“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos – we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors. "--------from Solaris
In these days nothing fascinates us as much as authoritative voices: barbarians, terrorists, Boston Brahmins, style gurus, Mandarins, experts, lifestyle managers ; nothing dazzles us free spirits as much as the spectacle of order, the mystique of totalitarianism and terror.
We are broken and love to imagine ourselves as thus: the Romantic longing for fragmentation, the Dionysian killing, eternal becoming, is the hidden affiliation of capitalism and the restless soul. Statelessness, liminality, exile, uprootedness, madness: nothing is more comforting than our lack of domestication, our being an end without an end. And yet, is this broken-ness of the body or the spirit, external or internal? This homelessness is but , perhaps, a mirror of the constant turning of the heart, "fading, soaring" (Goethe).
And from this broken-ness it follows that we can only be held spellbound by infernal order.
"There is no going back to the cosmos" Kelvin is told, only the pushing forward into the unknown, the infinite universe. The light drains from the world, and so begin the gnostic days.
Hannah Arendt: the great paradox: just when we understand ourselves as nothing but earthly creatures we desire nothing more than to escape the earth. But even on reaching the extreme limits of outer space we only have Gagarin's "there's no god here" (which Levinas interprets as: the end of transcendence). There is no Being, no order, only man and his thoughts. Which is why all modern horrors are a variation of the theme of the labyrinth, Piranesi's prisons, the gulag within the gulag.
Today I realised that I've never seen a stray dog here. A news report: a dog inCornwall refuses to turn right. Nothing sinister. He just can't turn right. So now the psychiatrists are working on him! I kid you not. And he screams, "the barking of the dog, a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!)".
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Monday, October 17, 2005
A Casual Piece
"Beware of false infinities"------Simone Weil
Today has been a difficult day for fasting. Time passes quickly though as the sparks fly in a conversation with Saleem and Mongol. "We've been reduced to the level of savages" he says, "only thinking of food, as if we should live by bread alone".
"But we've always been savages my dear Q." Our taste for blood goes unslaked and we outdo ourselves in thinking of ways to extend the 'unnatural gowth of the natural' as if these were part of some mysterious and rigid law that we fulfil, not knowing why.
In the darkening shadows a few lights go on. We look up at the windows , imagining the life that goes on without us. Nowhere else in nature is there such curiosity. At six we stop at the Wright's Bar-why does one have to go to an Italian to get a decent cup of English tea?. We gulp down large swigs of milky tea.
Infinity in a cup of tea. Even the ever-talkative Saleem is strangely quiet, subdued even. It is one of those perfect moments when all seems right in the world, everything is in its proper place. Kairos.
In the monochrome early-morning light even the council flats have an alluring beauty, as if these lunar buildings, a perfect mathematical equation, were carved out of marble, moonstone. One is reminded of how light can transform our own ugliness. For the Japanese, on the other hand, there could be no such crystalline, time-resistant structures: wabi , deliberate imperfection, meant that they had to grow with nature.
I pass a few snails that are huddled around a small puddle-what for them must be a veritable lake. The spirals of their shells all flow in the same direction-bar one. This is the handedness of the univesre, the slight imbalance, the imperfection in perfection, theanarchy in the heart of the black sun that sustains all worlds. If things had been arranged slightly differently, then we would be like this, and not like that; the faintest of breezes caused by a falling peach blossom is enough to disturb the equilibrium and take us to a parallel universe. Is this, then, the best of all possible worlds?
Nearby a slug has been crushed. Another joins him (no snails , I note). Perhaps to witness the spectacle of the nirvana-soul, or maybe just to comfort him in his last moments. There is an awareness of suffering at every level of being in the universe; compassion is the highest form of understanding. I had once seen the same thing happen with a crow as it was brought some food in an empty field. This blackest of crows, whose very blackness permeated every pore of its being, whose skin glistened with it, had he perchance flown too close to the sun?
Near Russell square a six year old Chinese boy-far too old, large-is being pushed in a pram by his mother who is bent over in ..in what? Bellow teaches us to be attentive but what is it? A tiredness with life, grief? And then I see the child moan, flaying his arms and legs in all directions like a shooting star. There is something terrible, frightening , in this desperate attempt to reach out, to communicate. His younger sister, in a pink school uniform, extends her arms and places the plams of her hands over his head and presses down as the mother blows a prayer over his head. In this gentle silence is there any need for more words?
