Black Sun

school iz out.

2012-02-17T20:20:00.000-08:00

'Every child is a thinking, creative, active, person'.
---from the NYRB.

You can't but help think that school is really a colossal waste of time. As is much of what counts as a university education. Stuffing more and more people's brains with facts, theories, or teaching them techniques that will prove to be useful in their careers; instilling discipline, the ability (desire?) to work hard, to question everything, prepare for better scores on tests, get 'the right answer' (without even knowing what the question is). The whole approach is so mechanical and mind-numbingly tedious. Foucault was surely right here to draw attention to the similarities between the school and the factory.

What could there be instead? First principle: whatever you do has to be connected to pleasure. Secondly: more music, more history, more art, and more work with one's hands, a greater contact with nature. Theory, yes. But above all: practices and practical thinking.

D.McCloskey has this line about Dutch schools. Don't know if it's true, but the relation to natural light is important.

the death of the heart or, as the iranians say: 'death to the heart'

2012-02-16T20:08:00.000-08:00

Is there no end to the insidiousness of these jews (Hallmark)? first it was birthdays, then anniversaries, now this! No wonder the Ummah is in such disarray! Who would have thought, religion finally undone ..and not at the hands of science or philosophy, but by those cute little teddy bears!

V-day, the source of all our problems, says an email from my enraged friend. Now you're talking, brother. Look carefully, you'll see the sign of dajal on those teddies (or was it in my cornflakes today...I forget). Anyway, I digress...these bloody romantic kuffar must be shown a lesson. Muslims do not believe in romance. Only sex.

The sisters, the revolutionary guards, are showing us the way, brother Junaid. (Although they should be whipped later for coming out in public). And what r u doing about it? Making more money for those shias and hypocrites in Bahrain? Shame on you. The Arab Spring, the Persian summer, the Paki autumn..soon we will have conquered all the seasons of the year.

~~~

'When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover's wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion...'

---D.P.

are you..er..experienced?

2012-02-15T19:32:00.000-08:00

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

2012-02-14T20:55:00.001-08:00

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

2012-02-13T19:52:00.000-08:00

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...

2012-02-13T05:23:00.001-08:00

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, ...

2012-02-12T02:47:00.001-08:00

"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

2012-02-10T23:01:00.001-08:00

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

2012-02-10T21:02:00.000-08:00

'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.'

&

2012-02-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

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., ...

2012-02-08T21:14:00.000-08:00

"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?

& (or the chains that bind)

2012-02-07T23:18:00.001-08:00

I would bring my life complete before you
...
When I summon intellect it is to the melody
of this longing. Thy hand,
Beloved, restores
the chords of this longing.
Here, in the thirst that defines Beauty,
I have found kin.

---Robert Duncan.

'The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.'

In an age that privileges the foot-loose, the radically undetermined, the ability to read and write the script of one's own life, what place is there in our thoughts and lives or loves for austerity, or restraints, or "bindings"? Why should I be bound to a particular place, or person, or job? Why resist the flux of time? If all is sovereign becoming...

The market and the dissipation of the solid structures in our lives. More generally: liquid modernity. You sometimes think that it is only memory and love that holds back, holds your hand across the bridge.

Mystery of mysteries: that eternal longing manifests itself in a particular place, a certain face. This, not that. And far less anything abstract or general. The view that from the narrowest angle something profound might open up, that each detail was like a gem in the dust, a ring in the desert.

What binds one human being to another? Is it not the other way: what binds makes us human? (of course, there are inhuman bonds as well: the bond of blood and country is utterly false unless it is between human & human, without exclusion or malice).

&

love: I wanted you to be.

& points forwards; points back. Is now.Joining what never was, what might never be.

& is, if you are attentive enough, both open and free, as well as closed and small. Is both 1 & 2. And not a number at all!

back to the future

2012-02-06T01:56:00.000-08:00

If you knew how things would end, the 'endgame', would that change how you act now? Would you act wisely, lovingly, knowing there was limited time, thinking to yourself: everything counts? Or would you become a knave: if the end is all there is, or if the end is not changeable, then why work towards being good?

For most of the time we stand, resolutely, with our backs to the future. No-one wants to imagine how things wind down, fall away, even if they could. Our lives, imagined as open, full of hope, unexpected turnings; our thin faces and those of our loved ones, recalled with great fondness. You see a face, plumpish, innocent, infinitely open, the head tilted to one side, mysteriously...

But we have no idea of the future. We stock up, hold back our hands, in the belief that we can make the future in the image of the present or the past, as if we could buy security, certainty, stave off the corrosive effects of time darkening on our hands. But there's no insurance, and no assurance. All strategies are bound to fail since we are, as long as we remain human, inextricably wedded to time, whether she loves us or not.

The future, the distant future, simply doesn't count. Or, to put it another way: we discount it. [The environmental crisis is one manifestation of us not acknowledging the welfare of people in the future-except in this case the people happen not to be us]. Life without certain people is unimaginable, but in a way that is at once more urgent than the notion that there were vast stretches of time before we or those people even existed.

What is near, what is close at hand, grab it. But the more you grab, the more you realise it isn't enough, that it doesn't do the trick. All of a sudden everything seems limited: this world, other people...so many things to see, to read, to be, and so little time. Even the earth is something we must escape (Levinas).

You look back and you find there was a time when you were not there; you look forward and time will be similarly empty. And now? And now I think there will be people in the future who will look back to us, understand, smile, and yet wonder why I copy the ancient words: my soul, my heart, why do you sigh within?

Experience

2012-02-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

Why is 'to labour' the same as 'to suffer'? Why do you have to be 'compensated' for work?

The idea that we could actually derive pleasure or find meaning in the work we do is a joke for most of us, just as is the idea that we could make something beautiful. An old socialist theme (Sennett, Morris...)

Wendel Berry, on tobacco cutting...

'There is incessant speculation about the weather. There is much laughter; because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished.And there are memories. ..The crew to which I belong is the product of friendship and kinship going far back. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The tobacco cutting is a sort of ritual of remembrance....The conversation, one feels, is ancient.

One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simple all, and is enough.'

There's something wonderful about the tone and rhythm of the writing. The thought of a shared life, of contributing to the common good, of participating a tradition or way of life that is as old as our human gestures. Must read Primo Levi's The Wrench now.

~~~

Contrast this with teaching at the uni. where the so-called 'life of the mind' means you don't actually produce anything tangible, with your hands, or anything that engages your whole personality. And a mind that is passionate about 'ideas' can easily become unhinged unless it finds expression in real life. The 'life of the mind' is only one form of intelligence and the dangers of one-sidedness are legion.

Secondly, the so-called 'community of scholars' (assuming it exists in pakiland, which it doesn't) doesn't really get to the heart of what the word 'community' means. One might as well be a monk. But even monks or ascetics can belong to an order!

Which, in a strange way, brings me back to something in the last post: what is a religious experience, and can we have one without religion? That sounds slightly blasphemous but is that only because our habits of mind and of speaking have for too long associated the experience with particular religious forms? And isn't the 'Protestant failing' always just lurking behind the corner? Without forms, institutions, receptacles,tradition, bridges, dogma does the lawless heart find itself not seeing beauty and meaning everywhere, in the ordinary, but quite the opposite: a world that is emptied of any significance, drained of any warmth? God, from now on is an infinitely distant God and grace and revelation lose their connection to worldly affairs? Isn't that the kind of 'gnosticism' the Pope was alluding to (even as he (mistakenly) tied it up with the notion of the so-called arbitrary Will in Islam).

Dewey. Yes. Time permitting.

The closest thing I've had to a 'religious experience' (and that begs the question: why call it 'religious'?) is in the presence of Rothko's dark paintings. Goya at the Prado seemed too historical. Here was something else, pointing to the timeless.

[I know that some of the more doubting readers of this blog were expecting my religious experience to refer to cinnamon rolls but, well, yes...there are some things that cannot, simply cannot, be talked about! :-) ]

Jewish philosophy...or the sick and the healthy

2012-01-31T23:47:00.000-08:00

'The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and the uniqueness of his life."

How we are warped by a warped picture of reality and ourselves. We grow into the picture we have/make of ourselves (Iris M). Is that an argument for the anionic-something common to Jewish and Muslim sensibilities, approaches? Or is it a case, more lovingly, less harshly, for appropriate images? To see justly, lovingly... (Iris, again). The need for icons, bridges, rituals.

Religion is not an 'explanation', but a transformation.

"But for those living without questions..." there is no question of whether a transformation is 'religious' or not. The transformative moment entering and changing the 'It-world'. Reverberating in specific forms as you find your own, particular, unique form in life.

"Dry spells" ...learning, hard work. Is there grace without it? For Christ's sake, let there be. If not, winter.

If you are healthy do you think of sickness?

"The attempt to substitute words, especially words that have no religious content because they have no genuine internal relation to a religious life, for that kind of life."

Of course, yes. Cavell's brilliant, dazzling essay on Kierkegaard. But then again, what is a 'genuine' religious life? That's the crux of it. The need for forms, languages, observances, ways of approaching. Perhaps.

The whole earth is a mosque.
---a prophetic saying.

Who is to say? Should these things not be decided by God? What counts as a 'religious' act?

Rumi: a prostitute who places some milk for a thirsty cat finds her way to heaven. Who is to say?

"What is unchangeable? Unbiased reflection reveals once more that it is only a name." (neither essentialism, not nominalism. The hardest thing to grasp)

Common sense action: "we are responsible for what we have thought and done in the past, responsible now, intellectually and practically, and that is what makes us thinkers, rational agents in a world at all.

Ruffu

2012-01-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

A regal face without crown or title, half-remembered. The absence of gold in your life; you make do with what's there. The golden light through eastern windows, the slanting light into the world, the human response a tilting of the head. Your brow, fresh, unlined, as when before the womb, when your simple soul was but a name with God...

Is the cross the way to you heart? The human heart, a cross, a path on which we fall. The splintered will.

Memory, reflection, require two points in time or, more precisely, one point that is not in time. The terrible fate of being oneself, directionless; the cramped existence of a black Romanian dog that shouts to God: "open up the universe a little bit more" (Bellow). For Christ's sake.

Ruffu:

A quick, rough and ready form of patchwork; a tying together of what is torn, even if only temporarily, even if with the cheapest of threads. In dark times, you take what is given...

The southern light that opens up something in you. Unties the knot, overlaps boundaries. Releases you into the familiar again. There you were, your face turned westward, extreme in your openness, your thoughts streaming out to sea. The silver of the old mirror still able to underwrite your image. Your face lacking clarity, but shining on nevertheless. After all these centuries things in the world still have the capaciousness of the first times, the old days. The silent star of your mind, the columns of deliberation, the calmness of your hand on my ruffled heart...

North by north-west. North, and I'm out of here. A metaphor is not of remembering. Life returns. An old trick. A gracious friend, a papaya. The jangling of nerves, the inertia of night, the jumbled up thoughts. Stitch them all up. Ah, it's a bleak skill.

The redwood in the heart. Your name, as dark as a forest. Your thin voice ]
]
]
]
]
]
falling away.

inclinations and intimations. findings. endings.

she turned my way. and i broke. north, south-east...

she then undid
the knot of mirror and of tapestry

and I undid the ruffu of her dress...

(Quotes: Ken Irby)

.

2012-01-26T20:13:00.000-08:00

Feeling a bit down, so won't be writing for a while.

Take care,

b.

the other side...

2012-01-26T04:43:00.003-08:00

Since you grew up in a small town and have always felt most at home in a big city -London...the Great Beast, Londonistan- country life and the rural 'areas' have never really appealed to you. To be honest, the countryside makes me feel slightly sick. Rolling hills, neatly parceled out picturesque fields, bovine docility, the parochialism and pettiness of peasants, the profound hierarchies of caste and gender sustained by the powerful. Rigidity, narrowness of outlook, 'irrationality' (dare one say it)...isn't that the reality? Perhaps. If Thibon is right-and he's probably as good a guide as anyone-then peasants and farmers are not your simple, conservative, traditional types but actually quite cunning. Are they also more in touch with nature, reality, the land and therefore more realistic, less prone to fantasies?

Of course, one of the most pervasive bits of fantasies that is dreamt up by city folks, the displaced, involves some sort of rural idyll, pastoral utopia. The deep desire for the unchanging, for fenced existence (to invert Larkin's phrase). The horror of living on the frontier, of lacking roots, a homeland.

And yet it is worth remembering that as rural life is drawing to a close (a majority of the world's population now lives in cities)we have, as a species, lived for at least eight tenths of our history without agriculture. A startling fact. Still, for all purposes, part of our mentality and habits have surely been formed in an agrarian setting.

Well, I don't want to say the obvious: that our current desire for the limitless is leading us to disaster: infinite wants and limited resources, so says the opening of any economics textbook. We want it all, and we want it now. And damn those who follow us to hell! The history of capitalism is itself the history of crossing frontiers, of colonising other 'spaces'. The 'space of flows', said someone. The idea of the home sounds woefully inadequate to us: it must take form as capital, be brought into the nexus of exchange: all that is solid melts into air.

The desire for endless happiness, for unlimited access. Restlessness, heroic or desperate as the case may be. Move on,get over it, and don't get fixated with any one identity, job, place or love. To talk of a vocation is really so old fashioned; one might as well talk about 'essences' or 'human nature'. Everything's interchangeable, and all is flux: liquid modernity.The pursuit of happiness is what it's about. City dwellers as the modern nomads.

Where are you from?
Nowhere in particular. Or, worse: I'm a citizen of the world!

And yet, maybe this is getting it all wrong, mixed up. As Hugh Brody writes in 'The Other Side of Eden', maybe it is the agriculturalists who have been the restless (and destructive) ones? Maybe-and this is the really troubling bit-city life is just an extension of, a natural progression from, a rural life. The 'unnatural growth of the natural (Arendt). Wasn't that there all along, from the very beginning? Didn't the settlers introduce violence, require the partitioning out of lands, enforceable by the law and, ultimately, by the threat of violence?

Anyway, all that brought back memories of Essex. God,how I hate Constable and Constable country.

(The pictures above are from my friend's village. Very peaceful and a quite special place. Intimately connected to one of the founders of one of the main Sufi orders in Pakistan (3rd picture). You can read more about the saint here).

...to the music of time

2012-01-24T21:10:00.001-08:00

Charles Rosen, on Elliott Carter:

"We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities."

"We live life forwards, but understand it backwards."

silent way

2012-01-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

"The using and discarding at will of so much sound, so much artistic brilliance, the reliance on intuition, on risk-taking, on not knowing..."

Out of place and out of time. Less and less yourself. Twice removed. The words falling all about you. And if words, why not the heart? When I think of you, I'm not here...

The words not said, you kept in your heart. I held your small chaste heart in my hands, as if it was a flower, and they a paper boat. What you didn't say was true, after all. It was there amidst all the white lies of your heart, all that was false, like the dark words you wrote on the blank page. 'I give you my word' translates as 'I give you my tongue.'The small curve of the 'n's' of your eyebrows, unfashionably Persian; that silly comma for a nose: the grammar of your face I read, and was speechless. The last word between us, a key. When all has been said and done, a full stop. What the Americans call "closure". But, for me, or so I think, a mark of slavery. Yours or mine, I forget. The full stop, where all paths lead, paths tended or overgrown, a small world of mirrors, where you are me, and I am you. It was like the mole on your left breast, the dazzling beginning of your silent ways...

'No-one can teach us morals'

2012-01-19T23:09:00.000-08:00

You've heard this phrase before: from Israeli fanatics or Muslim fundamentalists. As if our way is right, necessarily right, and always right. But there's more to it: it's a God-given fact-and there's no arguing with that!

Well, you don't believe for a second that a moral compass is 'given', or to the extent it is, then it is given to everyone and as a potentiality. No Syeds, no Brahmins, no Gurus; no pirs, no men in pointed hats, no swamis, no Shaikhs..no..as the Hindus say: "not this, not that"

Can a moral sense be taught, nurtured? If so, it's not through books or academia or music. You can study economics, philosophy, mathematics or whatever and still be a horrible person, just as you can be jewish, muslim, or an atheist and be horrible to other people. Not much use saying that in doing so you cease to be jewish/muslim etc. How to come to terms with violence within religion?

What is the 'first philosophy'?

You can talk all you want about pluralism (Isaiah Berlin) or 'infinite responsibility (Levinas). And yet, when it comes to real people, real events, what you say sounds fake, duplicitous. The Palestinians, for example. Or, you can harp on all you want about democracy but then at the very same moment say that the 'inferior races' aren't quite ready for it. Just as you can talk all you want about women's rights in Islam but, at some time or the other, you're going to have to face reality.

I dunno. On this one I tend to think that if it can be taught then it comes to us through our families: father, mother, sister and maybe through our friendships. Not as something that is inherited or inviolable. Anyone can fall (Augustine's pessimistic view in his later years, according to Peter Brown).

