Yes. A promise is a promise. I did watch Vincent again in a talk about multiculturalism, equality, neutrality, and recognition. And of course, as soon as I made the realization that I take Vincent as the measure of all things – well, in this connection he is the host – I also had to admit that this realization can in fact stand as an allegory for my claim that, at least where equality is concerned, there is none such. I mean, there I was, sitting on a round crème leather stool, close to the TV – I’m so myopic – and exclaiming: ‘finally a guy who is taller than Vincent,’ which is hard to imagine; ‘and look at his shirt!’ Just about the ugliest thing I’ve seen in a long time.” I had to close my eyes, or else focus on Vincent in order to counter the appalling site. At least Vincent was wearing one of my favourite colors. So there you have it, I was biased against Niels Holtug, the invited guest, from the start.
Ok, so let’s keep it simple and short this time around and imagine a scenario extrapolated from and based on what was said: insofar as diversity doesn’t create cohesive power at the national level, it is of course very easy to produce arguments that go against all that which is different. Which happens all the time, at least in a country which doesn’t have a multicultural history. People here are still mainly white middle class Lutheran Protestants. So, let’s see it: the foreigners hit Denmark. They are different. The Danes say: ‘hey, you’re different; you have to earn your recognition and convince me, the indigenous subject, that you haven’t come here to steal from me, fuck me, or be idle on my account.’ And the foreigner says, ‘Ok,’ and starts earning his respect even when it is often the case that he is way above the average Dane. Well, where the power to equalize things is concerned, some things can take a turn for the better for the foreigner in question. It has now dawned even on the fascists that, insofar as the government has the policy to help third world countries, everybody now approves of the fact that if foreigners send Danish money back home to their folks, they do this on their own pocket, which indirectly means that they contribute to the quota that the government has to cover in terms of help. So the fascists nod. This however doesn’t solve the problem that the fascists have with foreigners who come here as orphans, get an education, buy a BMW, and waste all that good Danish money on themselves, buying stuff that is soooo different than what the Danes imagine is in line with their own homogenous good taste and sense of style.
So what can we say? Give us a break? Yeah, let’s say that. Maybe someone will start listening.
As far as I’m concerned, Beckett is calling. The ‘nothing’ paper is done, and it is a sheer masterpiece. I wonder whose traditions I’m following when I insist on being so fast, so intense, and so impressed with myself that you’d think I must be kidding.
I get up this morning. Have a long shower. Wash my hair in “I Love Juicy” from Lush. Splash some jasmine conditioner in it at the end. Have my coffee, while reading my emails. Check the regular websites. Get a good laugh. I like farces, and some of my favourite blogs feature writing that borders that, or is that. My friend the mathematician makes me laugh so much that I get a belly ache every time I read him. I check the TV program. Today is Tuesday. Vincent will be on TV tonight, I tell myself. Unless the producers insist on being incompetent, again. Which they do, but this time I’m not surprised anymore. I realize, garsh, you have 5 minutes to get into the mood. Vincent will be on in 5 minutes, as he will also be on at 7. Two new instalments in one day! By Jove, such excess, I tell myself. But all the better. Between these hours I have to finish a paper on ‘nothing’ for a conference tomorrow, so yes, nothing plus excess is a good combo. This is just typical of me.
So, ideology and politics with Tøger Seidenfaden who is the editor of the Danish newspaper Politiken. The talk revolves around ideology as and in principle and ideology as and in practice. Great difference, as it gets disclosed by Seidenfaden who is almost as tall as Vincent and very dynamic. In fact, he also makes Vincent laugh, which makes me suspect that Vincent also likes farces. I already knew that he was visual, seeing things all over the place, but the other thing, I wasn’t so sure about. But sure enough, he laughs heartily when Seidenfaden gives an example of how, when some people threaten to leave their political parties and become members of some other opposite ones, they don’t do it for ideological reasons but for practical ones. This was the case once when a monarchist threatened to leave his right wing party for a left wing party because he thought that his own party was going republican. Doh! He forgot to check the ideology of the left wing party, which was openly republican, thus demonstrating a tendency in terms of people, now, focussing more on the ways in which parties handle practical issues, rather than what they stand for ideologically. So the point was that while ideology is on the retreat, people’s sense of pragmatism, however fallaciously construed on false grounds, is not.
