are you..er..experienced?

From an interview with Marilynne Robinson, Paris Review.

"You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marksto be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper...

I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not."


~~~

I don't really think of myself as religious and that view is confirmed by friends and relatives alike who see me as either too serious for religion or too much of a joker to take religion seriously. Yes, well...religion "vs" religious".


Would love to get a copy of M.R.'s talk, 'Metaphysics and Value Statements' where she, apparently, lays into Macintyre. There does appear to be a strain in modern thinking that is resolutely anti-modern. Which is not to deny that there are some things towards which one should be opposed. However, the tone of it all is a bit sad. It's the usual culprits, the usual morose tendencies in play: the falling away from Truth, Beauty, Meaning (all with capitals, please note) and the only thing left to do is to determine when this veritable second Fall took place: the Renaissance and the monstrous assertion of the 'I'; the Reformation and the reliance on conscience, an 'inner' I over the weight of tradition and accumulated wisdom; or was it industrial capitalism, bourgeois society that produced this Frankenstein, at one stroke rebellious against both nature, society, as well as any notion of 'place' or order of the soul?

And of course, that view of 'atomisation', 'fragmentation', alienation will always, I guess, appeal to a particular type of person (estranged intellectuals, for starters; unhappy teenagers for another). Oh, and of course, the religious radicals will latch onto any semblance of a critique, since to feed on negativity is always an easy option.

I do love Macintyre's essays on 'Faith and Reason' though.

~~~

Not a religious bone in my body. Except my funny bone. You hear the call to prayer each morning, since the loudspeaker seems to be located two yards outside my house. (loudspeakers, now, there's a Jewish invention for you, if ever there was one..if only I could convince them of this!). Now and then you'll have the odd dream about not praying but by and large you don't have any sense of guilt about this. What was that line by Fenelon on indifference again?I'm reminded of my old buddy, Piracha, who swears he's going to get his shotgun out and blow the maulvi away.Religious people are a curse, or simply too boring to be worthy of consideration.

Steady on, b. Genuinely religious people are fascinating. all you've got here is religion or religiosity.


~~~

Have you had a religious experience? Well, that type of question is really frowned upon. Even if I had, you hardly think I'd share it on blogland do you?! But yes, I guess Rothko at the Tate comes closest (followed closely by coffee and cinnamon rolls).

But what is a religious experience? Should it be "marked off" from other areas, scientific endeavours, artistic creation, being a good citizen? (Dewey). Is it the "quality of an attitude" or can we pin it to something more objective? Must there be an appropriate 'object ' of faith?

Ch

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past , that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, that habit which gives us shape. ..He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour , and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...

---James Salter.

Cheever and the lost life, the lostness in life. On the edge of everything, this cold glass, these black keys, the fuzzy hiss of the speakers is this tangible sense of something that is lost, not quite there. Didn't make it. On the edge of the life of things is a blue line...

The sense of falling, of falling away, of fallen things. The grey pallor of puffed-up, sullen faces, the forlorn look you see on some people's faces, even in the brisk early-morning light. The sense of being a tremendous failure. The word tremendous deriving, in large part, its substance from the fact that it was, in truth, an ordinary failure, no different from anyone else's mediocre stab at life. But it was tremendous in a different and special way, even though he wasn't even unique here either. It was this: that he couldn't even imagine what 'success' would mean or if he'd be happy if he got it. 'Success' is an American affliction that blights a man's life, and clouds his judgement.

What would it mean to succeed? What could it mean? Some form of recognition by a half-assed drunk, a steel bar to mark the fact, a brief moment of fame amongst one's contemporaries and then the inevitable slide into oblivion? The revelry and irreverence in that punk go-getter's eyes, reading from the script like a whore.He hoped that he might see him in another light, with the moral clarity of a saint, or with the judicious wisdom of a cardinal. Why these religious metaphors? Somehow he imagined good sense returning to him, like a natural balance; thought that a gentle forgiveness might make its way to the surface, instead of this unrelenting narrowness of vision, the cool irreversibility of a fixed image. To see him (and therefore himself) with the eye of a drunkard, as if he was viewing him in clothes two sizes too big, which is to say, as slightly ridiculous and nothing more.

Walks past the monolithic building in the morning, its imposing dullness can't hold a candle to the irreducible dullness of what happens inside, the narrowing down of sight, the collapse of imagination. At least the early-morning shadows are soft, softer than those at the end of the day that cut across it at acute angles. How much light and shadow this building's absorbed already! It has this unlimited capacity to do so, and that makes it timeless.

But for now, everything's soft, like the heart of the sparrows, or the ginger cat licking its wounds on top of the trash can. There's a degree of gentleness or drowsiness in the voices overheard in the corridors. The mild excitement of trembling in the uncertainty of first love. Or so it seems from a distance.

"Ch", she wrote, and he, imagining himself to be Jewish, thought this was a word of disdain or mockery: 'Ay, ay, ay'. Nothing he said could explain what he meant. And her words were lost in the translation. "Ch" reminded him of currency, an amount to be paid in compensation. Or maybe it was a word, followed by a click of the tongue, used to frighten beggars away.

What was that one line, that one word by which we may know ourselves?

the bridge

From silverpoint to bluesmoke, jagged edge to smoothable curves, things merge into others, if looked at in the right way, with sufficient attention, detail, and care. A shift in perspective, a movement within the stillness, a change of heart, the first word like the first cool autumn clouds after a dry summer. Brown to grey. The receptivity of a hand, that knows shapes in the dark and trusts...

A mirror, where additions and subtractions are made, time working behind its timeless surface. A bridge that leads from one person to another; and each person is a bridge, a frontier.

'Let me show you something, she suggested, it's a prepatory position we take on the floor and we call it the Bridge because our weight is suspended between our left hand palm down on the floor and our right foot also flat on the floor. Between these two fixed points the whole body is expectant, waiting, suspended.'
---John Berger.