Iris M.
The background work required to be a good person. The need for second spaces, revision, for places of refuge, for generosity, for openness. Not the 'isolated will' making a choice. attention, concentration: seeing someone, something, oneself, in the right light. Clarity and charity.

think green

2012-01-18T22:34:00.000-08:00

"Once students were attracted by seeing the urgency of economic problems and by a sense of their mission to solve them. Now the best come to economics for the opportunity it provides to exercise arcane mathematical skills."

J.K. Galbraith (1969)

Is the environmental "problem" really an economic problem? Is it, fundamentally, something that economics can tackle and provide a "solution" to?

Well, first things first: there's no doubt that it has been economic production and the lifestyle associated with it that has been (and is) at least a part of the problem. Secondly, economics as a discipline hasn't really helped in providing any way out (some might argue: how could it since it has, for years, been justifying more production and consumption: growth, precisely).

So, what could economists say: that the basic problem is that the externalities produced by economic activity are not 'internalized' (i.e that the costs are not taken into account). From this it follows that appropriate taxation on polluters will lead to an efficient level of pollution (or, alternatively, if property rights are well defined then the people who cause the pollution and those who are affected by it can trade so that one pays the other off for the privilege of polluting or having clean air/water etc.. Who pays who depends on how the property rights are assigned).

Of course, that's all crap.

1. It's not clear that when it comes to pollution everyone knows the exact extent to which particular activities affect which particular people and in what specific ways. Distinct from that, it is not clear that anyone can know how increased pollution will have an impact on human beings or the environment: there may simply be things we don't know we don't know: fat tails.

2. But let's say information or knowledge wasn't a problem. Also, assume away problems associated with property rights (do you have the right to clean air and what if an industrialist producing in country X has an impact on the quality of your health/life?). Even then:

3. How would all of those trades come about? Isn't there a free-rider problem here? I know that you're willing to pay to prevent pollution and since I would benefit from that as well I might be tempted to say: why should I even bother paying for it? But if I think like that, so will you, and we might end up where no-one pays for the reduction in pollution.

4. Or: if you're very poor (P), you might say, since money is more valuable to you than ill-health, I'll accept a payment in return for allowing the industrialist to pollute. P could be a poor country. Who is anyone else to say that this is a non-voluntary transaction or that P doesn't fully understand the full ramifications of the transaction? That smacks of paternalism, and seems to go against the dominant idea that tastes/preferences are given, indisputable. To talk about 'the good', in an objective sense, really means, or so it is argued, sometimes going against freedom-and that's paramount.

5. But why should the costs be 'internalized' in the first place? One example of this is as follows: our actions now will have an impact on future generations (on people who are not even alive now [can they be called 'people'?]). So, why should I cut back on my consumption just so Z can live a better life? What is the economic argument for that? Not sure if there is.

6. Economists will say: well, if you think of society as one infinitely lived individual then this problem disappears. But that's really a mathematical solution-and not based on any ethical foundations. And of course, if you assume that then distributional concerns become less pressing. What else would you expect! Less pressing, but not eliminated.

7. a) So, if society is one individual (a "representative agent") then, obviously, if he pollutes he's really affecting himself. Therefore: pollute less. [aside: you may have noticed that the only considerations here are of a particular type: consequentalist and human-centred. To say that we have obligations to non-human beings is really to take a step in another direction]

b) but there are still questions about how to weigh up costs and benefits over time (the inter-temporal distribution problem). Typically, economists will think: the benefits to "me" (remember, there is only infinitely lived me) in some future time period (t -125, say) are of less value (importance) than benefits to me now in the overall stream of benefits (as seen by "me at t-0...i.e "now")

But why is that? Is there an economic rationale for that? Think about what's actually been done here: effectively, what we're saying is that the welfare of someone in 125 years is not as important (it is "discounted") as the welfare of someone (which conveniently happens to be me) now. That itself is an ethical issue (as explicitly recognized by Stern in his influential report).

Verweile doch! du bist so schön

2012-01-14T02:36:00.001-08:00

Won't you stay still, for once! Like the devil you are, always fading, always soaring. The truth of you now, and only now. The image undistorted by a question. Take off your glasses that you may see clearly, that I may see...Unloosen your hair and mourn the death of me-at your hands.

dog and nothing but a dog.

And at last he meets a black dog
running around in smaller and
smaller circles
like an ominous spider
spinning its vast web...

like a carrier raven,
like a cat, like a mouse,
like a black-burning bush.

like the still point of my heart.

He feels he loves the dog with a love
whose essence is hopelessness just as
hopelessness has its essence in love.

But there is no essence,
only dog,
black dog,
staring fiercely back at me,
like my own fate.

the human voice

2012-01-13T23:31:00.000-08:00

(with apologies to bob)

Desert Island discs remains one of your favourite programmes. Of course, to the purist the idea of a song horribly truncated like that, the interjection of the human voice, the mixture with personal memories, anecdotes, politics, and humour must come across as something quite barbaric. The Beeb pandering to the unsophisticated palettes of the untutored and lazy.And yet, for all that, the human voice remains the thing that fascinates you.

Micahel Foot, at seventy five, his mind bursting with intellectual excitement. Sue Lawley, oozing with so much delectable charm, that sparkle in her eyes (or so you imagine).

A life lived with deep commitment. The idea of home. No, not the idea: the reality of it shaping what and who you are, always fondly remembered, acknowledged. American politicians (and modern British ones) always sound comically fake. Not even stage actors in a second-rate play at a run-down theatre. There's something ridiculous, eminently laughable, about conservatives.

the death of the heart

2012-01-13T21:43:00.001-08:00

If ever I was tempted to read a book for its title alone, then it would be this one. I love the first words, the first page of a novel, because they draw you in; they're like a film trailer or a band striking up before the actual performance, or the moment you adjust yourself and settle in back home, the door firmly closed, the lights blaring away, time kept at bay. Events in the world as distant as the stars-which sounds kind of heartless (Hume's little finger and all that)...

The crackle of the loudspeaker before it starts; the maulvi clearing his throat, preparing himself. That registers, but ever so faintly, like the slow return to zero of the galvanometer needle and its shadow. You lose track, eat when you can. People come and go.

The other day, you bought Moveable Feast, and since there wasn't much traffic, and because of its size, you started to read the blurbs on the back as you drove with one hand. Which is kind of crazy, especially as you're not that fond of books after all! The dougal, on the other hand, has read everything under the sun.

-Yesterday, lunch with your old friend, canny and wise, as worldly-wise as one can imagine. He has this incredible (and irritating) habit of being able to look someone up and down and then form an accurate judgement of their life, their unique problems, their soundness. A bit like Sherlock Holmes.

But he just wants to discuss his 'woman problem'...the problem being that he's addicted to them, even though he can't admit it. But because he can see so clearly, so uncompromisingly,he recognizes there's something wrong, that someone with half his strength would have become unmoored if they'd gone through what he's gone through. Addicted not to the love of women, I should add. Not much point asking 'where did it begin?' or trying to describe the boundaries of desire. Each man is an island. And so is each woman.

What can I say? I shrug my shoulders. "Go and see a psychiatrist...a female psychiatrist."-

The mystery of the opening up; a beautiful face glimpsed. You move, north by north-west. Uncharted territory; the only belongings you carry with you are the shoddy ones you wear. Your hands as dry as the pages. You forget all the reviewers and critics that you so despise. There's no telling only, at best, a showing, a pointing to. Commas and breathlessness.

The momentum of the inner world.

Shall we talk about the end, then? A good ending, the perfecting ending, when you close the book in your hands, and just sit still with the sad realization hanging around you that you have to return to life, ordinary life. You think to yourself: what the fuck was that?! Just the death of the heart, or something like it.

cross my heart

2012-01-13T00:16:00.000-08:00

Couldn't find any of this online, but it's a lovely cd. If you live in Lahore I can make a copy for you.

In a discussion with a colleague yesterday: what counts as a cross-listed course? Is there a set of criteria -perhaps not rigorous or definitive, but something on which one might base one's judgement?

One idea is that you run courses together, simultaneously, hoping students themselves will make the leap across the divide, see and make connections themselves? This, the 'pillar model', seems to expect too much of students in my opinion. And you can really only make that leap when you're on a sure footing yourself. Since most of us are blind to our habitual ways of thinking, and are only reminded of them once we've left them-like an exile from his homeland-then, and only then do we really get a clearer picture of our assumptions, methodologies, aims, history, etc.

The other way of thinking about this is a real conversation, a dialogue within the course itself. The problems here are legion: who, today, has that type of inclination or, indeed, training, to cover such vast ground in anything but a superficial way?

What, exactly, is meant by the cross?

How can one enter another's territory, land, without knowing the required etiquette, the ways to approach the other? Not just the borders, or places where people and ideas overlap, but deep into the heart of the other? How do you open yourself up, make yourself available without losing yourself? The awe, the bewilderment, the utterly mysterious: like the face of the other, that you recognize but do not know. Somewhere, somewhere deep in you the stranger ceases to be a stranger...

the lost ones

2012-01-11T21:56:00.000-08:00

(with thanks, as always, to jacky B.,"a dark glass", for pointing me here).

Heart.
Still.
Untrue.
For you.

"I want to know how you fell. Tell me all the details!"

My heart?

"Who cares about your heart!"

What would you know? The ghost songs of a life. I nearly became a white man, but didn't. (The Allama once wrote that he was saved from becoming an infidel by reading Wordsworth. A bit dramatic, but there you go!). Always the intrusion of the comical in what turned out to be, ultimately, a falsely serious life.

How I nearly scored a goal for the Colts. The rain pelting down, washing away the image of Danny on the sideline, screaming to me to go on my own. Beaten the (offside) trap. The slanting rain, the moment opening up before me...

Or how I nearly made the right decision: put my name down for philosophy, only to renege and take the cowardly get-out clause. The loss of nerve, the swerving at the last moment to safety.

What about the time you were nearly seduced by a married woman? Get out of here!

On the dark side of the moon, the other you lives, the one who chose 'right' instead of 'left'. But why the moon? In California, right now, there's a tramp or a millionaire , who has my name, and less of my fate. Closer to home, in the walled city, a slobbering drunk lies heaped up in a corner, wearing my stolen coat, dreaming my dreams. And in the mirror, I sometimes catch a glimpse of that other me: confident, bragging, years of success under his belt, his hands resolute, knowing, his eyes dazzling, his heart not in need of another...there he is,just as ready to fall, the old fool.

fine form

2012-01-10T20:49:00.000-08:00

To find one's deepest instincts; to stick by them.
---D. H. L.

Something odd to our modern ideas about the notion of narrative, a sustained picture of ourselves over time. It's as if the edges of the mirror are clouding inwards, so that the face itself is invaded by doubt, mystery. How to look at yourself clearly? No wonder the world seems so opaque!

Of course, the years of fakeness accumulate around you, can be seen in your eyes, heard in your speech. Words and voice always the first things to look for when you're looking for betrayal-assuming you can still recognize it. The tell-tale signs.

How to find the form that is an expression of your innermost desires, aspirations? Mostly, life is a compromise, a slow erasure of vision. Family, society, work, or religion will beat it out of you.Your old Jewish roots warn you though:don't expect too much: to be human is to be anachronistic, to be a stranger to the world. And yet for all that, this can veer wildly into a sort of cheap gnosticism, a tardy kind of self-centredness. No man is an island, and we all need "bridges", Forms, stepping stones, places of refuge.

Time passes. Only the young and the old understand. F.R. has this line: five seconds! If we had five seconds of love, truth, and understanding, what would the rest of the day be like?! The moment you wake up...how to keep that moment of awareness with you during the day? That pure gift? First thoughts? You're sure there's an old Islamic text one should recite on waking. Etiquette. Probably sounds too formulaic, mechanical to us now. Still.

What use are the words, without the life? Religion isn't a matter of words or concepts.

under the glass

2012-01-09T06:18:00.001-08:00

...In the morning the mirror is consulted again,'
said Doctor Johnson, but
not of this one dumped in the back of a Peugeot truck:

it is left, one corner broken off, among the riven architraves,
and won't be consulted again.
It is in with the ripped out sinks, the sofa springs' dying octaves,

it is with the builder's rubble that is valueless.
Now that its silver leaf is
peeling off, it is pond water with gleams beneath the surface.

There is a frogspawn of rust-spots. Black stipple on mercury.
There is a cloudiness
of depth and current, scratched by teeth beneath the glass

but bright enough for provincial eaves and firs to crane
over - for the first glimpse.
The mirror is put out. It will not be consulted again.

First, there is the misplacement - a veiled indoor convenience
must cope will all that light.
It reflects a worm's eye view of what will soon evaporate:

the passers-by with collars up for whom spring broke
too early, knock wet
turgid blossom onto it - equally misplaced where breeze-blocks sit,

as incongruous as the fractured seventy eight
of Beethoven's Fifth
dumped in the stingers - where nature and something else conflate.

Second, there's the passivity - the mirror tilted as it is
reflects every detail
of onrushing sky - the gulfs of blue and weightless cumulus

that drift like floes, that billow, fly, and break apart.
And so I think this bit
of junk's not just the still reflecting point of art

but may be likened to a certain juncture in
the history of clouds,
at which formations such as these might part to glimpse

maelstroms both human and equine, far below,
and which will yet
tear softly apart, to show the goings on of god knows what.

Lastly, there are the soft concealments - the mirror invokes
the droplets
of wet that steamed off with the last to smile in it:

the youthful nurse's theatre of unwitnessed face,
the couple who
moved in and out of it some twenty times a day.

Now all that consults it is sky. Soon, it will go
to the council dump,
but here finds cloud after cloud moving slow

though its skin of liver-spots is utterly still,
under the glass of which pours this
bright moving floor or conveyor belt, freckle-faced.

---Tim Liardet.

~~~

Under the glass, behind the mirror, the words not spoken, clearing, rising, breaking the still surface of our lives. Time reverses in the evening mirror. A dim round light above it, a fading yellow haze, helps bring back something of the past. The lines on your face, like those etched in blood by a tribal, to mark the passage of time, the forward rush to dying silver.

2012-01-08T20:54:00.000-08:00

To walk in the morning light, the dark leaves still by your side. The rain has cleared things up, and you smell fresh earth after a long while. The icy northern wind: the grass trembles, and your teeth chatter like an old man's. The mud is compact, full of crystals.Reflected light held in a calm puddle of water. Walk on, like someone discovering a new world, or the straggler left behind, surveying what remains of a settlement.The wind howls in the empty corridors of the half-completed building.

In the dark intervals between, you found yourself.Lost, as always.I can read, I can write. Is that the sign of the humanness in the human, like the strawness of straw?

Things get misplaced. You worry about that for a while. What direction is this, you fail to understand. No step brings us closer.Winter has brought a kind of clarity; you see yourself without shadow, pared down to the essential, or at least the minimum. The fundamental questions still applying as time goes by.Life, thought, as opaque as ever. The seasons of discontent. The generality of it all.

The other day, buoyed up by the prospect of this blasted term finally coming to an end ("closure", as the Americans love to say), you suddenly see one of your better students in a corner, pensive, quiet. Is everything okay?, I ask. She starts to cry: it appears that one of her cousins has killed herself. Just ten days ago N had told me a similar story about one of her relatives. What can you say? That there's a distribution of pain and suffering and joy in the world and that it will reach each one of us in its turn? That we are here but to fill in the slots, the individual names not being important?

Of course, this thought struck you even during those sensuous dances. (What a bundle of fun you are b!, I hear you say). Why should beauty remind you of death? But no, it wasn't that, or just that. Rather...I bumped into one of my old friends at the re-union. At first I couldn't recognize him. Don't think I've actually seen him for 20-odd years. He was, and remains to this day, one of the most down to earth and soft spoken people I've met.

"How have you been and where have you been?"

He sort of shrugged off these questions and just said: I've been kind of anti-social". His hair used to be jet black, plastered to his head. But now, it was all wavy and grey. His eyes were sunken and he looked not unlike a figure out of a Durer picture. Forget which one. A strange sort of madness, or half-madness if that's the right phrase, in his eyes. I looked at his name-tag. Who was this, after all. Then it clicked: he was the one who'd been in jail for the last fifteen years on a murder charge.He was the one. It could have been anyone.

In the early hours of the morning, with most of your friends sloshed and the initial charm of the dances wearing thin, you walked around and talked to those of your friends who could still manage to speak clearly. One friend, extremely rich, told me of the terrible time he'd had over the last seven years: litigation and family disputes; another of how he was racked with guilt over his kids not being able to speak Urdu, about them not being able to communicate with his grandparents. Behind the surface, the cigars, the girls, the booze, there's the old familiar heartache.

You think to yourself: get the hell out of here, get out quick and don't look back.

the memory of the future

2012-01-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and the uniqueness of his life.
---M. Buber.

Without meaning, the world is just things.
---JCO.

There is no "proof" or set of "arguments" for or against God! It seems quite ridiculous that anyone would want to try and convince someone else-one way or the other. And isn't a good life already religious, in some sense? What is that sense though?

Maybe not an 'inner transformation' of one's life-that seems to be asking for too much. Nor is it-and this is only your two cents-a fully coherent life, one in which there's the acknowledgment, understanding, and acceptance of a narrative thread. Our lives are too jumbled up and fragmentary for that. Then what?

Moments of recognition-of others, of ourselves.All this is possible only against a certain background, a picture of the soul. And that background work is done by others: the compassion of loved ones that allow you to be: volo ut sis. No higher wisdom, don't look for it.

Memory binds. Forward-dreaming and the past are lovingly carried with you, and are not sources of illusion or fantasy. The distance between us, between all kinds of pluralities, is recognized, the way broken-ness is. It wants to, and doesn't want to be named. Memory is a bridge that spans time, all that was thought to be lost, lost to thought.

What is the future but the past? The point becomes a circle. Like a boat moored to the land, it gently rocks outwards and is brought back in by the same rope!

ravel

2012-01-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

Southern California: I thought I'd lost you there for a moment!

