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I pass a woman sitting quietly on the steps outside a door on a sun-drenched day. The white light has made a desert of this place, she thinks to herself as she ties and unties a plastic bag. She sits , hunched, wrapped in a quilt coat and looks and looks at the feet that pass her by. How many this hour...90..., 92, 93. She mumbles the word "velocity" to herself again and again. Is it because they move to a different speed, a different rhythym of life, that they cannot see her?

On the 275 a woman fumbles nervously for a gold coin in her pocket, looking for reassurance. She can feel herself entering the twighlight years of her life. Her intelligent face and her shock of grey hair is out of place in these parts. She is American, perhaps, or at least she has lived through the 60's there. In her purse , a copy of Blake's poems. Below her thin lips there is largeish red blotch, which remids me of a map. She brings her pointed fingers to her face so that no-one can read it.

Time's in her pocket, ticking loud
on a stalled hand

Birds in flight. Unmoved by the solid world below them. There is nothing to do but follow one's instincts like a mathematical rule. To live in a world that is completely one's own. The space between the wng tips of each bird and the distance between each flock display the variety of time-experience. The flow of time depends on one's perceptions, on one's existence. The whole world is a set of clocks wound to a different speed. We look at each landscape, each segment of life and reduce it down to our own, creating a timelss, static image of it.
---After E. Bishop.

The spluttering ring of blotches on the moon's surface: are these wells of black water, vast pools of dark, brackish,bitterness that allow the light to stream forth, unblemished? But when Man landed on the planet it was smaller than he thought and the grey dust that looked so beautiful from a distance was but fine grains of sand after all. The rocks were lifeless, indifferent. Looking down at the earth he wondered to himself which was the dream , which the reality. If this was heaven then it was imageless and pointless. How many times must we sacrifice home ?

He could see a thought move slowly acorss his face like the falling shadow on a sun-clock or a memory that weaves and unweaves the echoes, a plangent song of the sea. Time had come to a stand-still here and there was only a steady, constant light, a blank gaze of eternity. He couldn't help but long for a sight of all that he had taken for granted: the square with its grey-black gravel and floating pink plastic bags, the cardboard boxes , a monument to all that has been discarded, abandoned, the screaming of the kids as they played basketball and swore at eachother, and even the old tramp with her stubby legs and knotted hair had a sort of faded beauty. Perhaps he could invent that world again-in his mind.

Like an 'I' counting to a
hundred, waiting to be found.

A nameless anxiety overtook him. All of this searching, for what? A drop of water, life? First things first the poet had said. But he was wrong.

You give the thirsty a dew drop when You have oceans.
And then they say that You are generous!

Perhaps we were wrong all along, this seach for an immensity that we could immerse ourselves in has led to nothingness and silence. There was an incredible lightness up here, but he desired nothing more than to be bound, weighed down again, to re-adjust his vision and search again for that fire buried in the mirror.

He returned and had green thoughts in the green shade. Everything seemed to have changed. But even though he sometimes detected a certain vagueness in her gaze, a silence of the stars on her lips, he was not overly troubled by this; they seemed like so many infinitely distant black spots. He felt something in him unravel and fall away. The old woman tied and untied some more knots .

Blue and Red

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains,
like dried blood,where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herringwhile he waits for a herring
boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.
"He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

---Elizabeth Bishop

I'd posted part of this before but the scintillating wonder of it only becomes apparent on a slow reading of the whole. It starts with the summoning of a world in all its detail, the gaze moving over the world in a careful, measured, way-not distracted or eager to reveal some deeper, darker knowledge, it doesn't linger for too long on any one slice of life, spreading its attention widely and lightly, like the unfolding of a bird's wings. A perfect balance of precision and insight. It is as if the patient accumulation of the particularities of a world, of reality as it is, is leading up to something. It is the prose observation of a scientific mind that calmly waits for a greater truth to emerge from a sea that is intimately familiar. One can almost hear the gears of the poem shift as it moves out of a world known through cold detachment to a new world of unending mystery; one can feel the poetic imagination taking flight, the wings softly warming to their task until the world of surface realities is but a shadow and our mind a flame, blue and red.

Sign of the Times

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.
-----Ecclesiastes

Und alles Drangen, alles Ringen
Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Hernn.
----Goethe

As I turn to write of my woes,
the paper is infinitely still,
the pen is but a flame.
----after Amir Khursrau

I SPIN, I spin, around, around,

And close my eyes,

And let the bile arise

From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!

The earth and heaven are one,

The horizon-line is gone,

The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!

Perplexing items fade from my large view,

And thought which vexed me with its false and true

Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,

This is the sole true mode

Of reaching God,

And gaining the universal synthesis

Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes

Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.

So round, and round, and round again!

How the whole globe swells within my brain,

The stars inside my lids appear,

The murmur of the spheres I hear

Throbbing and beating in each ear;

Right in my navel I can feel

The centre of the world’s great wheel.

Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,

No stay, no stop,

Like any top

Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.

O ye devout ones round me coming,

Listen! I think that I am humming;

No utterance of the servile mind

With poor chop-logic rules agreeing

Here shall ye find,

But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.

Ah, could we but devise some plan,

Some patent jack by which a man

Might hold himself ever in harmony

With the great whole, and spin perpetually,

As all things spin

Without, within,

As Time spins off into Eternity,

And Space into the inane Immensity,

And the Finite into God’s Infinity,

Spin, spin, spin, spin.

---Dowden, E.

The words form Ecclesiastes are, I think, my favourite from any religious text. To some they may suggest a perfect hramony, an unchanging centre to our being, a place where still waters run deep. Each thing, each part of our identity, must find its proper place and time, be at one with its destiny. Peace would be an acceptance of the part of Being that is parceled out to us. But to me these words speak of just the opposite. Turn , turn and turn we must, but in the heart and not the body. Each thing has its time and place, its 'season'. Qalb: a constant uprooting. For anything to grow we must dance ourselves out of those former selves, must die into becoming.

A star-to our minds- gives the impression of permanence, but is in truth nothing but fire and light, a spark in the darkness that lives on through many a death, a flicker of time itself. The mountains melt beneath our feet, all is perishing just as so many new vistas open up before us. This is the the way it has always been, the way it always will be; ours is only to read the sign of the times and move on.

Let me run, run
and never find
---Shah Latif

It's Just Not Cricket

There was something about the comical end to the cricket match between Pakistan and England that wasn’t wholly surprising to anyone who has followed Pakistani cricket over the years. There has always been something amateurish about the way in which they have gone about the game-and that is, I would say, what has always made them such an exciting team to watch. Back in Pakistan we always used to say “anything can happen” and “always expect the unexpected” -and this was as true of our politics as it was of daily lives. Everything always changed and yet it always remained the same. And so the cricket team has come to represent all the qualities of the country itself: a mixture of brilliance and bravado, flamboyance and farce. Very often the unexpected did happen and when it didn’t we could always fall back on the excuse of match fixing!

Let’s face it. The series was a lacklustre one without the likes of the hugely talented ‘Freddie’ Flintoff and Muhammad Asif, and without the ‘Pindi Express’, Shoaib Akhtar. Despite Bob Woolmer’s admirable efforts to add some steel to the side they have still retained some of the flashes of their true colours-the dramatic collapses, the wild overthrows, the suicidal running between the wickets and, oh yes, the ability to collapse onto one’s wicket a la Inzamam! But when all is said and done, and when the dust from this unpleasant episode settles, I hope that all genuine cricket lovers will look back and remember the effortless greatness of the Pakistani captain, the swashbuckling stroke play by Younis Khan and the irresistible charm of the impetuous Afridi.

No-one will begrudge England her victory-they were the better side. This singular event is the one that will stick in the memory but if we concentrate really hard some of us will remember that this was a scorching summer when Strauss found some steel in his nerves, a summer when a Sikh enjoyed cult status (perhaps for a season only, given the vagaries of the game); more than anything else, it was a summer when our star arrived too late, when one of the old-world cricketers, one of the truly greats, stepped up to play his last innings under dark skies. And yet his understated greatness is , perhaps, destined to go unnoticed.

