Sigur Rós - Heima (live from the film)

Looking for God: Sartre's avoidance?

I first read Sartre in my late teens.Because I HAD to read him to impress the girls etc etc.We all had to do that. I have been reading him again at the age of 48 as I wanted to explore what he really thought about God.
He mostly stayed away from the notion of a God even if he expressed no basis on which to plant his philosophical feet. To hell with that, he didn't need it. He was ready to survive in mid-air. We are French,( trust me, I know THAT one, I married a Frenchwoman) he was ready to say. We have minds, we can live with the absurd and ask for no reward. That is because we are noble enough to live with emptiness, and strong enough to choose a course which we are even ready to die for. And we will do this in whole defiance of the fact that, indeed, we have no footing. We do not look to a Hereafter.
It was an attitude; it was a proud stance; it was equal to living with one's mind in formless space, but it deprived existentialism of more interesting explorations. For atheism ( in his case I prefer more to call it non- theism)is a somewhat meaningless undertaking when it comes to philosophy. Atheism can contend with ethics (as Sartre did most brilliantly, that was his familiar ground), but when it comes to metaphysics, atheism dies a sad death. It is, after all, near to impossible for a philosopher to explore how we are here without entertaining some notion of what the prior force might have been.
All the same, Sartre's philosophical talents were unquestionable. He was able to function with precision in the upper echelons of every logical structure he set up. If only he had not been an existentialist! For an existentialist who does not believe in some kind of Other is equal to a chemist who designs a terrific drug that he offers it to no one. If existentialism is to flourish (that is, develop through a series of new philosophers building on earlier premises), it needs a God who is no more confident of the end than we are; a God who is an artist, not a law-giver; a God who suffers the uncertainties of existence; a God who lives without any of the pre-arranged guarantees that sit upon formal theology with its flatulent, self-serving assumption of a Being who is All-Good and All-Powerful. What an oxymoron--All-Good and All-Powerful. It is certain to maroon any and all formal theologians who would like to explain an earthquake. Before the wrath of a tsunami, they can only break wind. The notion of an existential God, a Creator who may have been doing His or Her artistic best, but could still have been remiss in designing the tectonic plates, is not within their scope.
My curiosity through all these is Sartre, at no point asserted his non-theism. Why?
I intended to finish this blog by quoting him which, to me,transmits almost what borders on a childlike seeking of God. The last sentence is almost heartbreakingly poignant.


“The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”

aqualung - strange and beautiful subtitulado esp(video oficial)

A mashed potato thing!!

Haven't blogged for a while; been feeling flat and listless. The first signs of spring show in the potted hyacinths waking up in the living room; makes me feel fucking ecstatic. No!!Food is the same cross between some sort of a broth and a stew most of the time. And mashed potatoes!!Have never eaten so much of mashed potatoes in my entire fucking life. All that remains is to run into Dickens by the graveyard at some point!!

Oh! well, since I am feeling like a whinging nincompoop , I won't try any metaphysics or ethereal indulgences today. Yes, been reading some Sartre and Nietzsce often and on. And a Sidney Sheldon!Its got sex and stalking!Best thing to have happened to me under the duvet for yonks!

Somebody bring me some steak and chips please or take me away to spend an evening with some obscene belly dancers.Or an illegal opium den!!

Radiohead - House of Cards (For Joao Lucas)

An abandoned Song

Tamed by fatigue, we lie on bed;
the rising sun through the trees dyes us red;
in broad daylight her red silk shines,
abandoned, almost Dickensonian.
At last the trees are green on Manderville Street,
blossoms on our few little plants ignite
the morning with their murderous five day's white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad -
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye -
and dragged me home alive. . . . Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your fifties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Russians in the heat
of Spinny Hill, fainting at your feet -
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional Indian.

Now four years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child,
your old-fashioned tirade -
loving, rapid, merciless -
breaks like the Indian Ocean on my head.

