While watching "A Simple Life" with my wife at a local cineplex, i was talking to my wife and asking her questions about the movie which was in Cantonese. My wife explained to me what certain cantonese phrases meant and as she did so, i heard a "SHHHHHHHHHH!" loudly from the couple seated to our left. I hadn't realized that we were speaking loudly but that seemed to be the case with the couple. After a while, the couple moved a few rows in front (the cinema was lightly seated) but not before the man complained loudly: "it's as if they bought the whole cinema!" After that i only spoke to my wife in hushed tones and kept all my replies to her in minimalist-fashion like. But we were exonerated of our crimes as another group of movie-goers to the right of us spoke just as loud and sometimes you could hear their cellphones ringing too. I noticed that when the movie ended and the lights were on, the complaining couple walked off very quickly. Maybe they were disgusted with us or they were fearful of further conflict?
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Proton - will we ever let it die in peace?
Now this is getting old and tired. Just like the man who championed it. We never had a comparative advantage in making cars but we dived headlong into it, nonetheless. Power windows that don't work, cars that break down in the highway and clog up traffic, high import duties making better quality imported cars out of reach of most working class Malaysians and all manner of madness ensued. One man and his obsession with cars and his impossible dream overrode the wishes of ordinary folks for good quality affordable cars. Now after almost 3 decades of folly, pride still reigns supreme over common sense and honesty. Will someone tell the leaders of this country that there is a limit to madness and stupidity?
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Asking the Big Questions
The present view of life, or at least the view that informs the policies of the most powerful governments, is hard-nosed, no-nonsense, stripped to the bone - and rooted in science. All of which would be fine, and just what the world needs, if only the politicians, bankers and corporate bosses who run the world really understood what science is, and what it isn't; what it can do and what it cannot.
The version of science that prevails and, alas, is often encouraged by the scientists themselves in the interests of making a living is crude in the extreme. And then, in turn, this crude and ultra-materialist science is co-opted to the cause of an even cruder economic dogma known as neo-liberalism, which is rooted in the idea that human beings are made most happy by material goods, and that progress means more stuff.
The piles of money thus generated are used in part to support more of the same kind of science, and so it goes on, round and round, in a positive feedback loop. As the merry-go-round continues, the world falls apart and humanity grows more desperate; the poor obviously so, the rich looking over their shoulders.
But science doesn't have to be like this. When science first began in the Middle Ages, and through the 17th century when it began to come into its own, it was conceived as an exercise in metaphysics; an aspect of scientific discourse that has, over these past few hundred years, gone missing.
As Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Professor of Islamic Studies at The George Washington University, Washington DC, observes, the loss of metaphysics from the western psyche "is most directly responsible for our modern predicament".
Because science, stripped of its metaphysical context, has encouraged us to treat other people, our fellow creatures, and even the Earth itself, with what amounts to contempt. And it has caused us to horribly overreach.
In his now almost 15-year old TV documentary Man and Nature, Professor Nasr summarised beautifully what metaphysics actually is: "the science of the Real, of the origin and end of things, of the Absolute and, in its light, the relative". And crucially: "It can only be obtained through intellectual intuition and not simply through ratiocination. It thus differs from philosophy as it is usually understood".
Metaphysics does not necessarily or exclusively belong to religion, but in practice it seems to: and the great founders of modern Western science - Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Robert Boyle, John Ray (all Christians) - were deeply devout albeit in a huge variety of ways; and so too were their medieval predecessors, both Christian and Muslim. All these great thinkers saw their science in the same way that the composer J.S.Bach, some decades later, saw his music: all was for the glory of God.
The early scientists practised science so that they, and the world, could appreciate God's works more fully. For them, science was an act of worship. Certainly they thought that their science could be useful. Newton, for example, was financed for a time by the admiralty because astronomy, obviously, could improve navigation. But, even knowing that their science might have practical application, they surely would not have supposed as their modern successors have that they could understand the universe so exhaustively that they could take over the world. The scientists of old sought to work more harmoniously and fruitfully with Nature, which they took to mean with God. They did not presume to usurp.
So, what changed? A whole succession of events, is the answer. Firstly, in the 18th century, came the Enlightenment: the supreme age of rationalism. It began to seem to thinkers at that time that all facts could be known, and - guided by the inexorable logic of mathematics - that, simply by applying the power of reason, all could be understood. To be sure, the greatest thinkers of the 18th century, including David Hume and Immanuel Kant, warned that rationality itself, and indeed the human mind, has its limits.