Many commentators have noted that the Pakistani team could have complained in a more appropriate fashion by protesting after the match. Of course, that would have been a reasonable approach but one totally out of sink with the Pakistani mentality.
It was a question of honour more than anything. But even here there was something of the old world commonsense and pragmatism that both countries share. The team was hoping that their sense of grievance would be heard but, as they say back home, “if not, then not.”

Pakistani cricket is changing and I dread the day that they (we) become more cold and calculated. For cricket is not just cricket, it’s a way of life. And in cricket, as in life, there is a wonderful range of personalities and attitudes. The bearded Muhammad Yusuf could say in a post-match interview he didn’t do anything, that it was all God’s Will whilst Younis Khan, when asked why he played like such a ‘tiger’ replied, because it’s in our blood to fight like a tiger. No, a tame post-match protest would have been a quintessentially English way to go about things. To the very last the team showed why they were Pakistani: style and panache above victory-even if that can sometimes end up in the ridiculous.

Dihliz

Islam started out as a stranger and an exile and will end up that way.
---Prophetic saying.

Knowledge is three things: an awe-inspiring book, an abiding tradition, and the ability to say I do not know.
-----Ghazali

Dihliz is a threshold space, a place that approximates to a no-place, a no place like home. But this liminal space is also a welcoming space and not an abyss. It is in-between, an isthmus. The dihliz is is a limit and a passage way that distinguishes and at the same time connects the inward and the outward, the higher and the lower. Would one be exceeding the boundaries of sense to say that Man himself is this limit, a barzakh who stands at the centre of all the worlds? Just as an image can be continuous and discontinuous with its object.

The Dihliz reminds one of a pilgrimage, a disruption of the familiar, the Same. It is the place, therefore, where we can listen to an event, something that restructures the past and the future. For a shaman the whole of history is a series of 'events'; Nature herself is continuous Revelation. For us, those with a modern mind, there can be no such things as miracles. For them, a flower or a star is no less miraculous than a shining apparition. For us, the closest we can conceive of such a thing is the entry of wild luck into our ordered lives. But it is invariably from 'outside' and very rarely does it elicit an appropriate response. Whereas, on reflection, every thought and action is the irruption of freedom, anarchy and open possibilities into the closed world.

Dihliz: outward sobriety, inward drunkenness, necessity and freedom. The dihliz is not a place that can be 'pictured', re-presented; it is a path, a corridor, a place of transition and transmission. In itself it is nothing. It is only a place that is made up of the trafficking of internal and external 'events'. It is the place where the life of the city outside impinges on all that is inwardly felt and lived: the private world of memories and shared recollections, of easy-going familiarity, contests with the political and public worlds. More than anything else, it is where the past and the future intermingle, a nunc stans that can never exists on its own, independent of other realities.

Neither Here nor There

Because this unfamiliar world is so entirely different from the one you have known at home; because it offers so much that is strikingly strange in image and sound, it brushes you sometimes, if you permit yourself to be attentive, with a momnetray remembrance of things long known and long forgotten: those intagible realities of your own life. And when this breath of remembrance reaches you from beyond the abyss that separates your world from that other, that unfamiliar one, you ask yourself whether perhaps it is not herein-and only herein-the meaning of all wandering lies: to become aware of the strangeness of the world around you and therby to awaken your own , personal, forgotten reality...."
------Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca

For some people the world only becomes more familiar with time-far too familiar. It is these very same people who feel the need to break out of the world's monotony, to search out the exotic, to escape its solidity in a drug-induced dream. But-and this is what is so paradoxical-it is those very same people who have a certain type of love for the world and the security it offers. It is the warm comfort of identity, the radiant afterglow that tells us: 'I' and the world are one. For Augustine and the Church the real horror was not that the world offered a better picture of the truth, but that its charms were so seductive, that she could g so far in satiating our hunger. The world only becomes the world when we desire it so.

For others, though, the world and other people only become more opaque with time. Faced with this mystery one can do one of two things: either try and prise it open, clearly analyse, codify, classify, quantify all of that strangeness or allow it to pass, learn to understand that there are things we will never know. This latter response can, in turn, lead to a sort of fatalsim but , at its best, it can lead to a deepening sense of mystery, to an understanding that we are, by very our nature, always in-between states of being, always caught between nature and civilisation, city and desert, God and nothingness. We have but a faint memory of that Paradisal language, live a life that is always a life to come. Deep down in ourselves we know that we are strangers in this land and always will be, but another thought presses against our minds: we dimly perceive that there is no going back and that a bland future that consists of nothing but attestations of the spirit will be the end of us. We are truly neither here nor there. This exilic state brings us to tears. Are they of joy or sorrow?

Leap of Faith

The one that held acquaintance with the stars,
And wedded man to man by purest bond
Of Nature, undisturbed by space or time;
Th' other that was a God, yea many Gods,
Had voices more than all the winds, and was
A joy, a consolation, and a hope.

Visited Chiswick House today. Mind-numbingly boring. A perfect example of 18th century classicism: rational, clear spaces and perfectly aligned columns. Too much regularity can be a form of madness. The gardens, too, were immaculately kept, planned with architectural precision and all the sobriety of a geometric mind. Only the trees seemed to resist in their own way the imposition of linearity on them. The trunk of one had managed to twist itself right around itself, as if it were trying to spiral out of control; another's branches sunk to the ground , touched the earth and then in the most bizarre and fantastical fashion surged and snaked up again so that the whole branch came to resemble a giant horizontal 'S'.

There are two ways of looking life, running throught just about everything, marking out two temperaments or the two parts in us: the individualistic, atomistic vision that starts with 'I' , the lonely self, and the desire to find one's deepest instincts, live one's soul. This duality, or division has, we suspect, been with us from the very beginning: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life.

Stone, indestructible, everlasting, and abstract is the symbol of rational knowledge. It is an idea of perfection and boundedness, the lawlines of our culture, the first constructions of a mind that gradually awakens into self-consciousness. To place a stone on top of another one is also to initiate an act of remembrance, to imagine a temple, but also a grave (which is but a place of communication between life and what eludes it) . But an extreme rationalism can also lead to a fanaticsm of thought, a hypertrophy of the mind. The stones that circumscribe the hearth's fire can, in a late civilisation, become oppressive and heavy. Totalitarianism is the extension of 'home' to everywhere. Fatherland.

The fall: the Tree of Knowledge offers the promise of immortality, or an alternative way of achieving this. But Man, who is 'hasty', must approach things one step at a time..stepping stones. The rational always binds the truth to one level -even though it gives the impression of an abstract many-sidedness- creating order, harmony, and unity. A singular truth. A calm , golden circle. But at its centre is the Tree of Life, an axial symbol of all that escapes the squares of the mind; the anarchy of the heart is like her deep roots, the branches that soar up to heaven like the wings of a prayer or love. This tree, life itself, is all that cannot be captured by our systems of thought, a muddy centre that is the mythological, chaos and intuition of the universe that precedes the rational, that fires our creativity and imagination.

Our first temples, our first politics, originate here in this sacred place; a tree encircled by stones. Nature and culture, heaven and earth. Also, our first dancing grounds. Ever since that first fall we've been trying to decreate ourselves, tear ourselves away from the rigidity of thought, convince ourselves that there is a form of understanding that lies beyond analysis and 'knowledge'. But that requires a leap of faith. A faith in the uncertainties of life itself and a trust in what is unknown. And that means returning, with a child-like naivete, to simplicity and looking once again at the world and other people without any concern for perfection or imperfection. Thought and action, inward and outward, remain distinct , but united. Then, and only then, do we feel the stone, think the tree.

Often rounded, always open.

There's something about an integral intelligence that isn't pedantic, argumentative or finicky-or at least not always so. The cleverest people always know not what to say but when to say it. More importantly, it is the style of their silence that leaves a lasting impression, as if emptiness itself required a certain artisitc approach to one's personality, a learned response. Just as there are a range of voices, so are there a range of silences: one can pass over the faults one sees in one's loved ones or friends just as there is a supreme etiquette, generosity of soul, in learning to let go. Both require a sort of openness that goes beyond 'truth' or 'facts' . But always there must be an extension of the contours of our being, the ways in which we can conceive things, the depth of our perceptions, and a heightening of our awareness of the truly different.

