She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku
Verily towards God for the Lord is thy Limit.
(Q: 53:42)
The Sufi's book is not composed of ink and letters:
it is a heart white as snow.
The scholar's possession is pen-marks.
What does the Sufi's own?
---- foot-marks.....
The Sufi stalks the game like a hunter:
he sees the musk-deer's footprints and follows.
For a while he traces these lines,
but then it is the musk that is his guide.
A hundred stages along the track,
years of aimless wandering,
are nothing to a single leap guided by the scent of love.
--After Rumi
Modern man wants to know everything, to see from God's point of view. He is compelled to reduce everything to his own terms of self-understanding on pains of admitting the possibility of the impossible, the existence of the ("ghayb")unknown, and a reality that he has not shaped. It is, as Levinas once said, a defence mechanism of bourgeois man. Nothing unsettles him more than the thought that truth is not of his making.
But how can I know? We ask all the wrong questions. Already we see the substitution of second-order questions for primary ones of ethics: how do we live a good life? It as if his questions are only posed to, and therefore answerable by, his mind. For all of his dazzling intelligence we have to say that it is , ultimately, only of a technical kind: dry, abstract, and formal. On the other hand, there is an integral intelligence that eludes him -and this requires the virtues (both moral and intellectual)....Hearts and minds.
Most importantly , there is an awareness that wisdom resides in understanding and intuition; that there is meaning and that there are values that cannot be captured by our conceptual frameworks. Ibn Arabi reminds us that God created us with two hands....Blake would say that we see the world through both eyes and in a sublimely profound phrase: he who sees ratio sees only himself.
What can science tell us of friendship or art or poetry and music ..and what of love? Even by its own lights it has nothing to say of the soul or God. That we have the freedom to act in a causally ordered world...is this not a miracle in itself ?
There is questioning and there is a quest from within faith (Anselm). A beautiful phrase from the late Pope in Fides et Ratio has it: Faith illuminates possible paths for reason. This is what Attar would call the 'trackless way'...
Living Thought vs the dead letter of philosophy:
(From Bachelard)
A shifting, striving style of soul that doesn't fix itself to any one identity or idea. A concept is an idol, a stepping stone. 'Reverie shatters old forms and frozen images', opens up vision to ever fresh vistas of the world, to ambivalence, wonder and freedom. De-cision is a new beginning. Unity is not given but is an 'asymptotic goal', a potentiality,a direction: Desert theology. (Which takes us back to Levinas: the city dreams of totality, not of infinity).
Concept is to image as mind is to soul. One cannot study an image, only admire it (mirablis, miraculous, wonder, admiratio).
G. Bataille:
To seek sufficiency is the same mistake as to enclose being in some sort of point. We can enclose nothing, we can only find insufficiency.
Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown.
It is the unknown that compels us to love [the key is not to look for a final solution-which is a death wish-or salvation, but to live one's soul (D.H.Lawrence) ]
God is in us at first the movement of spirit which consists-after having passed from finite knowledge to infinite knowledge-in us passing , as if through an extension of limits, to a different non-discursive mode of knowledge , in such a way that the illusion arises from a satisfaction-realized beyond us- of the thirst for knowledge which exists in us.'
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Ghost Train
The Central Line is buggered-has been for two weeks. But it's great to hear all the whingeing that goes on-a national hobby in these parts: I dunno know...pathetic..it's ridiculous,..this is a third-world country. It's one of the few times the farangi will talk to strangers. The only other people on the tube system who do that are drunks or Amrikis..especially the ones who wear those grey or blue t-shirts with 'Harvard' written on them! Just exactly how many people go to that university! Reminds me of a line from Chatwin when he met a Bedouin: Tell me Mr. Chatwin, have you been to India? Yes. "And just how big is this village, India?"
Waiting for the train and a grey and silver ghost-like one slinks in, as if there wasn't a driver. One of those low-ceiling ones. But there are no people in it and some of the carriages have 'Northern Line' written on the side whilst others have 'Central Line'. This is some sort of weird hybrid that has slipped the lines. It's hard to see what's in some of the carriages because the windows are tinted but in others the seats have been ripped open and there are bottles of chemicals stacked up in neat piles. This skeleton of a train seems to be on its last legs. It's always amazing when something like this turns up out of the blue..a bit like the Thames whale last year.
