“That’s why it’s so appalling to see so many liberals making excuses for bin Ladenism and Jihadism as if it was some kind of fucking liberation theology, which it is not. It’s the most reactionary ideology in the history of the human race. It means business. It means slavery; it means mass murder; it means bigotry. It means the abolition of culture.
And there are people who say we have to understand its deep-seeded nature, which we certainly do, but not by apologizing to or retreating from it…
Say it once, hope not to have to say it again: You do not deal yourself a hand in the conduct or formation of British foreign or defense policy by putting a bomb on a bus in Tavistock Square in London. You do not. Final. Do I have to say it twice? No.
Will I listen to anyone who says that we should? I certainly will not. I certainly will not, and nor should anyone else.
And the Prime Minister will not do so. And what people ought to realize is that there is indeed a connection between this and the wars abroad. The same people did this at King’s Cross and Edgware Road and Aldgate last week who last Friday blew up 34 school children in Baghdad. Yes of course there is a connection: we’re fighting the same people. And they will rule the day. Or we will outlive, and out kill, and out fight them.
They say they prefer death to life, maybe they do.
They want to be martyrs, we’re here to help.
But our love for London will outlive their hatred, and their love of death. Believe me.”
__________
Christopher Hitchens, speaking at D.G. Wills Bookstore in California, May, 2006.
The picture is of Lee Rigby, son, husband, father of a two year old boy, and drummer in the British Royal Regiment — ritually and barbarically murdered on the streets of south London yesterday.
“We swear by the Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. The only reason we have killed this man this is because Muslims are dying daily. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth … We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.”
____
The above quote came from the man pictured above. Yesterday, on a busy street in South London, near the Royal Artillery Barracks and the Mulgrave Primary School, he and an accomplice beheaded a man wearing an Army charity t-shirt, then loitered around the scene for twenty minutes, waiting for police to arrive. Dozens of bystanders and children from the nearby school watched helplessly as the victim bled out on the street. Some confronted the men; some took pictures and video. An eyewitness account of the initial incident:
“Then we saw two knives – a meat cleaver – they weren’t small knives, they were like big kitchen knives used in a butchers. They were hacking at this poor guy. We saw the whole incident… We thought they were trying to remove organs. They were just hacking at him. Digging and digging and digging and digging. Horrendous… They were praying like it was a sacrifice, shouting Allahu akbar (god is great).”
Predictably, the liberal reaction, both in London and Washington, and in Bloomsbury and New York, is uneasily treating this event as essentially political in nature. London Men Commit Murder Calling to End Occupation in Afghanistan reads the standard, soft headline.
But one fact must be made perfectly clear, as it is now written in the blood of a man beheaded in Woolwich. This is not a political act.
When the Jihadist cried out that “you people” will never be safe, he was declaring this as a British man, about a British victim, and to a British bystander. Speaking politically, he has as much a right to call Afghanistan his home as David Cameron does. He has as much of a right as Boris Johnson to claim that a dead woman in Kandahar justifies murder in south London.
All indications are that these men are Nigerians born in the United Kingdom, a country that is at least 1,000 miles closer than Afghanistan to their native land. So what could possibly make them refer to the Brits as “you” and Afghanistan as “ours”? It of course cannot be merely a matter of political ideology or foreign policy. It of course is Islamic radicalism.
The barbarians aren’t at the gates, they’re inside our city.
__________
I will write more about this when I find the time. But on the bus to work, scanning the tepid reactions of Western media to this event, I felt an incredible pang of anger and had to put something down before this incident is submerged in the current of the 24-hour news cycle.
With the bloody knives and soaked hands, the old woman casually strolling past with her cart, and the collection of bystanders scattered in the background, the video below is one of the most surreal I’ve ever seen.
“Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another toward the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.
But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.”
It’s interesting: all of those areas purporting to lead to self-fulfillment, when considered either individually or collectively, are so alluring. Yet — and I say this without having attained anything like fruition in any one of them — I know they can’t lead to sublime, substantial happiness. I somehow am positive of that; in fact, I’m almost equally as sure they only frustrate one even more in the rabid quest to feel fulfilled.
Consider this passage from A Canticle for Leibowitzas a sort of macro-level frame for a human life that seeks ceaselessly to check all of the above boxes:
“The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.”