After the tea we, like Knulp, have no desire for anything and there is no idle chatter. Just thankfulness and stillness and a total lack of concern for the world that is hurriedly passing us by. This feeling lasts for a few minutes then, out of idleness, we casually turn for a second cup. It is poisonous, bitter to the dregs...and we start to argue again.
Only a saint truly knows "how to bless", knows that infinity is but a moment that becomes hell if we try to create it or if we grasp it too tightly with our hands. The desire to add to perfection or to reduce imperfections, to make everything right, without grace and humility, corrupts our souls.
Today has been a difficult day for fasting. Time passes quickly though as the sparks fly in a conversation with Saleem and Mongol. "We've been reduced to the level of savages" he says, "only thinking of food, as if we should live by bread alone".
"But we've always been savages my dear Q." Our taste for blood goes unslaked and we outdo ourselves in thinking of ways to extend the 'unnatural gowth of the natural' as if these were part of some mysterious and rigid law that we fulfil, not knowing why.
In the darkening shadows a few lights go on. We look up at the windows , imagining the life that goes on without us. Nowhere else in nature is there such curiosity. At six we stop at the Wright's Bar-why does one have to go to an Italian to get a decent cup of English tea?. We gulp down large swigs of milky tea.
Infinity in a cup of tea. Even the ever-talkative Saleem is strangely quiet, subdued even. It is one of those perfect moments when all seems right in the world, everything is in its proper place. Kairos.
In the monochrome early-morning light even the council flats have an alluring beauty, as if these lunar buildings, a perfect mathematical equation, were carved out of marble, moonstone. One is reminded of how light can transform our own ugliness. For the Japanese, on the other hand, there could be no such crystalline, time-resistant structures: wabi , deliberate imperfection, meant that they had to grow with nature.
I pass a few snails that are huddled around a small puddle-what for them must be a veritable lake. The spirals of their shells all flow in the same direction-bar one. This is the handedness of the univesre, the slight imbalance, the imperfection in perfection, theanarchy in the heart of the black sun that sustains all worlds. If things had been arranged slightly differently, then we would be like this, and not like that; the faintest of breezes caused by a falling peach blossom is enough to disturb the equilibrium and take us to a parallel universe. Is this, then, the best of all possible worlds?
Nearby a slug has been crushed. Another joins him (no snails , I note). Perhaps to witness the spectacle of the nirvana-soul, or maybe just to comfort him in his last moments. There is an awareness of suffering at every level of being in the universe; compassion is the highest form of understanding. I had once seen the same thing happen with a crow as it was brought some food in an empty field. This blackest of crows, whose very blackness permeated every pore of its being, whose skin glistened with it, had he perchance flown too close to the sun?
Near Russell square a six year old Chinese boy-far too old, large-is being pushed in a pram by his mother who is bent over in ..in what? Bellow teaches us to be attentive but what is it? A tiredness with life, grief? And then I see the child moan, flaying his arms and legs in all directions like a shooting star. There is something terrible, frightening , in this desperate attempt to reach out, to communicate. His younger sister, in a pink school uniform, extends her arms and places the plams of her hands over his head and presses down as the mother blows a prayer over his head. In this gentle silence is there any need for more words?
After the tea we, like Knulp, have no desire for anything and there is no idle chatter. Just thankfulness and stillness and a total lack of concern for the world that is hurriedly passing us by. This feeling lasts for a few minutes then, out of idleness, we casually turn for a second cup. It is poisonous, bitter to the dregs...and we start to argue again.
Only a saint truly knows "how to bless", knows that infinity is but a moment that becomes hell if we try to create it or if we grasp it too tightly with our hands. The desire to add to perfection or to reduce imperfections, to make everything right, without grace and humility, corrupts our souls.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Third Man
Jonah once taught me that even in the darkest of days, the blackest of suns, innocence survives. And that that innocence was pure life itself, the green waters: hope, faith in the unseen. Just as a whale lives on in the vast oceans of a cold, infinite universe, so too in the heart of hearts of a man something survives.
On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.