Eventually a train does pull in. I find 15 pence on the floor, look around, and pick it up. The day before I had given exactly 15 p to a beggar. I wish I had given a pound. What goes around comes around...
Tea outside the wb:
The Persian tells me how noisy Iranian audiences are at cinemas. He has no idea! Back in the land of the pure I recall how two friends sat through the whole of a film discussing the price of tomatoes and other vegetables. I had to turn round to them and tell them this wasn't a f'ecking sabzi mundi. 'Mundi': market...is that word connected with 'the world'? And then there were the two people who couldn't make head or tails of the Urdu-dubbed version of Time Cop since it was next to impossible to understand how someone could die three times. And watching Twister I told him how the crowd would howl with derision at the evil guys and clap thunderously when they were 'taken up' by the twister (one said: Allah mian has taken them up).
Dalrymple in Xanadu has a great story about how an audience of tribals in Kazakhstan are watching a James Bond film when the scene with the tarantula come sup . They hold their breath. And then when Bond kills it they take off their shoes and stamp the ground, killing another hundred imaginary ones. And then the cries go up : Allah Akbar!
It's hard to explain to the Persian the tradition of call-response at the cinemas. Someone at one end of the cinema might make a witty comment (during the film) and another person will shout something back as a response or a further question to which the first person then replies in turn. And then there are the people selling fake chocolates: Kit Kart. One of these people , a young man with a very well oiled black beard makes a sudden appearance. He's there to watch the 'dance scene' of Reema and is nowhere to be found after that scene. For once there is pin-drop silence in the hall. Even the people in the 'sofa seats' are quiet (I kid thee not, in one there is actually a red velvet sofa stuck to the wall).
Waiting for the train and a grey and silver ghost-like one slinks in, as if there wasn't a driver. One of those low-ceiling ones. But there are no people in it and some of the carriages have 'Northern Line' written on the side whilst others have 'Central Line'. This is some sort of weird hybrid that has slipped the lines. It's hard to see what's in some of the carriages because the windows are tinted but in others the seats have been ripped open and there are bottles of chemicals stacked up in neat piles. This skeleton of a train seems to be on its last legs. It's always amazing when something like this turns up out of the blue..a bit like the Thames whale last year.
Eventually a train does pull in. I find 15 pence on the floor, look around, and pick it up. The day before I had given exactly 15 p to a beggar. I wish I had given a pound. What goes around comes around...
Tea outside the wb:
The Persian tells me how noisy Iranian audiences are at cinemas. He has no idea! Back in the land of the pure I recall how two friends sat through the whole of a film discussing the price of tomatoes and other vegetables. I had to turn round to them and tell them this wasn't a f'ecking sabzi mundi. 'Mundi': market...is that word connected with 'the world'? And then there were the two people who couldn't make head or tails of the Urdu-dubbed version of Time Cop since it was next to impossible to understand how someone could die three times. And watching Twister I told him how the crowd would howl with derision at the evil guys and clap thunderously when they were 'taken up' by the twister (one said: Allah mian has taken them up).
Dalrymple in Xanadu has a great story about how an audience of tribals in Kazakhstan are watching a James Bond film when the scene with the tarantula come sup . They hold their breath. And then when Bond kills it they take off their shoes and stamp the ground, killing another hundred imaginary ones. And then the cries go up : Allah Akbar!
It's hard to explain to the Persian the tradition of call-response at the cinemas. Someone at one end of the cinema might make a witty comment (during the film) and another person will shout something back as a response or a further question to which the first person then replies in turn. And then there are the people selling fake chocolates: Kit Kart. One of these people , a young man with a very well oiled black beard makes a sudden appearance. He's there to watch the 'dance scene' of Reema and is nowhere to be found after that scene. For once there is pin-drop silence in the hall. Even the people in the 'sofa seats' are quiet (I kid thee not, in one there is actually a red velvet sofa stuck to the wall).
Thursday, November 23, 2006
A.I.
I watched this film again last night and so am repeating this post-what else am I but a mechanical turk of sorts?
What would it be like to see the passing splendour of the world with the eyes of an angel, without concern for its trials and tribulations, where though the rise and fall of whole species flash before one in an instant, still one's heart doesn't sink? There are no judgements, no values, just the simple bearing witness to events, pared down to their most fundamental components (the whole story is in the fragment and the fragment is in the whole); the simple recording of an infinite series of changes in a logical fashion; to have the spectacle of all that has ever happened, all that ever will happen, laid out in front of one's eyes like some richly woven tapestry.