~~~

And now, for 20 seconds of something totally different. Rita

the inexorable slide to fanaticism...

Well, since c, anton, and now roxana have abandoned me I might as well write about politics...

In a discussion with a beard. He writes:

" If you are a non-theist, you have no claim to rights"

But how did this start? A few days back a group of lawyers decided to ban a product because it is produced by Ahmadis. Of course, this is the beginning of fascism. No, not quite. When the state makes it mandatory that you declare on your passport that you are not an Ahmadi, when you can go to prison for 3 years if you wish someone 'salam' and you're an Ahmadi, then this isn't the beginning but just a continuation, an escalation of the madness.

(It should be remembered that it was a group of lawyers that vigorously defended Qadri, the murderer of the Punjab Governor, because they thought he was defending blasphemy by speaking out against the blasphemy laws. So, here you get an idea of how far human decency has been forgotten. These are, lest one forget it, people from the middle classes, people with some sort of formal education).

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, there's been the story of the good people of Chiniot. There the panchayat (tribal council) decided that a woman from the aggrieving party in a dispute should be 'given' to the aggrieved party.So, get this-and this is proof of how fucked up this country is, if further proof be needed- the 14-year old girl is given. She comes back dead, of course. There's no need to spell it out. But that's the level of 'honour' in what is an utterly barbaric place.

So, as Leonard Cohen sings, this place is going to slide. That much is obvious. The real question is: can I get out in time?

tinker, tailor, ...

"This is about the life of the book – and the future of the defiant craft of the illustrator and his pencil, "the hand of the artist", as Selznick puts it, in a computer age, and of materiality in a time of virtuality."

By sheer coincidence, the book you picked out yesterday was Tinkers by Paul Harding. It was either that or Esmeralda (D.D.)...too expensive by far, or Savage Detectives (no time to read). So, given M. Robinson's endorsement, it had to be this (only later did you realize he was her student and the cynicism started creeping in). Anyway, the reviews for Bolano were worse: this shows that literature is still alive...blah, blah. Don't care if it is, really. Or if it is dead. The voice of the American Salesman. Oh well, guess it can't be avoided and so go along with it.

Let's see.

And maybe the singing detective, not savage?

To turn back the time. Now, there's a skill for you.

inner vision

My heart hears across the silence; and I think of you, and therefore find you. On an island, an island in the North...My black heart finds you & therefore itself, fair as the first day we spoke, images and words, and letters falling away to the first moments of your silence, Ariadne's startled gaze. Your breath on the mirror, spreading like a fine web around my soul.Introductions were made, tea was poured out in the best china.

A stone statue looking out to the blue Pacific, his heart spinning, turning,for the days that were lost. What was said was false; what wasn't said remained true.The finality of her 'are we done now?'. A word to be erased.

The gold of the wheat lying on the ground, or the sadness of cathedral gold, like days of summer we remembered together, for gold always unites; and if not summer, then what? The creases around my narrowing eyes,the senses once so quick to flash out, like shaken foil, or a silver fish in the darks, now slowed down to notice the movement of shadows. I see you now only inwardly, darkly.If not winter,

the chomsky brigade

'During the past 20 years America has been unhinged by ideological hubris – a disorder that Chomsky cannot analyse or even properly comprehend, since he embodies it himself. As an unsparing critic of American policies, he has at times been useful – there has, after all, been plenty to criticise. But like the neocons, he belongs in an Americo-centric world that has already passed away. In any larger view, Chomsky's view of the US as the fountainhead of human conflict is as absurd as the Bush aide's belief that America can create its own reality.'