The narrowing down of our horizons, the contraction of our hearts can, in itself, only be a phase, a possibility. Jalal cannot exist without jamal. there is a type of cleverness-an intelligence of the mind-which is like a perfect mathematical bridge, and to displace but one part of it would disrupt the whole structure. But there is another type, that of the whole person that is of sprawling nature, that sees intelligence in humour and hears music in intelligence. For a true philosopher there is no acivity from which one cannot learn. The whole earth is a mosque.

the hedgehog knows one thing but the fox knows many. Fox: quick-footed, nimble, light-hearted, often out of sight, cunning. An unhoused, roaming spirit that leaves a trail of fermenta cognitionis.

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Besides the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

------Thought-Fox, Ted Hughes

Flashes

For me, this is one of the great paintings-and whether it has Buddhist elements to it or not can only be a question of secondary importance.

Aniconism, by precluding every image inviting man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul onto an 'individualizing' form , creates a void...the quality of a contemplative emptiness. Instead of ensnaring the mind and leading it to some imaginary world , it dissolves mental 'fixations' just as contemplation of a running stream , a flame, or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward 'idols'.

Paradise is an eternal springtime, a garden perpetually in bloom, refreshed by the living waters,; it is also a final and incorruptible state like precious crystals and gold. The crystalline state is expressed in the purity of the architectural lines, the perfect geometry of the arched surfaces and the decoration in rectilinear forms; as for the celestial springtime, it blossoms in the stylized flowers and fresh, rich and subdued colours of ceramic tiles.

This "duality" is synthesised in Islam in the city and the desert, intellect and will, each of which represents a 'pole' in our life and the universe itself: being and becoming. We need to 'see' or think of the world and God. The vast cathedral of ideas and our fascination for constructing them would be inexplicable otherwise. It is this abstraction that allows us to 'get out of ourselves' . But at the same time as we want to think the stars we want to feel them. If thought 'kills' the world , or we die a little in order to think, then there are other forms of understanding that lie beyond the desire to 'know' and these are thrown up by life and experience itself. This dynamic understanding is to hear the unfolding of reality, to grasp things in statu nasciendi. The Allama would say that he still hears 'kunfa yakun' now. God is not a concept. The 'ceaseless reward' and the constant veiling and unveiling of reality is an 'image' of this unending striving.

What is such a 'state' and can we ever get a glimpse of what is, ultimately, a nomadic thought? The miraj is one such point of focus for here the Prophet (pbuh) returns to life and the world in the 'second subsistence'. These are the green waters that lie at the heart of the darkness. If we are nothing in the Face of the Divine then the Prophet shows that Islam is truly both negation and affirmation; a final state where 'love stilleth the will' but also, and eminently a life where open possibilities still lie before it, ready to be internalised so that one can say that I and my destiny are one, where every act expresses my secret: Verily towards God, for God is thy Limit. Goethe would say towards love, soaring , fading. Another word for this is wonder.

But let us put this to one side since this is a wisdom that is reserved for the few. To retun to a more contemporary example, D.H. Lawrence has this to say :

The sheer delight of a child's apperception is based on wonder; and deny it as we may, knowledge and wonder counteract one another. Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is a civilsation based on knowledge , and hostile to exprerience, is boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored...because the wonder has gone out of them.

In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round, consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide. There are no gems of the living plasm. The living plasm vibrates unspeakably, it inhales the future, it exhales the past, it is the quick of both, and yet it is neither. There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, permanent. ..Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystalisation. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. The whole tide of all life and all time suddenly heaves , and appears before us as an apparition, a revelation. A water-lily heaves herself from the flood and looks around, gleams, and is gone. We have seen the incarnation, the quick of the ever-swirling flood. We have seen the invisible. We have seen, we have touched, we have partaken of the very substance of creative change, creative mutation. ...tell me nothing of the changeless and the eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.

Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don't give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream . It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this very instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick.

The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities. ...the bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending on its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence such a bird came: whither it goes : from what solid earth it rose up, and upon what solid earth it will close its wings and settle, this is not the question. This is the question of before and after. Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.

The most superb mystery we have hardly recognised: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. The ideal-what is the ideal? A figment. An abstraction. A static abstraction , abstracted from life. It is a fragment of the before and after. It is a crystallised aspiration, or a crystallised remembrance: crystallised, set, finsihed. It is a thing set apart, in the great storehouses of eternity, the storehouses of finished things.

---Excerpts from Titus Burckhardt's Art of Islam and D.H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism

Lost in Translation

A Sunni makes it to Heaven and is shown around by an angel.
He comes to a large hall full of Christians, devoutly singing hymns.
"Christians! How did they make it up here?" he asks, exasperated.
Then he comes to another hall and it is packed with Jews.
"Jews!!! don't tell me they made it as well?"
and so on and so forth. Hindus and Buddhists and Shias....

Eventually he comes to a room with a blue door. The angel slowly opens it as he puts his finger to his lips. "Shhh".

Looking in he sees a vast hall with just one man praying there, a man that he instantly recognizes as a sunni.

"But why so quiet ?" asks the Sunni.
Angel: "Because he thinks he's the only one up here!"

A Jewish mother is playing with her son, David, on the beach when a huge wave sweeps him out to sea. She is distraught and prays to God with all of her strength.

"God, I'll do anything, name it. I'll pray for seven days and for seven nights, just bring me back my little Davie"
God eventually repents: "Oh, okay then"

And in an instant another huge wave brings back little Davie, safe and unhurt.

The woman looks at her son, then up to God, then to her son again.

God: "For Christ's sake, what's the matter now with you woman? You look so perplexed"

Mother: "ay, ay, ay. God, when you took him already he had a red hat on him"

A shia lays on his deathbed and calls for one of the local imams to his side.
"I want to become a Sunni" he tells him.

The Imam is shocked.
"But why?. You've led a holy and long life as one of the faithful"

"Yes", he replies, "but if someone is going to die I want it to be one of those bastards."


A young boy, hiding in a cupboard, sees his mother carrying on with her lover. They hear the main door opening and she says: "quick, hide in the cupboard, it's my husband". So, there they are, the kid and this man. The kid says to the man: "It's dark in here".
Man: "yeah, yeah, so what".
Kid: "So, if you don't want me to spill the beans then you better give me a hundred dollars". The man obliges.

Next week exactly the same thing happens.
Kid : "It's dark in here".
Man: "Not you again. Okay sunny, how much this time? Just keep your mouth shut. Get it."
Kid:"200 dollars"

Soon the father of the kid notices that he has all these fantastic new toys and questions him as to where he got the money from.
"A strange man gave it to me"

The father is mightily upset. "I told you not to take money from strangers, now go to confession. In the confession box he says to the priest:
"Gosh, it's dark in here"
Priest: "Listen kid, don't start that again!"

Courtesy of Marh who tragically passed away last year.

Ubo was speaking in Punjabi to a Sikhni for half an hour when she turned to him and said : are you Iranian? I kid thee not :)

Reminds me of my 'brother', Amir, who was looking for a flat over the phone. He came across someone called Mr. Xu ("Zoo"). The conversation lasted for fifteen minutes? "Do you have a girlfriend?. Yes/no?"
"You be smoking in flat. yes/no?" You pay rent on time. yes, good. And then after fifteen minutes he abruptly switched the phone off.
"What did he say?", I asked.
Amir : "he said: 'one larst quesunn: prease. you man or you woman'?"

I never quite understood all of Amir's swearing in Farsi, most of it was lost in translation.

Black Sun

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
------Rebecca West, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon

After those insipid, languid summer days, brimming with light and frivolity, autumn finally emerged like a sail boat beyond the horizon or like a sigh of relief. The great tree grew dark and heavy with the rain and the rough, unhewn stones once again seemed to resume their eternal life under the watchful black clouds. And occassionally the sun's brilliant light would burst through and illuminate the vertical sheets of silvery rain so that the whole scene was quite unreal; it was as if nature, tired of the monotony and regularity of the seasons, had decided to display a full-hand with an exuberance and dazzling style that underlied the abundance and sheer range of all her possibilities.

