some blessed Hope

I leant upon a coppice gate


When Frost was spectre-grey,


And Winter's dregs made desolate
    

The weakening eye of day.


The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
    

Like strings of broken lyres,


And all mankind that haunted nigh
    

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
    

The Century's corpse outleant,


His crypt the cloudy canopy,
    

The wind his death-lament.


The ancient pulse of germ and birth
    

Was shrunken hard and dry,


And every spirit upon earth
    

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
    

The bleak twigs overhead


In a full-hearted evensong
    

Of joy illimited;


An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
    

In blast-beruffled plume,


Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
   

Of such ecstatic sound


Was written on terrestrial things
    

Afar or nigh around,


That I could think there trembled through
    

His happy good-night air


Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    

And I was unaware.

(Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush)

Tonight is given to poetry. For imagery, for the power of hope in a dying world, this is sheer delight. 

poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

[ ] these rebel powers that thee array;

Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,

Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,

Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?

Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,

Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?

Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;

Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,

And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVI)

free hands, free hearts

There is a rare and precious gift that some books possess: the ability to transcend limitations of print, locate the centre and crux of the human condition, and to carry its way powerfully into one's self. Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows [1] belongs to this class. 

Written between 1955 and 1963, Everything Flows is Grossman's second and final condemnation of the Stalinist era, and a raw, powerful, poignant telling of the Soviet story. It tells of Ivan Grigoryevich, freshly released from the gulags into a world that free of Stalin and yet full of him. The book follows Grigoryevich's search for his innocent, happy, idealistic past, and his reconciliation, serene and unbitter, with the indelible changes of Stalinism. His meeting with Anna Sergeyevna, his landlady and lover, is a pivotal point of the book, and here, Grossman lays the ground for three momentous beliefs: Freedom, love, morality. 

For Grossman, the simplicity of this truth is overpowering: Life is freedom. He (and it truly seems as though it is him speaking; he slips often into first person, and addresses the reader directly) sees the Soviet era as an inexorable move towards the triumph of non-freedom. From the birth of Lenin - nay, from the beginning of Russia - the foundation of the Russian state has been, to Grossman, the merciless shackling and mocking of freedom [2]. The atrocities of the Soviet state are brutal executions of freedom: the freedom to choose what to sow, what to wear and speak, where to go, who to associate with.  

For both Grossman and Grigoryevich, no progress of humanity is permissible or possible in the absence of freedom. "There is", he says, "no end for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom" [3]. Freedom alone makes progress possible, [4] and it is untouched at its core by every chain and shackle [5]. Freedom is life, and life freedom. And for Grossman, the history of Russia is the history of slavery - the slavery of the masses. The ideals of Marxism that Lenin adopted and purportedly understood - the proletariat, a state for the people - was defeated by the ideal of non-freedom stamped onto the Russian psyche. Lenin destroyed the old order, and history paved the way for and chose Stalin - Stalin, who both feared and hated freedom, and therefore sought to vanish it from Russian soils and souls. 

The stories of Ivan Grigoryevich and others at the labour camps in far Siberia are tributes to this. The collective farms that refused citizens the right to choose what to sow, the internal passports that dismissed their freedom of movement, literary and scholarly purges and indoctrination that mocked their freedom of thought, labour camps and mass executions that spurned their right to life - all were affronts against freedom that rested in the centre of their selves. 

Through the eyes of a young mother, put away in camp for failing to denounce her husband, Grossman describes the destruction of hope. He paints hope as an irrational light - it keeps one alive and going, for the hope of a better tomorrow - and cruelly crushes it out with the hunger, forced labour and penury of the camps. For Grigoryevich, hope in the invincibility of freedom is the only thing that keeps him alive, and for his cell neighbour, hope lies murdered against a universal law that conserves and preserves violence.

The account of the Terror Famine of 1932-33 is Grossman's greatest contribution to Everything Flows. In it, Grossman bares his ideas of love, freedom and morality - and I have read nothing more raw and powerful than the simplicity of his language here. For Grossman, Anna Sergeyevna's narrative of the Terror Famine to Ivan Grigoryevich is the greatest gift of love. It is what has deeply touched her, changed her for ever, and shaped her views of the Stalinist state. In sharing the pain and the horror and the moral culpability, she gives to Grigoryevich her greatest burden, and places in him the ultimate trust of understanding [6]. Through the Famine, and the story of the four Informers, Grossman portrays the different faces of morality: one forced by the need for self-preservation, one blindly following the master, one gladly denouncing for self-gain, one indifferent to consequences. There is no moral judgment here, no good, nor bad, only a question as to the foundations for all these. All roads must lead to freedom. 