---John Gray, The Guardian.

A few years back one of the beards here started his tirade against 'the west' in the following way: "Ayatollah Chomsky says...". Other notable beards implored the audience to consider what they've done to us in Bosnia (which is, no doubt, more comforting that thinking about what we've done to us in Sudan, East Pakistan, Iraq,...)

Well, of course, that's unfair. You can hardly blame Chomsky for the dull-headed readers he gets. Maybe. Is there something about the tone in which someone writes that appeals to a particular mindset?

You can't but help think that this is connected, somehow, to when you read Chomsky. If you're 19 he can seem utterly convincing. I did read his Pirates book when I was 19, as it happens, and thought he was the cheez. But, either through good old Kashmiri laziness or through the inheritance of common sense passed down lovingly by my parents, I only skimmed through some of his other work. 501. Like porn: you've seen one, you've seen them all.

For muslim ideologues and zionists Israel is the centre of the world. For islamophobes, muslims are at the centre of the world's problems. It's getting a bit cramped in the centre!

Ammons: renouncing centre!

~~~

The other article I read today was about the decline of romantic comedies in Hollywood. What's strange is just how appealing a lot of American culture is when there's supposed to be all this anti-americanism around. Is it that real people can see through the rantings of politicians and intellectuals alike?

Of the latter, the usual appeal to (European) snobbery. How can you like ze hollywood..it is for, 'ow you say, the philistines, mon ami. Well, a lot of European cinema is pretentious crap.Please don't talk about Pasolini. B-bloody b o r r r ing. Or the anal, convoluted writing. To be sophisticated is to be misunderstood by the plebs.

'The unbearable lightness of being a prawn cracker.'

&

There are some questions that don't interest you, and require nothing more than good sense in avoiding them. Like East & West. Distinctions become increasingly meaningless with time. Is this because your vision blurs, or because you see more clearly now? With time.

The width of the interval between people is no-body's business. A distance is overcome only if one first imagines there to be distance. A bridge can fall away-as in the old myths and stories-once you sense the truth, get a scent of it.

Seven seconds is a space, in which we are contained, in which we find ourselves.

~~~

Dersu.

Couldn't watch through the whole thing. Some nice photography-but then again, i could have just watched National Geographic. Irreverent, I know. But it didn't work for me. I don't know why, but increasingly everything seems fake. There's a temptation to internalize that and conclude that that's because there's something fake in your own life; there's the tendency to dismiss and sneer at everything (words, film, music) because they're not the "real deal". It's one of the strangest things you've come across-perhaps because you're so naive; this scepticism towards words and language. As if what was real was lurking strangely and tantalizingly behind the scenes. Either that, or the bizarre notion that the surface is all there is. You can veer from one extreme to another.

But here's the thing: you don't for a second buy into the idea of the 'mystical east', nor do you believe that people in 'the west' are "alienated" or that they've lost their moral compass. If truth be told, we're all middle class now, and there's no going back to the virtues of the saint or the pagan aristocrat.

Instead, we have to find ourselves where we are. "This is where it's at" says Walter Matthau in The Sunshine Boys. It's all slightly ridiculous, of course. There's nothing great about the soul of the bourgeois and even less so does he possess any heroic or noble qualities. But the "brotherly love" of the commune or the monastery went hand in hand with hatred of outsiders and the lower castes, the unbelievers, women, jews , niggahs...

If western civilisation is a very good idea (Gandhi) then so is religion. Gandhi, now there's a fake for you! FFS!

Dersu:

The 'Mongol'...you'd think after all that arduous trekking he'd have lost some weight! Jesus! Get out of here! And the translations were awful: "Bird stop sing. Rain end". Yeah, okay, be a good chap then and pack up the tents Tonto.

etc., etc., ...

"And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries."

Something will be lost when those geeky bastards manage to put everything down on a computer or on the web. At the book fair I managed to pick up a lovely little copy of Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and M. Peake's Gormenghast.

Wendell Berry continues to delight:

'He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars'. I'm sure there's a common phrase about 'small kindnesses' but I can't remember it off the top of my head [would an American say off-eh the top] Probably because I've never used it...not: never had the occasion to use it, and not: never been aware of their importance but, rather, never affirmed them or really acknowledged them).

Smallness. The world in miniature. Not in a book. A book is in the world. Living as an outsider, a stranger, means that home is that world. You are scpetical of people who take that further and talk of the original home. As if to say: we must now move on from reflections and fragments.

Satanic mills, the wheels of commerce that move in opposition to one another, Man against Man (man against woman); humankind against nature, the timeless against time. Conflict and distinctions being what defines us: politically, spiritually. What would it be like to think with someone, for someone, of someone?