In England one often has such spectacles before the end of the day but they never last for more than tewnty minutes. Before the earth regains her composure and tranquility and the slow seepage of reality starts, before all of the birds have made their way home, the light will flare up like this, so that the shadows will seem more real, hauntingly so, than all the objects in the world. And one is not sure if it is morning or evening.

The swami looked troubled by this, thrown off kilter, as if she had just seen an solar eclipse. It is morning, it is night; it is the same sky that we look at. But if you are young you view such a scene with hope, knowing that the sun will come to fill the day; if you are old, then this very same sky will fill you with dread as you come to realise that everything is quietly slipping back into darkness and the unknown.

Half of me longed for those blazoned summer days, null, meaningless even, but deathless....

A Testament to the Unnoticed

You can't do anything if you don't have anything. And, what's the point of living if you're not going to do anything?I'm usually buying towards a goal. I have something in mind, I know what gear I need, and with each new thing I'm 1 step closer to getting to do it. Like, this year is mountaineering, and I need all kinds of neat, new stuff if I want to be able to go next year, I need to start picking it all up now. Weeee.

I couldn't have made this up if I had tried. I remember reading Bacon saying that western man was restless in an empty room and I can now understand that, even if its roots are as obscure as ever. Of course, it's a gross generalisation to portray the "East" as 'static' or 'contemplative' and the "west" as 'dynamic ' and 'restless' but maybe this isn't such a false depiction in so far as it conveys at least some of the tendencies of the modern soul.

And why did you climb this mountain?
Because it was there.

To me, nothing suggests the complete metaphysical nullity of our age more than these words. Underlying it is a profound boredom, a dullness of spirit that sporadically comes to life in a desperate attempt to reaffirm a sense of existence , or at least a concern with existence. It is a paradox of our times that we should place such great emphasis on autonomy and freedom and yet be so caught up in the whirl of getting and spending. Marx was right to suggest that capitalism would replace a dependence on other people by a dependence on goods. One still has to come to terms with the unenviable possibility that many of our freedoms are actually metamorphosising into the most terrible of addictions, a tyranny of the desiring self.

This cult of action-doing something, anything-goes hand in hand with a bleak sense of meaninglessness. In an indifferent universe, one devoid of any intrinsic beauty or norms, one has to create one's own values. For the existentialist, the very act of 'willing' is all that counts-and it matters little whether that is an angelic or a demonic will, all that is of significance is the skill and inventiveness dispalyed, the sheer urgency and authenticity of the striving. It is as if one were living in a vacuum and that life itself had become a 'problem'. Intrpospection, inwardness and asceticism, like their opposite, wild hedonism, stem from the same disdain for the world, the same desire to escape from it. This is, as Hannah Arendt saw so clearly, the oddest of the consequences of the banishing of the 'other world': it is the moderns who flee the world-either in abstractions , fantastical illusions, hallucinogenic dreams, or in the frenetic search for the exotic:
Been there, done that.

Of course, this is an era where people pride themselves on their independence from 'authority', on rebelling against bourgeois norms and conventions, and in their ability to shock society and express themselves. Except that it is this very transgression against established hierarchies that is desired and produced by late capitalism. Shopping is now seen as an act of freedom and perhaps, even, as the last symbol of our defining characteristic: the ability to choose. The products themselves have come to take on magical, talismanic qualities, with their ability to say something about the innermost recesses of our soul and accurately express who and what we are !

We are caught between a number of contraditctory impulses: a paralysing self-consciousness, indifference, indolence, and ambivalence , an inclination to anonymity, co-exists with a desire to be "useful", to escape the ordirariness and mediocrity, of a suburban life where one could pass one's life unnoticed. But perhaps they are connected in that the dull stillness, the ennui of a world that has been de-sacralized and levelled down, pushes us ever further to extremes, to spectacular entertainment, a sensuous intoxication, and a narcotic of gold that "kills time". But there is a certain weariness, jadedness in all these less than convincing efforts.

The isolation and anxiety that may have driven a previous generation to be besotted by abstract ideologies, to be entranced by the mystique of authoritative voices, is really a thing of the past in all likelihood. For us, there can only be indifference to politics and a numbing conformity. As in the Monty Python sketch, we all claim that we are individuals...in unison!

Nietzsche, with his prophetic insight, had predicted that in the last days of our civilisation western man would want, more than anything, to renounce desire. We have come to painfully to realise that our mountain of things are every bit as ephemeral as our pleasures and that the relentless desire for more and more has exacted a heavy price on our relation with nature and our solidarity with other people.


Some of my favourite books: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/richpub/listmania/byauthor/A5JA3ZONCCADY/202-3443077-7148600

The Disinherited Mind

Jede dumpfe Umkehr der Welt hat solche Enterbte, denen das Frühere nicht und noch nicht das Nächste gehört
---Rilke

I was listening to a great Radio 4 programme in the morning which featured some folk music - Ewan McColl singing of the hardships of the industrial age and the Irish fiddler, John Doherty. After that, there was a wonderful blues' song, Black, Brown and White by Big Bill Broonzy. Perhaps part of the current nostalgia for folk is understandable against the background of an England that is slowly slipping away, receding to a memory vault that is nothing but an England of the mind. *

Whether folk art or music can be sustained in essentially different social conditions is a moot point. Can a sense of "place" (Raymond Williams) survive when the frenzy of capitalism is hell-bent on undermining the very notion of stability and continuity? "All that is solid melts into air".

As is the case with religion, without a framework of reference, what Simone Weil would call "bridges", can we have anything but fragmentay experiences? The very possibility of "experience" is thrown into question and a certain shallowness comes to the fore. Experience, like character, depends ultimately on memory, transmission, and communicability; a shared set of norms, stories, and language, the things that have an inextricable, a hidden, but deep rooted affinity with the land are passed down from generation to generation as if the most precious of possessions. To the western mind, or more specifically, the modern mind, such an idea smacks of collectivism and goes against the grain of modern thought which starts with the 'I'.

But for the ancient heart existence and the world are given, as is language and the rules we work within. The "muddy centre" that is there before us. We are, therefore I can think. This is what Levinas would call the infinite being placed in us. Ours is not , then, a search for knowledge but acknowledgement.

"The epaisseur opaque of a life centred on nothing but itself, a sort of weightless irrelevance. Without testament, without tradition-which selects and names, which hands down and preserves , which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is-there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future."
-----Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future.

"Since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity."
Tocqueville

The American woodsman is interested in nothing. Any notion of sensitivity is foreign to him. Those boughs so elegantly sprouted by nature, the fine foliage, the bright colour that enlivens a part of the forest, the deeper green that darkens another part of it-all this means nothing to him. He has no memories to call upon in any particular place. His only thought is for the number of ax-strokes required to chop down a tree. He has never planted anything; he does not know such pleasures. Any tree that he plants is worthless to him, because he will never see it when it has grown sufficiently large to be chopped down. Destruction is what keeps him alive. Destruction is everywhere; hence every place suits him. He cares nothing for the field where he has done his work, because his work is only toil and no idea of sweetness is associated with it. What emerges from his hands does not pass through all the stages of growth that so touch the farmer's heart. He does not follow the destiny of his products...he has no regrets about leaving the place he has dwelled in for years.

And they [the Fishermen] have no love for any particular place and know the land only by the ugly house where they live....this man is a trigger of technical violence : his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci from which it can hang images...Woodsman and Fisherman are ...united in their hatred for the earth that still generously envelops them. It is a hatred for all that grows and that, in growing, becomes sweet and fades. Their pace is different from everyone else's: they strike blows, they pull and tug-gestures that are a metaphor for those of the gambler who rolls the dice. And in their devotion to the blow lies their cosmopolitan mission: the blow is the same everywhere ; the plant has the flavour of a single place. ..the citoyens seemed archaic and out-of-date compared to these two new characters, who, beyond the frontier, were acting out the gestures of burgeoning history.
---Talleyrand, cited in Roberto Calasso's Ruin of Kasch

*
I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.-
But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,
That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

---Larkin

Via Negativa

I have the habit of starting my sentences with the word 'No'..."no, but..." or "no, not really." Perhaps there's a set of words or thoughts that one inherits from a particular place or from one's ancestors, a turn of phrase that encpasulates something about one's being and that is transmitted from one generation to the other, sometimes knowingly but mostly out of the reach of consciousness. Only in moments of pure stillness or exile does one "catch oneslef"- to take up that wonderfully evocative Buddhist way of speaking-using such words. Does one have to be estranged from oneself and one's times to see things clearly?

