Doing Up

Work, work, work. I am only these days recovering my capacity for grinding out serious material. A colleague of mine refers to it as 'doing up the tables' – the hard work of looking at stuff and structuring it so that it means something more important than just the sum of its words.

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In other news, I've been listening to Annie Lennox again. The Medusa collection is really one of her best. I wrote about one of the songs in that collection last year — almost exactly a year ago! It was a coincidence that I wound up listening to it again today; but as one of my ancient colleagues once said, "We talk about coincidences a lot, but we never ask 'Who makes the incidences co?' "

Ha. Anyway, here is a link to one of her live performances, 13 years ago in Poland. You should really think about those lyrics while you listen to her smoky, chilling voice burning your false-consciousness away. There's a much better recording here, but without the live performance, audio only. Enjoy!

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Back to the idea of work. A colleague at the Institute showed me this wolf-writing and said, "Do you think you can work it into your matrix?" I hesitated at this. I mean, look at the list: it has gulags in it!

I don't think that the American fascism described here is quite the right metaphorical construct. However, single-party states do have many things in common. And as another colleague pointed out today, educational institutions do tend to be authoritarian rather than authoritative, and they very strongly defend their right to be that way. This is not true of all of them; rather, places where this is true venerate the relics of what some of us call Fordist position. Like Henry Ford's customers, clients of some educational systems can have a car of any colour – provided it is black.

Nobility

It's funny what kind of reflections one makes on Maundy Thursday, when thinking of a garden named Gethsemane.

True nobility is an odd thing. It elevates those exposed to it. In a group of people dedicated towards a goal, a noble leader raises each one up, so that a peer becomes peerless, and a peerage is an exaltation. I have met very few such leaders before; I think that in one's life, to have even met one of these great leaders.

There are those who may not be so exalted in the way that society measures it, but they make you a better person just by being around. This also is ennobling, which I have realised is a better, more powerful version of the weak and profligately used 'enabling'. To ennoble someone makes you a bringer of transcendance, makes you a source of light and inspiration (or at least, a conduit of such).

I have known one person of the first kind and perhaps three of the second kind. And somewhere out there is that person I know whose name means 'nobility' and who is indeed appropriately named.

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On another note, there is also a kind of nobility associated with not letting others grind you down (oft expressed in the pseudo-Latin phrase illegitimi non carborundum). One of my favourite songs about this phenomenon is the one most eloquently delivered by Annie Lennox in her 1995 album Medusa, Neil Young's Don't Let It Bring You Down.

Old man lyin'
By the side of the road
With the lorries rollin' by
Blue moon sinkin'
From the weight of the load
And the buildings scrape the sky
Cold wind rippin'
Down the valley at dawn
And the morning paper flies
Dead man lyin'
By the side of the road
With the daylight in his eyes

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around

Blind man runnin'
Through the light of the night
With an answer in his hand
Come on down to the river of sight
And you can really understand
Red lights flashin'
Through the window in the rain
Can you hear the sirens moan
White cane lyin'
In a gutter in the lane
And you're walkin' home alone

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around...

You will come around...

Don't let it bring you down
It's only castles burning
Find someone who's turning
And you will come around...