There is a limit, of course, to what we can understand, and there are flaws in the methods by which we seek that understanding. However, the message that emerged from the Enlightenment was quite the opposite. Omniscience, it seemed, was within our close grasp, and rationality - straight thinking: empirical observation and math - would be the way to achieve it. Thus theology, and religion in general, began to seem embarrassingly old-fashioned.
And as the 18th century rationalist zeal continued, the 19th century brought a lot more change in similar vein. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw the rise of modern earth sciences and, in particular, of modern palaeontology, both of which threw serious doubts on the bible's Creation story in Genesis: suggesting, at the very least, that this account, if taken literally, was hard to square with the now known facts on the ground.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection has often been blamed for the loss of faith in the 19th century, but the truth is that this trend was gathering momentum well before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Indeed, the theme ran right through 19th-century literature and philosophy, from Dostoyevsky to George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
The 19th century also brought the rise and rise of big-time engineering, from the bridges of Isambard Kingdom Brunel to the steam locomotive and the towering skyscrapers of Chicago, and by the end of that century, the rise, too, of industrial chemistry. It began to seem, to many, that humanity really could and would finally control the world - that God really was now redundant.
Finally, towards the end of the 19th century came the rise of positivism: basically, the belief that we could understand everything we needed to understand and that was possible to understand, and that we could achieve this simply by observation; by reasoning and maths - in other words, by science. Science, it was fondly supposed back then, provided certainty and would prove its assertions.
In the early 20th century, the logical positivists went further, insisting that any assertion that could not be proved was literal nonsense. Since they accepted the assumption that science could prove its theories, and nothing else could, they believed this meant science alone should be taken seriously. Metaphysics, though, does not ask questions of a kind that can be answered with certainty, and with proofs; and so it was that metaphysics went right out the window and right out of people's heads.
The behaviourists, too, contrived to explain the psychology of animals and of human beings as simply a series of reflexes. Physicists and biologists alike provided more and more detailed knowledge of the workings of the universe, down to and including the structure and modus operandi of DNA.
By the 1970s, we had "genetic engineering" - the transfer of DNA between different individuals that could be of quite different species - and so it to seem that we human beings really could control life itself, even create brand-new life forms to order.
GMOs - genetically modified organisms, notably in the form of GM crops such as maize and soya - began being presented as "the saviours" of the world, as if we would all starve without them (this being a key theme of The Future of Food and Farming, the latest report by Professor Sir John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser).
But the 20th century also, for those who cared to listen, sowed huge seeds of doubt. The physicists showed that the universe is innately unpredictable. The fundamental particles of which it is composed behave randomly to a significant extent.
And so even if we could really understand the universe (which we cannot), we could never with any accuracy predict its behaviour. Science philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out that in reality science does not prove anything beyond all doubt. At best, it can simply disprove what is impossible. All its theories are provisional.
Kurt Godel, the Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher, showed us that all mathematical statements that are not simply matters of definition (as in 2 + 2 = 4) contain some component that itself cannot be proved, which means they, too, to some extent are all arbitrary and that math is not the great unequivocal arbiter of truth that it was once taken to be.
Specifically, the late 20th century naturalists and psychologists showed that the psychology of animals cannot sensibly be described in behaviourist terms - essentially as a string of reflexes: in particular, Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, is now writing of the politics of animals, and the empathy that exists between them. And that the once simple thinking behind genetic engineering - the notion that if we fiddle with DNA we can turn out new organisms in order - is now known to be extraordinarily naive, because the relationship between individual genes and the form and behaviour of the whole animal or plant is far from simple.
The British biologist Sir Peter Medawar summarised this pretty well when he pointed out that science is nothing more or less than "the art of the soluble". That is, scientists address only those questions they think they have a reasonable chance of answering. And they appear to provide such certain answers only because they take such care to tailor the questions.
In the end, science, like all human understanding, is just narrative: a story that we tell ourselves. What we call "truth" in science is just the story that we happen to find the most convincing. Clearly, the notion that science can make us omniscience is nonsense. The greater and even more dangerous idea that we might achieve omnipotence is an even bigger nonsense.
So, what do we do now?