I rememeber speaking with my uncle and him saying, "I've just realised b, you're stuck in la ('negation) ". There was more truth in this than I cared to admit. And then he told me how the Allama had said that Nietzsche was only half a muslim since he had taken negation to be a final destination when it was only a stepping stone in the stream of life, a "station" that one passes through.

God is not God. God is not God. God is not God. He is. He is before the sign that signals him. Before designation. He is the void before the void, thought before thought; thus also the unthought before the unthought-as if there were a nothing before the nothing. He is the cry before the cry, the trembling before the trembling.
He is the night without night , the day without day. The look before the look, the listening before the listening.
He is the air before breathing..Not yet wind, but light air, indifferent in its
primitive infinity.
------Jabes, in Desert, Ethos, Abandonement.

But there are different things that we negate and different ways of doing so-some legitimate, some not so. No, even at the very least we can say that a complete 'nilling' is not possible since this too is our act and therefore an affirmation of existence (the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God).

But is there a way of freely praising? Rumi would say that free will itself is the ability to praise God for His Beneficence.

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?
-----W.H. Auden

What is it that we moderns want to negate. God? That goes without saying.
Part of us wants to know for oneself, to know oneself and not have a witness to our being, an acknowledgement. Escape. The old story. But wither shall I flee?
To see the world as it is, in pure contingency, from a distance: the Fall. We land with a thump and rub our heads.

All philosophy, thinking, begins with awe and wonder. But to think is "to die a little" to the world so that one does not die completely. Put negatively, is thought anything but the staving off of death? Death is the point of all points.

The philosopher does not permit his wonder stand as it is, to be released into the flow of life. Of necessity, he must "hook" the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought's "object" and "subject" from the flow of life and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates and is perpetuated in the motionless mirror of his meditation; that is in the subject. He has it well-hooked; it is securely fastened and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive, statuesque, subjugated."

The solution and dissolution of their wonder is at hand-the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a wonder to eachother; they are in the very heart of wonder. Life becomes numb in the face of death and dies. The wonder is unravelled . And it was life itself that brought the solution.
---Franz Rosenzweig.

Gnostic Nation

By mid-week do you dream of the weekend and a few days of freedom from the drudgery of work? Do you think of a holiday as an ‘escape’? And do you think that politicians are hopelessly detached from the “real world”? If so, then maybe you have, like the rest of us, Gnostic leanings.

But what does an ancient heterodox religious movement have to do with our 21st century lives and can we really draw such historical parallels? It has become fashionable to think of our lives as similar to those of the men and women of Late Antiquity. In politics it has become a commonplace to talk of the emerging system of governance in terms of “Empire” and to view America as a new hyper-power to rival Rome in terms of its cultural influence, military power and in its megalomania. It is not, however, just the current Bush administration that would have had Gibbon writing about fantasy and folly for in some sense the growth of religious fundamentalism is also a sign of the ‘virtualisation’ of politics, driven as it is by a rejection of the norms of history, tradition and community.

With the rapid emergence of China and India fears of decline are not totally misplaced. There is an uncanny feeling that we’re living in the autumn days of a civilisation, and that there are, as George Steiner points out, no new beginnings. As with the decline of Roman Empire, there’s the feeling that things are coming undone not just because of military overstretch but because there’s a loss of nerve, a radical turning inward: in short, a new Gnostic age is upon us.

The essential feature of Gnosticism according to the thinker Hans Jonas was the sense that the individual was a lonely, atomised, self “thrown into” a hostile world that is not of his own making. One consequence of this radical dualism was that Nature and the world were devoid of any intrinsic standards or values and that they were nothing but a realm of force and power.-a view that our modern scientific outlook has done little to negate. As with the first Gnosticism, we find ourselves isolated, alienated in a world from which God is utterly remote and if not dead, then at least seriously ill. For Gnostics, ancient and modern, truth and salvation come from within, from knowledge (“gnosis”) of the divine spark that is surrounded by an infernal order, the satanic mills.

One could endlessly speculate on the causes of this new mood: urbanisation, cosmopolitan rootless-ness and mutli-culturalism, globalisation, science and technology: all seem equally strong candidates. Perhaps the most important is our obsession with personal happiness and pleasure, as if the body and our raw sensations were our defining and only reality. And modern-day consumerism, with its internet shopping and the ‘no-places’ that are the shopping malls, only fuel this extreme sense of inwardness.

The surest sign that we’re living in a Gnostic age is the development of an unbridled individualism in what is coming to be called ‘the century of the self’; the coming of age of a ‘me-generation’ that is, as Simmel would say of the meteropolitans, blasé about the world around them; we seem to be bewitched by private lives-our own and that of others- and this is manifested in our fascination with celebrities and the vogue for biographies.

But perhaps the clearest indicators that we’re entering a new Gnostic age come from popular culture. One can hardly fail to escape the huge interest in ghosts, angels, near-death experiences, new age cults, Sufism and contact with the ‘spiritual world’. In all of these cases one can detect a profound dissatisfaction with organized religion which is deemed to be too politicised, ritualistic or ‘worldy’. Salvation lies within, says the prison governor in the immensely popular film, The Shawshank Redemption.

Recent television programmes and films have also captured this Gnostic feeling.
The cult programme ‘the X-files’ specialised in informing us that the world was not quite what it seemed. Phrases such as ‘trust no-one’ and ‘the truth is out there’ spoke of a deep suspicion of the world. It was as if the world itself was one big conspiracy theory. Such a view is mirrored in our penchant for all sorts of conspiracy theories-from crazy Zionist ones to staged moon landings to the current blockbuster, The Da-Vinci Code. And the Gnostic idea that reality as we know it is actually being manipulated by some alien force was a central theme of major films like the Matrix and The Truman show. But if you are truly a modern and not an ancient Gnostic, then your reaction to this article will have to be one of sheer indifference. Did I hear you say yeah, like, whatever?

62

To our minds there's something unsettling about our love of repetition, rituals, set phrases, and cliches. It is a variation on the horror we feel towards what we initially think of as random events but that gradually start to appear with a diconcerting regularity. It is as if inanimate matter pre-figured or mirrored our own state of soul, and the pattern of events said something about the meaning of our lives: a remnant of primitive thinking, animism, that must be expunged if we are to have 'clear and distinct' ideas. 62.

This world of ours, a Parmenedian block universe, has exhausted all possibilities but yet still somehow manages to point to something other than itself.

But it is not just the poets who suffer from this excess of meaning; the medieval imagination was saturated with a vast array of interconnecting, interlacing and overlapping systems of thought, feeling and sense. We, too, are haunted by the uncanny, and a half-formed thought that an invisible thread links 'habitat' with 'habitus' lingers on. In addition to the vague intuition that we're only saying and thinking what other people have already thought and said, there's an eerie sense of deja vu, a dark anxiety that in a world that is governed by a strict mechanism-where even chance follows statsitical laws-the wildest of co-incidences are something to be expected. If the universe has no beginning then we have been through an infinity of similar moments.

I think back to my English Literature teacher, the highly respected Usmaani saahib, who with his balding grey head and thick black square glasses had something of a slightly comical look about him. A person whose soul was ill at ease with the modern era, but who nevertheless was able to remain blissfully unaware of the flow of time by immersing himself in his books. He had an odd sense pride in his deep affinities with an England that only existed in the mind: Morris Minor's, cricket whites, and an idealized 1950's view of a profoundly moral and static society. "The greatest evil of our times," he once lectured the whole school , " is boiled sweets". But I also remember his keen insights when it came to Hardy.