The picture was taken on one of those temporarily fulfilling foreign holidays to Ireland.
“Since the dawn of the Christian era a certain way of life has slowly been shaping itself among the Western peoples, and certain standards of conduct and government have come to be esteemed. After many miseries and prolonged confusion, there arose into the broad light of day the conception of the right of the individual; his right to be consulted in the government of his country; his right to invoke the law even against the State itself. Independent Courts of Justice were created to affirm and enforce this hard-won custom. Thus was assured throughout the English-speaking world, and in France by the stern lessons of the Revolution, what Kipling called, ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law.’ Now in this resides all that makes existence precious to man, and all that confers honor and health upon the State.
People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armory of potent and indestructible knowledge?”
“Among the open questions in neuroscience, I believe the function of sleep remains perhaps the most embarrassing. We don’t know why every night our brain needs us – and presumably itself – to sleep for several hours. There is every indication that sleep performs an essential function, if we only knew which one.
The indications are that sleep is, first of all, dangerous. Obviously you are made vulnerable to predators if you fall asleep and don’t respond to stimuli. It is pervasive; we do it from the cradle to the grave. It is universal: every animal that has been carefully studied does so – from fruit flies to ourselves. There is no single exception. It is also irresistible, as we all know. If you do experiments to keep animals awake – or humans awake, for that matter – there is no way that you can overcome the need for sleep. You can even use pain, shocks — at some point the animal will fall asleep. It is also tightly regulated, with a big portion of the brain stem, the hypothalamus, all kind of complicated connectivity being set up to put ourselves to sleep and then wake us. And finally, if you don’t sleep, or sleep too little, it is clear there are serious consequences. In fatal familial insomnia, after a few months of lack of sleep, you die. Rats die after two weeks. But the most obvious consequences are cognitive consequences. There are all kinds of problems. We become extremely bad cognitively. We make mistakes of all sorts, and we become extremely irritable…
The enigma of sleep function has been around for a long time. All kind of ideas have been proposed. The theory I propose is the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, which is an attempt to understand what is the core function of sleep in every animal.
The idea here is, in short, that sleep is the price we pay for plasticity, which of course is a feature that is functional primarily when we’re awake, when we adapt to the external world.
In our brains, neurons either spike or they don’t — that’s how they communicate. Spikes are more expensive than non-spikes in terms of their synaptic consequences, in terms of the energy they use. So spikes should be reserved, and as far as we can tell they largely are, to signal important events — events that convey a lot of information. Now, when you need to adapt to a changing world — which is basically all the time, especially during development — what you need to do is shift strength of synapses or even add synapses to make sure you are firing for important events or important changes in the environment.
And every neuron does that, to make sure it signals important stuff downstream, in this complicated brain where every neuron is immersed in a sea of other neurons. It doesn’t know what it’s getting, or from where; it doesn’t know what it’s signaling, and it doesn’t know where it’s sending it.
So, in all of this uncertainty, for any learning system which is as complicated as a brain, there is a problem in the end, which is that neurons tend to strengthen to make sure they signal. But then that becomes biologically untenable, because stronger synapses consume more energy, occupy more space, require more supplies, and finally they saturate signal to noise.
Basically, then neurons start firing for everything, and that can’t be good. So there is a need for renormalization to make sure that total synaptic strength is constant.
And we think that that renormalization is not only essential, but it better happen offline, when you actually can sample in an unbiased way the environment of a neuron. And every neuron, by itself, does this in the course of a night’s sleep.
That’s what we think sleep is fundamentally for.”
__________
From Dr. Guilio Tononi’s recent talk on The Function of Sleep at the Allen Institute for Brain Science Symposium.
I had never before seriously considered this question of the purpose of sleep, or the sheer strangeness of the fact that we don’t yet have a firm understanding of its biological function. It’s nothing less than absurd to ponder what happens to me, to you, to everyone as we spend one third of our lives unconscious.
As Neil deGrass Tyson observed, “Aliens might be surprised to learn that humans must lay semi-comatose on cushions for nearly a third of every Earth rotation.”