____

[1] Grossman was born into a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1905. After the German invasion of 1941, when his mother died (he writes elsewhere that he was unable to persuade his mother to flee Ukraine, as he did), he moved to Russia and became a war correspondent for the army newspaper Red Star. Grossman's descriptions of Nazi death camps and massacres of Jews ("The Hell of Treblinka") were used as testimony at the Nuremberg trials. His condemnation of antisemitism in Russia and public dissidence would have earned him an arrest and a harsh term at the gulags, had not Stalin died.

For a Just Cause, and its sequel Life and Fate are Grossman's accounts of the Stalinist era, and reflect his changes in perspective. Unlike the former, Life and Fate is an explosive and sharply critical account of Stalin's regime, and for this reason, suffered at the hands of the KGB before finally being published to wide acclaim. Everything Flows is his final novel, and is possibly unfinished. 

[2] And that is all that Grossman compares Leninism and Stalinism (and Russian history) against: freedom. It is a heady and mindblowing comparison, for Grossman paints freedom as a simple and fundamental - the fundamental - core of the human condition, and then demonstrates how Stalin massacred it. 

[3] Not merely this; Grossman's pleas for the cause of freedom are as many and emphatic as they are brief. In a pivotal passage on the value and inherence of freedom, he says, "The history of humanity is the history of human freedom. The growth of human potentiality is expressed, above all, in the growth of freedom."

[4] "Progress, in essence, is the progress of human freedom. What is life, indeed, if not freedom? The evolution of life is the evolution of freedom."

[5] "Freedom is not, as Engels claimed, the 'recognition of necessity'. Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome."

[6] Grigoryevich does the same; he wishes for his lover to return, so that he may share with her "the burden, and the clarity, of his understanding. This was the consolation for his grief. This was his love."

i do believe in faeries

Indefatigable has always been one of my favourite words. There is such a lot of quiet spunk in it. A certain amount of "I'll show you, world!", but not only that. Add to that a pinch of humour, a dose of healthy self-doubt, passion for an ideal, the urge to give, infinite depths of hope and a head always held high (metaphorically, of course). A certain quiet, comfortable sort of peace with oneself. 

I remember discovering this word so beautifully clearly. It's a fond memory. I had been introduced to the series of my childhood, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, and I was on a quest to discover Montgomery herself. Anne is a simple enough storyline: an orphan child, sensitive, starved for love. Adopted accidentally, permitted to stay. A stormy, endearing growing up. One could not help but love Anne; she was too human to be only a book-girl. She had her share of faults - anger, judgment, prejudice. But she knew the art of self-awareness, the rare ability to admit to fault and the importance of ideals. Her world was all that was fanciful and utopian, but also (or perhaps for that very reason*) strongly moral and guided by self-prescribed values. Montgomery, whom the biographer described as an 'indefatigable' scribbler, had poured much of herself into Anne. 

Montgomery grew up without playmates, with dour grandparents, with only books for companions and cherished friends, with no prospect of college-learning. She taught school, cared for her aging and ill grandparents until they no longer had the need, and moved, without much choice, into a humdrum existence. Throughout, she scribbled. Day in and day out, on good and bad days, through a harrowing war, through her newborn's death, when her love became futile, when growing up friendless. For her, writing was both strength and a release. A rich, giving, contained self pouring itself out through ink and pen. 

She defined 'indefatigable' for me. Ever since then, I have looked at that word wherever it turns up and been reminded of that plucky spirit, scribbling away determinedly through rain and sun. In return, it has given me the ability to see, recognise and worship the illimitable human spirit, and the autonomy that lies at the foundation of human life. It has taught me to respect human spirit (though I fear I forget 'tween-times, and have to be reminded continually) and to seek it everywhere. It has shown me - fleetingly, tantalisingly - the value of a life lived with an indomitable sense of spirit, of the refusal to give up, the aspiration towards the highest ideals and of the treachery that is compromise. 

In moments of exceptional clarity and gratitude, I am convinced that integrity - the pinnacle of all human values - comes from such steadfastness. A necessary, if not sufficient, condition. An unvanquishable, unassailable spirit. 

____

* I was sent this delightful quote from Charles de Lint's The Onion Girl: "People who've never read fairy tales, the professor said, have a harder time coping in life than the ones who have. They don't have access to all the lessons that can be learnt from the journeys through dark woods and the kindness of strangers treated strangely, the knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. I'm not talking about in-your-face lessons, but more subtle ones. The kind that seep up from your subconscious and give you moral and human structures for your life. The kind that teach you how to prevail, and trust. And maybe even love."