"Isn't it weird, slightly unbelievable even, that so many things should slot into place just at the right moment?" asked on student. "It is," he continued , "as if divine Providence, and not the character of Gabriel Oak, is the main spring of action. "

"Yes, " came the reply, "it certainly looks like that at first glance. If one takes a slice of life, any life, then any event appears to be truly random, a pure co-incidence. If one were to look at the event and see it as but one of many in a whole series of occurrences then it would lose all of its strangeness and uniqueness; either that or each one would come to take on a magical, special, significance. But more than this, any life is nothing but the interweaving of the predictable with the unpredicatable. Over the span of a 'whole life' one should learn to expect the unexpected. "

I don't know how many of us understood this at the time. It was a lazy summer's day and his voice had tapered off towards the end, floating like a cloud into the empty sky.

My thoughts turn back to something else someone said but that I only now feel the urge to recall. It was an old shaykh from the deserts of Mauritannia. The lecture itself was rather dry and bland, and he spoke in a matter-of-fact, monotnous tone. I think that he himself realised that his time was running out; in a world of soundbytes and instant knowledge, there seemed to be little point to the patient, slow truth of a classically trained scholar. The painstaking examination of evidence, the analysis of ancient, dusty parchments and obscure legal rulings were hardly things that were likely to catch the imagination of a modern-day audience.

On the whole it was an uneventful talk. The Shaykh was mindful of the centuries that stood between him and us. His words on pluralism, the necessity of diversity-at a political and metaphysical level-were greeted with a shuffling of feet. This reminded me of what another shaykh had once said:

There was once a great shaykh who started to address a huge gathering by asking who knew what he was going to talk about today. Everyone raised their hands.

"Then there's no need for me to say anything more."

The following week he asked the same question and this time, aware of what had happened the previous occassion, everyone kept their hands down.

"How can I talk to you if you don't even know what I'm talking about?!"

A week later and the same question.

The crowd had now swelled, since he was one of the most reputable scholars in the whole land. This time, they thought, they would get the better of him. Half of the vast crowd raised their hands.

"Well, then I suggest the half that knows tells the half that doesn't. What need is there for me!"

Anyway, our Shaykh, the Shaykh of the desert and the flowing black robes, drew the discussion to a conclusion and looked unsatisfied with the whole experience. Then someone from the audience asked a question regarding who could legitimately interpret the Holy text. The Shaykh's eyes lit up and his whole being became animated.

"This is an obscure and technical point so I'll only give you a short answer "...and one could see his mind sifting through a library of thoughts and accumulated knowledge. although he was talking about texts quite a few of us came away with the impression that he could just as well have been talking about a chapter in our lives:

"Only someone who has an understanding of the particular text , its specific meaning- the literal as well as the allegorical , the general spirit of the whole book and how the specific is related to the universal import of the verse, how the verse is related to other verses and general spirit of the whole book; someone who has a profound knowledge of the language and of the circumstances-political, social, economic-in which each verse was revealed. somone who knew which verse was revealed when and someone who understands the times we now live in; someone who is at one with the land from which he comes...only such a person is qualified to speak. But this is the short answer...."

Omkara

I am not what I am

What drives him? Not malice or envy or hatred-these are all too conventional. What we have here is something far more ambiguous, far more interesting. It is the perennial outsider's contempt for the circle of sunshine that people find and build around themselves. The solidity of their lives, their ability to find meaning and love repulses him who lacks all seriousness, all gravitas. He views everything as if it were a game, a cosmic play. He has no desire to usurp the position of anyone else-that would only be to enter the fray. Far better to mock the certainties of life from its fringes, to weave the element of the absurd into its pattern. A trickster, a joker, becomes god-like by introducing chance, superficiality, and folly into human affairs....

I've given up trying to finish Herzog. I've started the book three times now but to no avail. It's far too rambling, disjointed. Instead, I've taken to choosing books on the quality of the print and the typeset-the most arbitrary of things. Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Bellow's Dangling Man. By a quirk of fate, all seem to be dealing with the numbness of the ordinary, the crumbling of the familiar world around us. What look like the most tangible of realities turn out to be only a cover for something else.

General Z and the Charm of Tyranny

If ever there was a demonstration of the curious, but grim and inescapable fact that the majority of mankind can easily be duped by the most absurd and fantastistical of illusions then it came in a conversation I had with a friend....
But the General was, despite all that can be said against him, a profoundly religious and humble man. Why, don't you know that he used to pray five times a day?

And as if to reconfirm my gravest fears he went on:

The Taleban have been misunderstood by the westren media and "farangis" like you; they represent "pure" Islam, a return to simplicity and a shunning of all "innovation,"of all that is friviolous and extraneous to a good life. There is, finally, tranquility and order in that war-torn country. Surely not even you can deny this? There is no fear of theft and soon, as is the case in Saudi Arabia, people will be able to leave their doors open again without any worries. People in your country are riddled with uncertainties and doubt, a meaningless existence and a scepticism towards other people; here, everyone-and especially the womenfolk- knows their place in the scheme of things.

It seemed pointless to continue. But what exactly was the allure of order, authority, tyranny, finding one's "place"- in him and in all of us? Was there something to be said for the old, closed world of narrow assurances, a charm that would partly explain our fascination with authoritative voices (Susan Sontag). Perhaps the re-emergence of conservatism and tribalism, or at least its appeal, was that in a chaotic and globalising world made up of the ceaseless flux of events and the emergence of an ever-new formless reality one could close the gates on a rapidly changing world, withdraw into one's private shell. Conformity and the creature-warmth of the crowd...perfect anonymity. We live in a shape-shifter's reality, where the stage-set is continuously being changed. Last orders, gentlemen.

Should we distinguish on the one hand the desire for authority, stability, and order-as well as the leaders who can both represent and deliver these things-and the sympathy and blind allegiance that some people can show for a tyrannical leader (Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong)? Are we talking about a difference in degree or kind here?

The strongman , the authoritative voice that knows how to make decisive decisions, whose will is the force of law, outside the bounds of reason. A pillar of strength, standing resolutely against economic dissolution, social fragmentation, moral decadence and the chaos that run amok in the cities, brought on by the cosmopolitan intellectuals, the cultural litterati and the avant garde. Amidst the collapse of, the draining away of meaning from life, the Great Leader unites us all again in these end of days: he is the body politic: l'etat, c'est moi.

But from where does he derive his strength? For some, he is a veritable force of Nature, a shaman priest-king born under an auspicious star, the representation of a mighty Will, an elemental power that is thrown up by the vortex of History...he is, in short, nothing less than the manifestation of a people's Destiny. A millenarian king, a messianic saviour who comes to redeem time, to rid the earth of corruption and impurity, whose very presence signals the beginning of a new age, a utopian moment. In the tradition of those authoritarian sages, holy saviours he commands obedience because of his ability to embody the future of his people and the land.

The Leader offers hope of a great leap forward, a dazzling and glorious existence and not the mundane, bourgeois idea of piecemeal improvement and reform that underlies democratic politics. But these are sociological explanations. Is there something in our psychological make-up that pre-disposes us to the reneging of our independence and autonomy. Do people actually desire to be slaves, to fall back into nothingness or child-like dependency?

This is a thought that is too disturbing to contemplate and must be banished. The same applies to Miligram's Stanford experiments. But the questions simply won't go away. The return of the repressed.

The Narcissist as the Great Leader: the independent self who needs no other. A shining, glamourous, luminous tyrant who is beyond all need. If we love him that can only be for our own good. The singular focus of all devotion and praise, a whole and perfect being in this world of fragmentary, incomplete and marginal selves.

It seems that the tyrant, then, is associated with a complex of ideas that one could subsume under the heading of arcadia: he is the re-incarnation of the ancestor, the giant who walked alongside the foosteps of men, a Father of the Nation. He brings us back to the mythical age, a time when the purity of the tribe was unblemished by contact with foreigners and strangers and politics was still the politics of blood, the hearth, and ancient lineages. This ability to re-establish a pattern in people's lives -social harmony-is taken to be a quasi-divine function. But he does so by turning the tables, by rebeling against the anarchy of all that precedes him; he is a Revolutionary hero, a visionary who can 'read' the spirit of the times.

