Morning Star

A fascinating combination of combative and stoical heroism with a priestly bearing conferred on Indians of the Plains and Forests a sort of majesty at once aquiline and solar; hence the powerful and irreplaceable beauty that is associated with the red man and contributes to his prestige as a warrior and martyr. Like the Japanese in the time of the Sammurai the Red Indian was in the deepest sense an artist in the outward manifestation of his personality: apart from the fact that his life was a ceaseless sporting with suffering and death, hence also of a kind of chivalrous karma yoga , the Indian knew how to impart to this spiritual style an adornment unsurpssable in its expressiveness.

...[t]he crucial importance he attaches to moral worth in men- to "character" if you will-and hence his cult of action. The heroic and silent act is contrasted with the empty and prolix talking of the coward; the Indian's love of secrecy, his reluctance to express what is sacred by means of facile speeches that weaken and disperse it, can be explained in this way.

The whole Red Indian character may be summed up intwo words, if such a condensation be allowable: the act and the secret; the act shattering if need be, and the secret impassive. Rock-like, the Indian of former times rested in his own being, his own personality, ready to translate it into action with the impetuousity of lightning; but at the same time he remained humble before the Great Mystery, whose message, he knew, could always be discerned in the Nature around him.

Wild Nature is at one with holy poverty and also with spiritual childlikeness; she is an open book containing an inexhaustible teaching of truth and beauty. It is in the midst of his own artifices that man most easily becomes corrupted, it is they that make him covetous and impious; close to virgin Nature, who knows neither agitation nor falsehood, he had the hope of remaining contemplative like Nature herself. And it is Nature, quasi-divine in her totality , who will have the final word.

-------Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds

Earth, Fire, Wind

All yours, Injun, twenty-four bucks’ worth of glass beads,
gaudy cloth. I got myself a bargain. I brandish
fire-arms and fire-water. Praise the Lord.
Now get your red ass out of here.

I wonder if the ground has anything to say.
You have made me drunk, drowned out
the world’s slow truth with rapid lies.
But today I hear again and plainly see. Wherever
you have touched the earth, the earth is sore.

I wonder if the spirit of the water has anything
to say. That you will poison it. That you
can no more own the rivers and the grass than own
the air. I sing with true love for the land;
dawn chant, the song of sunset, starlight psalm.

Trust your dreams. No good will come of this.
My heart is on the ground, as when my loved one
fell back in my arms and died. I have learned
the solemn laws of joy and sorrow, in the distance
between morning’s frost and firefly’s flash at night.

Man who fears death, how many acres do you need
to lengthen your shadow under the endless sky?
Last time, this moment, now, a boy feels his freedom
vanish, like the salmon going mysteriously
out to sea. Loss holds the silence of great stones.

I will live in the ghost of grasshopper and buffalo.

The evening trembles and is sad.
A little shadow runs across the grass
and disappears into the darkening pines.

-------Carol Ann Duffy, Selling Manhattan

Black and Blue

To my horror I find that I'm becoming a white man....

I should have realised that something was wrong by the cessation of the traffic outside. But too late, as usual. It was if the world had stopped and that this little local crisis had the power to re-enact that rarest of things: a time when English people actually stop doing things and start talking to eachother about something other than the weather. The flood- caused by something as unremarkable as the usually gentle Roding-had started.

By the time I got to the garage I could hear it thundering down the slight incline, menacingly, as if it were a slab of lead or ice. Not to be outdone by the river's maliciousness, the clouds darkened over. Inside, the water was black and up to my ankles and the musky smell of the furniture that was brought from Pakistan now mixed with that of dank wood. The rats had already scurried off with their customary good sense, as if they could sense the impending doom of this sinking ship.

It was too late to phone Bogdon -the Polish Robin Williams look-alike-and it would take too long to explain to him that we needed the services of "the Russian" (the huge Ukranian, a force of nature in his own right, who could be commanded, like a djinn, to move just about any object on earth). And I knew then that the attempt to save things was futile. With this realisation came a sense of relief. There was a perfect stillness. A cool northern breeze pushed up against my back and over the water, causing a flurry of silver ripples against the carpets and my Zen bed, the Zen bed, Zen bed.