Sigur ros - Heima (HD) Official Video

Looking for God ( Bertie's Bloomer)

This refers to my earlier post and the enquiry into the 'first cause'. I stumbled into Bertrand Russell's thoughts on this and it is so feeble I almost couldn't believe my eyes (Okay okay he was Russell but so what?) He goes:

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well use. world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

Don't Bertie.Please.

Looking for God (A different matter altogether)

I have started some work and it seems odd wrestling with Excel after all these years. Good fun though as it gives me a break from what I call the world's loneliest cottage. I should be able to increase my hours gently over a reasonable period of time. I have a caring mother there in Sid's wife, Jayne who keeps an eye on me should I start running too fast too soon.

The temparature on the car dash was 5 degrees, there is hope!

Looking forward to my trip to Nottingham tomorrow. Should be fun.

Anyway, let's go back to thinking about what/who is God again.

The existence of the world and everything in it can only be explained if we can determine the first cause. Accepted. It is impossible for anything to be the cause of its own existence because then it would have to create itself, and to do so , it would have to exist before it existed. If something exists, it is because something else prior to it was its cause. Therefore, if no first cause exists, neither will anything else exist. So, WHAT/WHO is this first cause? So how did we all happen? An act of God or as Monsignor Dawkins & Co claim, an act of matter which is self existing and not created?

Matter has been long considered as a parallel argument to us as a being( from the scientific circles) but does it fully answer the first cause argument? Matter is not nearly as abstract of an idea and in fact, we are all matter, so the notion that matter "is" is not nearly as far fetched as the idea that God "is". Okay most of us will accept this notion if we can be convinced that matter can self create. However, when we examine this notion, science has ALWAYS fallen miles short of making a convincing argument. I want to be fair to the God argument here and stop being blindly trendy in following this God-bashing and examine what science has to argue instead.

It doesn't require a quantum physicist to know that we live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger with every passing day. Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards!If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together. The day before that, we were still closer. Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been?At a point!At the beginning! At what scientists themselves call a singularity!Not so long back (1998?) it was discovered that the galaxies are accelerating in their expansion. Any notion that we live in an oscillating or pulsating universe has been dispelled by this discovery. The universe is not slowing down, but speeding up in its motion. So WHAT was at this starting point?

A second proof that we had a clear beginning but not an eternal cycle of matter -going- on can be seen in the energy sources that fuel the cosmos. Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by using an incomprehensible amount of hydrogen in the process. In spite of that tremendous consumption of fuel, the sun has only used up a very small amount of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence. This incredible process of combustion is not just confined to the sun. Every star in the sky generates its energy in the same way. Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars(don't even try to imagine the zeros), thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos. If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen should be left? The fact is that hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe! Everywhere we look in space we can see the line in the spectrum--a piece of light only given off by hydrogen. This could not be unless we had a beginning!

Finally,In space, things too get old. Astronomers refer to the ageing process as heat death. If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it. Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded. So what does this do to the scientific premise that matter is eternal ?


So science making claims as matter being eternal and self creating is extraordinarily dodgy at its best and fail to convince me as being the cause of all creation. Besides, even if it has been self creating itself since an eternity in time, to be honest, is hiding behind what seems simply concepts beyond science itself. It just doesn't sit right, does it? Well, to me anyway. An odd paradox. Hmmm!!

More on this soon.....

Looking for God ( Googling God)

Just when almost all of the snow had gone comes another short dusting of the stuff. We all hold our breath and fortunately matters don't go beyond that one evening's threat. I take comfort that the days get longer from now on, even though de facto it means nothing. We are a long way away from proper sunny days and natural warmth. Bit of psychological comfort after the coldest December in Britain in a 120 years, I guess. I fell as settled as a newcomer can be in a community and things have been more or less steady. I have no strict goal posts apart from seeing the next month or two through in quiet reflection.

So I think of God etc.

What is God?

Who is He really?