We need to acknowledge that the past 300 years, from the Enlightenment onwards, has largely been a diversion. Perhaps this was necessary - to show us the limits of rationality, which includes the limits of science. But now it should be obvious that this particular party is well and truly over. We need to return to an earlier position. We need to reinstate the concept of metaphysics.
Metaphysics asks the very biggest questions, including questions of values, which scientists are so careful not to address because they are not "soluble" by the methods of science.
Rational thinking is of course vital to serious inquiry, but it is not sufficient. If we don't want to limit our understanding to what we can see and measure and stub our toes on, we have to employ ways of thinking that are not, strictly, those of ratiocination. In practice, this means we must cultivate our intuitions.
Intuition is a broad-brush term, like "mind", and "consciousness", but it's none the worse for that. It means, broadly, what we feel in our bones to be true. Thus, intuition includes everything from our reflex fear of heights to our more specific fears of spiders or snakes, and includes our intuitive feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye: an intuitive feel, that is, for transcendence.
Specifically, the idea of transcendence is that the universe isn't just "stuff", with spaces in between. The universe itself is mindful. THe elusive term "spirituality" means just this: a feeling of being directly in touch with the mind of the universe. It isn't simply a hormone-induced dreaminess occasioned by sunsets and Schubert, but truly a feeling for transcendence.
Intuition and, specifically, the intuitive feeling for transcendence - for a reality behind what can be directly seen and measured - is, as i see it, the raw material of religion. Religion is not blind intuition, but the general feeling for transcendence which becomes embedded in a grand, all-embracing narrative. The task of religion is to cultivate intuition.
In theology, intuition and ratiocination are in perpetual dialogue, each testing and drawing on the strengths of the other. In Christianity we can see this in the New Testament with Thomas, the disciple who expressed his doubts because what he was asked to believe seemed to offend his reason. Faith is what we achieve when we decide, rationally, to trust our intuition.
Scientists themselves of course rely on their intuition, as all of us must. The history of science is littered with stories of scientists who suddenly see, in a flash - not quite out of the blue but more or less - what is the case. My own favourite example is that of the Nobel Prize winning cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, who, sitting under a tree (trees seem good for intuition) suddenly perceived that genes may move around within the genome - the beginnings of the "jumping gene". She said it took her half a second to realise this and 3 hours to explain it to her colleagues. In this she was one up on Einstein who said that he perceived relativity in a flash and then spent the rest of his life explaining it.
Scientists must use their intuition, too, to tell them what is true. The math alone doesn't reveal the truth. It merely suggests possibilities. Most famously, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prizewinner Paul Dirac said he judged the truth of an equation by its beauty. As Keats put the matter, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...that is all ye need to know". Indeed, the greatest scientists, like the greatest poets, are the most intuitive.
Science, properly conceived - including its limitations - is wonderful. I love it. I have spent my life on it. But it should be seen as Newton and Ray saw it: not as a means to take the world by the neck and bend it to our will, but as the means by which to admire the world and everything in it as fully as we are able.
Science in its standard form is just an exercise in applied materialism: the world and our fellow creatures are reduced to a resource, to be turned into commodities, to be sold for money.
Anyone who prevents us from doing this - who stands in the way of "progress" - is conceived as the enemy, and pushed aside, with the help of more science. The whole process is vile.
Religion is also conceived as the enemy, and indeed the people who stand in our materialist path are often dismissed as religious fanatics. Unfortunately, there are religious fanatics who respond by dismissing all science. The resulting spat makes for good television if you like that sort of thing, and it engages some of the world's best-paid "intellectuals", but it is nonsense nonetheless and unworthy of us all.
In truth, when science and religion are properly conceived, we can see that they belong together. They are not merely equal-but-separate. Religions properly conceived attempt to provide a complete narrative, a complete account of the world, and so should embrace the more limited agenda of science.
When science is embedded within its religious matrix the two together are the stuff of metaphysics, seeking to understand what the world is really like and where we belong within it, and what, therefore, our attitude should be towards it.
We might appropriately end with a quote from Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
(Source: Resurgence magazine, Sept/Oct 2011)
But the 20th century also, for those who cared to listen, sowed huge seeds of doubt. The physicists showed that the universe is innately unpredictable. The fundamental particles of which it is composed behave randomly to a significant extent.
And so even if we could really understand the universe (which we cannot), we could never with any accuracy predict its behaviour. Science philosopher Sir Karl Popper pointed out that in reality science does not prove anything beyond all doubt. At best, it can simply disprove what is impossible. All its theories are provisional.