~~~

The weird and yet fascinating story of the Ovitz family. Mengele was in his thirties. The randomness of it all. The damned and the saved.

~~~

'a sheltered, privileged, mysteriously stalled life'

---JCO.

Fuchs  found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming  and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land  wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"what  is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a  story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it  sings."

The incredible, the superhuman ability  to accept the cards that have been dealt to you. With the blessings of  the sun. Not to ask: what might have been but, instead, to inhabit the  parcel of history that's yours. 

~~~

The  piling up of books, the sheer, dizzying fertility of the  culture-churning industry. The rapid, burgeoning, growth of academic  papers, newspaper reports, tweets, blogs, 24-hour news, cheap pop music,  the derivative market: criticism, analyses, commentaries, biographies  of biographers, films, clips, documentaries, all available at the click  of a button; the mind not knowing what the hand does. This frantic,  frenetic gathering and accumulation of details, information, its  exponential growth; the hyper-inflation of words, the silence of the  commons destroyed. 

The libraries, the museums,  vast cathedrals of the human mind, vast storehouses categorizing  everything that's ever been done or thought. What a tangle we've got  ourselves into. Another fine mess. Long ago it's outstripped the human  capacity to name, let alone understand what it all means. 

At  a stroke this might seem oppressively burdensome, the great weight of  the past, unplumbed, sunken, as dark as whale, so vast that it defies  structure; on the other hand, the sheer accessibility to this bloated,  overblown mass of details, profundity mixed up with trivia (the need for  search engines to shuffle it all about) may, in fact, have the opposite  effect: a delightful giddiness, light-headedness: pick out whatever you  can for yourself, like a great jumble sale. You stumble across  something, a story, a reference (good ol' wiki), a writer or a musician who was once considered great but that now everyone's  forgotten or will forget in 30 years. All but a few amateur experts and  dusty-haired academics, holed up in the tower have even heard of them.  Everything is rediscovered. Like the Eloi, you start from scratch, not remembering what happened before. You find a few leaves away from the whirlwind.

Multiplication. Think about it: Prafit with his two volumes and thousands of pages. Do you really think anyone's  going to read that, give you the privilege? Or Burton, six volumes on  melancholy with the fashionable blurb: this books is about two things:  melancholy and everything else.

The sustained  brainwork, monkish devotion to the Cause, the blind, fanatical  collecting, storing up  for the winter of the mind, this colossal,  mammoth effort comprising small, marginal advances added to one another.  A few samples for you, from one page: The Last Imaginary Place: a human  history of the Arctic; The Future of the Brain (dim, let me tell you);  Choral Masterworks; Kansas city Jazz. The examined life...This morbid  inability to forget. Major and minor works. Black studies, gender  studies, development studies. Post-colonial, post-industrial,  post-everything..the colossal leviathan ploughs on, devouring..heaving  with a monstrous incomprehension, like a silent movie...Great Authors  Series; Great Books. There's something neurotic, hurried, unnatural  about it all, this tumble of imagery and dialogue. Bring back the Taleban. The 'world of celebrity, fast movement and shiny living'.

Art staves off death. Old hat. The art of storing up art. Now, that's a story!

Steiner: Errata.  

the jewish question

2012-01-04T22:37:00.000-08:00

Re-reading Putnam's nice little book, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.

What struck me-and what probably drew me to this book in the first place-was the central question which could be stated simply as: "a life without questions". The tree of life, the tree...

To go back to the first place; the dark fruit of our origins gratefully accepted. "6.522: The problem of life..."

We're too quick looking for the answers, not paying enough attention to the questions; the questions we ask are often the wrong ones anyway. Academics specialize in this. To what extent are our questions related to life, an ordinary good life?

Rosenzweig, despite his anti-Islamic stance, is fascinating. At least what little I could make out from the Understanding the Sick and Healthy book (also something to be re-read).

Come on, come on, I hear you say. Spill the beans, cut to the chase. Give us the quotes you've culled and killed, taken out of the context,to bring back to the stream of life.

I dunno, seriously.Close the books, none of that matters today. Have a cinnamon roll, some black coffee...put on Grizzly Bear and be thankful for the care and attention of loved ones. To speak to, of, for...does this not mean to think for, of, with?

*I should add that this has nothing to do with politics. It really is something that is, if anything, pre-political (if not opposed to the law or the political, then at least prior to it).

But since we're here, there is no escaping the terrible reality that it was perhaps the very questioning, the reluctance to "conform" (in St. Paul's sense of the word) that, in part, led to the barbaric 'final solution' (a point made by George Steiner, I think).

Also, it meant to allude to the fact that there is no question, that the setting up of questions-political and otherwise-is often already a kind of betrayal. 'What is a black man? And what colour is he?'Who is a 'real' Muslim? Once one has posed that question, the door is open to all sorts of categorizations of fake or not pure Muslims: Ahmadis, Shias, Sufis, etc.

the impure heart

2012-01-04T02:06:00.001-08:00

the winter sun's halo above the library, dispelling the finer particles; on ledges, pigeons alighting, and suddenly taking flight, fearful. the dark-slit windows of the fortress library; my mind on a precipice.a speckled pigeon scaling the incline of the lamppost. a student turning on his heels...

from where i am, i get to see so much; but little of the outside filters through my darkened windows. I spy, with my little eye, something beginning, and something ending.these worlds in miniature, fragile and precious, the brightest hour in the heart's mirror when I speak your name.

the darkness in our hearts: anything goes: nothing comes. the open field, a diagonal dry pathway, that cuts back to home, that i know even in the dark. i can find my way when light begins or when shadows fall about me. but when you look my way, I'm lost and falter. the purity of our hearts remains unseen, unknowable-God only knows; what is impure shines with its own name, is recognizable, is broken.

Everywhere around you there is the inheritance of silver, the splendour of green, but only in the heart the glitter.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled...

~~~

He said "no" and really meant "yes"
she said "i hate you" but she spoke so softly...
each denial is a denial of something.

The executioner laughed, and though he didn't see it, word of it brought a smile to the prisoner's heart.

'the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart'

---G. Hill.

The winter heart, that struggles with its own blindness, full of impure thoughts. Dreams of spring. The blossoming of flower from stone and ice.

~~~

okay, okay, I know: this is supposed to be about politics...

the arab spring

2012-01-03T20:31:00.000-08:00

What we lost, by following the fucking Saudis, was a beautifully coloured strand of our being. What we found, instead, was the coarseness and crudity of the bedouin in our souls, the desert in our hearts, the wrecking light of the southern sun. No Persian ever called me niggah. Arab spring? Nah, it's always winter there.

~~~
I found a word.
you came to me.
The hunt was on,
but i lost you
Because I saw you everywhere.

the fabric of our being,
richly woven,
undone by what fair hands!
A green celtic bracelet around your thin wrists,
the snakecharms of your eyes,
leave me tongue-twisted.
"Faith is under the left nipple"
And infidelity under the right.
Lost to the world,
I found you elsewhere.

the heart's desire

2012-01-02T23:10:00.001-08:00

****] heart
****] absolutely
****] I can
****]
] would be for me
] to shine in an answer
****] face
****]
****] having been stained
****]

The starred heart, hardly recognizable, not even yours.The heart's endless desire to break.The coal fires are nearly exhausted, and it's not really bitterly cold anyway. There's still enough warmth in your body, even at 12 at night, out in the open.The rooftop restaurant buzzes with hushed expectation. The fires, the flaky ash-grey embers, are moved to one side and the well-worn carpets are rolled out. Some sort of second-hand Persian stuff.

The red and blue notes are tossed into the air; cheap Bollywood numbers blare out into the dark night sky. Alcohol starts to flow, the empty bottles kept neatly on the floor. Old a_ slouches in his chair, his arms folded, resting on his knees. He still has his silly brown wool hat on. He looks on at the scene unfolding before him, memorizing it, or so it seems to me; he's like the last man on Brighton pier, looking out to the sea for a kind of lost freedom.

Someone else, who you don't even know, reaches out with one arm, like an old grizzly bear trying to claw at what he can't have. He mumbles some tune to himself as he does so. You can see he's intoxicated by it all. By now the academics and the sufis have left. J says to me: "If I'd wanted to see so many fat people, I would have stayed at home!"

Sherry blushes like a 12 year-old girl, with all the attention he's getting.

The dances: mostly boring. But one woman in particular is spectacularly beautiful. Large brown eyes, sometimes softly burning, at other times sparkling. Her hair down to the small of her back, a silvery blue and green 'choli', with a strapped back. Thin, tall-ish. Smooth, bronzed legs.

All sounds very decadent, I know. But it wasn't. Cross my heart, and hope to die.

without title

2011-12-31T01:14:00.000-08:00

acquiescentia in se ipso.
---Spinoza.

Being the person one just wants to be. Not wanting, being. Not the pleasure one derives from that harmony,or not just the pleasure, but the life itself (of which pleasure is a part). In silence. But not a resignation to the satisfaction of desires, motivations, goals we just happen to have. One notion of freedom lies that way, no doubt, and the alternative view of freedom, 'objective' or impersonal, can also be paternalistic: freedom structured or ordered by reason.

But no, being the person one wants to be.

A freedom from titles, names; to find a good that is not so tightly linked to them. On the other hand, a good that is expressed in the things you do in your life. 'The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.'The loved one has many names, is nameless.

2011-12-29T22:02:00.000-08:00

you burn me.
---Sappho.

Classes over, the term all but come to a close, just the fag end now.A tremendous sense of relief. Students' gazes buried away in their books, the library ticking over with thought, your hands cold and dry, but the lines more prominent now. A small tree, nameless, with its dark eleven o'clock shadow. There's something both beautiful and horrifying in the thought that it will survive us, that life goes on, somehow, miraculously.

Your mind has slowed down, is less restless. Always strayed too much, unlike your starred heart. Like an old person, you look forward to soup at 4 o'clock. You have no desire to talk to anyone. Just stay in your cell and read up on community. Yes, I know! Maybe some fragments that you'll hold, not shape, in the palm of your hands.

In the morning mist you walked past dark leaves, a few holding the memory of summer and brilliant blood-red.

You were late, as always. It passed you by. This sense of lateness, your defining characteristic, reflected in your eyes, part of your inheritance.You wait, patiently,for some kind of recovery, recollection and more. The winter mind, the winter heart, conserving,holding back, for the memory of the future, the day you remember me.

]
] nor
] desire
] but all at once
] blossom
] desire
] took delight

freeing the dust

2011-12-28T20:43:00.000-08:00

a moment, amongst moments. thinking it would open up on to something, and not collapse under its own weight, become thought again.bright and gleaming.stone blossoming into flower, dreaming of star.

The water
flashes
each time you
make it leap -
arching its glittering
back.

Each moment slowed down, frame by frame. You return to it, read it slowly, as you imagine doing (ideally) with your life. Where that (ideally) comes in was tricky. The water, the thing, on its own, isolated. The world before us. Then human agency; then the world again, the world alive, independent existence.At the centre: the ability to make something happen, to be connected to the world in that moment. I think, I am thinking. To 'I am'. The gaps covered by that arching back, like a salmon returning home, a rainbow of hope, a mirror, doubling what was one. The salmon is the stream. 'I think'. The 'I' is given, must be lovingly recognized, acknowledged.Home, your perpetual origin, was carried in your heart,all along.Water helped you remember, bring you back to the black land, where your fair hand turns, and turns again, the dark pages.

Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk asked one of the disciples of Rabbi Moshe: "What was most important to your teacher?"

To which he replied: "Whatever he happened to be doing at the moment"

I said, the summer garden I planted
bears only leaves–leaves in abundance–
but no flowers.
And then the flowers,
many colors and forms,
come forth...

What magic denial
shall my life utter
to bring itself forth?

2011-12-27T20:40:00.000-08:00

This is near the place I used to live. The river Roding, usually so tame and quiet, melancholy, actually flooded once.How amazing that is, when something crosses it's time-worn boundaries, makes contact with what has surrounded it for so long.

All I remember now is like a loose thread.When the Roding slows, and stones lie still in its dark waters, my heart is lost.

We humans, who have thought of commonalities in terms of things that transcend us, like religion or abstract reason, or in terms of blood and soil, have never stopped to think that living side-by-side with other people was what it was all about. If all truth was on the boundaries, then human beings are that boundary par excellence.

~~~

Chekov said: Let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we’ll never get anywhere.
---V.G.

...

2011-12-24T21:20:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas !!!

~~~

Lovely Christmas with friends: roast chicken (lemon and thyme); rich fruit cake, mashed potatoes; warm spiced cranberry drink (vodka optional). Good, decent, and intelligent people to talk to and yet, for all that...what is it?

A told me, matter-of-factly, in a hushed voice, amidst all the laughter: "I don't want to be here". Well, join the line, kiddo. But she'll be okay, will land on her feet. Always does.

bt, young and enthusiastic, practical head on his shoulders, always speaks his mind, and knows his mind. More importantly, points me to interesting poets and novelists. Impossible to keep up with, but that's okay.

Hasan K, tall and lanky, a bundle of bones, glasses, and communism ; the academic's academic. Could talk about China for ever, and still hold an audience.

Someone says, above the din:"critical thinking". I hear snatches of conversations around the room, Lately, I've become quite invisible. Then someone says, with great confidence, "academia is about questioning everything."

Is it, I wonder to myself.This isn't really about freedom, though you recognize how important that is. That you can question anything is not the whole of the issue; it is, rather, whether you need to, whether some things are (and should be) taken as given. Not just your reasoning abilities themselves, but all sorts of practical and moral insights. Some things are left best in the half dark.

Fudge, under the table, looking on at us with those sad eyes. Old fudge, unable (or unwilling) to participate in our conversations. Seen it all before, I guess. The most reflective dog this side of the Oxiana.

And yet, despite all that, there's a restlessness in your heart. The shadow of those who are absent moves across my face, is on my skin, twists beneath my shoulder blades. Home is where the heart is. And your heart is homeless.

At random, I flick open the book closest to my free hand, as people of faith in the past might have opened their holy book. The first words I catch are:

'We have entered the dark stretch of night just before dawn
as we have entered the dark stretch of land
before the home's come to.'
---Ken Irby.

2011-12-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

The time to speak freely is not upon us yet, only its distant shadow. Still, bound, the tongue weaves a pattern as the mind imagines a world, the heart does not know.It was on a day like this, the chill in your bones, generations of unknowingness reflected in your sad eyes. We are here for a while, then gone.

You fall. Head over heels, again. There's no fool like an old fool. So, here you are, out of step, out of sync with the times. "Walk on," or walk in. The distinctions no longer interest you, are like the haze in your heart.

half-way

2011-12-22T22:52:00.000-08:00

'Took my heart to the limit,
and that's where it's going to stay.'

(as pop songs go, this ain't half bad. Bob, forgive me!)

Well, Cornelius?

'Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet'

Fragments, fragments is all we have. Hold them carefully in the palm of your hand. Close your hand, flesh to flesh, like the circle of earth, when night becomes day, and opposites meet. The hollow of the hand, the locus of prayer. The deal was done. Give me back what was mine. This world in miniature, like a speck of dust in your eye. And yet, it still brings tears!

How many images go up in to the making of a human soul? Perhaps only one. The mirror broke, the ice queen relented, and now I hold pieces of her heart in my hand.

~~~

Little r has, in one hand, throughout the day, either Billy Badger or Rupert the Bear. It's strange what we become attached to, what we become used to. Even a silly face has its charms after a while. And prisoners, no doubt, reconcile themselves with the marked faces of their fellow prisoners, as if sharing a common fate could eliminate the memory of freedom.

~~~

"You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you cannot find them, and if you could, you couldn't arrange them."
---Coleridge.

~~~

]heart
]absolutely
]I can
]
]would be for me
]to shine in answer
]face
]having been stained
]

[

2011-12-20T21:09:00.000-08:00

The bracketed future,
[
together, alone: [ ]
Time, the space between us [...]
Of waiting.

"Look...doings!"said little r.
Soon there will be [I am]
God [as a] witness [to] our doings.

Our words b[ro]ken, as the b-ro-ken world.
What kinship does b have?