"This or that.There is no third way. And that is our path. " A path and not a place. A direction..like zeno's arrow that never arrives; fate is a direction, not an achievement. But to choose the third way is one thing-what the Allama calls 'higher fatality'-and there is a desperate fatalism that is imposed on us. If the question arises: believer or unbeliever I can say , with the Hindus, "not this, not that."Perhaps being just human, not a just human, but someone with just one foot in eden. Which is to resist perfection, being a finished product. The third man slips through categories but is not a negation of them. Not a refusal to answer, but just a Li Po smile that floats downstream.
Schrodinger's cat is neither alive nor dead, neither this nor that; but alive and dead-as long as one doesn't look at him.
In cricket, the third man is a boundary-man. Close to being absorbed in the crowd and equally close to the centre of action. He never sees clearly though. Most of the time he just waits until there's a pointing finger, or until he's shouted at. Engulfed by the shadows, his job is only to save, to negate.
In the camps, via the trains, are brought all those who are third-rate, third class..inferior products. Most have been separated from their names and are now just numbers. But in the heart of this darkness is the Muselmann. He lives in the third place in the Third Reich that is the true hell. Here , in limbo, the cross where the norm meets the exception, one does not hope for a salvation that one cannot attain; one is absorbed in indifference, unaware of the absence of God's gaze. In this no-place like home the individual ceases to belong to himself or a community: two's company but three is...the third person is an automaton, a walking ghost. The un-holy ghost. The fear, as Freud saw, of ordinariness, of being an emperor with no clothes. He is on the verge of becoming an object, a "what", not a "who".
The 'third order' continue to live an ordinary life and this makes us question what is ordinary, what does belonging to humanity mean at the limit?The Muselmann is a mystic of nothingness. An "anonymous mass", someone who is beaten by time, always the same, identical. He is too empty to suffer and "not a trace of thought is to be found in his eyes". The fixed gaze, the mechanical, sad , expressions. For him the world has become nothing, he has followed the commandment to die before one dies and now lives in the inner world only..in a slumber from which he can never awake.
On the third day it is said that a being was created that was the same, "season after season", one whose very being was "in itself".
The camps: the intersection of perfect order with perfect chaos. One hesitates to use the word 'perfect'.
No-one can gaze at the Muselmann without being turned to stone, that is: without becomming inhuman, no-one in particular. One must mimic him and become indifferent to life if one is to live. A rat, a 'queer sardonic rat'. But why is this? One can look at death, there is a pornography of it, but no-one can withstand the indeterminate, the void. Instead, we cover our nothingness and this is another name for humanity.
How can one look at the despised face-so eagerly blanked out because we cannot forget that he reminds us of ourselves? The Muselmann is the only one who sees the Gorgon, face-on. The Gorgon is always without profile (just as the lumpenproletariat are without a silhouette): a flat face, without a third dimension. But no-one can see the Gorgon. Therein lies the mystery: only he sees the impossibility of seeing; the one thing he knows is not that he knows nothing but the sheer impossibility of knowing. The Muselmann himself becomes the Gorgon.
When the law has been internalised then one has been 'annhilated'. Finitude is the awareness of distinction. It is the space, the absence of God where time and desire are born. The inner circle of the Muselmann is the mirror of the la makan.
The Muselmann is the denial of the limits of ethics, of what establishes good and bad. He is the negation of negation.
(This is lifted from Agamben's book, Remnants).
On this day more than any other I want to be alone. To be alone is to be complete she said. But sometimes one finds things, like a flower growing in the cracks of the abstract city, or a mushroom slumbering in the tall grass, lazily, aimlessly dreaming away, running down time and one is amazed that all that is incomplete is so fragile, tender, and precious. At Mile End thirty small children scramble aboard, the crackling of their laughter disturbing the serious world of the adults. They are herded in, though they don't seem to mind this. In other times,on other trains, in other places, there would be no such laughter.
"This or that.There is no third way. And that is our path. " A path and not a place. A direction..like zeno's arrow that never arrives; fate is a direction, not an achievement. But to choose the third way is one thing-what the Allama calls 'higher fatality'-and there is a desperate fatalism that is imposed on us. If the question arises: believer or unbeliever I can say , with the Hindus, "not this, not that."Perhaps being just human, not a just human, but someone with just one foot in eden. Which is to resist perfection, being a finished product. The third man slips through categories but is not a negation of them. Not a refusal to answer, but just a Li Po smile that floats downstream.