Let's never be too old or too wise to believe in faeries, Anne says. May we never - to believe in, or learn from, them. 

Quote

"Whereas in earlier ages, religion led to a degree of fatalism, contemporary understanding pulls paradoxically towards an acceptance of risk but away from a tolerance of results when they occur."

Reading for academic assignments has its perks. Every once in a while (rather frequent whiles), one comes across gems such as these. This is, by the way, from an article by David Bergman on corporate criminal responsibility, in Reconstructing Criminal Law, edited by Lacey, Wells and Quick. The rest of the article is quite routine, but this stood out.

Choosing Our Lives

How should one live one's life?

Broadly, two ways: your way or by another's direction. If you're a fatalist, this post is not for you. If you condemn or pity yourself as a product of your circumstances, this is not for you, either. I, for one, believe in human autonomy. An inevitable corollary of that is the freedom of choice, and thus, the power to shape your life, exactly the way you want it.

I. The Autonomy of Choice
The idea of human autonomy, as Kant[1] proposed it, is that one creates one's own (moral) laws. In sum it is simply this: "[the inherent value of the world, the summum bonum, is freedom] in accordance with a will which is not necessitated to action." This is, then, Kant's emphasis on autonomy as the ability to choose whether or not to act (and with the help of human reason, which is a corollary of autonomy, to choose how to act.

The basis for this insistence on the fundamentality of human autonomy rests in the Kantian idea of the noumenal self[2], which, unlike the phenomenal self, is unaffected by and is independent of (or transcends) external influences or natural events. The noumenal self is to be understood in relation to the phenomenal self. The latter is a product of nature - it is bound by the a priori laws of space and time,[3] and is a product, to a great extent, of deterministic laws.[4] To put it simply: the phenomenal self is all those parts of us (the body, mind and intellect, says Indian philosophy) that are affected by external influences or circumstances.[5] Kant believes that noumenal self is independent of all these and transcends them.

Well, all of that is too complex for this post, and I don't understand them fully myself. The quibbles of language will further complicate the ideas. To explain simply: imagine yourself (Person X, the noumenal self) looking through a telescope. The telescope is your phenomenal self: it's going to be affected by adjustment, focus, the quality of lens, etc.; the sort of focus and accurate imagery it gives you will depend on all those. You (Person X), on the other hand, are independent of all those, and you have the power to adjust the telescope because of this independence. Kant (and incidentally, Indian philosophy), attributes the basis for human autonomy and free will to this independence/transcendence.

So then, one is autonomous. But what does that mean for us, really? That we have the ability to choose whether or not to act. This is not only at the physical level of action ('I'm going to throw this stone' or 'I won't write this exam'), but also at a deeper mental/emotional/intellectual level. It means that we have the ability to choose what we accept and reject of the external influences bearing down upon us. 

For example, you and I may each have a different work ethic, and different academic opinions about the same thing. The choice to condemn myself (or yourself) as inferior or superior (which is permitting an external influence to define yourself) is mine and mine (or yours) alone. To take another example, I can say: "The entire world thinks I am a horrible person, and I feel unhappy about that and I am tired of it." The choice here whether or not to internalise the world's opinion into oneself. I can or can not choose to internalise these, and therefore, choose whether or not to let the world's opinion affect me (the self). Similarly with ideas ('I think he's an idiot, and I have nothing to learn from him' or 'Everyone's got something sensible to say' - as Bernard Shaw said, pebbles of truth everywhere).

That - the decision of whether or not to permit an external influence to define/change/affect us - is the first step. The second step is the hardest that we shall ever be forced to make[6], but it also, in some sense, the most liberating. Step Two is responsibility for one's thoughts and actions - and therefore, responsibility for the consequences of those choices.

______

[1] I choose him for two reasons: first, because he is one of the only people I've sought to read extensively on autonomy, and secondly, because he appeals to me. More the former, of course.

[2] Noumenal self is one that is unaffected by any a priori laws; it is beyond all this. In some sense, the idea of God fits this, only Kant is speaking of the human self. Indian philosophy's idea of Brahman (or the Absolute or Ultimate Consciousness or Truth) is similar to this. Noumenon refers, in the Kantian sense, to the thing-in-itself.

[3] See Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, specifically the Transcendental Aesthetic, where he discusses the most controversial of his theories: the idea that human beings cannot understand anything in itself, but only appearances (moulded by practical postulates of space and time).