The sudden illumination of a beautiful face or the witnessing of the death of a star are looked upon with equanamity. The sigh of a love-torn heart is not so different from the gentle rustling of leaves in the spring. The permanence of crystalline matter is replicated in the art and politics of men. An equation governs the movement of the planets and certain proportions, 'notes', are to be found in the universe as well as in the sadness of a song. The wavering light, the uneasiness in the poet's heart. Everything is something else. Every image flows into another and a thousand generations pass to produce the all too ordinary face that stands before you. But, he who sees Ratio sees only himself....sees only the geometry of his soul.
As Lull's thinking machine knew: all sentences, all meaning, could be derived from the combination of a finite number of words. All stories are a repitition of the seven basic plots. The world itself is a metaphor. A horse is a car without wheels, a man a chance agglomeration of matter that is interchangeable with the environment...a thinking reed. The angel looks at the hordes that attack Rome and knows they follow the same patterns as other migratory animals.What we picture, what we wish for in our innermost heart , is what we become.
The angel sees without the complications of a body, without the gestures of a culture; if he has a language , it is mathematics. All thought is pure, the clear reflection of everything in the mirror of his pure soul. This is the ancient dream: to know, to see with the eye of God, sub specie aeternitatis. A smooth immanent world that is never interrrupted by miracles or anomalies. Gradually, the earth yields all of her secrets. Only one remains, though he delights us not: the strange hybrid creature that thinks but is finite, that is finitely infinite.
The mechanical turk is able to calculate all possible 'moves', all theoretical outcomes, and lives in a black and white world of perfect foresight where the only unpredictable thing is who is what colour, and that is determined by chance. Otherwise the universe is governed by necessity, ' the veil of god'. Once the rules and the properties, the characteristics, of all of the elements of the system (the players) are understood it is a mere formality for the Turk to work out all possible games and to play out his life accordingly in his spotless mind.But still something perplexes the Turk. He has heard the poet talk of a blue flower and this is an absurdity beyond his comprehension. Man must build a machine that can question itself.
"When will I be human?" asks the robot. But in the very questioning, the desire to be something that he wasn't, something that he knew in his heart of hearts would never be an option-not for him at least-in this,wasn't there a sign that he was already human, all too human in fact?To despair over the road not taken or the road that one is denied. He sat there, transfixed by the statue of the blue angel, an image that he had searched for for so long. And now,2,000 years pass and still there is no answer to his prayers, only longing and hoping. Maybe this, he thinks to himself, is what it was to be human: to wait for something out of the blue.
But what is this 'thing' that he waits to become? Not to be first among many, for there have already been many before him, but to be unique, utterly distinct , so that he can be loved in the proper way. And at last the boy finds that day, that instant from the past when he's momentarily recognised for what he really is, when he is allowed to bring the past back for a day.Humans search for the witness to their own being. Are we only sustained by the memory of love, or the desire for being loved?And when that day passes, receding into the shadowy land of what was, and when he finally understands that the moment has passed, as it invariably must, and can never be truly recovered, then what? Is the acceptance of life as finitude, transience, and fragility, the limitof humanity or is there also a reaching out to transcend the ephemeral?Aren't all utopias, all forward dreaming, and the need to repeat just that? But perhaps this submersion into the permanent is a betrayal of sorts-would we be human without the tragic?
And then in a supreme act of intelligence he realises that we are what we search for; that he himself is a melancholic blue angel with wings that would fly and thoughts that stir like the sea. And then a keen awareness dazzles him: that amongst all the broken and incomplete things of the world, we, and only we, could have lived at this particular moment, in this particular place: a brilliant uniqueness like no other is rooted in our impermanence, it irrupts in the core of our being-if onlywe would know it. Newly created at every instant, our self is like a fire that first cracks and then burns all that is solid, all that is fixed by the intelligence of the mind.
(From the film, A.I.)
Saturday, November 18, 2006
M.F. and F.M.
Milton Friedman and Free Markets.
He stood for free markets and freedom.
Nonsense. Nonsense on stilts. He stood for a very limited and impoverished view of freedom (negative liberty) and a particularly narrow conception of what human beings are. A more sophisticated approach understands that markets exist within a culture and set of institutions, that markets (and the motivations that underlie them) are not universal and that they are , in fact, instituted by political actors (David Harvey, Neoliberalism; R. Kiely, Globalisation, Polanyi, The Great Transformation). East Asia and Russia have learned this the hard way. South America is also now recovering from the same type of fundamentalism that he preached.