The right wing party, Dansk Folkeparti was mentioned several times, precisely as an example of explaining what it is exactly that makes it successful, beyond solidly grasping and maintaining power mainly through lying. The party uses a common trick: when it claims to go with a concrete and precise ideology, instead of referring to the substance of this ideology, it insists on referring to universal foundations, which no one wants to challenge anyway. Hence the party is safe. In other words, when right wing politicians go on and on about championing the freedom of speech as the holiest of the Danish national cows, they know that no one will challenge that. Of course, if they were asked to elaborate on the substance of the freedom of speech, its functions and instrumental uses, they would have a problem. I’m afraid that the whole lot is not that smart.
This brings me to a thought I was entertaining on the spot. What would happen if such insistence, for instance, that it’s better for the foreigners to go home – even those who were born here, mind you, because supposedly they don’t uphold the Danish values, or that it’s better to keep the monarchy, because surely it does uphold the Danish values – was met with this reaction from the foreign lot that often gets the blame for all things rotten in Denmark: ‘however much you hate me, I still love you’. Basically this would mean equalizing the exact same strategy that the right wing parties employ: involve the foundation galore, and don’t ever even think about elaborating on substance.
It worked for Martin Luther King. He persisted in his love, and he won, even though he got killed in the process. I’m reading this passage from African American critic bell hooks’s book: Outlaw Culture where she says this in the chapter entitled: “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” emphasising the idea of choice in King’s statement: “I have decided to love.”
“King believed that love is 'ultimately the only answer to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet.' I share this belief and the conviction that it is in choosing love and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good.” (294).
So, love. Hmm. Beckett is calling. Critics think that he never loved anyone. I am, of course, of a different opinion. But yes, before things get too cosmic, off I go to think of nothing. Stay tuned tonight, though. There’ll be another post. All as lavish, and excessive, and loving, as we shall care to make it. Love is as love does. After all.
It’s 2 am. I’m reading a paper that my mathematician friend has just sent around asking me what I think he should entitle it. He gives me four suggestions:
1. "On the magnetic immortality of launching operations from the Kourou Space Center";
2. "Life is a mystery but LL must stand alone in four sections and one appendix";
3. "The shortest way to becoming a full professor is being launched in space completely naked: a rigorous proof";
4. "To be Lipschitz or not, that is the question. The answer is maybe."
As I’m looking intently at the paper, which is his major breakthrough since he started thinking about it in 98 – you can also get a glimpse of it in the fragment below – I’m thinking: if I’m not going to understand this until 5 am, which is in 3 hours, I’m going to hang myself by my own artificial tongue. Meanwhile we can call the paper: “On orbiting around the category theory BWV 51 Jauchzet Gott in Allen Landen where we relate the existence of extensions of Lipschitz functions to the existence of ends and coends for functors precisely in M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici.”
This month I had decided that Eliott was entirely wrong when he famously declared in the first line of The Wasteland: “April is the cruellest month.” “Like hell it is,” I kept saying to myself. “Not compared to November.” And yet. Upon seeing certain people wearing certain jackets you change your mind. You come out of your catatonic state and start anticipating better times. Yes, you’ve guessed: Vincent was on TV tonight exuding warmth and unambiguously establishing point to point protocols as he was gesturing in connection with talk about rhetoric. I could have sworn that if it hadn’t been for his Stewart&Strauss green baseball attire, I would have mistaken him for a courtier just coming down the impressive stairs of Versailles after having been detained in an audience with the queen.
Christian Kock, a professor of rhetoric from Copenhagen University delivered the ideas today, mainly on how to avoid believing anything that dumb journalists and even dumber politicians are tying to convince us is true. Kock’s own body language, looking only down at the floor, disclosed how appalled he is at the idea that nowadays in politics, rhetoric, alas, is not about good and sound arguments – as was the case in times even way beyond the reign of Louis Quatorze, namely in the peripatetic times of Aristotle, when one had time to walk and think, rather than ride horses or waves, or whatever – but about good and bad dress on prime time TV. Sure enough, we have to sympathize with the poor politicians who are constrained to having to deliver whole messages and the perpetuation of good values, if they are chosen, in only 5 minutes. So, we excuse them for delivering only the necessary slogans, lies, and meaningless numbers.