Craig Raine, in his poem “A Martian Send A Postcard Home,” mimics the voice of a martian who is noting different facets of human life and reporting them back to his kind. These take the form of riddles, the last one being a coded reference to human sleep and dreaming:
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
“My grandfather said that remorse was the worst emotion life could contain. My mother did not understand the remark, and I do not know what events to attach it to…
Ever since I first read it, I have remained haunted by a line from Edmund Wilson’s journals. Wilson died in 1972; the events referred to happened in 1932; I read about them in 1980, the year The Thirties was published.
At the beginning of that decade, Wilson had married, as his second wife, one Margaret Canby. She was a stocky, humorous-face, upper-class woman with ‘champagne tastes’: Wilson was the first man she had known who had worked for a living. In the previous volume of his journals, The Twenties, Wilson had called her ‘the best woman drinking companion I had ever known.’ There he noted his first intention of marrying her, and also his sensible hesitation: ‘Well though we got along, we did not have enough in common.’ But marry they did, into a companionship marked from the first by infidelity and temporary separations. If Wilson had his doubts about Canby, she had even stronger reservations about him. ‘You’re a cold fishy leprous person, Bunny Wilson,’ she once told him — a remark which Wilson, with typical unsparingness, confided to his diary.
In September 1932 the couple, then married two years, were having one of their separations. Margaret Canby was in California, Wilson in New York. She went to a party in Santa Barbara wearing high heels. As she left, she tripped, fell down a flight of stairs, broke her skull, and died. The event produced, in Wilson’s journal, forty-five pages of the most honest and self-flagellant mourning ever written. Wilson starts taking notes as his plane slowly hedge-hops west, as if the enforced literary act will help block off emotion. Over the next days, these jottings open out into an extraordinary monologue of homage, erotic remembrance, remorse, and despair. ‘A horrible night but even that seemed sweet in recollection,’ he notes at one point. In California, Canby’s mother urges him: ‘You must believe in immortality, Bunny, you must!’ But he doesn’t and can’t: Margaret is dead and unreturning.
Wilson spares himself, and his putative reader, nothing. He preserves every impaling rebuke Canby delivered. She once told her critical, complaining husband that the epitaph on his tombstone should read: ‘You’d better go and fix yourself up.’ He also celebrates her: in bed, in drink, in tears, in confusion. He remembers fighting off the flies when they made love on a beach. He calls to mind the ignorances that charmed him — ‘I’ve found out what that thing over the door is — it’s a lentil’ — and placed them alongside her running complaints: ‘I’ll crash someday! Why don’t you do something about me?’ She accused him of treating her as just another luxury item, like Guerlain scent: ‘You’d be charmed if I were dead, you know you would.’
The fact that Wilson treated his wife badly, both before and after marriage, and that his grief was contaminated by justified guilt, is what gives this stream of mourning consciousness its power. The animating paradox of Wilson’s condition is that he has been released into feeling by the death of the person who accused him of lack of feeling. And the line that has never left my memory is this: ‘After she was gone, I loved her.’
It doesn’t matter that Bunny Wilson was a cold, fishy, leprous person. It doesn’t matter that their relationship was a mistake and their marriage a disaster. It only matters that Wilson was telling the truth, and that the authentic voice of remorse is sounded in those words: ‘After she was gone, I loved her.’”
Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?
As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.
My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar. It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.
In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)
And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?
Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis discussing Judaism and Antisemitism at Jewish Book Week in London in 2007:
“Saul Bellow once said to me, privately, that without Israel, Jewish manhood would be finished. I don’t think he meant Jewish men; he meant Jewish self-respect. But it was a sort of atavistic way of putting it. He felt that this idea that we’re going to bring about a scenario where the Jews cannot be put to death, and institutionalize that in a state — he upheld that notion.
And during last summer, when these unpleasant portents for Israel were emerging, there was a great efflorescence of antisemitism here in England. If you remember those middle-class whities waddling around under placards saying WE ARE ALL HEZBOLLAH NOW. And my response to them then and now is:
Well, enjoy it while you can, because Hassan Nasrallah wants to kill you.”