Go, if you must, ] [
I await your return...]

~~~

we have
a Grand Master of chess
made of electronic circuits.

But above all
we have
the ability
to sort peas,
to cup water in our hands,
to seek
the right screw
under the sofa
for hours

This
gives us
wings.
---Holub.

The unclenched hand, 'solar generosity', said Larkin; the curvature of our hands, a sign of our humanity:knowing what to let go of, what to hold on to...

Q&a

2011-12-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

Where are you when you think? Not here. Which is strange, for someone who's 'all there'. Yesterday, I had to stop the car at the side of the road, put on the emergency lights, and repeat to myself: where the fuck are you? How can an oriental be disoriented?

Where are you when you think of another?

When you're a student you always hear teachers trying to be sexy by saying something like: 'it's not about what you know, it's about the questions you ask'. Knowing isn't everything. Or something equally odd: 'question everything'.

7:00 a.m.

No-one about except the cleaners. The earth still slowly coming to terms with the morning light. Shall I be open today, or not; who will find love on this bench, under this tree today, and who will lose it? Black coffee, a croissant. Lecture: woefully under-prepared. Hoping to wing it. Nabs, dear Nabs' books just come in, sitting on my desk, next to the pile of articles on utilitarianism.: Ken Irby's collected poems; Anne Carson's 'Fragments of Sappho. Danke, danke.

Outside on the steps, someone has made and left two white paper boats, the size of my thumb. Really quite delightful.Both capsized.Sunk, the night before.

The questions, you found, were only there to pass the time, to hear your voice, to read your words. How superficial is that?!

to fall in love with,
as surely

as the loved one
in the photograph before me.

---Ken Irby.

What intelligence you have is quite silly, really. The light in your eyes; I'm light-headed when I think about it.The distances between people. One might as well be Algerian or Chinese.

My house: there aren't many things in it any more. Nothing to count or tally. The only people there are visitors, strangers, or cut-throat property-dealers.And yet, for all that, still it stands, empty like a human heart.

I-level

2011-12-18T20:27:00.000-08:00

I am I,
when I am you.

Dodge the questions, as you dodge the bullets."Droll rat," they would shoot you, if they knew.In the mean time, the time we have between us, let's dance together in a minefield.

Loyalty, fidelity...to what or who, God knows? Your own Jewish nose, so unremarkable in other ways, has picked up the scent and follows your trackless ways. What kind of religion is this, that leads you to infidelity?

Darkness crumbles. Is it day or night? The winter fires, Anna said.Remember? The late flaring of your soul. For so long, your I at an angle to the universe.I see you face to face now. You've saved the last dance, the dance of death, for me.

Golden words of wisdom from swami blacksun

2011-12-17T02:31:00.001-08:00

Irony of ironies! Having just written an article for the papers (don't bother asking for the link: it's as crap as this blog) on the importance of trust for development ('social capital' and all that) I get a lecture from an estate agent on the importance of trust! Bizarre!

So, there I was, in this dusty little square, a little corner of the dust-bowl that is Lahore, carcasses hanging outside the butcher's, flies, the works. His office: cheap wooden paneling (like you might expect in a 1970's second-hand car dealer's office). On the wall, next to a huge grey filing cabinet, a picture of his father...Sufi something, something. A lovely railway-green table. Qur'anic verses on the wall. Fading mustard sofas, bits of the covers peeling off. Two fans, both gold plated. A huge wall clock, something one might expect in a railway station. A rich, ornate pattern of flowers on the ceiling. You almost imagined that behind some closed door they were making B-grade films. Or God knows what.

As I wait for the estate agent an old bearded man tells me, in response to my question whether X still lives around here: who knows. He may be alive, he may be dead. After all, we all have to die, we all have to go back to God.

Yeah, er..okay, uncle.

First lesson in life: never talk to anyone unless you have to.

The lecture:

Do you see this? he said, holding the flimsy contract in his hand.

"It's all meaningless". What matters is trust, whether someone's given their word. In the end of the day, this piece of paper is only as good as the character of the people behind it. I've done lots of deals with people and it's been about honour.

Lesson number 2: when someone puts their hand up to stop you from interjecting, just so they can continue on their cheap Sunday school sermon, you know they're majorly screwed in the head. Ride the tiger, grasshopper.

I could see this wasn't going to be a pleasant next 20 minutes. When Paks go on a rant the best response is to just let them have their say (hope you're taking notes, Roxana and anton!) or, if you're like little r, the 'chaabi master', just egg them on a bit!

Lesson number 3, little ones: always imagine the end of a conversation; the handshake, you getting back into the safety of your car. When the other person talks think of something pleasant like cinnamon rolls or Monica Bellucci...it helps pass the time. Now and then raise your head so as to indicate you haven't died of boredom and nod your head as you say: "Really?".

So he continues...are you telling me there's no corruption in England, America! There's more, much more! "There are people living in cardboard boxes in the Bronx chipped in his friend, the "engineer."

Of course, I'd been making the point in my article about the importance of trust. But that has to go hand in hand with contracts, a good and transparent legal system. Part of me wanted to ask him: why do you think Pakistan's so fucked up then? But if I've learnt anything over the years it's that it's best not to engage with other human beings. Especially if they're not very pretty. A harsh lesson, I know. But it's the way of the future, I tells ya! Sod all that stuff about community. Give me my money and let me go home....

On the way back: stopped over at the Last Word, as a drunk might find refuge in a pub in the mid -afternoon, sinking into oblivion. Didn't want or need anything, but at least here there was a moment of respite. Anyway, my Burnisde books haven't come in. Doesn't matter. Khair...

~~~

Pharmakon: the poison and the remedy are the same; time is the great healer, time is the wound. Your absence is real. Is reality anything else?

the orient

2011-12-15T20:49:00.001-08:00

You know, I've traveled a bit in 'the orient' (why, I even live there and might be said to be an oriental of sorts myself) but I've never seen anything like this. Missing out again, I guess!

But no, the serious point: what is this fascination and obsession with 'the east' and with women's bodies and the veil? Of course, there's a political context to it; it would be naive to assume otherwise. The 'East' as passive, half-awake, there for the taking. The east that needs to be liberated, set free from captivity ('the lustful turk' and all that).

The East as a dreamworld, a place and time of lost innocence (but also, confusedly, of uninhibited sensuousness). Gaugin, perhaps? In a world that was being narrowly defined by rationality and industrialization, wouldn't it be nice to return to the pre-reflective states and to nature?

On the other hand, isn't a lot of the criticism just reactionary? In the 'west' people suffer from alienation, a lack of protection; they face the relentless gaze, the tyranny of fashion; they miss out on family life, homeliness, security, modesty, etc., etc. the harsh world of politics and the public realm being left to the men, the hunters. And shouldn't we respect differences? Eastern (Muslim) women are not like the farangi women, are they?

Well, don't buy it for a second, not a for a second.To talk about the Enlightenment nowadays is to align oneself with all sorts of unpleasant bedfellows. Narrow views of rationality, a thin concept of 'Man', a lack of respect for difference and uniqueness; the crushing of all that reeked of tradition, superstition, emotions. Science, prose and not art or poetry. Sure, but isn't it also an attempt to see what we share with one another, what we hold in common? A respect for sameness doesn't necessarily lead to the flatlands; instead, it can be just the opposite: east, west, man, woman, rich, poor...there is only the human being.Or, to be more specific, the ability to see ourselves clearly depends on our ability to see other people clearly:to keep the right balance between people's specificity and individuality and what is common. Us & them. The '&' unites and individuates.

winter fires

2011-12-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

There's something primitive and satisfying about putting on the heater in the early hours of a winter morning. Is this a deep ritual from our ancient past?

Driving along the Canal yesterday, late in the afternoon; the green, opaque water slowly moving down, as if it had suddenly become more reflective, cautious, this last month. It carried with it a few twigs and dry leaves. It seemed as if no-one even recognized its existence.On the way back, a delightful scene of lots of small, ankle-high fires in the grass. The gold vivifying the green. Each fire unique and yet, somehow, mystically tied to the other.

'You realize I attach great importance to the human voice, more than to what is written, for what is written does not contain my voice'

At Canal View you notice that the woman has a very distinctive face, very tender, tinged with some sort of sadness. She folds her arms. Has strange cheekbones. There's something 'western' about her. Not her accent or even the way she carries her hair (which is always a dead give away). 'You always pick out such things,' I'm told. Yes, that's true, I always like to see gold in the straw, wonder what history a face has? God, I can't stand mirrors any more.

There's no betrayal like the human voice.
---Richard Ford.

2011-12-11T21:13:00.001-08:00

A white butterfly floated into the prison and my heart beat faster. She left, and my heart fluttered after her.

~~~

Five states of mind. None of them true. Quintessentially, you draw circles around an absence. Your heart, officially dead wood. On which a butterfly perchance came to rest.

~~~

Behind the black was the red; and behind the red the white. But behind the white there was only a heart.

~~~

The way of the future is the way to the past. If time flows then, as the Romans knew, it flows backwards towards you.

Sun and time fade; the winter light, weak and fragile, coldly reflected on the library's high windows. Books and soil become closely packed. The winter's mind conserving, not straying or wavering. All I remember is like a loose thread.When the Roding slows, and stones lie still in its dark waters, my heart is lost.

She smiled at the questions, as if to say, 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'. A fraction of her known, as if glimpsed from afar.'She did not care for films, newspaper reportages, the radio. She wanted personal knowledge.'She was always on the inside; he always on the outside.But if you open this door, she said, make sure you don't bring in the cold with you.

fixations

2011-12-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

Late 14c., fixacion, an alchemical word, from M.L. fixationem (nom. fixatio), noun of action from pp. stem of L. fixare, frequentative of figere "to fix" (see fix). Used in the Freudian sense since 1910.

Are there people without fixations? Is not the constant denial of fixations itself a fixation?

There are words, there are words we repeat to ourselves, to others, as if they were like us, or would like us. Everyone needs a fix 'cos everyone's broke. Spent.

A phrase, a word, your signature. What is the word or phrase that is you? For fuck's sake. Repetition and ritual. Need I say it again.

Epitaphs:
Death isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I want my money back!

~~~

Does death, then, have the final word, like a mask with its fixed expression? Something not to be repeated (or even spoken)?Perhaps then.And yet death is the fixation! 'The point of all points', the ultimate 'brokenness' that cannot be fixed. Aren't our fixations so many distractions from it, our way of extending the moment? Two ways: religion, art, abstract thought, as a way of detaching oneself from life; pure excess as a way of being absorbed in the moment, of forgetting that it will not last.

Why are you throwing this corn around?
To keep the tigers away.
But there are no tigers here.
It must be working then!

But what if you're fixated by someone? Breathlessness. Asphyxiation. Suffocation. Wonder, not finding its expression in life, turns to stone, becomes hooked to an 'object'. Does one end up killing the 'thing' one loves?

Goodbye Lenin

2011-12-07T21:03:00.000-08:00

100 pages in to Lesley Chamberlain's 'Philosophy Steamer'. Not half as good as the excellent 'Motherland'. But still...

What was the appeal of Communism? For the life of me, I don't get it! Of course, the notion of the 'common good', notions that were floating about in the 'silver age' and already present amongst the populists before the commies appropriated it. But you believe too much in the individual-Jesus, that makes me sound like Ayn Rand!-to be really attracted to the common anything. No, not the individual, or any other useless abstraction,just my own and the people I know.

What is fascinating, though, is this battle between the individual, the rational, on one side, and the collective notion of the good life, and the mystifications of Tradition on the other. The 'progressive' part of Communism had to destroy the old order, old ways of thinking. And of course, it only led to a new type of fanaticism. To believe in reason only is, as Berlin rightly said, an extravagance. But, but, that sort of cold, detached view does appeal to you in some way. You haven't got an ounce of mystical or religious sensibility in you at all.

'Inwardness' as a form of resistance to the materialism of capitalism and communism alike. But, on the other hand, the need to get away from 'inwardness'. Keynes: Good states of mind depend on things working. The charms (and dangers) of utilitarianism, of piecemeal social change/reform.

In the end of the day, you're too lazy to be attracted to any ideology. Even religion seems like such an effort. Austerity and worldliness require too much concentration, absorption.

The Dougal once told me about a Quaker 'gathering' she went to. People just sat on their chairs and kept quiet.Reminds you a bit of that line from 'wise blood': The church of Jesus Christ without Jesus Christ. A bit like five easy pieces, if you know what I mean. I wonder if you can bring your own sarnies, or a flask of tea?Don't even have to talk to anyone either. Now, that's my kind of religion! Though you always imagine the chairs to be too austere and uncomfortable. Some sort of Bauhaus or Ikea crap.Far better the plush ones at Border's or, even better, the British Library.

all these things you are

2011-12-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

Singularity. Black hole. The first star. Fish in time's dark waters; Tree, Daphne. Crow in dense foliage, dreaming of star. A mind, wandering. The fierceness of the day like your heart. A stray dog, Pythagoras's friend. Royalty without title. The red blush of innocence. A song of experience.Mirror, object, reflection. Cornelius, all these things you were...

the inner fake

2011-12-05T23:47:00.000-08:00

I don't know what my best side is, honest, but from here, all that 'inwardness' does look awfully fake.

'I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet.'
---Charles Simic, NYRB.

What have you learnt over the years? Nothing. But all those books ? Even less than nothing.Well, at least they helped kill some time. The Ph.D. , for Pete's sake? What a joke that was...and how easily you complied!The oddest thing is how people without an 'education' think that people with an 'education' are clever.

Cleverness was never what it was about. Would you give up your books, then, for a different life? Yes (except for the books with pictures. I like those).

But what else could you do ? (don't worry, this is just me talking to myself). I mean, you're even more useless in 'real' life than you are in the fake, academic one! Touché, old friend (er..remind me not to talk to you again!).

Would it have mattered if you'd been a good academic, though? Probably not. Then I'd be even more brain dead.And your use of the past tense is very sly, if you don't mind me saying. What if you'd actually read a book, you know, like from start to finish? If it ain't good enough for Samuel Johnson, it ain't...(note to former self: a fragment to shore up the ruins).

Can you be serious for a moment?

Yes, okay, for a moment.

Do you have to be East European to realize the absurdity of life? No, only to realize the absurdity of words like 'East European'.

Is there a streak of madness in your family? Well, now you mention it, old dougal...but no, it's what's saved us all these years. How do you work that out? Everyone has to work it out for themselves.

2011-12-04T20:52:00.001-08:00

R.I.P.

2011-12-04T18:27:00.001-08:00

the periodic table

2011-12-02T20:50:00.001-08:00

"Distilling is beautiful. First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike. Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition … And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries."

Was thinking about this and have to admit that the word purity does grate. Who, in this day and age, can accept the idea of perfection or an unblemished soul?

In today's Observer there was a piece on a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. These lines struck you:

'The book paints a picture of a man who was often distant from his children, cruel to a long-suffering first wife, caught in an unpleasant second marriage and spent much of his later years depressed and angry.'

This reminded you of a comment made by the great Shirley Williams about her ex-husband, the philosopher Bernard Williams. Something along the lines: might have been a good philosopher, but was a terrible husband.

Recently, similar sentiments expressed about Christa Wolf and, before that, about Isaiah Berlin (by Edward Said).

The Gauguin problem:
Can goodness be one-sided? One could be a good painter, a good musician, even a good philosopher (in some technical sense, I suppose) but does that count, how does it count, in the assessment of a person as a good person? A good life means what, exactly?

Well, of course, it's unfair to set the bar so impossibly high that no-one ever clears it. Secondly, it's unreasonable to expect, given the way human nature is, the mixture of elements that goes up to make a personality, that someone will be good in lots of different ways. You might even say, screw the morals, as long as he or she is creative in their field, that's what counts. By talking about 'the good' in ethical terms aren't you really just opening the door to fundamentalism and authoritarianism, to people who want to impose their idea of how goods should be ordered?

Thirdly, you don't know the context in which people make choices, only see things from afar. Someone stabs his wife, but he was traumatised by his childhood experiences;someone thinks nothing of the Palestinian people's aspirations but then you've got to understand where they're coming from; and if someone supports a dictatorship or a colonial power you have no idea why they did that (for their mother's sake?). Maybe there wasn't much of a choice anyway, maybe goodness is sometimes only about choosing the lesser of two evils.

I think there's a lot to be said for that. Of course. But just to be a contrarian..I'm sure you could find some 'goodness' in all sorts of horrible people. If Hitler had been a good painter, then what? If a suicide bomber is kind to his own family does that in some way absolve him or her of what they've done?

Most of the times the waters are muddied; but sometimes there has to be an idea of clarity, doesn't there?

on the 1001 th day and night

2011-12-01T22:20:00.001-08:00

When you've run out of things to say to one another, the words turning as cold as the blank wall at 3 a.m. on a winter night. You count the hours to go but you can't read the time, there isn't enough light.Dreamer,dream me now.When you think back because that's the only way you can think...

The old music, that survives in forgotten, sleepy small towns. The song, the singer, reaching a kind of fame-if you want to call it that-for a few days, one summer. A kind of perfection, that knows its own end. Now that lost music is in your eyes.

Your jumpers have holes in them around the shoulders; there are toothpaste marks, rubbed off but the smudge still visible, on the front. Your jeans are torn on the inner side. Yes, the inner side, never your best. Your shoes have never been polished and their colour has faded from neglect and indifference. You comb your hair with your fingers, not bothered to look for your cheap plastic comb.