Its difficult to understand how such a naive view of things could appeal to so many. Corruptio optimi pessima perhaps..but perhaps it is just that simple views of reality will always hold sway over more complex ones. May God preserve us from the extremists...
As Brando said in Apocalypse Now: have you ever considered any real freedoms?
He stood for free markets and freedom.
Nonsense. Nonsense on stilts. He stood for a very limited and impoverished view of freedom (negative liberty) and a particularly narrow conception of what human beings are. A more sophisticated approach understands that markets exist within a culture and set of institutions, that markets (and the motivations that underlie them) are not universal and that they are , in fact, instituted by political actors (David Harvey, Neoliberalism; R. Kiely, Globalisation, Polanyi, The Great Transformation). East Asia and Russia have learned this the hard way. South America is also now recovering from the same type of fundamentalism that he preached.
Its difficult to understand how such a naive view of things could appeal to so many. Corruptio optimi pessima perhaps..but perhaps it is just that simple views of reality will always hold sway over more complex ones. May God preserve us from the extremists...
As Brando said in Apocalypse Now: have you ever considered any real freedoms?
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Tea, Chocolate & The History of the World
There are some thinkers who could write the history of civilisation as the passage of so many dazzling ideas or as a landscape brilliantly lit up by the fireworks of the mind (Isaiah Berlin , for example). But then there are the 'hedgehogs', the slow accumulators of detail, those whose eyes pass slowly over every contour of the canvas, every crevice and crack, tracing and then retracing the convoluted mechanisms of power, the web of interactions between thought and the world, those who see the very structure of the world as composed of localised patterns and discontinuities. And underlying both, they think of the deeper rhythms of the land , the soil, as if this slower history were the fabric on which other patterns were superimposed: Braudel writes as if the whole history of the world could be written down starting from the production processes , the consumption patterns, of the simplest of foodstuffs. Starting from tea one would be able to draw up a map of all human history-her majesty and her folly.
Both Boserup and J. Herbst point to population density as a possible reason for technological and political developments that would, eventually, lead to the west succeeding. Countries with low population density and poor technology (the hoe) have less incentive to invest in the control of space. Rain-fed agriculture adds to this effect. If that space itself is inhospitable or if 'exit' is a distinct possibility then it is not surprising that relatively weak (but egalitarian) political formations occur (Gellner). High density implies a greater incentive to switch to more efficient technologies. It may also, incidentally, be why the west was so hooked to property rights (de Soto).
Luxury: ' Luxury can take on many guises..what does not change is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme..a spectacle, fascination, the dream that one day becomes the reality for the poor.
the display of luxury is the foundation of capitalism (Sombart) [See also Bataille: the accursed share] or is it a sign of sickness, decadence (so speaks the wahabi, the puritan). .."the attainment of the superfluous causes greater spiritual excitement that the attainment of necessities".
Modernity is, if anything, the 'revolt against necessity', the unnatural growth of the natural. This has ended up with the city and its rhythms: the city that never sleeps. Globalisation: one time and space.
Today's luxury is tomorrow's necessity. If America slowed down we all could. Oranges for the Stuarts, handkerchiefs for Erasmus, glass window panes made from soda not potassium for 15 th century Venice.
Food , glorious food.
'There was no sophisticated cooking in Europe before the 15 th century.' Just quantity: mets . Even Montaigne ate with his hands. Forks do not become general in England before 1750 (and are not mentioned before 1660). To eat with a fork is to eat 'in the French manner'.
Dionysus rediscovered.
Paris before the Revolution drank 120 litres of wine per person per year. quita-penas: drowner of sorrows. The first distillation (Brandy, spirits) attributed to Raymond Lull! (d. 1315) .
The ancient battle:
vodka, gin against beer.
wine against beer.
Teutonic vs Mediterranean
the divine stuff.
Chocolates reach Europe via spain via Mexico. The history of colonialism goes hand in hand with the history of capitalism. First stage: luxury items for the court: silks, precious metals, rare woods. Second stage: mercantile capitalism; theird stage: industrial capitalism. Reaches England in 1657 and there follows three centuries of rotten teeth! In Andalucia hot chocolate for breakfast.
Chai.