Google throws up more than 480 million entries to the word God. A widely used word then but little understood among most of us who would position themselves as 'mainstream', 'atheists', 'humanists' or 'agnostics'. I have been at least one, some or most of these most of my life. I know little of God but I can assure you, not for any lack of wanting to know. Quite the opposite really. I had a natural quest of God like most others, it freely followed from the missing piece of the enormous puzzle that sat irritatingly at the back of my mind since I was rather young. What was beyond the line of palm trees in the deep,dark distance that my child's eye couldn't fathom? And beyond the planets, galaxies etc.? You know that one? I think most, if not all of us do move with that unfinished puzzle as we grow older, not been able to quite find it as we graze the pastures of Theology, Philosophy, Science or Churches in the process. Some find it (bastards), most don't.

The problem is God remains mysteriously absent from those 480 million sea of suggestions. At least to me anyway. Google takes me through the proverbial Wikipedia to a plethora of information ranging from visionaries from Indiana and Wisconsin flogging books and DVD's to the usual banjo playing of the doolally evangelism of the American Bible belt to even a brothel which has mischievously meta tagged its way in there somehow.

Okay, so, in His absence lies the enigma, I see. I am comforted that He remains unavailable through Google and the clever whorehouse. He ought to be bigger and better than that. Yes, I gently stroke the comforting irony.

Will post more in a day or two.....

The Dangling Conversation - Simon & Garfunkel Tribute

Three poems written over the last week

The Waterside Poem for Maya

Maya,It was a thousand evenings ago you abandoned
yourself to me inside an old Volkswagen. In the
faintest post- dusk light by the dark expanse of the
reservoir that lay in front of us. We
rushed. hurriedly feeding from each others' mouths as if it
would be the last time we could taste each
other. I kissed your purple pendent made of gemstones as the red of the burn
crept up your neck and
burst in a blush of red across
your face. Your sweet perfume made God
rattle the dice cup of love in my veins. The windscreen
and the windows were misted by our mad mangled octopus
of love; through steering wheels, gear stick or even our own
breaths.
Plain.
Blatant.
Unashamed.
The Starlings drew maps of
non existing continents in the last drops of
lights outside. The swans and the Canada Geese
were quietly making way out
of the waters and coming inland.

A thousand evenings
later I
find myself by a lakeside many
miles away. I stood by it staring into
what would have been its ordinary fare on an
ordinary day but for
its frozenness. One single swan was
walking towards
it's perfect-white centre. Oblivious
of the weather warnings.


Poem for Maya (the awful illogic of love and God)


That is a bridge too far my mother would say
I say never you venture on your own
again. I smell the coriander in her clothes
as I feign submission to her reprimands.

Earlier, my dog and I, the Sun beating down the bursting
Bougainvilleas and lines of Rusty Shield Bearers
Had made our way to what once was a wooden bridge and
had watched tiny Barbs and Rasboras flirt with yellow butterflies on
the edge of the waterlillies,Underneath, lay
mysterious, moss laden, deep, dark waters.


Later
My father explains the constellations of stars to me from
the verandah as a little breeze blows. Andromeda, Aries, phoenix and Orion.Water drips
on a tin mug.


Years later, A thousand broken bridges and a billion stars later I
stand by a doorway in a misty nowhere cottage and
long for an Englishwoman. She
kisses fast and uses the front third of her tongue on mine,almost
anguished by the guilt of our flesh in conversation.


And cries later watching me unlock my insane Indian ghosts.
She tries in vain to save me but I eat her, in agony, in deep darkness of
My heart, my heart.


And dying from a thousand, violent sins unknown the
awful illogic of love and God are the only things that suddenly
seem real.


The Unrequited Breast



Maya's pout in bed was a sign of her
playfulness. The 'duck-face' of her being
wanted. I fumble from somewhere lost in my
mind's woods in distant response;wrecked, battle-torn and
detached.

I am aware of her electric response at my
barest touch as outside the ugly, ordinary hoot of a
Tawny owl murders the silence lapping the tall birches.

I watch as she gathers herself in polite
composure as she leaves, always remembering to smile what
really were an ocean of tears. I glimpse her left breast still sing as
it slips out of her red silk gown.
Perfectly shaped.
A nipple.
Erect.
Unrequited.

We seek separate spaces and
the night to play out our bodies'
two separate tragedies.


--