Why, what's up with you? Anyone would think you've fallen in love...or out of love. This is how you live when you have a cold heart.

goodness

2011-11-30T22:29:00.000-08:00

One of the most mysterious words in the English language. What is it?Certainly, you don't want to reduce it to desires or preferences: your wanting something, x, cannot make it good.The satisfaction of your preferences, whatever they happen to be, is good in an instrumental sense but unless it leads to something good we'd struggle to call it good.A good thief or a good criminal is good in a very limited sense of the term.

In economics, of course, the word is an empty term, not really carrying much substance. In fact, Broome suggests that we do away with the substantive view altogether. Goodness, according to him, is really a relation of 'betterness'. And again, we're to assume that this is not connected to an 'objective' notion of betterness but, rather, a subjective ordering. Economists think, have to think, in terms of relativities: x is good is a meaningless statement; we can only say x is better than y (for me). Choice, then, is about choosing what is the best amongst all alternative feasible options.

Now, what's wrong with that?

If you say you want to buy a good pen you'd hardly be likely to say what constitutes a good pen is the fact that you want it? Or, to say that you like pink pens makes it a good pen ('pushpin is as a good as poetry'). Surely there's something internal to a practice or an x that makes it good, some set of widely shared criteria? Can taste (in the modern sense of the word) or pleasure on its own ever be a reason? (The Pope's distinction between different types of pleasure is relevant here...Hannah: pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality).

x is a good cricketer.

Is that really about x being better than other people?

The question, then, is how is good 'stuck' to cricketer? Is 'good' attributive because it is comparative or does it require, as Bernard Williams holds, a more "intimate" relation?

If you say of someone, 'she's a good person', what you seem to be saying is that she is, fundamentally, an okay person. She is, at heart, a decent sort.

Which is strange, really. It means: a) goodness is nothing special and b) it's not really unique or tied to someone's way of life. Have we lost the ability to talk of a 'good life' without the religious framework around it? Who in this day and age talks about good or evil?It does sound awfully pretentious to our modern ears to speak about what constitutes a 'good life'. It's what I make of it...what 'works' for me, works.

'Be a good chap and shut up, won't you'

elemental

2011-11-28T21:19:00.001-08:00

I don't know why, but reading Miroslav Holub reminds me of Calvino. Maybe Mr. Palomar. There's something utterly simple about the poems, as if everything is redeemed by the last words. Like the last brick in a wall, the final farewell between friends or loved ones...everything suddenly makes sense, is seen clearly. You breathe again, realize you were caught in the spell of someone else's imagination, and now you must return to life, always return...

The yellow balloon, of course. Our reduced lives. ticking away, atomically. the loose strands of our being, looking for a small hand to pull us back. And all that innocence strays through all that experience.

I'll slip out in front of the curtain, taking
great care not to tangle my strings
in the flies,
I'll jingle my bells (merrily),
doff my cap
and before the puppeteer knows what's happening
I'll speak in my own voice,
you know,
my own voice,
out of my own head,
for the first and last time,
because afterwards they'll put me back in the box,
wrapped in tissue paper.
I'll say what I've wanted to say
for a whole eternity of wood...

~~~

What am I doing here. Without the question mark Chats., what indeed. And where is 'here'.

what is a black man. and what colour is he.

Stop the press. The first genuine 'mouse on the bs.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle...one of my students is now the foreign minister.God help this country!

the world that isn't a world

2011-11-25T23:25:00.001-08:00

There's nothing worse than seeing a blog that's been abandoned but is still 'out there' (well, there is actually, but...); it's not like a run down house but more like a home that's suddenly, inexplicably, been vacated. You roam around in the house and see all the familiar things: references to books, music even, the odd tale of heartbreak or anxieties..it's all there bar the person himself/herself. You don't know if this person has moved on to a new city, divorced, developed some terrible illness or even died. All you see is the carcass, the fragments of a life. A world that isn't a world any more.Freaky.

The importance of the living word, for Christ's sake!

P.J. pointed me to this:

To be whole-
now, or again,
to know the divine healing,
that which is known by blood-blood's faith
as by the bloodfall.

Carried by silver and star and reflection.
To be healed, if there's disease
Those plants we know by older names:
Boneset, selfheal, thoroughwort,
tansy for bitterness
Or the healer's milkweed: Aesclepias...

taking stock

2011-11-25T21:19:00.000-08:00

As usual, the lists appear. Books of the year etc., etc.

So far, for me it's been (in no particular order):
Jesus's Son
Falconer.
Tim Liardet's latest poems are also there or thereabouts.
G. Dyer's essays, 'Working the Room',
John Gray's Immortalization commission.

Books I plan to read before the hols. are over:
Wildwood,
Cheever's journals

List of books I've recently bought but haven't read:

Miroslav Holub's collected poems,
Pessoa's Book of disquiet
Wolf Solent,
Veronica
Exit ghost,
Rabbit, Run,
Life and Fate

Books on their way (or photocopies):
Bruni's 'Civil Economy'
P. Foot, 'Goodness'
Love's work,
The Lover's discourse (barthes)
John Burnside (his latest novel and poems)
That they may face the rising sun,
a book of Sappho's poems

Books I have but will never have the time to read:
Rebecca West,
The Machiavelli moment,
The Meaning of Icons.
Romanesque art by Schapiro,
The poetics of space

Books started but not finished (too many to list here)
biographies of Celan, Matisse and Hardy
Vertigo by Blom.
The Romantic Economist.

Books on my desk that I periodically dip into:
Gunter Eich's poems, 'Angina days'
Robin Robertson's poems,
Macintyre's Dependent Rational animals
Griffin's 'Well-being',
Beyond the Invisible Hand

Books I've started but will definitely not continue with:
Lorrie Moore's Gate book
James Salter's pretentious crap.
Jon McGregor.

Analysis:

Can't read biographies; don't like economics; the books I'd love to read, have stored away, are on art or history, you've become very judgemental; am drawn to Catholic writers; need a break to read. Need a break to escape from reading!

2011-11-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Waking up in the middle of the night I don't why, but I thought of these words: the dark recesses of the mind without the light of God. No doubt, this came about from finding a copy of Macintyre's wonderful chapters, Fides et Ratio, and from a weird discussion with a behavioural economist who claims there's a 'molecule' in the brain that inclines us to be moral (his words were "cause us" and that seems really problematical).

If morality is an 'act', an intention to act or a change of mind, a second thought, something that depends on clarity (perhaps not always), some kind of 'movement', then isn't there an 'I' that is directing this movement?
~~~

Some people here think that it's shrewd or clever not to say anything. Whereas, knowing and expressing what you believe in is surely a form of intelligence? Of course, those who think they always know what they believe or those who feel they always have to express it, are often insufferable bores at best, irritating ranters at worst.

~~~

Listening to some lovely playing of Scarlatti's on the radio the other day. By someone called Tharaud. But I like this better.

blame it on...

2011-11-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

For the Dougal:

Growing up in an all-white community you didn't, naturally, realize how un-cool white people were. You had an inkling of course. I mean, the National Front were still about and some people still found it hard to overcome their 'race consciousness'. And you really couldn't take people who harped on about Empire too seriously, could you? Underlying it all was a terrible idea of superiority and arrogance. The way people looked down on black people, for instance. Just showed up how primitive their 'thinking' was, really.

Later on you realized-and how could you not realize given the way you were brought up by your parents-that not all white people were un-cool (no, not as dramatic as a Malcolm X moment, but still). After all, there were some white people who listened to the Jackson 5 and George Benson, B.B. King, Marley, and Otis. Not as a form of resistance to the mainstream but for the simple reason that they could see beauty and find beauty in something they weren't familiar with. That itself is a form of resistance. "Take you shoes off and,you know, relax," as Redding said in one of his songs.

Later still, you could see that people who liked classical or jazz, I mean really liked it, were actually open to other influences, could appreciate other stuff. You remain convinced by Sain Z's words: if you see beauty, you'll see it everywhere...which is why Peter Brown, AnneMarie Schimmel, Edward Said will always stand out for me: there can be no self-knowledge without an understanding of, a concern for, other people and traditions.

~~~

Came across a brilliant interview with Macintyre..on education: "The task of the educator is to stand against the current which in fact will probably overwhelm him."

Or as St. Paul said: "Be ye not conformed to the world"

The full text can be found here

if nobody speaks (of remarkable things)...

2011-11-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

then i won't also. Okay, okay, only two pages in, but already I want to burn this book (where's the Taleban when you need them?). That's got to be the worst start to a book I've come across in a long while. It may get better (can't get much worse); it may even turn out to be a great book, but the beginning is pure and utter crap. In the beginning was...mud.I guess one has to be grateful..it's not often one comes across such purity.Not even Lorrie Moore's gate-stairs or whatever it's called sucks this much.

The city, it sings. Do me a favour.

Stacked...hang on, that sounds a bit familiar...very Larkinesque.Okay, then the whole structure...isn't that a rip-off of Dylan Thomas? If the dougal was reading this she would say two things: you haven't fucking read Thomas and yes, it is a rip off.

Hackled and crackles and clip-clop. Come on dude, I could say that...the clip-clop of the rag-and-bone man's horse, just before he snuffed it. Ah, the particular and the universal.

Listen.

Please, for Christ's sake.

Listen, and there is more to hear.

Yes, unfortunately so.

~~~

Kahneman: peak effect.

~~~

Was driving past the uni the other day when a car in front of me was crawling at 15 miles an hour, blocking my way. Eventually got past him and was about to give him the old stare when I noticed that he was a very, very old man, his hands locked on to the steering wheel, his incredible bony hands fragile and elegant at the same time whilst he seemed to be staring out into eternity. It was two in the afternoon and a brilliant sunny day and yet he had the windscreen wipers on (full speed and all, the crazy punk). I'm not sure if he was dead or not but the whole thing was spooky, let me tell you. It was like some sort of death crawl, a ghost ship in what people mistakenly call 'the real world'.

~~~

slacker

2011-11-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

Everyone who knows me will testify to what an absolute and shameless slacker I am.

O.E. slæc "loose, careless" (in ref. to personal conduct), from P.Gmc. (cf. O.S. *slakasslak, O.N. slakr, O.H.G. slah "slack," M.Du. lac "fault, lack"), from PIE base *(s)leg- "to be slack" (see lax). Sense of "not tight" (in ref. to things) is first recorded c.1300. The verb is attested from 1510s. Slack-key (1975) translates Hawaiian ki ho'alu First record of slack-jawed (1901) is in Kipling. Slack water "time when tide is not flowing" is from 1769.

Not flowing. Yep, that's me. Would love to say it's because I'm such an anarchic, counter-culture, hip revolutionary but the sad truth is that it's really plain old Kashmiri laziness! And no, not the kind of deep and quiet idleness that leads you to self-reflection and profound insights into what life's all about but, rather, the kind of idleness that means that for large parts of the day you're sleeping or thinking about sleeping (if you're not thinking about devouring a divine c.r. that is).

Why do you find it so hard to buy into this idea of productivity, routine, order? I spend most of my time day-dreaming and can achieve in 20 exalted minutes or so what most people can't do over the span of their whole lives!

"Slacker", "loser". Always a sense of strong approbation associated with them in the Protestant world or the world of success and achievement (E.P.: Time-Work discipline, Foucault on idleness as the new cardinal sin and all that). Do your work, and do it well, meticulously.The notion of perfection. But to what end? Khair... 'Yeah, like, whatever'. Blasé, indifferent. Simmel. Can't be bothered to read it again. Where's wiki when you need it?

Of course you don't believe in work! Avoid and evade at every opportunity. The K-manifesto: never do today what you can put off 'till tomorrow. I've gut a grudging respect for people who work hard, people like nabs and R, though they make me slightly sick and dizzy.

When I was unemployed I found it hugely comforting doing something like getting dressed and posting a letter at the local post office. Now I think universities are amongst the best places for useless people. They're like a retirement home for the middle-aged and badly dressed.(I'm not talking about a proper university, of course; those are full of ridiculously eager people working with great gusto and little refinement, trying to convince themselves and other people that they're clever/not useless after all).

A rant takes up so much energy. Better just to smile.

Whye slacke you your busynesse thus?

Work shall set you free. And yet there's wage slavery everywhere! A life consumed by work,a consumer life (if you think of 'work' as meaning 'labour' a la Arendt). Your head is full of so many fragments of useless knowledge, how can you contribute to the knowledge economy? (I'm taking the piss, just in case you're wondering).

Here's the dope:

"You're a skatepunk rebel because you work seventy hours a week beta-testing video games. This, we might say, is meta-bullshit."
---Mark Kingwell.

a song for Roxana (thank you!)

2011-11-11T07:55:00.000-08:00

we're on a dying planet, kid. yep, that's the way it is. if i could tell you the things i love you'd be startled! still, no time for that. now, where's that balloon out of here, toto?

you placed a black spot in my heart, a few brown ones on my arms and shoulders. but since your hand was so fair i've grown quite fond of them...

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

a non-killer whale (for anton)

2011-11-10T05:37:00.000-08:00

moon-whale:

Their music is immense
Each note hundreds of years long
Each complete tune a moon-age

So they sing to each other unending songs
As unmoving they move their immovable masses

Their closed eyes ecstatic.

---Ted Hughes.

The sea, like our lives, dark and light; it will rain and it will not rain. You carried with you keys, for different rooms and different houses. Moving from one room to another silently, re-imagining some sort of habitation, warmth, loss, lies, the stories that will be fabricated, binding generations. I will leave a coin under the cupboard, in the dark and the dust, so that something of mine grows old. What moves the heart, except this unending song that falls, like rain, and not like rain?

Walk out into the sun's dying shadows, cast on blank walls and blank faces with perfect, symmetric equality-the sign of our forgetfulness; shield your eyes from the low-angled flickering light, bright like a knife. These, the last days, were like the first in their mystery, and this house of mine, vast and incomprehensible as the sea, this house like a creaking raft in the sea, an empty shell. The vanity of our lives. To think of belonging, and possessing, of the even flow of time, when in reality only a tent of scattered stars. We drift, we drift, without anchor, points of light, full of heavy songs, songs of longing for the moon.

~~~

Today I was driving with someone. At a turning the car next to us suddenly accelerated and screeched in front of us, blocking our way. A well-built young man came out and said to the person sitting next to me: "Don't look at my family or else I'll rip you to shreds." Which was sad, really, since he disrupted a very nice train of thought...

The winter sun, deep shadows after a brightly-lit afternoon. You look around at all the new houses coming up. This idea of beginning. But also: who knows how things will be in ten, twenty years...A doctor said something to me: you can't plan everything in your life...you have to leave some things to God. That's so true! Tawaakul. The most incredible thing-if you've got it.
You can think: in the whole history of humankind so many things have gone wrong; but that doesn't really get at it (I really must apologise to the long suffering readers of this blog for all these gloomy thoughts!). It's this: in any individual life anything, at any moment, can go wrong and you can't really stop it or foresee it. You can see the appeal of Utopias, of idylls, Arcadias...'the Garden,' the protective home, shelter, refuges from the fierceness of the world.

But these houses, in the fading light, you look on them with a sense of awe. The laughter, the heartaches..it's all there. In the morning you read these lines from an ancient text (Xenophon):

[8:18]How good it is to keep one's stock of utensils in order, and how easy to find a suitable place in a house to put each set in, I have already said.

[8.19] And what a beautiful sight is afforded by boots of all sorts and conditions ranged in rows! How beautiful it is to see cloaks of all sorts and conditions kept separate, or blankets, or brazen vessels, or table furniture! Yes, no serious man will smile when I claim that there is beauty in the order even of pots and pans set out in neat array, however much it may move the laughter of a wit.

[8.20] There is nothing, in short, that does not gain in beauty when set out in order. For each set looks like a troop of utensils, and the space between the sets is beautiful to see, when each set is kept clear of it..."

Order in our lives. How we long for it. But not just any old order: has to be the right type.And yet you know, you can spend your whole life thinking it's just around the corner, or that if you did this, rather than that, then things would somehow slide into order. But it doesn't work like that. Not for most of us, anyway.

a time of gifts

2011-11-09T18:52:00.001-08:00

\
. .

'This nose for example, which no philosopher has hitherto spoken...'

Looking at my nose close up in the mirror. How very ancient it is! Not in the sense of an august and wise Roman senator, but more like a deep-sea fish.

~~~

On Saturday, driving down towards Cavalry, on one of the better roads in town and there, what do I see in the dark? At first I thought, what the hell is that, a deer? Duh! No, a brown donkey running down the middle of the road, in the same direction as the cars! In the land of lazy sods you can imagine how lazy the donkeys are. As an old friend once said (with reference to Italy, actually): any country that has such a high proportion of donkeys can never make any progress. (Now, there's a Ph.D thesis for you!).