[4] He means that one cannot understand anything one sees without the crutches of space and time. We understand an event in relation to its position in time and space. It happened now because caused it. For example, 'I am unhappy now because my grandmother died yesterday.'
There is an intrinsic link to the idea of cause-effect in this determinism. If you cannot control the cause (the weather), you cannot control the effect (the tsunami). This is different when we look at internal workings of ourselves, I believe. The question there is not whether or not I can control the causes (those may be in the past, and thus out of our control). The question is merely this: can I exert some measure of control over my response to this external stimuli now? Or am I inevitably, helplessly bound by its effects? 

[5] 'I stole a loaf of bread because my family is dying of hunger.'  Here, 'I' am affected by these external event: relationship and identification with the same (family), starvation and fear of death, lack of resources. Kant says that one cannot give moral judgment (right and wrong) in such cases. Remember Amartya Sen's illustration of three children and the flute in The Idea of Justice?

[6] And I do mean forced, you know. It's an inevitable corollary of the first step. We shall see what happens when we refuse to accept this step, too.
 

Rant

The world is moving too fast. No, I don't mean how fast the technology is growing, or the new fast-paced world and living, or this increasing tendency towards immediate fulfilment of wishes. I mean simply that time is going just too fast.

For example, Titanic released fifteen years ago. Fifteen. Man, that makes me feel so old. Lion King was sixteen years ago, and I watched that in the theatre. My cousin, who was crawling on the ground looking for pebbles to chew when I'd begun school all starry-eyed, is now contemplating a career in experimental physics.

It doesn't end there, either. Does it ever occur to you that a day (all twenty four hours of it) ends way too quickly? You don't even realise it's gone, and it is, and before you know it, another day is over, and then another, and then another. Three years of law school have gone by this way. 

Now, this rapid passing of days is all okay, but only if we think we've utilised that time efficiently and effectively. And that's where I strike a snag, generally. Time is just not my slave: more like a fairy slyly dancing just out of reach, giggling and taunting and stepping clear of grasp all the time. I was once told that time is like a candle burning in the midst of a terrific seastorm (relevance being that it could go out at any point), and therefore, underscoring the paramount importance of managing all that precious time. You know, all that jazz about living each day as if it were your last. For example, you don't want to spend your last day... sleeping, do you? You should be climbing the Seven Peaks, or making a movie, or traipsing an unknown forest path (and fighting those bears while you're at it), or cracking a secret enemy code, or locating extraterrestrial intelligence, or talking to your dog, or  settling on a comfortable chair with a book you've never read. Learning something new. Always that, and nothing else.

Bugger boredom. And laziness. And all that (ejusdem generis).

soul meets body*

For you, mansion, are my abode,
Though only for a while.
And if I not build your doors and windows,

Then who shall build for me?

* Death Cab for Cutie (Plans)

the world goes round and round

Recall how the most appropriate things come to you when you need but least expect them? There's really no believable, sensible explanation for these things, but I like to think it's us remembering old lessons learnt, and picking up the reins again.

I came across an old piece I'd written over two years ago, and I find it astoundingly reflective of my life now. Fascinating how history repeats itself - no, comes back around in spirals* (because after all, one never steps into the same moment** twice) - not only the events, but oneself. This process of inevitable flux, of personal change, is as beautiful and fulfilling as it is painful. The pain soon goes away, though. Yipee.

One wonders, then, at one's ability - nay, irrepressible tendency - to permit oneself the luxury of the same (or similar) experiences, over and over and over again. Old wine in infinite new bottles. One finds it painfully difficult to break conditioning, learn from experiences, and actively seek new ones. Laziness? Perhaps. Routine? Almost certainly. Fear? Absolutely. Days, months, years may go by, but the mind will insist on keeping certain things alive (emotions are a great hand at this), and refuse to learn from experience (getting burnt by a candle flame: standard example). Some call it foolishness; some incorrigible optimism (what if you don't get burnt this time?!).

One is conditioned to human living: fears, hopes, despair (incidentally, Michael Drayton's poem To Despair, part of Idea, is great), vulnerabilities, dependencies are all part of the human condition. One finds it impossible to wean oneself from these, not only because one perceives them as natural, but the effort required is immense. Who would not desire an easy life?

I love how incomplete and muddled this post is. First drafts always reflect half-formed ideas.

---

* I believe this was Vico's theory. I haven't verified this. SEP will have something, I'm sure.

** River, moment. What's in a word?