sufi andrey

a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart.
---Paul Celan

[why write? Not for self-expression, or discovery or any other such nonsense. certainly your thoughts are drying up without any commenters. why is it only women who write to you? and women who stop writing you? press on. or off. you read: "i have a cold"; "i hate my mum"; isn't silence better than blogging?]

not a double life, but half a life. can't you think of any real numbers, b?

there is no mention of the word 'sufi' in the Qur'an. yes, but there is no mention of the word 'moron' and yet still you exist.

From 'Sculpting Time':

it's all too easy to be satisfied with glimmers of intuition, rather than sound, coherent reasoning.

It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means 'rust'. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.

the saddest smile

'I can only identify the inner by my knowledge of the outer'
---Iris M.

the saddest smile, also the most enigmatic. for me, for you? the saddest smile, that remains inward.

so, there it is, there you go.
i remeber it well
you didn't turn around to say:
i need you, i don't need you.
i remember you well...

you held the world up for me
even though it wasn't real!
a clown in the moon
or the moon in the clown
still, always my clown.
the ritual of departures,
that some call life.
the tyranny of not knowing you
against the easy familairity of the hours.
how did it come to pass:
which is to say: how does time pass?

what is real, what most so?
the innermost: the universal: Truth, Freedom..?
or orange pyjamas? too late on the scene, a witness to ashes and grey embers, like the memory of a stone, a door that wasn't opened for you, a dream within a dream. is that not a kind of reality?

why is saying 'regards' a way of saying goodbye? that's no way...

v. re·gard·ed, re·gard·ing, re·gards
v.tr.
1. To look at attentively; observe closely.
2. To look upon or consider in a particular way: I regard him as a fool.
3. To hold in esteem or respect
4. To relate or refer to; concern
5. To take into account; consider.
6. Obsolete To take care of.
v.intr.
1. To look or gaze.
2. To give heed; pay attention.
n.
1. A look or gaze.
2. Careful thought or attention; heed:
3.
a. Respect, affection, or esteem
b. regards Good wishes expressing such sentiment.
4. A particular point or aspect; respect.
5. Basis for action; motive.
6. Obsolete Appearance or aspect.

[Middle English regarden, from Old French regarder : re-, re- + guarder, to guard (of Germanic origin; see guard).]

taking leave. what is taken?

"what M is trying to do is to see D not just accurately but to see her justly, lovingly"

---Iris. M.

[the names have been changed to protect D]

change the names, change your mind. repentance. how will you give a label to these thoughts? a reassessing, a redifining, re-vision. nothing is given. capstones shift. how will you escape the world? by a leap of the will? into the blue. a different world, or the old one where i meet you five minutes earlier, where you wear a hat for me, over your straight/curly hair, to make yourself known.

'love is knowledge of the individual'.

this-ness. not: that-ness.

'we grow by looking' looking out for one another, and in for one another.

'the idea of a patient loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like 'obedience'.'

like being in a white room, where everything is made clear. or even there, will you turn your face from mine and say:

'we are not always the individual in pursuit of the individual'?

cat and mouse

without mouse there is no religion.
not as Aurelius imagined it:
a ribbon of chaos thrown into the order of things,
the spherical form of the soul tardy, frayed.

but without mouse there is no chase or hunt
no frenzied mind, no swaying heart.
just the slow uncoiling of time
around a hole of oblivion.

a slice of luck, decaying.
the trap abandoned but ready to spring.
just cat, alone and bemused,
licking his own lips, unable to speak.

Before Descartes

All the smiles were from your side; all the tears, from mine.


There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

----Wallace Stevens.

Like the reflection of the bridge in the torrent,
dance in the depth of affliction.
Keep your place firmly, yet dance,
separated from yourself.

Time has no loyalty; the single
moment is our treasure.
Dance in the loyal covenant from the beautiful ones.
Constant seeking is delight-why do you think
of getting over it?
Give up walking-dance at the sound of the caravan bell.

---Ghalib.

Goethe's thoughts:Urphanemon: the original-beyond which is the inanimate, the unthinkable and the speechless, where all understanding sinks below the surface,shut off from the light: it solidifies into a rigid abstract idea; beyond, in the other direction, it becomes mere sensation,contingency, appearance, 'senseless': a particular thing unrelated to either anything else in time or space or the universal. The whole phenomenal world seems and is at this balancing point, this fulcrum-neither pattern nor point, but both. Insofar as we too are a 'thing' amongst others-a perceiving thing- our position corresponds to theirs. We are destined to fade and soar as well. This blueness-is it sadness or joy?

Thus Simone Weil could say that we're at a level below which we'd be incapable of being loved by God and above which we'd be burned by the love of God...between zero and infinity. A step in the wrong direction and we'd be blinded. Not too close, nor too far apart. Everything is this. Veiling and unveiling. Hiding and seeking.

Selections from Goethe's Diwan:

Life's such a wonder of contradiction,
Give thanks to God when he squeezes you so,
And thank him when he lets you go.

~~~
Wave upon wave flows, countless, infinite
Your lips ever poised to kiss,
Your soul outstreaming its sweet note
your loving heart outpoured, your throat
Thirsty for wine's deep mysteries.