Reaches Amsterdam in 1610, France 1635, Morrocco, 18th century (via the English) As with all things, the Chinese were there first...some twelve centuries earlier in this case! Tea leaves dried by fire (green tea) or by the sun and then fermented (black tea) [or what we call 'English Tea']. British colonialists try to market it by saying that one should drink 50 cups a day -for medicinal reasons! Thankfully, the Kashmiris preserve their salty tea. Damn those Punjabis to hell for putting sugar in it! In Egypt: Two spoons means four, 3 means 5 ,..i.e 2 is taken for granted.
Gives us this day our daily tea:
England: 1693: 1 lb per person per year.
1800: 3.2 lb
1840: 5.7 lb
[Aside: New York: coffee: 1 lb/person/week]
Cha-no-yu. Every plant of civilisation creates a state of strict bondage.
Kafoue.
Banned in Mecca in 1511 and again in 1524.
Arab saying: good coffee should be like love: hot and bitter.
Reaches Venice in 1615. The cafe and information channels: insurance (Lloyd's ), literature. A whole separate cultural history.
Not universally popular though:
'When Cartouche was about to put to death (november 21, 1729) the judge, drinking coffee with milk, offered him some. "He replied that it was not his drink and he would prefer a glass of wine". '
Both Boserup and J. Herbst point to population density as a possible reason for technological and political developments that would, eventually, lead to the west succeeding. Countries with low population density and poor technology (the hoe) have less incentive to invest in the control of space. Rain-fed agriculture adds to this effect. If that space itself is inhospitable or if 'exit' is a distinct possibility then it is not surprising that relatively weak (but egalitarian) political formations occur (Gellner). High density implies a greater incentive to switch to more efficient technologies. It may also, incidentally, be why the west was so hooked to property rights (de Soto).
Luxury: ' Luxury can take on many guises..what does not change is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme..a spectacle, fascination, the dream that one day becomes the reality for the poor.
the display of luxury is the foundation of capitalism (Sombart) [See also Bataille: the accursed share] or is it a sign of sickness, decadence (so speaks the wahabi, the puritan). .."the attainment of the superfluous causes greater spiritual excitement that the attainment of necessities".
Modernity is, if anything, the 'revolt against necessity', the unnatural growth of the natural. This has ended up with the city and its rhythms: the city that never sleeps. Globalisation: one time and space.
Today's luxury is tomorrow's necessity. If America slowed down we all could. Oranges for the Stuarts, handkerchiefs for Erasmus, glass window panes made from soda not potassium for 15 th century Venice.
Food , glorious food.
'There was no sophisticated cooking in Europe before the 15 th century.' Just quantity: mets . Even Montaigne ate with his hands. Forks do not become general in England before 1750 (and are not mentioned before 1660). To eat with a fork is to eat 'in the French manner'.
Dionysus rediscovered.
Paris before the Revolution drank 120 litres of wine per person per year. quita-penas: drowner of sorrows. The first distillation (Brandy, spirits) attributed to Raymond Lull! (d. 1315) .
The ancient battle:
vodka, gin against beer.
wine against beer.
Teutonic vs Mediterranean
the divine stuff.
Chocolates reach Europe via spain via Mexico. The history of colonialism goes hand in hand with the history of capitalism. First stage: luxury items for the court: silks, precious metals, rare woods. Second stage: mercantile capitalism; theird stage: industrial capitalism. Reaches England in 1657 and there follows three centuries of rotten teeth! In Andalucia hot chocolate for breakfast.
Chai.
Reaches Amsterdam in 1610, France 1635, Morrocco, 18th century (via the English) As with all things, the Chinese were there first...some twelve centuries earlier in this case! Tea leaves dried by fire (green tea) or by the sun and then fermented (black tea) [or what we call 'English Tea']. British colonialists try to market it by saying that one should drink 50 cups a day -for medicinal reasons! Thankfully, the Kashmiris preserve their salty tea. Damn those Punjabis to hell for putting sugar in it! In Egypt: Two spoons means four, 3 means 5 ,..i.e 2 is taken for granted.
Gives us this day our daily tea:
England: 1693: 1 lb per person per year.
1800: 3.2 lb
1840: 5.7 lb
[Aside: New York: coffee: 1 lb/person/week]
Cha-no-yu. Every plant of civilisation creates a state of strict bondage.
Kafoue.
Banned in Mecca in 1511 and again in 1524.