Blessed is the man who hears the thunder
And does not think:
"it's the end of the world".

But it was hard not to think of the departure from Pakistan a year back and lost friends, a parting of ways which was at least the ending of a world. I will never forget a dusty and gloomy room in the dilapidated back streets of Lahore where I was shown a 19th century Caucasian carpet.
"But I cannot afford this [it was 30 lakhs -around 40,000 pounds] " I said to the owner. At which point he pulled up a chair, told his son to make some tea and said Khalid, let us look at it just for the beauty of it. The old ways of the east die hard...

Reluctantly our mam came down-nothing, and surely not something as inconsequetial as a flood, could tear her away from her book of poetry. She was particularly fond of reciting the lines: we asked for four days of life; two were spent in waiting, two in regret. She surveyed the damage from a distance, like a grand Ventian Doge, and said: "I hope you've saved the onions and tomatoes, I need those for tonight's dinner".

When the waters receded I could just about see from the corner of my eye that most of the albums had been destroyed. From childhood we had been taught-though taught is not the right word-that there were great benefits in 'not looking' at the world. I now knew what this meant.
Marvin and Otis, B.B. and Sam and Dave; and the reggae cassettes as well: Marley, Steel Pulse, and Toots. Miraculously, Streisand and Manilow survived. I should have read this as a sign.

A few months later I had to download some of my favourite tunes to an ipod (if you don't know what that is, it's like a walkman; if you don't know what a walkman is it's a bit like a cassette player...eventually , we'll get to human memory!) The choices were, to my great surprise, white groups from the 70's and 80's . Not Arvo Part of Bach's fugues, which might have denoted a modicum of respectability, but pop and rock for Christ's sake!

How bizarre. I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as half jewish (my grandfather was also known as 'the old Jew'-largely because, as far as I can make out, of his fine waistcoats and dandy hats-and I had always imagined that there was more than a hint of Buddhism in the lazy, pluralistic traditions of the Kashmiris, but this was going a bit too far. Of course, language and the grey clouds had already long ago entered our blood, gently shaping our thoughts like the contours of a river-bank.

But , politically at least, there was a radical refusal of system that was always muslim (shia?) To always take the weaker side, as if to redress the balance, was to be in a permanent state of opposition. But now this! Admittedly, it wasn't as serious as supporting the English cricket team but....

There is nothing left to do; it seems as if time istself is pushing us in this direction. I have to download some Louis, quick, before it's too late....

Cold empty bed...springs hurt my head
Feels like ole ned...wished I was dead
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Even the mouse...ran from my house
They laugh at you...and all that you do
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Im white...inside...but, that dont help my case
Thats life...cant hide...what is in my face

How would it end...aint got a friend
My only sin...is in my skin
What did I do...to be so black and blue

Music of Time

We live in a fragmentary age, where we can see and feel only parts of the whole picture. An era of narrow specialization and a world of fantastical, slender, and restircted vantage points. Is this because of the times we live in-times in which the world's myriad images swarm before our eyes, clamouring for our attention ? (note: already the question has to be broken down, offering up its multiple constituent modes of analysis: the psychological, the political, the sociological, each as palusible as the other, each as good a substitute for the other).

But perhaps it is because the very content of our knowledge-in distinction from our approach to it-is in itself fragmentary, incomplete, incoherent, ambivalent. What can we know of history or any process whose results lie undetermined so far ahead in the distant future? The times we live in or the Time we live in?

The turning away from the classical precludes any sense of 'totality' and maybe even the notion of order and authority are de-valued. The tension between the infinity of life and the rigidity, fixity of the mathematical and of 'structure'. However, from another perspective it is the mathematical that expresses not permanence or the absolute but an infinity that is dynamic...an unending series (and it is the biological which represents temporality and contingency).