Kurt Godel, the Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher, showed us that all mathematical statements that are not simply matters of definition (as in 2 + 2 = 4) contain some component that itself cannot be proved, which means they, too, to some extent are all arbitrary and that math is not the great unequivocal arbiter of truth that it was once taken to be.
Specifically, the late 20th century naturalists and psychologists showed that the psychology of animals cannot sensibly be described in behaviourist terms - essentially as a string of reflexes: in particular, Frans de Waal, the Dutch primatologist, is now writing of the politics of animals, and the empathy that exists between them. And that the once simple thinking behind genetic engineering - the notion that if we fiddle with DNA we can turn out new organisms in order - is now known to be extraordinarily naive, because the relationship between individual genes and the form and behaviour of the whole animal or plant is far from simple.
The British biologist Sir Peter Medawar summarised this pretty well when he pointed out that science is nothing more or less than "the art of the soluble". That is, scientists address only those questions they think they have a reasonable chance of answering. And they appear to provide such certain answers only because they take such care to tailor the questions.
In the end, science, like all human understanding, is just narrative: a story that we tell ourselves. What we call "truth" in science is just the story that we happen to find the most convincing. Clearly, the notion that science can make us omniscience is nonsense. The greater and even more dangerous idea that we might achieve omnipotence is an even bigger nonsense.
So, what do we do now?
We need to acknowledge that the past 300 years, from the Enlightenment onwards, has largely been a diversion. Perhaps this was necessary - to show us the limits of rationality, which includes the limits of science. But now it should be obvious that this particular party is well and truly over. We need to return to an earlier position. We need to reinstate the concept of metaphysics.
Metaphysics asks the very biggest questions, including questions of values, which scientists are so careful not to address because they are not "soluble" by the methods of science.
Rational thinking is of course vital to serious inquiry, but it is not sufficient. If we don't want to limit our understanding to what we can see and measure and stub our toes on, we have to employ ways of thinking that are not, strictly, those of ratiocination. In practice, this means we must cultivate our intuitions.
Intuition is a broad-brush term, like "mind", and "consciousness", but it's none the worse for that. It means, broadly, what we feel in our bones to be true. Thus, intuition includes everything from our reflex fear of heights to our more specific fears of spiders or snakes, and includes our intuitive feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye: an intuitive feel, that is, for transcendence.
Specifically, the idea of transcendence is that the universe isn't just "stuff", with spaces in between. The universe itself is mindful. THe elusive term "spirituality" means just this: a feeling of being directly in touch with the mind of the universe. It isn't simply a hormone-induced dreaminess occasioned by sunsets and Schubert, but truly a feeling for transcendence.
Intuition and, specifically, the intuitive feeling for transcendence - for a reality behind what can be directly seen and measured - is, as i see it, the raw material of religion. Religion is not blind intuition, but the general feeling for transcendence which becomes embedded in a grand, all-embracing narrative. The task of religion is to cultivate intuition.
In theology, intuition and ratiocination are in perpetual dialogue, each testing and drawing on the strengths of the other. In Christianity we can see this in the New Testament with Thomas, the disciple who expressed his doubts because what he was asked to believe seemed to offend his reason. Faith is what we achieve when we decide, rationally, to trust our intuition.
Scientists themselves of course rely on their intuition, as all of us must. The history of science is littered with stories of scientists who suddenly see, in a flash - not quite out of the blue but more or less - what is the case. My own favourite example is that of the Nobel Prize winning cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock, who, sitting under a tree (trees seem good for intuition) suddenly perceived that genes may move around within the genome - the beginnings of the "jumping gene". She said it took her half a second to realise this and 3 hours to explain it to her colleagues. In this she was one up on Einstein who said that he perceived relativity in a flash and then spent the rest of his life explaining it.
Scientists must use their intuition, too, to tell them what is true. The math alone doesn't reveal the truth. It merely suggests possibilities. Most famously, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prizewinner Paul Dirac said he judged the truth of an equation by its beauty. As Keats put the matter, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...that is all ye need to know". Indeed, the greatest scientists, like the greatest poets, are the most intuitive.
Science, properly conceived - including its limitations - is wonderful. I love it. I have spent my life on it. But it should be seen as Newton and Ray saw it: not as a means to take the world by the neck and bend it to our will, but as the means by which to admire the world and everything in it as fully as we are able.