~~~

At the Eid family dinner I'm egged on to apply for Principal at my old school. Uncle M__ with his corny jokes...a couple are invited to dinner at 7 but the hosts don't serve dinner immediately; instead, they just ask: "are you comfortable?" One hour passes, then two and all they can say, at regular intervals is: "are you comfortable?". Ten o'clock, ten fifteen. And still no sign of the food, still the same old question: "are you comfortable?". By now the couple are furious so the man says, "Listen, we didn't come-for-the-table, we came for dinner!".

I know, I know.

Next time: must avoid these family gatherings.

~~~

A time of gifts. Anything Bob recommends (music-wise)turns out to be fab. Books: not so sure. But Time of Gifts does look like the real thing. anton, of course, is always right and has superb recommendations. Just got Veronica and, so far so good, despite bilal's reservations.

~~~

Just realised that there are lots of really interesting perspectives on the economy by Catholic writers: Macintyre, Bruni, etc. The idea of the 'civil economy'. Ties in with the idea of the gift and 'other' motivations for exchange. i.e a move away from Adam Smith. What is meant by the 'common good'? Is it something beyond Pareto (or, more broadly, utilitarianism)?

~~~

Roxana came up with this beautiful line (which I can't remember now!)...went something like: '..as if an innocent and wise face could wipe away all the vileness in life.' Indeed. But there are so many ugly faces. Has any philosopher commented on the effect of that? Still, she must be right...the naive view that beauty will somehow triumph over all the stupidity and cruelty. Each child has that potential...

Maybe I'm just growing old, but almost every woman I see nowadays looks beautiful, has something about her.

Sigh, sigh...

'too much, not enough'

2011-11-07T23:57:00.000-08:00

Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, B__ had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus — the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great...Her mouth — were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? — had curved itself to a certain expression...

B___, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

----fftmc.

~~~

Strings:

Talking to A.I., a string theorist. It seems the latest thing is that the world (universe) is the way it is because that's the way it is. Perfect symmetry already contains chaos. It doesn't matter which way you put it. And there's no real explanation (don't ask for one!). It had to be. Or else there wouldn't be individuals like us, right now, at this very moment, asking: why does it have to be?

What little I understand:

If the sun were a degree closer we'd be consumed by its fire, light...disappear in her flames; if it was a centimeter further away we'd be frozen, our souls hardening, forgetting, our thick fingers fumbling in deep pockets, a quick death due to the lack of heat, light. A word, an image; part of you becomes hard, another softens, melts. There are no more questions.

On earth there are always reminders of this precarious balance: too much, not enough. Some things are infinitely far from us, and at the same time infinitely close.

The world is the world. What sense is in this. One might as well say the queen is the queen!

~~~

There's something animal-like in Boldwood's response. That always struck you. The red seal matching the red of his bleary eyes. Red was everywhere. And he's hooked to it. Why this effect on the Puritan soul? His resistance breaking down by the mere mention of a few words, sent only casually. Later, she will wish that the words could be erased, wiped away, but it's too late..they've already lodged deeply in his flesh.

the 10,000

2011-11-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

sennett says somewhere that you need around 10,000 hours of practice to develop a skill. Was thinking-oh, okay, was dreaming-about this just now. With a sport, say. Is there something like 'mechanical intelligence'? (goes back to the indian juggler). say you can develop some level of physical fitness, as probably lots of people can. but what makes a great player great? with the thousands of hours under your belt you would know the speed of a shot, its spin or bounce, the right angle to play a shot, the right position to be in when the time comes; having the whole repertoire of shots in your bag and the perfect judgement to know which one fits which situation; you'd know the character of the person facing you, her strengths and weaknesses; you'd know something of your own soul too...

and all this would gradually become second nature, instinctive, so that someone looking at you from afar would think of how 'effortless' it all was, how 'graceful' you were. sportsmen and women who are graceful...now, there's a category! any suggestions?..that romanian girl, what's her name...nadia c., fed, of course, zaheer abbas (you struggle to think of an english sportsman with grace)...we're talking grace and refinement in the way you play, though, not necessarily in your whole personality (muhammad ali, the prime example). when is the mechanical transformed into lightness, the ability to dance?Zidane. or is there a natural, inborn talent? putting your socialist hat on you'd like to think not, or even if there is that 'luck' shouldn't translate into astronomical rewards.

what is that time when you're so immersed in what you're doing, what you're good at, that you open things up a bit, actually create time, or a bit of space? the greats always seem to have 'all the time in the world'; it's as if being half a second in advance of everyone else means being in a different world.

athletics. that's a tough one. the ratio of effort to talent seems skewed. but not the greats: m. Johnson or carl lewis who were too 'wooden'. maybe someone like calvin smith.

in music, too. do you just have the right ear, sensibilities, dexterity or can you plug away for the 10,000? even then, what counts as mastery?

who are the really clever economists then? (fff, you've got to help me out here). Er...academics aren't that clever though...lots of mechanical 'skills' without much grace or purpose. technical intelligence is one thing, what schuon calls 'integral intelligence', another. (i'm sure nabs could say a thing or two about mathematicians and the relation between maths and creativity).

Anne marie schimmel, peter brown...15, 16 languages. we're not talking here about what's the latin for: 'where's the nearest McDonalds?' anton, roxana, and the dougal too perhaps. is that all practice? and is that different from a mastery of a language? g. steiner; racine knew 500 words; shakespeare 20,000. what skill does a poet have? her eye for detail, her sense of place..how can originality be a skill.

okay, this might sound slightly blasphemous but God's had more than 10,000 hours...Penguins, yes, there's a good creation. lots of fun. but Man? didn't the devil have a point there? in the muslim tradition the devil says, don't send him to earth, he'll only create bloodshed and mayhem.

primo levi has this line about how those with skills manged to, somehow, survive. of course, ubo would make it. his skill? the ability to tell a joke, a story, make people laugh and feel at ease. that's another way of opening up space, of breaking things down.

the ladder of escape

2011-11-05T05:36:00.000-07:00

hard to know if the line (or time) takes me away from you, or to you, he thought to himself. hide and seek; this desire to find you, to lose oneself. for a recluse, a line is a ladder, is an opening to another world; a word, a smile, the kindling of the heart, ties that would bind. bound and free, like a floating bridge that is at once a place where people meet, and simultaneously something that vanishes before your eyes. but the ladder is itself the world...

his eyes too dream-filled to think clearly. condemned to think of escape, to think that beauty or greatness is to be found in books or images or that one's emotions would be found mirrored in a song. and the inward life of a recluse is full of such fantasies and projections because there is, ultimately, only the inward life.

but he thanks the stars, the line of wavering stars that were his; outside, people move about mechanically with a blank look, and an unfaithful heart. it is wrong to say that nothing happens without words or a witness, or that there can be no movement when the body is still...the ladder was a door, a door that led to another room. he looked around this room that was so familiar only to notice that all his possessions had been stolen. but she did leave a mirror at least: 'look at you, think of me!'

it would not be here
if you were here.
what is remembered
is love.
---ken irby

letters from the heart

2011-11-04T04:36:00.000-07:00

Mir-o-slav Holub,

We know everything
from A to Z.

Though sometimes the finger
is on the place between a and b,
empty as the prairie by night.

Between G and H,
deep as the Carpathian Lakes

...

sometimes it is
on the Galactic cool spot
after the letter Z,
on the beginning and the end,
and it shakes slightly
like a strange bird.

Not from hopelessness.

It's simply so.

"Unfortunately, we didn't have the volumes from R to Z-and the want of them shows in me to this day."
--Gunter Eich.

'You only love
when you love in vain'

There were words in my heart that I couldn't speak, that stood silently to attention like wooden soldiers on a shelf; others, unknown, like a language one dimly knew in childhood but that one's now grown out of, these are like the stumps of a tree, concentrated reminders of what might have been. Rings of time that never touch or overlap.Full of such empty places, unchartered territories,the silence between us, between our words, our letters even...all this seemed to be everything.

There are mountains, and mountain ranges, that don't belong anywhere, that spill out over and across the frontiers.This much we know, though knowing wasn't much after all.

~~~

Listening to the beautiful 'Preciso Aprender a Ser So'(Elis). Have no idea what it means, but it does sound wonderful even though the words escape me. The only videos for it are the cheesiest thing imaginable, or the slower MPB version.

the mystery of the child

2011-11-03T23:49:00.001-07:00

Never did get round to reading Marty's book, but there was something intriguing and appealing about the notion-probably because you're so childish yourself. And it's this: what is meant by the simple words, 'take care'? Take care of yourself, we often say. Well, who but a sage does that or can do that? But, perhaps there's something else, at once more ordinary, prosaic, and yet mysterious all the same...and it's this: to look out for someone else (not just look after-which can lead to all sorts of stifling dependencies- but to look out).

To say it's just an obligation, a duty, a norm, makes it sound as if it's something imposed from without; to think of it in terms of rewards is to debase it. Can pleasure ever, on its own, be a reason? (Which is not to deny pleasure or happiness can accompany such acts, ways of being). You want something, but it's the state of the world you want, not the satisfaction of a desire or the inward pleasure that you derive from it coming about that matters. Look out.

What is it though, what is the mystery? God knows!

Vulnerability. Yes, that goes without saying. Today, little r opened a book (Carol Shields) at random and pointed to the first words: 'Goodness is not an abstract concept'. But here's the amazing thing: each child sees the world for the first time and thereby adds something to the history of the loving gaze. That's something. The word "hippo" is still funny even though "hippopotamus" is too frivolous a word in English to be in any way helpful.

Natality, wonder, openness. Each child has a name, names the world anew; names last, names least, often mistakenly. Must we mean what we say? When face to face with wonder the only response is to become childlike oneself. Not a reversal of time, for there is no such thing, but moving through it, as one does in a dream, back to a place that was always there, even though you'd somehow forgotten it...

In der Stunde X werde ich dennoch denken, dass die Erde schon war...

einem Weihnachtsgeschenk von Anita.

fear and trembling (or fear and loathing)

2011-11-01T03:53:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has just run this article.

Mostly, I don't want to comment on any political stuff because: a) I don't understand it and b) it just shows me how sick people really are-and that sickness must reach back to you somehow, in some form, no matter how hard you try to insulate yourself from it or ignore it.

Well, okay, maybe it's not indicative of how backward some people in Israel really are, but I wouldn't be surprised. Probably as backward and retrogressive as people in Palestine or Pakistan or Afghanistan. This isn't really about specific countries or 'religions'...nor is it about the different scales or extent of it...surely it's something more pervasive, some kind of darkness that cuts across those boundaries...a sort of universal fucked-up-ness.

All those years of 'civilisation', of reading, the great works of art and flights of the imagination; all those fine feelings, religious sensibilities, speculative reason, and still, for all that, the same old ridiculous tribalism and stone-age instincts. Jesus!

a dream

2011-10-31T23:21:00.000-07:00

A picture of the beautiful Elis, who sings like a dream.

Faithful old T has helped me..er..locate one of her cds ('Romantica' from the 5-cd box set). Must ask Miguel to get me translations of the lyrics.

~~~

Standing over little r in the morning, my arms folded, as she sleeps blissfully, in her freestyle, carefree way. The early morning light is like a blue haze since we have a blue shade to keep the sun out. Thought to myself, when she's 80 or 90 she'll have no idea that I watched over her like this and I would have been long gone. (How many of our acts go unnoticed, even though they're surely real with or without a witness to them?). Doesn't matter. Some things are right in and of themselves. And perhaps we see the faces of our loved ones in dreams too...

2011-10-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

Old Grenville, what a sad little character he was. Even his name was hardly believable. What did he teach again? Was it literature or language. They were probably the same thing in those days anyway. Strange that I should remember this after all these years...

I look at the grey-blue floor tiles.Something you might expect to find in a cheap hotel.You see a single hair,the presence of a human, curving asymptotically to the crack between the tiles;an upturned cockroach, apparently content in its small death; and a squashed mosquito, flat as a pancake, its body horribly twisted around the centre. All this laid out on the Cartesian grid, or like pieces in a grotesque game of chess.

The rain pelted down. Crashing down on us as we ran from one building, across the rugby field, to the smaller set of buildings where our class had already started. Some of the wiser ones had already decided against it and stayed put. There was always sense in staying still against the flow of the world.But the test had begun and we were already ten minutes late. Somehow we were hoping that the heaviness of the rains would clear us of any obligations, wipe out the next 45 minutes of our lives...

We made a dash for it. Half way, caught in no-man's land, and already the rain had plastered our shirts to our bodies. There's always a stage when things get so bad that you say, fuck it, just carry on...

We make it and stand in our own puddles for a minute, laughing, catching our breath. Inside, the revered silence, what people will later call 'the life of the mind', even though they don't what they're talking about.

There he is, old Gren. Light-brown suede jacket. Sometimes he'd wear an outlandish red jumper. You'd imagine he'd go for a yellow bow-tie as well. Must be gay. But wasn't man enough for it. He has that ridiculous stoop, one side of his shoulder closer to earth than the other, as if he's in this permanent state of apology. Thousands of years of subservience in his blood. Suppressed, like most other people in Wales, there was nothing mythical about him...

Write an essay on...Blow on your hands to get them unfrozen. No words come to your head. How great it would be to write something just now, something not connected to the past, to other writers, to the future; something that could be read and then thrown in the waste paper basket in the corner, the dunce's corner. Duns Scotus and all that. Except, except Grenville, the whole classroom was one such corner. Surprised you couldn't see it...

What do you remember now? Not the words but the rain, the running across a muddy field. You seemed to have spent an inordinate part of your life running. Running back home before it got too dark, or running past the cripple's house...at the corner of the street there lived a man, a very old man, who would occasionally come out in his wheelchair, his trouser legs all floppy and folded neatly back to his thighs; and he wore that army jacket, highly decorated, but he scared the life out of you. Run, and hope to God you never see him.

Down from his house was the old train bridge; covered in so much black soot and grime that it looked like a block of crap and was almost invisible. There were probably loads of such useless old things, places of dark refuge, strewn around the country-particularly up north, since everything up there was dilapidated and shit. And the scale of the arch was not something human beings could relate to either.

back to the sun

2011-10-28T02:53:00.000-07:00

Only this? Those shivers at first-light, this succession
of moments, thread after thin thread-hours, years
drawn into the curve of life...

I don't want to hear from you,
don't want to see your eyes.
There's more to life than this.

---Robin Robertson.

Back to that first moment, your smile trembling through the rain. First light. Just warm enough for us to touch one another, before you moved off on a tangent. Back to that open door, where we once lived off one another. Your thin and gentle face, that quizzical look, like that of a dog that's lost her master. The sun made us equals.

And now? When you add up the years, you will notice I have nothing-all the smiles were from you, all the tears from me. My face has darkened for no reason that I can gather and my eyes seem unnaturally sad.The hand of the executioner is so fair!You promised to send word, said it would be a bond between us,like a fetter in a world that contains the space of mirrors.I wait here darkly for the sun to return, so that our paths might cross once again.

Misc.

2011-10-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

This is from one of the best albums of the year (pity about the lyrics at the end).Like Buffalo 66, the soundtrack is better than the film. What other great film soundtracks are out there?Suggestions? (And no dougal, you can't suggest any of your beloved musicals or Barbara-bloody-Streisand).Donnie Darko's got to be on any list. Then there's Requiem for a Dying Planet, with the beautiful musical synthesis of Reijseger and Mola Sylla in what is an otherwise ordinary Werner Herzog film. What is it about the combination of music and film that makes it even more intriguing than, say, image and word? Think: your favourite art books, from Civilisation, The Shock of the New,and Farewell to An Idea,to Martin Lings on Calligraphy and Ouspensky and Lossky on Icons...they all miss out on some intangible but fundamental ingredient, something vital, living, experienced in time, something that is of time.

Other great combos: cinnamon rolls and fresh black coffee; orange flavoured dark chocolate; fish and chips;peas and tomato ketchup, fried egg and chips (seriously, if you haven't tried that what on earth have you been doing with your life?!)Monica Bellucci and film...

Fusion: how I hate that word.Fusion food, fusion music.Lot of it kicked off, I guess, when you heard some Nusrat Fateh-not his original stuff though. But then again, there probably is no such thing as 'pure' music, a music that doesn't borrow, steal, mingle with various cultures and sub-cultures, or pick up something from the past (how can you fail to hear, despite all its contemporary sadness,echoes of the Beatles on Grizzly Bear's album?). And of course, part of the fundamentalist opposition to culture is precisely that it is so fluid and open to different influences and impulses. Khair, there's surely a difference between coming together and being thrown together?

A good example of where fusion-if that's the right word-works is here. Bob on 'the overgrown path' has a lot more interesting things to say on fusion.

~~~

Kaboom was imply awful, the most cliched film you've seen in a while.Wise Blood: not as good as you thought first time round. Which leaves John Harvey's choices of Fat City, Cutter's Way, and The Last Picture Show.

a year of magical thinking

2011-10-25T21:54:00.000-07:00

I love my love with an X
and the black cat bone
she buries in a kiss is sweeter now
than honey from the book of Genesis.

Rain in the yards; a cuckoo in the
meadows; I look in my bed tonight (and find
my brothers and sisters gone
and the curdled glaze
of everafter on my father's skin
is cold as ice

I love my love with an X
and here she comes now, now,
stealing across the fields and creeping around
to feed
my mouth
a sweet spot in the dark

she thinks is safe
until I drink her in.