But hasn't this always been the case? The radical insufficiency of a finite mind faced with a reality that stands apart from it; amind that stuggles to cirumscribe all that is 'other' but that also learns to come to terms with what lies beyond the realms of its comprehension, its own, as it were, 'glasses'. We see through a glass darkly and are somehow aware of this fact.

Leonardo: the mathematical and the biological, structure and universal flow. Music, as harmony, is a pattern and spontaneity.

My share in all that is happening ...I- this bundle of flesh and bone, of sensations and perceptions-have been placed within the orbit of Being, and am within all that is happening. Danger is only an illusion...for all that happens to me is part of the all-embracing stream of which I myself am a part. Could it be, perhaps, that danger and safety, death and joy, destiny and fulfillment, are but different aspects of this tiny , majestic bubdle that is I? What endless freedom, O God, has Thou granted to man.

----------Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca.

Rats

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your Cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver—what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.

---------Isaac Rosenberg

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

--------Robert Burns, To a Mouse

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful
of screeches like torn tin,

An effective gag.
when it stops screeching, it pants.

And cannot think.
'This has no face, it must be God' or

'No answer is also an answer.'
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth.

Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

For supplanting every human brain inside is skull with a
rat-body that knots and unknots....

'Stay' says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat's head down into godhead

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
and the sleep-soul of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow-

That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried

The horned Shadow of the rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs

While it supplants Hell.

------Ted Hughes.

Lahore is Lahore

The risk of having a port-city as your capital is that it is too open to the flow of ideas, goods, and people. Far better to imagine a new city out of nothing, an abstract glass city where none of the old mystifying powers of the land and established hierarchies can take root: the bureaucratic city par excellence, or make some provincial centre the main city, the main bulwark against modernist, dissipating forces. The capital has to be a city of desire and memory...

Lahore , like all closed or land-locked cities, has always existed. There has never been a time when it didn't and so to talk of the establishment of foundations is meaningless. Culturally conservative, she turns her back on the inspiration of the high seas and instead models herself on the slow-moving rhythms of the earth. If there is any regeneration or vigour it always comes from the north, but they too are soon lulled into her deep sleep and afternoon stillness. To live for a day there is to live for a thousand years.

The secret of its longevity is that it has retained all the charcteristics of a large village: the gossip, the landed elites, the bumpkins, the clowns and dreamers, the drunken poets and jilted lovers, ... and the intrigues are always of a small and trivial nature. In it simplicity and crudeness it has retained something of the human-whereas other cities grow by becoming more machine-like and less human.

Of the twelve or so remaining statues only a handful remain in public spaces-the others confined to the dusty backrooms of the museum. And what need would there be for such objects when the each person is a living statue? "Orr?" (And?) is the usual refrain...but what else is there to say but repeat the old stories?

Back when Lahore was a fledgling city a Lahori went for the annual Hajj to Mecca. On his return he was all praise for the holy city. The piety and holiness of the people. But the Lahoris, impatient as ever, wanted to know more: orr?
Well, fantastic food and hospitality.
Orr?
The sense of peace and tranquility, of closeness to God...
Orr?
Sensing their growing frustration he then told them what they had wanted to hear all along.
But Lahore is Lahore.

And since that day Lahore has always been the capital of the world, the only city in the world- beyond which exists only a number of smaller villages. Nothing could change her; immutable, inscrutable old Lahore.

But change she did. Some cities grow in lightness, others in extensity; Lahore doesn't grow either upwards or outwards but only in density, absorbing other people as it does foreign stories that she makes her own.

But soon a crack appeared in her heart; what was once only the wilderness now became the most inhabited part of the city; and what was originally within the confines of the "gates" was now only "the inside city". On the inside there were only decaying buidings, the fading splendour of once regal gardens and a sort of fatalism, resignation hung in the air. As the soul of Lahore drew ever more inward, attached by the thinnest of threads to the ever-growing distant memory of what she once was it was as if she was becoming a dream within a dream. But this in itself was nothing new. Lahore was always the most real of cities because she was the most unreal...