Franz Kafka was a poet of shame and guilt. So writes Saul Friedlander in his Franz Kafka: the poet of shame and guilt (2013, public library). Friedlander reveals to me the Kafka of sexual fantasies, spurned homoerotic thoughts, disgust at his sexuality and animality. This Kafka does not interest me, although I am intrigued to learnContinueContinue reading “Parables of Shame”
Category Archives: Personal story
Dear Readers
Dear Readers Even though the archive is burning, I have nonetheless done some renovations of my blog to improve its appearance and its use. I have updated my banner image with Turner’s painting of the fires that consumed the British Houses of Parliament in 1834. I have updated my gravatar image. I have provided moreContinueContinue reading “Dear Readers”
Simple steps
Here is a poem I wrote some years ago on a day when sickness is tugging at my cuff, and yet I can turn to my own poetry for some guidance and inspiration. It is called “Simple Steps.” When the mind loiters beyond its rulesShadowy misery crawls over my skin. It wraps itself tightly againstContinueContinue reading “Simple steps”
Going sane writing
Adam Phillips says somewhere, perhaps in one of his intriguing essays, perhaps in an interview with the Paris Review, that writing is for him “an experiment in what your life might be like if you were to speak freely.” It is also a description he gives, in another way, to the process that goes on in theContinueContinue reading “Going sane writing”
List: my lacunae in Bloom’s Western Canon
I admire Harold Bloom and his scorn for the New Schools of Resentment. I recognise my own motivations to read in his argument that “the self, in its quest to be free and solitary, ultimately reads with one aim only: to confront greatness…. Our common fate is age, sickness, death, oblivion. Our common hope, tenuousContinueContinue reading “List: my lacunae in Bloom’s Western Canon”
Gathering flowers for the mind
This morning I pulled down from my bookshelf a cardboard box that contains a hundred or more index cards on which I had written in the 1980s and 1990s when I was a student, and before computers, quotations, drawn from my reading. This old habit is like gathering flowers for the mind, and the sewingContinueContinue reading “Gathering flowers for the mind”
The start of a series of lists
Once a week on a Tuesday I will post a list, with Borges as more of an inspiration than the to do or to acquire list. today’s list – the pleasures of long service leave 1. telling the busy and self-important that I will be away from their fuss for a long time 2. daytimeContinueContinue reading “The start of a series of lists”
Is nothing sacred?
One of the surprises of my mid-life has been the admission of a longing for the sacred. In the 1980s I remember there was a band, called the Sacred Cowboys who sang a post-punk dirge, “Is nothing sacred?” The song got under my skin in a way, and it seemed to my youthful mind more ofContinueContinue reading “Is nothing sacred?”
Madness & History
I am reading Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization: a cultural history of insanity from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine (Thames & Hudson, 2015). The title is a wink to the English translation of Foucault’s Folie et Déraison, that is Madness & Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.ContinueContinue reading “Madness & History”
On suicide
Over the last month or two I have been writing a government policy statement on suicide. Here is an interesting conundrum: how do you write about a topic with such deep, rich veins of emotion within the favoured managerial babble of today’s governments? How do you write with care for the traditions of thought andContinueContinue reading “On suicide”
The disappearance of stories from the world
If Snorri Sturlusen had not turned his court poet ear to the old stories among his people, which the Church urged them to forget in favour of just one book, then the stories of Freya and Odin, Loki and Yggdrasill would have disappeared from the world. Yet these stories survived. Their conquerors were followers ofContinueContinue reading “The disappearance of stories from the world”
Traditions beyond politics
For much of my life I have thought about questions of politics and government. How can government respond to any one of dozens of social issues that have occupied my professional life? What can government do? How can a policy issue be presented to political decision-makers in a way that holds their attention, if briefly,ContinueContinue reading “Traditions beyond politics”
Staying sane and the infinite conversation
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four The lonely and arduous dutyContinueContinue reading “Staying sane and the infinite conversation”
Some measure of insanity
Let me simply record this statement from Donald Winnicott, which I have taken from the end of Adam Phillips’ short book on the enigmatically wise child-doctor and psychoanalyst: If I want to say that Jung was mad, and he recovered, I am doing nothing worse than I would do in saying of myself that IContinueContinue reading “Some measure of insanity”
Reclusive samizdat
To live authentically within the ruins of our culture today, to practise the ritual of writing solemnly, without regard for fame and fortune and the flickering nonsense of panel shows, to be in the world as God’s secretary, meticulous and devoted to something larger than your own life, to live truly to each of theseContinueContinue reading “Reclusive samizdat”
The extinction of meaning
The solitary writer dwells in an oppressive fear; that the line of culture, the traditions, the teachings that his labors seek to preserve against the decay of all human institutions, this thread of meaning, which he has painstakingly recovered from the past and braided with the personal traumas that inspire any writer, this way ofContinueContinue reading “The extinction of meaning”
An interlude on disaffection and living in truth
Yet again today I had the experience of feeling like I belonged nowhere and with no one in a room discussing political ideas. Yet again I felt disaffected from all political institutions, homeless among political ideas, cast out and made to appear a madman in expressing political thoughts. Where everyone appeals to networks and reputation,ContinueContinue reading “An interlude on disaffection and living in truth”
The burning archive
The Burning Archive is the title of my work in progress collection of poetry. It is inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting of 1920, a world in which political, cultural and social orders were in collapse. The painting was inscribed by Walter Benjamin into Gerhard Scholem’s apocalyptic visions, and became the most enduring of his ThesesContinueContinue reading “The burning archive”