other side of our economic world in which everything becomes commodified, including the most intimate aspects of life, such as friendship. We are in Afghanistan not only to prevent the return of Taliban and to destroy Al Qaeda, but also to make sure Pakistan’s situation doesn’t deteriorate further, to be a massive presence all along the border south of Russia (Caspian oil has become important), and to try to control Iran East (Afghanistan), West (Irak), and South (Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean where we maintain a fleet at all times), not to mention be a reminder to China that we are the top dog when it comes to energetic sources. The first objectives (Taliban-Al Qaeda) are a cover for the second galaxy of objectives, which are little talked about. It is interesting that our army is trying to be humanitarian in an area (Helman province) where in the fifties Brits and US already tried to be humanitarian for similar reasons (building dams and irrigation systems, but also worried about Iran which was nationalizing its oil industry: Dr Mossadegh was murdered, apparently with US help, to avoid that).

But back to the use of humanitarian means: giving food, medicine, talking to women and children. Of course, no matter the “cultural sensitivity training”, the locals are surely not confused about the exercise of power! Guns aplenty outside, planes that hit civilians occasionally overhead (automated drones often)… Is it surprising then that true NGOs find themselves under suspicion of being agents of imperialism or “the West,” and their volunteers may become victims of violence? I would like to see more discussion of these issues in our papers, but even the NYT doesn’t go there, or rarely.

A large skein of pelicans high in the sky lifts
petal-shedding plum trees from their pebble moorings.
Human figures speak scriptured echoes of linguistic laws:
swiss january signs that
the cawing of ravens will soon silence.
An infinity of blooms and specks of sun
are jealously guarded in my miqraot gdolot text,
pressing against the dark ink.

Sur la science moderne: un cosmologiste du MIT pousse l’idée sage et peut-être johannique que les mathématiques ne décrivent pas l’univers, elles sont l’univers même (ou la phrase devrait être inversée?). Prendre cette idée au sérieux est envisager des mathématiques infinies. Mais cela ne contredirait pas Augustin par exemple qui pensait que l’espace-temps, attribut de cette existence, était né avec l’univers: donc peut-être aussi leur mathématisation, ou être même? Belle citation prise à Stephen Hawking: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” (A brief history of time). Mais on voit aussi un étrange nominalisme pointer, par exemple lorsque Sean Carroll, cosmologue (?) à Caltech dit: “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception”. Mais qu’est-ce que cette nature qui obéit à des lois: seraient-elles donc étrangères à cette nature?

which is the title of a talk by Paul Bové, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh: Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: Fri Jan 29, 2010, 2–3pm, at UCSC, Humanities Bldg 1, Room 520.

Paul Bové has published such books as: Destructive poetics: Heidegger and modern American poetry (Columbia University Press, New York, 1980); Intellectuals in power: a genealogy of critical humanism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986); In the wake of theory (Wesleyan University Press, 1992); Mastering discourse: the politics of intellectual culture (Duke University Press, Durham, 1992); Early postmodernism: foundational essays (Duke University Press, Durham, 1995); Edward Said and the work of the critic: speaking truth to power (Duke University Press, Durham, 2000); Poetry against torture: criticism, history, and the human (Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2008).

The last title brings me to Czeslaw Milosz,

In Warsaw
….
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything: five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

(Warsaw, 1945, from New and collected poems, 1931–2001 [Harpercollins, 2001])

Well, well. Perhaps I talked too soon this morning, in the course on the gospel of John, about the assumptions made in economics and psychology:

Daniel Friedman, Professor of Economics, will be giving the 44th annual lecture sponsored by the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate: Beyond Fear and Greed: The Moral Roots of Financial Crises. Drawing on his 2008 book, Morals and Markets, tracing financial markets all the way back to our human origins, Professor Friedman shows why these markets have become so powerful, how they grew out of the imperative to expand trust from family and friends to wider and wider circles, how instabilities arise, and suggests some ways to mitigate future financial disasters.

This will be Monday, February 1, 2010, at 8:00 pm, in the Music Recital Hall at Performing Arts (UCSC).

Twenty people arrested yesterday in east Jerusalem, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where Jerusalem Arab families have been evicted from their homes recently. See the Jerusalem Post article. For maps of East Jerusalem and historical background, see the wiki article.