---John Burnside.

I sent this to some friends and one replied with the wonderful poem by Louis Macneice (Autumn Journal):

Surbiton, and a woman gets in, painted

With dyed hair but a ladder in her stocking and eyes

Patient beneath the calculated lashes,

Inured for ever to surprise;

And the train’s rhythm becomes the ad nauseam

repetition

Of every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal,

The’he faded airs of sexual attraction

Wandering like dead leaves along a warehouse wall:

‘I loved my love with a platform ticket,

A jazz song,

A handbag, a pair of stockings of Paris Sand–

I loved her long.

I loved her between the lines and against the clock,

Not until death

But till life did us part I loved her with paper money

And with whisky on the breath.

I loved her with peacock’s eyes and the wares of

Carthage,

With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff

With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado

And lots of other stuff.

I loved my love with the wings of angels

Dipped in henna, unearthly red,

With my office hours, with flowers and sirens,

With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.’

And so to London and down the ever-moving

Stairs...

~~~

Finally finished JCO's memoir. Parts of it made you cringe..."the widow this" and "the widow that". But on the whole, the writerly quality of it means there's sufficient space between the raw emotions of grief and the text. (Gosh, that does sound overly complicated! Makes me sound like a European intellectual!).And, the other way, it isn't an abstract discussion of 'Grief', 'Loss'. You know, you always read on the blurbs: 'A profound meditation on...' and think to yourself, that must mean it's good. You fear it will turn out to be mush, relentless wallowing in self-pity.

A strange book for me to read, I know. (What, do we only read what's the appropriate genre now?). And there's probably a whole industry nurtured, perverse though it may sound, on grief, loss, despair, 'survival' (the Americans are big on that), a phenomenon related, perhaps, to the exponential increase in personal confessions, the mania for revealing all and shocking people with the sordid details of one's not-so-interesting life. Lay your cards on the table, brokenness as the only way to the truth of it. That always surprises you because you think silence and withdrawal could be the only response. But then there's this weird and incredible line in Arendt (from somewhere): 'Any grief can be borne if it can be put in a story'.

There's also something terribly voyeuristic in reading about other people's despair, as if to say, I'm fine, I'm untouched by it all. Sit in your room, sip your coffee: other people are hell and other people's lives are hell.'If this is Man' and all that.

But no, I think JCO avoids all that...

A fabulous tale-well worth reading 'till the very end.

2011-10-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

Art thou not aware that they roam confusedly through all the valleys [of words and thoughts]
Q:26:243

A friend of a friend told me of this book; in the book was a footnote that mentioned the review of another book and in this other book there was a passing reference to ----'s book and it is from there that I re-tell this story....

Your goal is the Fire: it is your [only] refuge*
Q:57:15

[*="friend"]

al-Ma'arri's 'Epistle of Forgiveness' (which, incidentally, mirrors Dante but predates it by about three centuries) tells the story of one of the great poets, sitting at the very outer rim of Heaven, the outer regions where not many people venture, gazing intensely towards that fiery place far down below. From this vantage point he can survey the whole of Hell and his vision is taken up by its spectacle. But more than that. To his surprise he realises that he can converse with its inhabitants and so, why not avail such an opportunity!

The great Syrian poet decides to strike up a conversation with the famed Imru' al-Qays, the very same poet whose verses were hung on the Ka'ba. He inquires about his work and in particular of his justly praised epic, about the lack of an "and" in some versions, the inclusion of it others. What is one to make of this?

The response is swift and brief:

May God blot out the scholars of Baghdad!..If one reads the text in such a way what is left of the distinction between poetry and prose?

The Syrian is impressed. Despite the dense walls of smoke, the pungent smell of burning, he receives clear answers to the various textual, grammatical, lexical, and metrical questions he puts to the classical authors. Each statement is concise and uttered with the utmost serenity.

[Lest it be objected that time should not be wasted on such frivolous matters let me remind you, dear reader, that there time is not of the essence]

Having understood much Ibn al-Qarih-for that is the name of the illustrious poet whose journeys so delight us-travels around various places in Heaven. Here he comes across a city that is not bathed in light but pocked with caves and eerie trees. And this is where those creatures who lived before Adam are to be found. He converses with one such creature, a spirit who has taken on the form of a very old man. The old man reminds al-Qariah that no one really knows anything in comparison to the poetry of the spirits.

[Man!] What does he know of poetry. You are completely bedazzled by one ode and even commit it to memory when I can dictate thousands upon thousands of words in this same meter, more than can be written on all the leaves of the world, each more beautiful than yours. This is mere child's play for us! In fact, just one poem would rival all of yours. These words are the work of one of our poets who died an unbeliever and is now burning in the circles of Hell.

He's enticed by the prospect of having access to this vast treasure trove of poems but, then again, why transcribe so many words? Are these to be compared to the treasures of Heaven? Anyway, this is a dilemma only at the theoretical level for the spirit is reticent. Even more, the great poets and mythical literary figures he questions don't seem to remember any of their own poems-even though he can quote vast tracts of their beautiful verses to them.

By this time our Syrian friend is a little bemused. It appears that the inhabitants of Heaven are suffering from sort of literary and linguistic amnesia.

One poet explains to al-Qarih: my eternal beatitude has allowed me to forget all these poems and I no longer remember a single line of them.

Ibn al-Qarih pleads with him and offers to recite them in the most melodious voice in an attempt to jog the great poet's memory. The old man, as if remembering at least something of his former fame-if not his poetry- concedes:

Recite them for me, and may God's mercy be bestowed on you plentifully.

Further on, and to his great delight, he comes across al-Khalil ibn Ahmad, the first and greatest grammarian of classical Arabic. He looks up and sees Khalil riding a beatific chariot and 'as he ponders the verses in his memory it occurs to him that one could truly dance to the music of their elaborate rhythm.

At that instant, God the Almighty, in the kindness of His wisdom, allowed a walnut tree to emerge from the ground. The tree immediately let its nuts ripen, and threw so many of them to the ground that God alone would be capable of counting them. The walnuts broke open, and from out of each nut there stepped four maidens, who inspired wonder in all those near and far alike, who saw them. They danced to the verses of al-Khalil...

And yet the strangest of things happens here as well: al-Khalil, despite all the promptings, cannot recall that these are indeed his verses. After crossing the bridge, he tells al-Qarih, he has no recollection of such things. Al-Qarih is greatly saddened by this. How is it possible that he who once possessed the greatest memory of all Arabs, he who had dedicated his life to the very rules of time, could produce such a blank look? He begins to grow more and more despondent with every great figure he meetst. Was this, then, the future of mankind, of civilisation?

At last, Al-Qarih comes across Adam and recites to him two of his verses or ones that are commonly attributed to him. But Adam can only reply:

What is said in these lines is true and whoever composed them was surely a wise man. But as for myself, this is the first time I have heard these words.

Al-Qarih walks respectfully towards him and suggests that perhaps Primal Man has a faulty memory for a scholar has argued that you are in fact named 'Man' on account of your forgetfulness.

Adam reproaches him. "But how could such a thing be possible!" And then, with impeccable logic he explains to al-Qarih that he spoke Arabic only when he was in heaven; on earth he spoke Aramaic. Furthermore, the Arabic verse says: 'From the earth were we created, and to the earth we must return'. Only someone who was on earth could have thought up of such words, adding: the tongue of the poem is an index of time...it was most likely composed by some fellow in his spare time.

Our wily protagonist isn't completely satisfied by this explanation. Is it not possible that it was translated into Arabic? At which point Adam swears by God that the verse is not his and after that what else can be said: there can be no further dispute!

Al-Qarih wanders from place to place, ever more forlorn, ever more disappointed. The poets of Paradise, like Primal Man, forget and are not even aware of their forgetfulness. They are, it seems, happily reconciled to their forgetful nature. (The sinners, on the other hand, can do nothing but remember). Only the poet, only al-Qarih is allowed to remember! Is memory, then, the mark of the redemption we cannot achieve? Is al-Qarih mysteriously and mistakenly admitted to Paradise although he doesn't belong there, as if someone has forgotten to check his name against a list? The unsaved is, perhaps, a witness to a beatitude that the other poets cannot recall or have no need of recalling.

And only he, the fragile figure of a resolutely unredeemed humanity, could therefore glimpse a relation to language that would do justice to the empty essence of the speaking being who forgets; a relation in which recollection and oblivion remain as indistinguishable as the continuity and discontinuity of the time to which they are bound, and in which the memory of speech is at last liberated from everything that has been stored in it.

Stone Diaries

2011-10-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

'The site and generator of universal values'

I've mixed up the notes, so here's a mixture of Dyer on Gedney and Berger on Degas.

'People living out their lives in obscurity' (darkness, anonymity).

'Those who lack things are defined most conspicuously by what they own'

'Human truth in what seemed like an artificial situation..the truth of what is found, the commonplace, is often startling, surprising.'

'He loved the contrasted movements, concentration and relaxation, and the way in which each woman is absorbed in what she is doing'

'A momentary gesture's capacity to contain the timelessness of myth.'

'He saw his life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read.'

Auden: 'The man or woman in any walk of life who manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own.'

~~~

What happens when a word becomes obsolete, archaic? The slow slippage to obscurity, the pile of half-remembered things and phrases heaped up like unwanted clothes. And whole languages, too, crack and split, break-up and fall by the wayside, inhabiting or taking shelter in a few lone survivors. And these 'last people' then become like the ancients, unique in their ability to name the world with a sense of awe and wonder.

Gestures, too, I guess. What seemed to inhere in the blood, all that was lovingly or unconsciously passed down from one generation to the other, that was a product of a particular place and time, a particular kind of work and language, is that too destined to now fade from memory and be repeated artificially, if at all? Sraffa!

wise blood

2011-10-22T05:10:00.000-07:00

Landlady: "What do you do?"

I'm a preacher.

Landlady: "Which Church?"

The Church of Jesus Christ without Jesus.

Landlady [without batting an eyelid]: "Protestant?"

Yes.

Landlady: "Good, don't like no church with n'ggahs and foreigners."

You've got to laugh at the wackiness of religious "folks"-whether they're from American or closer to home. But what you liked about this film is not so much the craziness and funniness of the crackpots-though that is one of its appealing features- as the wide open spaces of the roads, the emptiness of the streets, the fading yellow light in the museum and the ordinary speech of unpretentious people; even the staircases and run-down rooms reminded you of a poem by Lowell. What was it again?

Not sure if I'll read the book, though. Let's see.

~~~

There was this line from Christopher Hill's engaging 'The World Turned Upside Down' which really was quite suggestive: the 'second turning inwards' (Hannah)...the 'religion of the heart'..was this connected to, in some way, the 'inwardness' of philosophical thought? Not: 'how can I live' but, rather, 'how can I know'?

Of course, the horrors of organized religion. But maybe there's something else: the lack of rituals, places of refuge, symbols, 'bridges' (Simone), the slow, patient understanding that relies on other people's endeavours, insights, scholarship; the tempering of one's views by contact with traditions and communal understandings, with worldly, practical matters...does the absence of all that lead to another kind of fanaticism? Not the world turned upside down but, instead, inside-out?

Each man is a prophet, a saint, is in direct contact with revelation, the end of times; he stands alone, aloof, heartbroken, against the world of sin. The existentialist hero. What is true, what is "real", is the spark within. And yet one has to know despair, suffering,one has to feel that God is infinitely removed from the affairs of men. The soul veers erratically from being nothing to being everything. The world itself is full of wide open spaces, empty streets...

sketches

2011-10-21T05:55:00.000-07:00

(With thanks to bob...another one of his excellent recommendations).

Sketches...as if everything could be said in a condensed form, a light brush-stroke. No, not everything, but a brief view of some segment of reality, filtered through one's own memories, the way in which a few lines of a caricature can also instantly capture some vital characteristic of a person.

It's hard to talk of death; it's hard not to talk of death. There are signs of it everywhere. Friends and colleagues with stomach ulcers, cancer, heart attacks or, as one relative recently put it, 'shocks', since he was not willing to face the reality of what had hit him-and who can blame him? The more general high blood pressure, anxiety attacks, high cholesterol of others. There it is, working its way into us, cell by grey cell. You can't stop it. The slow march, the drummer and the fool indistinguishable. The awful thought that you might not be able to take care of loved ones (not that you've done a very good job so far!).

You sit on a green wooden bench with a friend at midnight, sipping hot milky tea-desi style-and all around you see the students, young, thoughtless, swarming like bees around one another, immersed in their own world where looks are everything and frivolous chatter is a sign of being at ease with oneself. Thin, bronzed arms, lustrous black hair and baggy jeans. The thin, excited faces that they themselves will barely remember ten years from now. The casualness of it all is something you notice (notice, not judge) from the corner of your eye. None of all that matters. One shuffles up to you: "Can I steal a light?"

Later, you return home and try and put all such thoughts to bed. Wise Blood. But it can't hold your attention.

…[t]hat not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.’

—-Joan Didion

Jesus's son

2011-10-21T03:42:00.000-07:00

Interesting discussion with __ today. Think he was steering it to how he broke up with his thirty-ish radical feminist, radical atheist (girl)friend. What space is there left for re-vision, for doubt when someone is a radical? I mean, the problem always has to be with the world, and not with yourself. The radical's sense of certainty, his remarkable self-assurance. Plus, they just seem to have far too much energy!

~~~
Bumped into a colleague the other day. Grown quite fond of him, actually, despite his horrid political/religious views. But whenever we meet we have the exact same discussion and the words 'industrial-military complex' always crop up. Dude, there isn't much left of an industry here! But I continue with the act. Can't be bothered to argue with anyone any more and I doubt I could say anything useful anyway, even if I wanted to. Academics gave up talking like ordinary human beings a long time ago.

~~~

Was just thinking: how good Mark Vernon's piece on friendship is and how odd it is that he comes across as so unfriendly in his comments on his blog. Part of that, I suspect, is that anyone writing about religion/evolution..etc., etc. is entering a highly charged discussion with crazies on both sides. But still, there's something a bit suspect, methinks, about someone who calls himself an 'English writer'. Wtf!

~~~

Found some old copies of the NYRB (going back to the mid-'80's). Sure the dougal has stolen them or something. And flicking through the 'Christmas Review' whilst I sip my piping hot tea, Rachmaninoff's beautiful Vespers on in the background -sorry Bob, if you're reading this I guess you'd be horrified by the idea that there can be something like 'background' music-you'd excuse me for thinking I was, for one exalted moment, back home.

~~~

___ had recommended Jesus's Son. Turned out to be really good. I liked it anyway.

We can't imagine the shape of our fate, that's for sure.

It doesn't matter what his problem is until he's fully understood it himself.

I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place.

He was in his fifties. He'd wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years.

Through the neighbourhoods and past the platform, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes,a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.

But nothing could be healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself, tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar.

He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

It's got lots of lines like that. You think it's going to be all desolation and broken-ness but it isn't, strangely, and it's lit up by these warm moments of kindness and humanity.

~~~

Films ..er..downloaded and still to watch:

Fat City
The Last Picture Show,
Cutler's Way
(all recommended by John Harvey on his fascinating page, mellotone)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes,
Kaboom,
Wise Blood,
Badlands,
The Shock of the New,
The new Woody Allen film (though I really hate him)

Roxana recommended a film about someone walking into a painting but couldn't find it (sorry!). Infinite Journey, if anyone's interested.

there will be no more time

2011-10-19T22:05:00.000-07:00

I don't know why this seems the perfect version. To an untrained ear the Tashi and others sound just a touch too shrill. Or maybe there's something in the pacing that's different or maybe it's the video. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it reminds me of that haunting line from J. Lear's beautiful book, 'Radical Hope,' where Plenty Coups says: And then nothing happened.

~~~
Architecture and happiness, from Mark Vernon's interesting blog (his piece on friendship is excellent)...

A home, a house, a shell, a cave: this primal need for rest, for protection against the wildness beyond; our first sense of inwardness; the freedom of not appearing, of not being seen or known except by loved ones. The conservatism of the family...is it any different from the conservatism of the house? But each house also has its cellars and strange corners, its creaking stairs, its rooms with high windows, its view of all that extends beyond the house: trees, stars... The house is our first world, the ark, a bunker (Beckett's 'Endgame', when there's no more time), but also a reminder that nakedness is a terrible affliction. The house is inextricably linked with our memories and a sense of timelessness. The house: the place to which we return again and again, hoping to find a part of ourselves long forgotten.

Only the saints can truly be 'homeless'.

[Anyone who talks about tradition nowadays is asking for it. But if you're a old and grumpy-and Scruton comes across as that, a sort of thinking man's Prince Charles-then you probably deserve it. Anyone who uses the word 'monstrosity' is a fake]. Still, his idea of 'settlement' is surely on the mark: happiness is not a fleeting sensation but something that endures.

"A house, wherever it may be, is an enduring thing, and it bears perpetual witness to the slow pace of civilisations, of cultures bent on preserving, maintaining, and repeating...

It was as if the houses were a response to the external world and like the cloister, the fortified castle, the walled town, the walled garden acted as a protection against the difficulties of material life."
---from Braudel.

news from a distant star -or how b had an uncomfortable brush with reality.

2011-10-18T22:15:00.000-07:00

Ah, it seems to me more and more that people are the root of everything, and although it remains for ever a melancholy feeling not to find oneself in real life, in the sense that it would be better to work in flesh itself than colour or plaster, in the sense that it would be better to make children than to make paintings or to do business, at the same time you feel you’re living when you consider that you have friends among those who themselves aren’t in real life either.
---van Gogh. (via anton)

'Dr. Selby likens the the position of a human on earth to that of a man on a tight-wire who must continue along the wire or perish, being, however, free in all other respects. Movement in this restricted orbit results in permanent hallucination known conventionally as 'life' with all its innumerable concomitant limitations, afflictions and anomalies.'

This lovely quote came to me via C. That makes it sound as if she's some agent, so let me quickly change that to dear C. Must say that I feel like a prisoner who is sent cakes or birthday cards-except in my case it's books, cans of sardines and dark chocolates from the old country. Prisoner? Okay, okay, I'll cut out the melodrama...