Schrodinger's cat is neither alive nor dead, neither this nor that; but alive and dead-as long as one doesn't look at him.
In cricket, the third man is a boundary-man. Close to being absorbed in the crowd and equally close to the centre of action. He never sees clearly though. Most of the time he just waits until there's a pointing finger, or until he's shouted at. Engulfed by the shadows, his job is only to save, to negate.
In the camps, via the trains, are brought all those who are third-rate, third class..inferior products. Most have been separated from their names and are now just numbers. But in the heart of this darkness is the Muselmann. He lives in the third place in the Third Reich that is the true hell. Here , in limbo, the cross where the norm meets the exception, one does not hope for a salvation that one cannot attain; one is absorbed in indifference, unaware of the absence of God's gaze. In this no-place like home the individual ceases to belong to himself or a community: two's company but three is...the third person is an automaton, a walking ghost. The un-holy ghost. The fear, as Freud saw, of ordinariness, of being an emperor with no clothes. He is on the verge of becoming an object, a "what", not a "who".
The 'third order' continue to live an ordinary life and this makes us question what is ordinary, what does belonging to humanity mean at the limit?The Muselmann is a mystic of nothingness. An "anonymous mass", someone who is beaten by time, always the same, identical. He is too empty to suffer and "not a trace of thought is to be found in his eyes". The fixed gaze, the mechanical, sad , expressions. For him the world has become nothing, he has followed the commandment to die before one dies and now lives in the inner world only..in a slumber from which he can never awake.
On the third day it is said that a being was created that was the same, "season after season", one whose very being was "in itself".
The camps: the intersection of perfect order with perfect chaos. One hesitates to use the word 'perfect'.
No-one can gaze at the Muselmann without being turned to stone, that is: without becomming inhuman, no-one in particular. One must mimic him and become indifferent to life if one is to live. A rat, a 'queer sardonic rat'. But why is this? One can look at death, there is a pornography of it, but no-one can withstand the indeterminate, the void. Instead, we cover our nothingness and this is another name for humanity.
How can one look at the despised face-so eagerly blanked out because we cannot forget that he reminds us of ourselves? The Muselmann is the only one who sees the Gorgon, face-on. The Gorgon is always without profile (just as the lumpenproletariat are without a silhouette): a flat face, without a third dimension. But no-one can see the Gorgon. Therein lies the mystery: only he sees the impossibility of seeing; the one thing he knows is not that he knows nothing but the sheer impossibility of knowing. The Muselmann himself becomes the Gorgon.
When the law has been internalised then one has been 'annhilated'. Finitude is the awareness of distinction. It is the space, the absence of God where time and desire are born. The inner circle of the Muselmann is the mirror of the la makan.
The Muselmann is the denial of the limits of ethics, of what establishes good and bad. He is the negation of negation.
(This is lifted from Agamben's book, Remnants).
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Second Space
The first time is always too reticent, too opaque. We stumble and stutter, unfolding, stretching our wings, into wider expanses, open fields, second spaces. The point becomes a circle, the line a square.
At some point in the journey I woke up. Disoriented, I look out of the window, searching for something I could know in the pitch dark (hasn't that always been the case: we search for a familiar face). These are the unholy hours, when the world escapes to dreamlands but the solemn earth, remaining rooted by gravity and inertia, is black and unredeemed.
A thought tugs at me. I have left all that is valubale back there and there is no going back now.
A book on Robin Hood (another exile) and my own notebook on dinosaurs in which I had naively attempted to name and describe all members of the species. As if by picturing them alone one could learn their innermost secrets. Instead, I knew nothing of their slow, ponderous minds or, indeed, if they had second thoughts. Perhaps their one and only thought, "the one thing needful" , was that we too must die.
We arrive in a new town in the small, the smallest, hours of the day, unnoticed by anyone..except, perhaps, a stray dog. An inauspicious beginning! Our first steps are tired-it has been a long journey-weighed down by second thoughts. Not remorse or regret, but an uneasiness that maybe we shouldn't have moved in the first place, from the first place. A lament for the life that we never had, for the futures that are dead branches of the past. The morning is bitterly cold.