As Kock pointed out quite rightly, it is almost never the case that politicians don’t deliver prepared in advance sentences to concrete questions that have nothing to do with these sentences whatsoever, rather than listening to the question, thinking, and then talking as genuinely and authentically as possible. Well, the politicians are pressed for time, everyone can understand that, so too bad that professors have the nerve to suggest that slogans hardly ever strike a logical homerun. I mean, now that the politicians pay a shit load of money to their style advisors, designers, and ghost-writers who are all in the business of making them look good, how dare to insist on quaint traditions, such as using regular thinking in a campaign?
But Kock insists: rhetoric in politics today is about 3 things: 1) making recourse to fictive numbers – because no one bothers to check their accuracy; here the political claim often appeals to people’s emotions: ‘oh la la, in the old days the schumcks preceding me, spent so and so much on this and that, but in my time, no such nonsense, my expenditures are cut down to zero’ - ha, ha;
2) making recourse to stating things implicitly rather than explicitly; here, the lesson the politician learns, even in rhetoric schools, as Kock ironically implied, is that you can always imply things ‘elegantly,’ and embellish a little for the greater good of yourself, while if you insist on being explicit, you can risk being caught naked – shame on you, then;
and 3) making recourse to talking-points, as in, ‘yes, yes, I know you want to know this,’ the politician may imply when talking to a journalist, ‘but I don’t have an answer prepared for this; therefore you’re gonna get this other thing instead.'– no one cares anyway.
The meta-rhetoric is this: the politician avoids answering a question in a straightforward manner because he doesn’t have a thought in his head, yet this much he does have in head: the knowledge that the journalist doesn’t have a thought in his head either. Jolly good, as the audience is also presumed to stand guilty of the same emptiness, which makes me question the efficiency of Vincent’s own remark at the end, against all this wasteland: “be alert and on guard” [giv agt og vær på vagt]. Damn. Some musketeers insist: En garde against the cynical lot. Only, indeed, will it work, when even cynicism is not what it used to be, there are no sophisticated nuances in it anymore? We take it all in, raw and uncooked. None of it matters. What matters is that we all look good.
Tomorrow I’ll be at home all day, but I’m fussing already. How lucky that I don’t have to meet anyone, which means that I can indulge in that rare activity of sitting in my armchair and thinking some thoughts. But by Jove, what am I going to wear? A dress, a dress, my kingdom for a dress…
For Blaise Pascal
Here comes Keats, who didn’t get to live the sexual revolution. Keats was into hands; hand-writing, and hand-touch. Keats couldn’t make himself say, ‘how about it?’ like a moron, after the sublime silence trespassed the embarrassing threshold of ‘how about it, then?’ Lo, the feminists had a point: if you can’t find someone worth fucking, go fuck yourself. Very good point. Keats, can you hear that? I hope you’re turning in your grave as I bend over it, passing some good feminism over to you. Here comes Keats, whose “Living Hand” instils in me visions of caressing balls, if that is what the man wants, however vulgar and much in vain. But poetry can make anything vibrate. Listen to this:
“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see, here it is –
I hold it towards you.”
Halleluiah, I feel touched! I’m writing this to myself now. No one else. Norway, here I come, to fuck myself, and your sheep, and your provincialism, and your highest peak! Norway, I swear by your orgasm that although I can see that you don’t fall for all this piss that Keats is talking about, you can also see that this hand of mine will henceforth overcast and cancel all your Novembers.
“But if you’d try this: to be in my hand
as in the wineglass the wine is wine.
If you’d try this."
"wie im Weinglas der Wein Wein ist”
– I go to bed drunk with Rilke under my pillow. I still know what I know.
It snows, but I’m not cold anymore.
§
Yes. A promise is a promise. I did watch Vincent again in a talk about multiculturalism, equality, neutrality, and recognition. And of course, as soon as I made the realization that I take Vincent as the measure of all things – well, in this connection he is the host – I also had to admit that this realization can in fact stand as an allegory for my claim that, at least where equality is concerned, there is none such. I mean, there I was, sitting on a round crème leather stool, close to the TV – I’m so myopic – and exclaiming: ‘finally a guy who is taller than Vincent,’ which is hard to imagine; ‘and look at his shirt!’ Just about the ugliest thing I’ve seen in a long time.” I had to close my eyes, or else focus on Vincent in order to counter the appalling site. At least Vincent was wearing one of my favourite colors. So there you have it, I was biased against Niels Holtug, the invited guest, from the start.