Science in its standard form is just an exercise in applied materialism: the world and our fellow creatures are reduced to a resource, to be turned into commodities, to be sold for money.
Anyone who prevents us from doing this - who stands in the way of "progress" - is conceived as the enemy, and pushed aside, with the help of more science. The whole process is vile.
Religion is also conceived as the enemy, and indeed the people who stand in our materialist path are often dismissed as religious fanatics. Unfortunately, there are religious fanatics who respond by dismissing all science. The resulting spat makes for good television if you like that sort of thing, and it engages some of the world's best-paid "intellectuals", but it is nonsense nonetheless and unworthy of us all.
In truth, when science and religion are properly conceived, we can see that they belong together. They are not merely equal-but-separate. Religions properly conceived attempt to provide a complete narrative, a complete account of the world, and so should embrace the more limited agenda of science.
When science is embedded within its religious matrix the two together are the stuff of metaphysics, seeking to understand what the world is really like and where we belong within it, and what, therefore, our attitude should be towards it.
We might appropriately end with a quote from Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
(Source: Resurgence magazine, Sept/Oct 2011)
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Howl
By Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Howl
For Carl Solomon
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humour
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Saturday, December 17, 2011
The case for a new policy framework - by R B Bhattacharjee, The Edge Malaysia (week of Dec 19-Dec 25, 2011)
Re-produced from his "My Say" column by The Edge associate editor R B Bhattacharjee which was published in the Edge Malaysia, week of Dec 19 - Dec 25, 2011:-
"It is a good thing to have more transparency because the balance sheet of Petronas links directly to the government budget. If Petronas is in trouble, the government budget is in trouble," Woo observed.
"The biggest reason we are belly up is that the world has changed," said Woo. "The strong government has put in place policies that systematically drove away domestic capital. This is why Malaysia hasn't run a current account surplus in years, which, in other words, means capital flight."
A key lesson of the eurozone crises that is relevant to Malaysia related to the problem of mismanagement of government budgets and the ability to hide this bad practice. The Greek budget deficit, for example, was twice the amount that was reported in official records, for which the country was duly punished by the market.
A second issue is moral hazard, in the form of incentives that promote misbehaviour, such as the generous bailout of businesses. In particular, it is the idea that a financial institution could be "too big to fail" since if it were allowed to go under, it could bring about the collapse of the system because of the interlinkages with other banks.
These were among the points made by Professor Woo Wing Thye, the incoming executive director of the Penang Institute, in his discussion of the Penang in Asia lecture that was delivered by Nobel Laureate Professor Sir James A Mirrlees at the launch of the state-funded think tank earlier this month.
In a brutally frank synopsis of Malaysia's economic malaise, Woo outlined several factors that need to be addressed to steer the country away from a downward trajectory. His message is a sobering one that bears being paid careful attention to.
Woo's opinion carries the weight of a highly distinguished academic career and formidable advisory portfolio. They include concurrent professorial posts at four universities in the US and China, leadership of international economic task forces and projects and advisory positions on government and international panels, including the International Advisory Panel to former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and the chairmanship of the International Economic Advisory Panel of Penang. He was born and had his early education in Penang.
In relation to the encumbrance of institutions that are "too big to fail", Woo noted that the experience in the US was to strive to remedy this problem. When President Barack Obama had talked about "the change we are waiting for", what he had aimed for, according to his adviser Paul Volcker, was to remove the relevance of the "too big to fail" factor. Basically, by having many more financial institutions, if any one were to fail, it would not matter.
With reference to Malaysia, Woo pointed out that this hazard exists in the key role that Petronas plays in the country's finances. The world's experience with state oil companies is that they would fail in the middle of a boom, he said. Indonesia's Pertamina failed in 1974 in the middle of the Opec boom and PetroMexico collapsed in the midst of the second Opec shock.
"These state oil companies were overextended and not very transparent", Woo said. "They were basically the cash registers of their governments.
"It is a good thing to have more transparency because the balance sheet of Petronas links directly to the government budget. If Petronas is in trouble, the government budget is in trouble," Woo observed.
The great emphasis is on getting the public to accept the goods and services tax, he opined, signals that Petronas may be in weaker shape than we think.