~~~

Having coffee at 1 a.m., miles away from your house, when you have an 8 o'clock lecture the next day is not a good idea, let me tell you. Not that the students, poor sods, noticed the difference. Just a few more "let's think about thats" and slightly more prolonged "err's".

"So, what's happening at the uni?" they ask.

"Well, now that you ask, there's this case..." and then I stopped in my tracks because I realised how utterly petty and insignificant it all was even though it seemed like a big thing back within the walls of the green zone. We really are just big (read: fat) fish in a very small pond. In any case, by the end of the first sentence or two they'd lost interest and had started talking amongst each other about more serious matters. A sexual scandal might have done the trick, but plain old discussions of academic fairness and procedures bores the socks off anyone.

So, just sit back, sip your coffee, and listen to how the real world works (it ain't pleasant, take my word for it). Three senior bureaucrats and a documentary maker. The conclusion is that this country is fucked (Well, I could have told them that!). But no, there's a sense of the inevitable takeover by the crazies. Not that you care, really. But still, it was interesting to see people getting so worked up about the details of the shenanigans of the politicians...

Azam Tariq, one of the more venomous beards, used to tell his followers: Clinton wakes up at night, at 3 a.m in the morning, every morning, anxiety written all over his face, his brow sweating profusely, his hands tense, his gaze confused, all over the place. He shakes old Hillary next to him. Wake up, wake up for Christ's sake! "What is it now, Bill?"she asks. And then Clinton says, no, he's stammering now, the words trembling in his quivering mouth, "That Azam Taiq is going to kill me, I just know it.".

So, we sat under a tree at 1 a.m and I listened to how life here on earth carries on. Rushed back home. Little r was oblivious to it all, fast asleep. She'd scribbled all over my notes on 'Nutrition and the Labour Market'. I smiled, for strange as it may seem, to see a loved one dream is more real, has always been more real, than anything else in the world.

A lover's discourse/love's work

2011-10-18T01:59:00.000-07:00

This song came via jacky b ("A Dark Glass"). Ta!

I find a kind of hope here, in this
homelessness, in this place
where no-one knows me-
where I'll be gone, like some
over-wintering bird,
before they even notice.

Healed by distance
and landscape opening
under broken sun, I like this
mirror-less, flawless world
with no people in it.
[You, and you, and you]

Unmissed, I can see myself again.
[and] the grey is beginning to green.

---R. Robertson.

'Love's Work' by G. Rose is hard going, something of a strain to be honest, as if the 'ideas' or the mind was getting in the way. Why do you expect something beautiful or meaningful? As if that could transform death.

What's real? Anna Calvi and PJ, of course. Not sure about Lana del Rey yet. A voice always reminds you of someone else's voice. Obtuse, I know. Hard to know what the right angle is though. But today I caught a glimpse of a young woman's tawny hair and blue denim shirt and could have sworn it was...

Only someone who sees himself or herself truly can see 'the other', 'the object' as not really the 'other', not a 'repertoire of images' or an 'object'. Then, and perhaps only then, can you see a unique face and original gestures, traces of which are caught in other people's features and character, repeated from time out of mind, from time to time.

remains of the day

2011-10-17T02:35:00.001-07:00

(photo: courtesy of roxana)

In Queen’s Street
on Friday night
– lights only just blossoming
but already with the pomegranates
of shows for adults only –
among the herds of cars
a yellow
inflatable balloon
was bouncing about
with what remained of its helium soul,
still two lives left,

amidst the song of armour
bouncing with yellow
balloon fright
in front of wheels
and behind wheels,

incapable of salvation and
incapable of destruction,
one life left,
half a life left,
just a molecular trace of helium,

and with its last ounce of strength
searching with its string
for a small child’s hands
on Sunday morning.

---Miroslav Holub.

And what remains of our world? A yellow balloon, a clown in the moon, something of the soul's gifts, Sunday mornings-at least we were young then-with their halted clocks and framed time. Remembrance days, and feathered words. The mirror, because we were, mistakenly, on the left then. A star, a star so poorly drawn on the wall; a piano, unplayed. A few cold notes from Once in Royal David's City.

The table's set; everyone's late. We shuffle about like ghosts. A square of light bends to get on the lip of a plate. The rag and bone man safely in his horse-drawn cart, on his last rounds, disappearing down the street. Never to be seen again. Exiles are a dying breed.The rag-and-bone shop (of the heart) closed down. The small sighs before eleven. The soul's tinsel shimmering, uselessly.

Argentina's sunk. Wales, too. Hold up your hands, and let me fall, why don't you?

Last words

2011-08-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

Really must do it this time. And move onwards (if not upwards). Just to say: a big thanks and hugs to roxana, anton, C, nikki, sadia, and beth. Boy. Wolf. Cry. I know. Will probably resurface again. There, said it, to put the kiss of death on it. How can there be an end to something that hasn't begun? But khair, today seems the perfect day, for no other reason than it is the perfect day...

~~~

The quality of the light is the quality of our understanding.

I was walking past the familiar places, Denmark Street, Foyles, Centre Point, the Korean shops, the same old narrow circle. The smell of fresh coffee enticing, as always. Could have killed for one-if coffee wasn't prohibited. And the light, just then, seemed to have come full circle, reminding me of when I first came to London nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The pattern, scratched in time, ahead of time. And then things happen, are made manifest, in the dustbowl of the heart. No matter how many times we return we remain but small segments of an arc of a greater, unknown circle. The circumference of our understanding like old stones at the city's limits.

You don't stop to see your reflection but think of poor glass, like you the glass does not know what it sees. In other places, at other times, dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects. As the academics say: yes and no. And yes & no were in your eyes.

And what colour is blue? Is there a word for it? Was it something borrowed? Blue is something you searched for, and blue is what you found. You should have chosen red. Red was everywhere, but never yours. A memory, perhaps, like the rust of your heart. Why does the soul sigh, within? A question to myself. Who can say, except there's a loyalty to your inheritance, a fidelity to your roots. Last words strikingly similar to your first.

You mistook The Landing Light for The Wrecking Light. Unsurprisingly.

an interlude:

'you could not be reached

...but had to leave, instead

to the sound of your voice spinning in the dark,

at the slightest touch, at the slightest touch.'

In-between can mean being nowhere or it can mean being connected to everything. The places in-between, where you were, where I am. There was a time when time was not the space between us, between the thing and the thing said, a time when time didn't spiral, curve, fall; when time was not time. The silence enacted, phrase by phrase.

'...and the drama of it all flourished there

in the gently shaken arcs of shadow-work

the roof's filigree cast over them and seemed to draw

a graph. Your mouth was striped and dazzling as you talked

and saw and heard nothing but your hands and voice

your hands and your voice, beneath all that space.'

~~~

Body and world were never the place
for you to live in. There was climbing, though,

climbing not out of the body but out of world –
in the fork of the tree, so high up it seemed

you’d already got to the sky and I was gravity
in your shoes. I kept you upright by somehow

contriving to be the counterweight far below
as long as you swayed up there. And as your arm went up

mine sort of pistoned down. As your arm reached down
mine was slowly raised, Dodya, and you started back

towards earth with caution, a kind of guardianship
exercised by every nerve tensed for falling

in your body, and placed the sky-egg carefully
between your teeth; you placed it there so tenderly

and eased yourself down backwards as if you were
responsible for bringing down to safety

the rarest and most susceptible outer shell
of life’s longing for itself — so pristine and so sky-blue,

perfect, but for the faintest freckles of blood:
don’t fall, I shouted up to you, don’t fall, don’t fall . . .

Now you fall through time, if not through time and space;
and the darkened freckles survive, are everywhere.

They are on your hands, on mine. They are on your shoes.
They were on our mother’s wedding dress before you were born.

(poems by Tim Liardet)

'Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.'

the dead serial moments of ordinary life

2011-08-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

Prosaic. Ordinary. What is it to be modern except to be at ease with a simple, ordinary life? And yet, isn't that also a very ancient way of thinking?

K. Clark:

16th c. : work and humility. Northern Man: faith, sincerity, personal piety.

17th c. Holland: Divine authority replaced by experience and observation. 'Does it work,' not: 'Is it God's will?'

In painting: the solid, commonplace, worldly figures of bourgeois democracy. Realism and practicality, responsibility and the sheer absence of showiness. The first stirrings of a world of leisure, movement, independence.

The ordinary can also descend into the trivial and life in the flatlands can produce a wild intoxication with the exotic, risk; excess as a way of breaking out of boredom, all sorts of bourgeois escapes (Levinas) and mindless diversions. The unbearable lightness of being.

How to re-interpret religious truths, sacred history in the light of ordinary experience (Rembrandt?) Through an emotional truth, a story?

Vermeer: truth without convention, custom. Nature as it is. The natural light of the mind. Rooms full of light, shining enclosed space.

To see things clearly, precisely, mathematically. The linear prose of the world, of time. An awareness of time's ending.This does not cease to be any less mystical than the 'enchanted' world it comes to replace. The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.

ethics and economics

2011-08-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

Haven't actually read this but picked it up from another blog. Liked it since it chimed with some of my views on ethics and economics (quotes from Macintyre)

"What the economy needs is that people become responsible to its needs rather than their own, and so it presents as over-ridingly desirable those goals of consumption and ambition, the pursuit of which will serve the economy's purposes. The desires to achieve these goals, when they become central to our lives, prevent us from becoming self-critical about our desires, and so prevent the asking of Aristotelian questions about character and desire."

Thirdly, modern capitalist economies lead to "conditions of gross inequality: inequality of money, inequality of power, inequality of regard, and it is an undeniable fact that even the most successful examples of growth in the present globalised economy generate further inequalities. Aristotle pointed out long ago that a rational polity cannot tolerate too great inequalities, because where there are such, citizens cannot deliberate together rationally. They are too divided by sectional interests so that they lose sight of the common good."

The character of desire. There are objections to this on the grounds that it could lead to paternalism, i.e goes against the liberal ethos. But why should desire-satisfaction be equated with the good (individual or social) and why should it be any old desires, why can't the individual himself or herself reflect-as we often do- on the value of different things we want? Is there, then, no role for education or refinement? What such an approach conveniently ignores is how are preferences are often influenced or manufactured. At the root of it, can we say that we have or know what is some kind of first-order, primal desire, unfiltered, unmediated by others's expectations, desires, strategies?

2011-08-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

'A day of thaw...the sun, the blue of the sky, the broken ice, the mud, and the moving water turning the water into a dazzling mirror.'

--- Proust (cited in The Hare with Amber Eyes)

Jim Ede on HGB (via Peter Fuller)..."a continuing way of life..in which stray objects , stones, glass, pictures, sculpture in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognize if we are not to be swamped by all that is rapidly opening up before us."

People on a bridge, 'it is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows'.

There's something like near perfection in walking on a bridge on a Sunday morning. A time when people stroll, are not concerned about going anywhere, and less like themselves, and therefore more like themselves.

'There is light in these rooms, trembling reflections and glints of silver and porcelain and polished fruitwood, and shadows from the linden trees.'

'The world had undergone an Umsturz, an overturning, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished.'

This really goes against a large part of my-well, not thinking, precisely; rather, my temperament, since apart from my books and cd's I don't think I really value any objects (or is it: have any objects of value?). Old Puritan roots, I guess. Something suspect about thinginess and the awkward relation between inner-worldliness and worldliness?Need or desire? No, that's not quite it either. Can there be a 'rational ordering' of our preferences, desires?

And yet, I'm strangely drawn to these sentiments. The world is either too much with us or not with us enough (Levertov). Never could decide! There's a kind of fanatical self-absorption in both hedonism and asceticism. What would it mean to have a 'proper' love of the world?

'...all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures-but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities.'

...

----------------------

2011-08-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.

--Primo Levi.

~~~

The Hare with Amber Eyes is surprisingly absorbing. I don't know what it is about it, though, that makes it so. I think it's De Waal's ability to stay tight to the main spring of his emotions; it could have meandered off anywhere and ended up being a book about everything and nothing. Instead there is, for me, this recurrent idea that things and our proper relation to them are vitally important; that the deep continuities in our individual lives and the continuation of shared meanings between people depend on, ultimately, very small things, names, places, superfluities, even.

The book starts with, and pretty well ends up with, these lines:

'Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp.'

At the heart of it is a story of survival, of things lovingly passed on down the generations. But no, it's not just that; it's that there's no telling who or what will survive unscathed; and the answer, of course, is nothing, and no-one. the sheer utter randomness, the terrifying absurdity of it all. You can't do anything to protect yourself. Neither innocence or beauty or cunning will do in this world. Plan all you want, there's no insurance in life. It all sounds terribly fatalistic but true. Just the other day old MM was telling me about how a mutual friend had died ten years ago. I'd always thought it was an accident but he said he drove himself over the cliff. What can you say? Shrug your shoulders. That's what it's come down to.

And this line from Simone Weil (roughly): the uprooted, on pain of suffering, always try to uproot other people. You often hear people talk about the lack of a sense of place, the idea of being an 'exile', as if it was jazzy, and as if the opposite was a limited, parochial, fenced-in existence at best; at worst a recipe for bigotry, conservatism, and fanaticism. Blood and soil or the desire to escape earth.

after the rain

2011-08-18T06:39:00.000-07:00

the rain at 2:17 lights up the sky a bit. you love it when it darkens over like that, the house becomes silent and dark, the narrow window sills calm, the wooden doors closed and still. the rain falls evenly, with a constant but faint patter, until it's everywhere: tiny pin points, large grey blotches on the pavement first, then sweeping by on the horizon, through the tree tops, shifting angles, falling, it seems, in the best way possible. the ageless approach of the third thing, that makes it what it is, and no-one knows what it is.

outside, some of the cautious drivers switch on their lights; inside the lamps are lit, jumpers unfolded, mirrors become the colour of sky, like a dream that drains pinks into grey, or time reversed. inside, yes, there it was.

three black notebooks scattered on the floor. the work of little r, disruptive, darling little r. your notes on fairness kept in a plastic bag, irrelevant. you come to the close of the amber book and have to slow it down, lest something escapes you. the end often reveals something, like a gentle sadness. not some mystical utterance but probably something utterly ordinary, like a list of my favorite things. the small black buddha on the carved wooden stand. serene buddha, his thoughts never leaving the circle of his mind. behind him, a small medieval painting, woodcutters or village idiots. the kashmiri-rug, the warmth of the house, your old clothes that finally fit, this small world that will soon be empty, once the window panes start to shine with clarity. and then, after the rain, the catholicity will return to the orthodox way of things, and the mirrors will fail to show our true faces to one another again.

Erotic Capital

2011-08-18T02:40:00.001-07:00

Well, just when you think you've heard it all Newsnight gives air-time to the ridiculous air-head author of Erotic Capital. There's physical, human, social, and ethnic capital, so why not erotic? There's an unrealized value to be exploited here. Scarcity value, she goes on.

Hard to know where this stems from. The dominance of market transactions, no doubt. But where does that come from? A particular conception of property, a negation of the meaning of what Margaret J. Radin calls 'personhood'? Can there be any moral limits to markets (M.J. Sandel) ?

First: the conceptualisation, market rhetoric: everything must be thought of as a potential commodity, something that can be exchanged, something that has value through exchange. There's no question of 'intrinsic worth' or inalienabilities here. Then: the actual practices and justifications of those practices. Setting up markets, 'legalising' transactions, defining the efficiency gains (well, if two parties want to transact aren't you being paternalistic by blocking them...the 'sovereign consumer'-even the language is instructive. Aren't both 'better off'?). But the argument stemming from well-being is supplemented by that of freedom: freedom, an act of choice, pure and simple. And for Christ's sake don't bring morality into it.

...

Pan-pan girls:

'What is behind the phenomenon is hard to say--something of the sort always existed in Japan--the pan pan or street girls are not new. But the magnitude and garishness of the present situation is unheard of. In Shinjuku alone there must be at least 3000 of these kids--this is no exaggeration'

---Bennett.