____
“Antisemitism is a very, very serious cultural danger, and it’s only a fool who thinks that it is a threat only to Jews. Antisemitism is a very, very toxic threat to everything we can decently call ‘civilization’…
If someone says they don’t like West Indians, because of their — I don’t know what it might be — their music. Or they don’t like Indians because of the smell of their cooking. Or they don’t like Koreans for their Kimchi — whatever it might be. Every minority and majority in the world has a version of this kind of prejudice.
But, as Freud pointed out, they’ll all sink their differences when it comes to the Jews. And with the Jews it’s not their cooking or their sex lives or any of this, and it’s not just vulgar prejudice about skin color or smell.
It’s a theory.
It’s a paranoid theory that tries to explain quite a lot. It’s fascinated with gold, with secret documents, with missing codices in ancient treaties, with the idea of an invisible and secret government. It’s a very, very, very dangerous, pseudo-intellectual prejudice.”
____
“We might just talk a little bit more about what antisemitism is. You’ve described it as paranoia, and it is — it belongs with those sort of shithead conspiracy theories. And there’s a marvelous quote from Hitler saying that, after the Frankfurter Zeitung said there was an exposure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as being a fabrication; Hitler said, ’this alone proves it is genuine.’
Antisemitism is not quite a neurosis, it’s not quite a psychosis. Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate suggests that antisemitism is like a vast mirror, an ocean of insecurities. The cruising insecurities in the common mind, for some reason gravitate towards the Jew as the explanation of and reason for all frustrations.
The central paradox of it is that you may hate the Jews and think they’re insects, but you also suspect they’re running your life. The Jews, to the anti-semite, are both contemptible and all-powerful.”
____
“Nobody thinks West Indians are trying to take over Wall Street, for example. It’s just not alleged; people that hate them just don’t say they’re trying to take over the international financial system.
My grandmother, whose origins were in what is now Breslau, had a very simple explanation, she’d say, ‘Oh, come on darling, they’re just jealous.’ Well, of course, Goyim can be as jealous as they like. But it’s the protean nature of antisemitism that gets me.
If they can’t hate the Jews for being behind international finance capital, it will be because they’re behind international Communism. Often both at the same time.”
__________
Watch Hitchens and Amis discuss the Jews, Israel, and antisemitism below. I highly recommend this talk as a crash-course on the subtleties and interrelationships between those three complex topics. It’s also really funny.
The photograph was taken in Jerusalem. It’s what you see if, on a Friday night, you walk up to the Western Wall then turn around.
“What sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization…
We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. ‘Man has created death,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. ‘Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,’ wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.
This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die— mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.
But the second idea— and the other half of the Mortality Paradox— tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there— the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.
We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’ Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: ‘All men think all men mortal, but themselves.’
This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God— or nature—‘has set eternity in the hearts of men.’ In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that ‘in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.’ We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.”
I started reading this book late last night and got through about a third of it before falling asleep and into dreams about it. I’m convinced there is something very significant about this sort of software glitch in the human mind — this firewall that stands between us and the full picture of our own individual extinctions. (I’ve heard some people defiantly claim exception to Freud’s rule, but I’ve never found a convincing explanation as to what it looks like or how it’s conceptually possible.)
A fact that Cave doesn’t mention is that the second part of the Mortality Paradox applies even in our sleep. Strangely, even when our conscious minds are shut off and shut out from external sensory stimuli, we still cannot picture our own demise (you wake up at the moment you die in dreams). François de La Rochefoucauld coined a memorable epigram: “no man can look at the sun or his own death with a steady eye.” And it seems that’s true also when we’re asleep — when the sun is set.
Many poets have nodded to this strange feature of human cognition — that even when our conscious mind is shut off (like in REM sleep), we cannot die.
Ernest Dowson imagined our lives unfolding out of “a misty dream… within a dream” (isn’t that the plot of a Chris Nolan movie?)
Oscar Wilde complained, “reality is a dream that keeps me from sleeping”; a sentiment that sends a smirk to my face while on the bus most Monday mornings.
James Joyce — through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus — reflected soberly, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
“That’s why it’s so appalling to see so many liberals making excuses for bin Ladenism and Jihadism as if it was some kind of fucking liberation theology, which it is not. It’s the most reactionary ideology in the history of the human race. It means business. It means slavery; it means mass murder; it means bigotry. It means the abolition of culture.