We live through a series of real and imaginary lives, some parallel, some tangential. I sometimes catch myself thinking this way: life is a progression of exiles, escapes, expulsions. We fall, we fall, into this second space.
Perhaps I should say second-hand thoughts, since I'm not sure what is mine and what has been borrowed from others any more. "Theft is property...". Anyway, a second child can never be original and a second thought is but a thought about thought. So, one day, someone had decided and we packed our bags, got up and headed south. "Never look back" our friends warned us or else you will be turned to stone , like us.
Nothing really happened up north. One day was as good as the other. That was the problem. We looked for a second chance. What was wrong when chance was dealt the first time round? No time for that. Now
But what was that first thought again? Maybe it wasn't a thought at all, just a vague intuition, a looking out of a glass darkly, and second thought is a learn-ed naming, forgetting, of those feelings, an after-word. What (where) was that primal, silent language that we once knew, that absence or clearing in which we now lovingly place so many objects. I have become a question to myself, caught in two minds.
Even if the first thought was mine-and not God's- why do I need a second, a second opinion to validate my own? After 'A' , what need is there for anything else , said the poet.
There is no going back, no stepping into the same stream twice; neither the well of mimir nor ourselves are the same. And yet, in the still moments of the day, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. "That isn't me" . And we see who we once were, what we might have been.
Childhood has passed now. Let us not give a second thought to it. The autumn breeze rustles through the burnt-out leaves. Goodness has exhausted itself. And we cannot stay here any more. Already, there is a premonition of spring. Glaciers and hearts will melt. But this second thought fills me with dread. For it was on a day like this that Ymir was slain.
At some point in the journey I woke up. Disoriented, I look out of the window, searching for something I could know in the pitch dark (hasn't that always been the case: we search for a familiar face). These are the unholy hours, when the world escapes to dreamlands but the solemn earth, remaining rooted by gravity and inertia, is black and unredeemed.
A thought tugs at me. I have left all that is valubale back there and there is no going back now.
A book on Robin Hood (another exile) and my own notebook on dinosaurs in which I had naively attempted to name and describe all members of the species. As if by picturing them alone one could learn their innermost secrets. Instead, I knew nothing of their slow, ponderous minds or, indeed, if they had second thoughts. Perhaps their one and only thought, "the one thing needful" , was that we too must die.
We arrive in a new town in the small, the smallest, hours of the day, unnoticed by anyone..except, perhaps, a stray dog. An inauspicious beginning! Our first steps are tired-it has been a long journey-weighed down by second thoughts. Not remorse or regret, but an uneasiness that maybe we shouldn't have moved in the first place, from the first place. A lament for the life that we never had, for the futures that are dead branches of the past. The morning is bitterly cold.
We live through a series of real and imaginary lives, some parallel, some tangential. I sometimes catch myself thinking this way: life is a progression of exiles, escapes, expulsions. We fall, we fall, into this second space.
Perhaps I should say second-hand thoughts, since I'm not sure what is mine and what has been borrowed from others any more. "Theft is property...". Anyway, a second child can never be original and a second thought is but a thought about thought. So, one day, someone had decided and we packed our bags, got up and headed south. "Never look back" our friends warned us or else you will be turned to stone , like us.
Nothing really happened up north. One day was as good as the other. That was the problem. We looked for a second chance. What was wrong when chance was dealt the first time round? No time for that. Now
But what was that first thought again? Maybe it wasn't a thought at all, just a vague intuition, a looking out of a glass darkly, and second thought is a learn-ed naming, forgetting, of those feelings, an after-word. What (where) was that primal, silent language that we once knew, that absence or clearing in which we now lovingly place so many objects. I have become a question to myself, caught in two minds.
Even if the first thought was mine-and not God's- why do I need a second, a second opinion to validate my own? After 'A' , what need is there for anything else , said the poet.
There is no going back, no stepping into the same stream twice; neither the well of mimir nor ourselves are the same. And yet, in the still moments of the day, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. "That isn't me" . And we see who we once were, what we might have been.
Childhood has passed now. Let us not give a second thought to it. The autumn breeze rustles through the burnt-out leaves. Goodness has exhausted itself. And we cannot stay here any more. Already, there is a premonition of spring. Glaciers and hearts will melt. But this second thought fills me with dread. For it was on a day like this that Ymir was slain.
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