A central theme of these notes is thinking through and thinking with : searching out and identifying fragments, frames, clues, people, texts: whatever might assist in reckoning with our collective conditions. We need partners, collaborators, aids and inspirations. With that in mind, this note engages with a series of artists and artworks, classical and contemporary, centred around a recent Europe trip.

Tolstoy’s depiction of the jumbled mix of good and bad, continuity and change, is one that still holds. Invariably, though, our attention is drawn to the specific ideas now appearing and perishing. With the new year, the content monster rolls on, with previews replacing reviews, all while the trendlines remain in place.

How to finish writing in, through, and on the fractured, fracturing year that is hastening to a close? Initially, a long post was drafted, full of quotes and charts, but on further reflection, more analysis is not needed at this point. Grimly marching towards the new year with more trepidation than anticipation. The balance of probabilities would suggest that conditions are likely to get worse. Pseudoreality prevails.

In Kyoto, the calendar indicates it is middle of December and winter has started. Looking around, red leaves gathering on the ground, it still feels like late autumn. Seasons and schedules increasingly fall out of sync. The translators note that ‘ aki no kure’ ‘ can mean either “autumn evening” or “the end of autumn.”’ Twilight hours and twilight times.

Continuing the conversation with Pete Chambers, in late 2023, in which late-ness is deep with connotations. Our dialogue was partly prompted by Naomi Klein’s thought-provoking new book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World . Using frames of mirrors, shadows and others, Klein manages to capture something about the deeply weird and warped relations that now prevail between online and the real / ‘real’ world.

What to make of our present conditions? The post-Cold War era has passed, (hyper)globalization has peaked, the unipolar moment has finished, neoliberalism has perhaps entered its zombie phase.

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism : - Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil: - Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy : - Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’: - Paul Valéry, ‘Politics of the Mind’: - Anton Chekhov, In the Ravine :

That serious periodical, The Economist , has published a profoundly unserious article entitled, ‘What a third world war would mean for investors’, in which it offers such wisdom as: Indeed. The 60/40 might be in trouble if there is a world war. Bonds won’t provide much safety during nuclear escalation. Good to know.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil : - Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace : - Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 : - Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History : - Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday : - Albert Camus, The Rebel : - Karl Jaspers, Tragedy is Not Enough : - Innokenty Annensky, ‘Nightmares’:

With each new incident or disaster, a rush to place it within a frame, to enlist it to a narrative. In our eagerness to decipher the meaning of the moment we miss that what is occurring might simply beyond our capacity to comprehend and order, or that it has not yet crystalised. Too soon, not yet at hand.

Much of what we use and touch every day is likely connected to the sea: many items would have been wholly or partially produced abroad, and most – if not all – of the remainder would have relied on commodities that would have arrived on tankers and other ships. Yet this all forms part of that background web of global interconnections that we too rarely recognize or reckon with, but are vital to how we presently live.