Nehemiah Blake | notes, visions, prophecies

The website for London’s watchman.

5 days ago

Commercial routes, situationist drifts and pilgrimages

This answer to the question posed below comes from Will Self:

Could you explain the principles of pyschogeography and do you think it’s something that can only be applied to urban spaces?
Ooh, big question. I take my lead on matters psycho-geo from the Situationist fons et origio. It’s part of the tearing down of the Society of the Spectacle mandated by late capitalism; unstructured dérives or drifts across the urban landscape cut across the predetermined routes of commercial necessity which were best defined by a graffito I once saw on a supermarket wall outside Yate in Somerset: ‘Work, Consume, Die’. What I think of as ‘the man-machine matrix’ wants you tramelled on EasyJet watching a six-inch screen implanted in the back of another human’s head, wants you stuck in a car coughing out lead particulates, wants you staring at a VDU, doesn’t want you on foot, transgressing.

This version of psychogeography (very neatly defined I think) sets itself in opposition to the society of spectacle of late capitalism.  Nehemiah Blake has been forging a third path, one that sits triangulated to the two opposites above (just as John Bunyan lies triangulated with Daniel Defoe and William Blake in Bunhill Fields): walking neither the paths of commercial necessity nor the transgressive paths of psychogeography, but a path of pilgrimage; not a stance for capital or of activist protest, but the stance of a watchman.  I’ll be blogging his visions and watchman reports from this April at www.nehemiahblake.co.uk.

3 months ago

The coming re-enchantment of English Literature

The idea of ‘disenchantment’, of a devaluation of the ineffable in people’s lives, has always seemed to me better suited to the German tradition, capturing a Nietzschean insight. Though it is part of the English tradition, it is harder to see through an English literary or philosophical filter.

…Disenchantment is closely connected with secularism, which we are arguably further away from, in England anyway, than in Eliot’s day.

Been reflecting on that last statement on disenchantment and secularism by Anthony Brown on 3AM.  Does it mean we’re moving back towards enchantment in English letters? Nehemiah Blake would certainly argue that. That is his vision —the coming reenchantment of English literature.  I begin blogging his vision in April at www.nehemiahblake.co.uk.

3 months ago

The similar deaths of literature & Christendom

I find these two recent quotes from Symon Hill and Lars Iyer worth putting alongside each other because they express curiously simliar sentiments. Nehemiah Blake would say that the coincidence is not a coincidence, but that curiouser and curiouser, the restoration of both Christian faith and literature are intimately intertwined. 

This is Symon Hill’s observation of Christianity:

For hundreds of years, Christianity was at the centre of power in Britain. Like much of Europe, it went through various forms of Christendom, in which the state gave political backing to the official Church, while the Church provided moral sanction to the state.

As Christendom fades in a multi-faith society, British Christians have largely reacted in one of three ways.

Firstly, there are those who respond by revering the cultural shell of Christendom. This is the attitude that turns cathedrals into tourist attractions, expects to see nativity plays at Christmas and wants people to get married in churches that they never otherwise attend. It is the approach of people who last year celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible  because of its linguistic and cultural significance, as if the quality of a text could be considered independently of the message it conveys.

Here is Lars Iyer’s nostalgic desire for literature:

I certainly value the criticism my work has received. The fact that such criticism even exists is impressive to me. Spurious has received many appreciative reviews, including several dozen by readers of all kinds who had to write a short review of the novel in order to vote for it in The Guardian Not the Booker prize. For all that, I must admit, I’d like to see a backlash for Dogma, which is coming out in February. I dream of a detailed take down by Michael Hoffman, as he did for Stefan Zweig a while back, something really cruel … I have a desire to be told off, to be not allowed to get away with it. A desire for the order of the world to be restored, even as I know that it cannot be restored. This, of course, is really the desire for an older literary world, a world of tradition and security from which I feel utterly estranged. It is really a sense of nostalgia and mourning, which is, of course, very much part of Spurious itself. I long for a world in which Spurious itself could not exist, and which would never permit me to posture as a literary author.