~~~

Is its leaf one self-divided,
Forked into a shape of strife?
Or have the two of them decided
On a symbiotic life?
this I answer without trouble
And am qualified to know:
I am single, I am double,
And my poems tell you so.

~~~

Now may one hear it still from afar,
words reach their goal,
though sound and music fade.
Is it not still the tent of scattered stars
the high transfigured world that love has made?

~~~

And this one reminds me of a scene from Bergman's Seventh Seal..a late summer's evening under the northern skies, a final dazzling of the sun's light before the day is done, a cool breeze through the long grass, the deepening shadows...

And I'd dearly like my friends, both
Young and old up there to gather
All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together
Yet in other dialects men and
angels make communication:
secret grammars, speech of roses
And the poppy's conjugation.

~~~

Carried by restless passion
till in visions of eternal
Love we vanish, fading , soaring.

the greenish gloom

the black in the green. of the time that remains. we, who have no right to call ourselves we. questiae juris? our name erased from your lists, marked down eternally as the Muselmänner, as fate would have it.the iron in your soul, now in my blood too. after we embraced,the darkness in your heart a shadow in my eyes. and the stars, they hold your gold and precious metals as well, you say? what can we abstract from this?

in a place between that is not a place. stateless, without an identity. i have become an ikon of sorrow. not an exception, one of many, discarded, cast down, looked over, beyond your gaze. have you ever asked yourself why you are so cruel? the human heart, like the earth, is not a mine to be possessed and what riches there are, are gifts, not mine, not yours. not an abstract value in your mind. violence isn't power.

"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly -- it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now -- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air -- and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young -- almost a boy -- but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held -- there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck -- Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge -- an ornament -- charm -- a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas"

..mining, outside the social scheme of classic civilization. That fact proved sinister as soon as the methods and ideals of mining became the chief pattern for industrial effort throughout the Western World. Mine: blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust-there was indeed something devilish and sinister about the whole business. Life flourishes only in an environment of the living...

does the defect arise out of the fact that every other type of primitive environment contains food, something that may immediately be translated into life-while the miner's environment alone is-salt and saccharin aside-not only completely inorganic but completely inedible?

child of snow

Can it be you that I hear?
Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!



Write my name in the snow, so that when spring comes I am no longer to be found. Or erase it now, for nothing remains but a memory, of summer and a starless sky. Don't look back or turn my way, adding cruelty on to cruelty.

us and them

"Political space is never 'pure' but always involves some kind of reliance on pre-political violence...In human society, the political is the encompassing structuring principle, so that every neutralization of some partial content as 'non political' is a political gesture par excellence."

---Zizek.

Well, things are getting a bit edgy, a bit nervy here. Stay away from crowded places, lock your car door, sweat a bit when your car has to stop at a traffic light next to God knows who.

The state always has to mask its own violence, its own foundations. State violence is always deemed necessary or legitimate. Order, peace, security. You wonder about the word 'terror, though. Wasn't it first used in conjunction with the State? How can one ignore that most of the violence of the last century was carried about by nation-states? I know you want to forget colonialism, the Gulags, the Camps, the trenches, but can one continue to say this was a throw-back to medieval times or the irrational?

On the other hand, sympathy for non-state actors-resistance fighters in Kashmir, Palestine, etc has waned somewhat as terrorist activities closer to home have increased. Put a feather in someone's cap and give him a few stripes and all of a sudden violence is acceptable?

But is the violence of the state political, is it power?
Nation-state. The inscribing of life, birth, into the political realm. When, how? Has to be traced. Violence, perhaps it's a remnant of ancient divisions: ethico-religious ones. Violence is archaic, anarchic: blood and soil.But to think of "Friend" and "Enemy" is surely pre-political or the negation of the political?In a similar vein, can there be a politics of human rights?

Nazism: state racism, in Foucault's formulation. Bare life, not even that: a number....

Achtung

1.	Theology. a divinely conferred gift or power.

2.	a spiritual power or personal quality that gives an individual influence or authority over large numbers of people.

3.	the special virtue of an office, function, position, etc., that confers or is thought to confer on the person holding it an unusual ability for leadership, worthiness of veneration, or the like.

Also, char⋅ism .

---

Origin:
1635-45; LL, Gk, equivalent to char- (base of cháris favor, charízesthai to favor; akin to YEARN EXHORT ) + -isma -ISM

Synonyms:
2. charm, magnetism, presence.

Oh, the research I had to do for this post!

Admiration, to be solid and lasting, must be founded on proofs from which we have no means of escaping.
---Hazlitt, 'The Indian Juggler'

There are no proofs unless they are felt on the pulses
(after Keats)

How can you admire that which is randomly given, from above, a pure gift, rather than dexterity, perseverance, effort, artistic and mental brilliance, something which is superfluous, superficial, like beauty? The magnetic charm (karma, destiny) of it, the sheer animal wonderment, the relinquishing of the self to a dazzling, magic spell.

Does God judge us by appearances?

I suspect he does.