But why should so many ordinary, law-abiding, fundamentally moral and decent people be drawn to such a character? How does he mesmerize the masses, what explains the unquestioning devotion that he commands? With his death people often reflect and come to the conclusion that they had been living in a dream, a trance-like state, their senses lulled by his brilliant oratorical skills, or charisma. Compared to the prosaic, middling lives obsessed with 'getting and spending' the tyrant shows up the pettiness of all such aspirations. Once again the world can be perceived in black and white, and enemies can be recognised for what they are. His popularity is energized by our love of unity, seamless order, homogeneity, and purity. To transfer all of one's responsibilities on to someone 'higher', some cause greater than oneself, the desire to be nothing exists side by side with the tyrant's desire to dominate, to project himself in countless megalomaniacal ways. And we go along with this, content that the light is shone on the Great Leader and not on us, ignoring the massacres and the purges; long-standing friendships are torn apart in amatter of days as suspicion and recrimination and simmering tensions are allowed to come to the surface. Allegiance and loyalty cannot be divided.

The emergence of the Great Leader is greeted with great fanfare. A return to the boundedness of pre-lapsarian times is heralded as a triumph. Fence in existence, the builder of walls, the distributer of power. Nomos and Polis.
He inaugurates a politics of the heroic future now, establishing heaven-on-earth. Redemption in an all or nothing world. The politics of the theatre comes to replace one of pragmatic and rational concerns; it is based on anger, fear, suspicion, cruelty, and instinct rather than reason, compromise and scepticism. It can only succeed by infantilizing large sections of the population. But, ultimately, such a possibility depends on the 'sacralization' of categories in the 19th century: race, class, nation usurp the palce of the divine. Nazism, with its neo-barbarism, has one foot in Teutionic myth.

From Kadare's ' The Successor' :

Modern tyrannical power is constructed backwards and is deliberately ambiguous (as in a dream, one has to interpret it starting from the end). Power is nothing but the signature to events. The Great Leader's strength is not determined by his ability to stand opposed to the individual as a semi-divine, superhuman 'other'. Power is not hierarchial but total and ubiquitous. The individual is enclosed in a reality from which he cannot escape, paralysed by indecision, never sure which of the myriad doors is the real way out since each one looks equally enticing. It is a world of cul-de-sacs and bridges and paths that lead nowhere. He has the snaeaking suspicion that each one, like his howls of protest are actually part of the system orf ruse and deception. The more he struggles, the more deeply embroiled he becomes in the nexus of power relations. The ultimate symbol of this type of power is the labyrinth, Piranesi's prison, sybilline and oracular, complex warren-like corridors peopled by bureaucrats, functionaries, and pen-pushers. The banality of evil.

It is not the case that knowledge is power. The hold of the Great Leader on us is predicated on our inability to say or know anything about his power; he is shrouded in a veil of mystery, his power is everywhere and nowhere. The most insignificant detail comes to be invested with the most wonderous meaning. The steel of his power lies in his ability to generate and calculate dissonance, ambiguity. We are caught in his web, bewitched by the spell he casts.

But ultimately, the true basis of his power rests in his ability to convince us , to 'fake it'. Our allegiance to a false god is what sustains the illusionist...it is our desire to believe in the spectacle before our eyes. As in Oz we are taken in by the brilliant mechanism of power itself, the dazzling display of magical thinking. But it is always because we wanted to be seduced by the splendour of the fictions of our soul that we could be so entranced.

Candyfloss, Sugar-Coated Dreams

"Are you going to Kuwait?" he said sheepishly, knowing full well that I was stranded, like him, in this God-forsaken airport, its roof splashed with psychedelic colours and its sad and pensive Arabs looking rather forlorn. They mulled about with that vacant stare of theirs, one that was broken only by the gold and the glitz that was reflected by the glass casings of the small booths that packed this tiny airport like so many honeycomb cells. Against my better instincts I asked him what he was reading. Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicles. That opened the door and I soon learnt that he was from Harvard and Aitchison, my old school.

"Let's get out of this shiny, plastic sweet shop and see the city" he contiued. I needed no prompting since I was feeling slightly nauseous. On the way out, we bumped into A, from LUMS, my university. She was reading The Alchemist, and despite our derision claimed that it was actually a good read: "everything can be changed into something else." Three Lahoris, caught in a no-man's world. There was only one thing for it: head for the best restaurant in town...

"What is there to see?" , we asked the Indian receptionist at the hotel. He pointed to a large map which, apart from a few blue squares and miniature depictions of mosques was, as far as I could tell, largely made up of empty spaces and dotted lines. It was as if the spirit of the desert had, by some magic process of osmosis, permeated into the city as well. This went some way to enhance that uneasy feeling that tugged at us: there was something quite unreal about every experience, as if we had walked on to some stage-set of a movie. Could it be that the blue squares were really watering wells and that they, with their dark interiors, hidden from the surface realities were, like the mosques, the only solid things in this candy-flossed hallucination?

"There is being good shopping here" he said as he pointed to the outer rim of the desert within a desert.

"And over here?" we inquired, looking hopefully at what appeared like a few buildings.

"Not so cheap shopping there"

We decided to head off nevertheless, determined to walk there (when we told him we wanted to walk and get a feel of the city he laughed uncontrollably, like a child. "Yes. Feet is good".

We passed a number of tattered shops ("moving phones" read the signboard..i.e mobile phones). Very soon we found ourselves walking along an endless six-lane highway under a relentless sun and a cloudless and monotonous sky. We now understood why the Indian laughed so voraciously and when I thought of that silly , teethy grinning mouth of his I couldn't but help think that there was something sinister in it all. We passed a few motels, brightly lit with large, ghastly blue and red neon lights and an occasional 'diner' ; a number of cadillacs whizzed by, and we kept our heads down to avoid the withering gaze of the arabs. With great endeavour we tried to convince ourselves that we were not back in 1950's America. I saw A rub her eyes as if in disbelief. Had we walked into another time zone when we stepped out of the airport? How sad it was to see the Arabs living the dream of another people...

Late capitalism could never be satisfied with plain and simple desire since it always suggested the idea of proportion and was invaraibly associated with the world, which was finite. What was needed was something else, some new type of infinity: unbridled imagination, wishes and fantasies of all and any kind. A virtual reality where the mind is given free play...like Dubai, Las Vegas, where the distinction between appearance and reality dissolves to the clink clink of money, where the wilderness of the desert, the frontier, has moved inwards and pleasure, like everything else, was but the most intense and yet fleeting of sensations. Or Singapore... http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no6/frank.html

Ero, guro, nanosensu.

Murakami Takashi: Post-war Japan was givemn life and nurtured by America..We were shown that the true meaning of life is meaninglessness, and were taught to live without thought. Our society and hierarchies were dismantled . We were forced into a system that does not produce "adults"...regardless of winning or losing the war, the bottom line is that for the past sixty years, Japan has been a testing ground for an American-style capitalist economy, protected in a grrenhouse, nurtured and bloated to the point of explosion. The results are so bizarre, they're perfect. Whatever the true intentions that underlie "Little Boy, " the nickname for Hiroshima's atomic bomb, we Japanese are truly, deeply, pampered children. We throw constant tantrums while enthralled by our own cuteness.

Other Side of the Pond

"Have a nice day!"
"Er..yes. I will surely try to do so"

At first I thought that this was a one-off but very soon I realised that everyone was pleasant, beaming with confidence and optimism-except for the blacks, that is. In comparison, old world etiquette seemed just a bit shabby and contrived, a mask that covered the fissures in one's soul and that created an infinite distance between people.

At the shopping mall:
"Can I help you Sir?"
Did she say 'Sir'? No-one says "Sir" , unless they're being sarcastic: you are a cad and a scoundrel, Sir.

How different from a conversation one might expect in a store in England.
"Good morning"
"Is it?"
"Excuse me, do you work here, I'm looking..?"
"What?"
"I said, do you work here?"
with a shrug of the shoulders: "So they tell me"

No, there was something to be said for this lightly worn superficiality and new world exuberance.

I reject the 'depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a veritable driving-hall crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics. (Grosz).

But pretty soon this relentless desire to to be in a permanent state of happiness began to oppress my melancholic soul, grate on my nerves. On the television all one could see was smiley happy people, vacuous and sickly-sweet: weathermen tracing the path of a hurricane, some floozy selling a weight-loss product or a newscaster describing a massacre, it made no difference, one and all carried with them this ridiculous Little-House-on-the Prairie naivete. Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. Let's forget the intellect bit, buddy. I began to clench my fists...unfenced existence indeed.