4 months ago
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I do not know whether Shakespeare the man was Protestant or Catholic, skeptic or occultist, Hermetist or nihilist (though I suspect that last possibility), but the dramatist regularly drew upon the arch-Protestant Geneva Bible throughout the last 17 years of his productivity. Milton also favoured the Geneva Bible, though increasingly I wonder whether the final Milton was not a post-Protestant sect of one, anticipating William Blake and Emily Dickinson.

Harold Bloom, quoted by John Banville on Harold Bloom | Books | The Guardian
5 months ago
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If we believe in God, he claims, we can take any situation and, by means of our own behaviour, transform it into what he calls ‘the kingdom of God on earth.’ He tells me that the Church is the only voluntary association in our country which eludes the control of the state. I wonder whether he’s joined the Church because it helps him to oppose the regime or because he really believes in God.

Why don’t you ask him?

I used to admire believers, Tomas continued. I thought they had an odd transcendental way of perceiving things which was closed to me. Like clairvoyants, you might say. But my son’s experience proves that faith is actually quite a simple matter. He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple.

From Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being
6 months ago
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In Yoder’s view the proper model for the church’s relation to empire is to be found in Jeremiah’s instructions to the diaspora community in Babylon: Jews were to “seek the salvation of the culture” of Babylon by accepting their dispersion as a call to mission. They were to retain their separate identity by adherence to a peripatetic moral and liturgical life—they defined themselves by a “text which can be copied and read anywhere,” centered their worship on “reading and singing the texts,” established places of worship without priesthoods wherever ten households gathered, maintained their international unity by “intervisitation, by intermarriage, by commerce, and by rabbinic consultation,” found the “ground floor of identity” in “the common life, the walk, halakah,” and confounded kings and emperors “with the superior wisdom and power of the one authentic God.” There was no “Jewish emperor,” and they were not to hope for one; their leaders might be in king’s palaces, but it would be as “intermediaries” between “the community and the Gentiles.” (294) This is an “invigorating” vision, as Leithart notes; and as “a historical thesis, it accurately describes the experience of the church in the first three centuries” (295). It is even a “key vision that should guide the twenty-first-century Christian response to empire in a world after Christendom”. But it does not tell the whole story. Jeremiah hoped for a renewed Davidic dynasty; Daniel prayed for a return from exile; there is no criticism of the programme of Ezra and Nehemiah; and Isaiah ‘goes so far as to designate the temple-building Persian emperor Cyrus as Yahweh’s “Christ” and “shepherd” (296). The biblical vision does not leave the people in perpetual exile.

Peter Leithart: Christian Empire, Christian Mission | P.OST
6 months ago
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Pretty close to my view: “cut-ups, ­mosaics, found objects, chance creations, assemblages, splicings, remixes, mash-ups, homages; the author as ‘a creative editor, presenting selections by other artists in a new context and adding notes of his own’. The novel is dead; long live the anti-novel, built from scraps: ‘I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors-and-paste man.’

From a Guardian review of David Shields’s Reality Hunger
6 months ago
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Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle “neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he clarifies the final word:

“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it means that it does not base itself on something which already is … It points toward the future, because it does not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent that it is like a future language which is always ahead of itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.” (trans. Leslie Hill)

It does not base itself on something which already is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind of literature that does not engage with current events or familiar social relations, and where the style, language and subject matter - or lack of it - resists the utility of common understanding. Is modern literature, then, prophetic?

Stephen Twitchelmore on Maurice Blanchot

(Source: spikemagazine.com)

8 months ago
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In my view, the novel is one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We’ll call it even. The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it. At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. Joyce and Woolf broke it open again but, after them, the novel went back to the safe precincts it occupies till this day. It’s too bad. I’m grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson’s books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully. The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields‘ recent novel take on the art of the novel.

Teju Cole

(Source: 3ammagazine.com)

9 months ago