To mitigate the moral hazard, Volcker's response was to make sure that there were not institutions that were "too big to fail" because the banks in the US were too concentrated and had the lobbying power to resist the US Congress's efforts to institute meaningful regulatory reforms and open up the market.
Malaysia's response to the 1998 financial crisis was to reduce the number of financial institutions from 58 to 10 - that is to concentrate them. Tellingly, Woo's comment that "big banks are very useful because they can become a very convenient source of campaign finance" struck a chord with the audience.
The concentration of financial institutions had another insidious effect. "When we grouped these banks into much smaller numbers, it was basically close to a confiscation of private property," said Woo. "I think this contributed to the collapse of private investment in Malaysia after 2001 and is responsible for us being stuck in the middle-income trap."
The reason that the government could concentrate financial power in a few hands is that it is overly strong, resulting in the centralisation of decision-making powers, he said. This is seen in other areas too, such as in transport policy. "For example," said Woo, "which route the bus takes in Penang and where the bus stops are put is decided in Putrajaya."
This is the result of an outdated policy framework that is still being continued, although domestic conditions have changed, he said. For example, Malaysia no longer has cheap labour but has become highly dependent on imported labour for many economic activities.
"The biggest reason we are belly up is that the world has changed," said Woo. "The strong government has put in place policies that systematically drove away domestic capital. This is why Malaysia hasn't run a current account surplus in years, which, in other words, means capital flight."
He noted that a recent report by the Washington-based think tank Global Financial Integrity ranked Malaysia No. 5 in terms of capital outflow. Not only that, there has been a serious occurrence of brain drain.
Although the economy had grown 9% a year previously despite the flight of capital and talent, this was no longer possible because, according to Woo, "the world changed in May 2000". He was referring to the events that led to the collapse of the World Trade Organisation talks and China's entry into the body.
"All the FDI that was brought in to replace the capital that had fled disappeared," said Woo. "That was why our growth rate has gone from 9% to 4% since then. The capital flight and brain drain have systematically undermined the move towards a knowledge-based economy."
Citing the World Bank report entitled "Malaysia Economic Monitors: Smart Cities" that was released last month, Woo pointed to the discussion of the poor state of university education in the country in comparison with our regional peers. He highlighted the case of Universiti Malaya, which was ranked No. 207 in the QS World University Rankings 2010.
"It is a sorry tale of how we have run ourselves into intellectual isolation," said Woo.
"What Malaysia has to do is correct this wrong policy framework. A strong state was the right thing at the founding of the federation but over time, given the changes within the country and outside, we need a new policy climate."
Bitter medicine, indeed, but can we afford to ignore it?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
huh? what recession?
Just take a cursory view of the stockmarket lately and you'd be thinking: "when is this blasted recession supposed to be due?" Food and beverage stocks are now pushing the ceiling to new 52-week highs amidst doomy predictions of rising raw materials costs. Analysts can be totally wrong. On the other side of the coin, electronic and electrical exporters are suffering a crush and banking stocks have fallen from last year's highs. Plantation stocks are doing so-so. Anyway, time to sit back and watch as the new plateau take shape. I'd like to sell my Nestle counter for recession seed-money/war chest but it's moving upwards right now so i'll just wait till it settles to its new plateau. Or it might burst its bubble but i doubt it cos all the other food stocks are trending upwards too.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
have fun will travel
i enjoy taking a trip out of sleepy hollow, out of the country, every once in a while. It really helps me to get a true perspective on life and not succumb to the gold-fish-bowl syndrome. Many a times i have thought to myself how "bad" things are but really after seeing and talking to people elsewhere, you come to the conclusion that life where you are and what you face daily isn 't really that bad after all. People, places elsewhere have got it bad, but not so yourself. Not really. People work longer hours, face all sorts of problems at work and in life, have their own personal tragedies to deal with and still have to turn up at the office each day and do whatever distasteful things that their bosses command them to do. And if you thought that the government was bad, well, it could certainly be better but it's not the pits neither. I'm travelling again over the next few days and i take this opportunity to soak in the sights and open my eyes and my mind to possibilities and get out of this mentality of self-doubt and self-pity. The world's about to enter into recession again (unless something miraculous happens in Europe) and it's a good time to looksy around at what's happening outside the tanahair. Even more intriguing is travelling with my 2-year old daughter in tow. She's going out of malaysia/singapore and flying on a plane for the first time in her life and this will also be an opportunity for her to soak in the sights and smells of life outside of home.
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