Back at the house the kid sat there devouring a huge tub of chocolate-chip ice-cream. I just looked at him as he wolfed it down. There was more food in their steel fridge-which I mistook for a cupboard- than in the whole of Western Africa. Eventually he stopped, looked up with one eye (the other still fixed on the spoon) and said: this is my favourite ice-cream. This was a word I heard a lot: this is my space, my rights, my life. Me, myself and I. One wondered how much of modern identity was dependent on this sense of private property. My car, my house..all extensions of my personality.

But despite the staggering abundance of goods, the unwavering supply of gadgets and fads, there was something terribly depressing, dull even, in this world of plenty. A second glance convinced me that people weren't that happy or self-confident after all; with the chants U S A... , U S A at the stadiums I sensed a profound tribalism, a desire, a need to believe in something, anything, anything but this stifling, claustrophobic, small-town, shopping-mall numbness of the spirit. The hero worship of the President was no less surprising. The desire to project all greatness on to the Leader. Freud would have understood that. And was there something in what Norman Mailer said about the war on Iraq: the re-assertion of a wounded white man's pride: first the blacks, then women and now all that post-modern crap and relativism. No, we kicked their ass!

It always comes as a surprise to learn just how religious Americans are. A mullah in Pakistan told me that they are our "natural" allies against the kufr Communists. But even the religion is a kind of do-it-youreslf, self-reliance, form of therapy, neatly packaged by a slick media machine. Jesus loves you! How reassuring. Which car would Jesus drive. Wealth was a sign of God's blessing. No wonder all those poor black people looked so miserable!

I thought back to R, that giant of a man from Washington State, a Protestant missionary in Pakistan who never had an unkind word for anyone. We had spent hours convincing him that ikons were legitimate expressions of faith. The irony of it all, a sunni and a shia arguing for Christian symbolism! God is Love. God is Peace. He gave me some books full of cartoons to prove it so as well. I am a sinner. We're all sinners...can't you see that?!? I felt like agreeing with him because he was nearly in tears. "Aw shucks, you don't think God likes it when we kill other people d'ya? Violence is a sin I tell ya" (It transpired that just about everything one did in this world was a mortal wound to our flesh and spirit).

"But what about Hiroshima and Nagasaki then?"
"No, that was different."

But the strangest moment came when K, the secretary, had a mild heart attack. R placed his hand on his shoulder and started:
"In the name of Christ our Saviour I say heal thee". This he mumbled to himself in an ever more fevered pitch until we suggested that a hospital might be, just might be, a better option. He looked forlorn. He had once, through prayer, got one of his legs -which was six inches shorter than the other-to grow to the same length as the longer one.

And then there was the love of confession, the mania for for baring one's soul. It only took two minutes before one would learn of their "relationships" (a favourite word) and how, as Larkin would say, their parents had fucked them up. I felt the gaze of all those in the room on me, as if they expected some sort of personal revelation as well. All of a sudden old world masks looked quite appealing....

Insecurity reigns. Almost everyone hates his job...books on how to be happy, how to win friends, how to obtain peace of mind, how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.

In addition to this I saw reams of books on therapy, Self-fulfillment, stress management, books on how to release the inner spirit in you, Deepak Chopra and other charlatans, peddling their Oprah-like quick-fit psycho-babble for a dime: How to Find the Creative You, The Zen of Gardening, The Zen of Politics, the Zen of Everything Else, Tantric Sex, Self Assertiveness: 23 easy steps, How to Build Self-Esteem, How to Cope When you Fail to Build up Self- Esteem, Rumi for Beginners and Islam for Dummies, Shiatsu, Pooh and the Art of Philosophy. Not to mention the penchant for personal tragedies: How I had to Chop my Own Arm Off ...but I survived. Survival was big dollars. Surviving a crisis was what, it appeared, all people seemed to do: the crisis of marriage, obesity, divorce, childhood, adulthood, motherhood, nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, of finding out that one's dad is gay or one's mother is an alien.

Books on Fear and Terrorism. Fear was now an "industry". Be afraid. Be very afraid. Gone are the days of apple pie and picket fences. But it's always been like that: first the Catholics, then the witches, then the niggers and the commies, jews, beatniks and the washed-up, drugged-out sixties liberals, then the lesbians and the f-or-n-i-c-a-t-o-r-s, and these crazed towel-heads from the caves of the Middle East (Afghanistan). God, why are you doing this to us? Why do they hate us?

Democracy. Freedom. Democracy. No, fuck, it was freedom.

And the solution? don't give it a second thought. Go to Disney Land and spend your way out of it.

This preoccupation with the lonely, isolated self, this intoxication of the self, was making me feel queasy. I needed to get back to good old fashioned hypocrisy and old world deceit.

(Quotations from 'The Rush For Second Place', W.Gaddis; Norman Mailer's article can be found at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16470 )

Happy Accidents

Beauty is the promise of happiness
------Stendhal

An elusive happiness that is always just out of reach and that is the reason for the strange melancholy often haunting inhabitants of democracies, and that disgust with life sometimes gripping them in calm and easy circumstances.
---- De Tocqueville



Much of the current debate on happiness seems to revolve around what things go towards making a happy life. The issue becomes one of ranking the things that matter to us - meaningful relations, good health, education, job satisfaction, lots of money, the life of the mind - in order of importance, and trying to decide which institutions - the state, the market, the family - are in the best position to deliver them.

But perhaps another, more basic question gets passed over in all of this. Namely: should we think of life essentially in terms of happiness, and what exactly is this fascination with it?

Despite Nietzsche's claim that only the Englishman seeks happiness, the drive to feel good seems to be a universal preoccupation found in diverse societies over vast tracts of time. At its most basic, the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure may be hardwired into our nature, a mechanism that ensures our survival as a species.

At a more sophisticated level, for some people, happiness lies in the search for a "golden age": a time of plenty and abundance when we were not defined by what we lacked. Attempts at achieving happiness become variations on this theme of a return to lost purity, from the religious idea of "the garden", to the secular retreat, to rural idylls and even, perhaps, to our dependence on, and unity with, an authoritative figure in childhood. Could it not also be that our forward dreaming and the shape of our utopias is informed by the feeling that happiness lies in our origins: the first time, that first place?

In all these examples, happiness is another word for satiation, rest, bliss and perfection. The problem with the idea of happiness as some sort of overarching and guiding principle is that it is a projection of a very narrow view of what it is to be human. Are we really governed by this single factor, or might there be other things - respect, altruism, duty, compassion, love - that move us to act? That we attain some level of happiness in pursuing meaning, beauty and knowledge is not to say that the motivating factor is happiness; it is just to say that happiness accompanies such pursuits.

Of course, one of the main reasons that happiness has had such a long run, and why it is the current flavour of the month, is that there's a certain charm (and benefit) in reducing all moral issues to a clear-cut method of evaluation. By allowing us to assess different states of affairs, and the elements that go up to make a good life, on a single dimension that can easily be objectified, the idea of happiness provides us with a common currency, as it were.

Being hooked on happiness may at first glance look like the legacy of Romanticism; in truth, though, it is more closely linked to capitalism. We define our fundamental rights in terms of our ability to pursue - not achieve - happiness. Indeed, shopping and consumerism depend for their hold over us on cultivating this sense of being unfulfilled. It is hard to think of the endless expansion of capitalism, or the whole notion of progress and development, without this permanent lack of satisfaction and contentment. Our modern, troubled happiness is the new salvation not because it promises a perfect state of bliss but because it offers a picture of perfection that is always just out of reach: a happiness that is unlimited and therefore unattainable.

We have a sneaking suspicion that behind the shining surfaces and smiling faces - a life singularly devoted to the pursuit of happiness - there is another, more real and authentic life. Anything can be endured but the succession of fine days, said Goethe, and at least a part of us cannot but help think that there's something shallow, trivial even, in all this sun-and-wheat-consciousness. A life of perfection and of happiness is really the life of the Eloi: a life of boredom and indifference. If we are no more than "constantly moving happiness machines", is it any wonder that in these complex times it is only children who find happiness in things they do not possess: a star, a tree, a flower?