Arab saying: good coffee should be like love: hot and bitter.
Reaches Venice in 1615. The cafe and information channels: insurance (Lloyd's ), literature. A whole separate cultural history.
Not universally popular though:
'When Cartouche was about to put to death (november 21, 1729) the judge, drinking coffee with milk, offered him some. "He replied that it was not his drink and he would prefer a glass of wine". '
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
At One
I, who have thrice lost my tongue to the coil of time.
I give you my word.
Paradisal, sweet-sounding metaphors and then the words of my forefathers, the land. Is this, then, the same 'I' that knew the heavy silence of the stars? Why are all my answers questions? I have become a question to myself.
Become one. At one. At once. Unity of being is the unity of truth. God, Nature or Society. Instead, we are stars that have fallen, that have strayed from the path. Atone for one's digressions.
It is too late. The grey clouds have seeped into my mind. Already, I have lost my t' s and dropped my h's. And mind your p's and q's ! My lips have turned to stone at England's green vision.
And yet, and yet...something survives of my ancestor's thoughts; they radiate out from a distant past and brush lightly against me, like a gently guiding hand.
How old these bones are! In the corner of my mind I see a black ship in frozen seas, rocking to and fro, creaking. Images, if not words survive. There is a centre somewhere, not here, whose vibrations touch us even now, like ripples from a pond breaking softly on far away shores or black rain falling in the forest at night.
There is redemption only in transformations, in the metamorphosis of our selves, in a change of heart. I am what I am means that 'I' is already breaking out of Being.
As we wander in the desert we come across all sorts of discarded idols. Let us stay with them for a while. But there will be no primordial utterings, no words for home. I am finally at one with the speechless, am the letter that killeth...
K.
I give you my word.
Paradisal, sweet-sounding metaphors and then the words of my forefathers, the land. Is this, then, the same 'I' that knew the heavy silence of the stars? Why are all my answers questions? I have become a question to myself.
Become one. At one. At once. Unity of being is the unity of truth. God, Nature or Society. Instead, we are stars that have fallen, that have strayed from the path. Atone for one's digressions.
It is too late. The grey clouds have seeped into my mind. Already, I have lost my t' s and dropped my h's. And mind your p's and q's ! My lips have turned to stone at England's green vision.
And yet, and yet...something survives of my ancestor's thoughts; they radiate out from a distant past and brush lightly against me, like a gently guiding hand.
How old these bones are! In the corner of my mind I see a black ship in frozen seas, rocking to and fro, creaking. Images, if not words survive. There is a centre somewhere, not here, whose vibrations touch us even now, like ripples from a pond breaking softly on far away shores or black rain falling in the forest at night.
There is redemption only in transformations, in the metamorphosis of our selves, in a change of heart. I am what I am means that 'I' is already breaking out of Being.
As we wander in the desert we come across all sorts of discarded idols. Let us stay with them for a while. But there will be no primordial utterings, no words for home. I am finally at one with the speechless, am the letter that killeth...
K.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
nolite conformari huic a seculo
There is something harsh, severe, rigid, and strict in religion. Concentrated, pure, crystalline, as hard as diamonds. To talk of freedom without limitation..one could equally talk about a heart that is constricted and knows no love. But there is something extreme in Christianity which doesn't appeal to me (this is not a judgement and far less a moral position); we are only talking here of a compatibility with one’s temperament -and that is something that is utterly beyond one’s choice. Again, one has to tread carefully here since different tendencies are present in any one tradition. Islam has its asceticism, for example. And no-one would contest that its outward sobriety in certain matters is anything but a refined detachment or that half the religion is jalal and 'awe’ and reticence. Add to this that the perspective is infused with the spirit of the ‘law’ and obedience rather than love and it is quite possible to come to just the opposite conclusion of what I am suggesting. One must also be aware that differences in perspectives narrow down considerably the more one’s actions and thoughts are centred on a truly religious life.
But be that as it is, there is something disconcerting-from the Christian perspective-about a religion that is so concerned about the good of this world and the good of the next. Behind such a concern there is always the hint of a suggestion that what we have here is a concession to worldliness and sensuality, a conformity to the strictures of an organised religion and not to the unbound spirit. Hagarism.
This confusion of perspectives is, of course, not always a result of bad faith. From a vantage point that stresses ‘the one thing needful’ or the truly singular cosmic intervention of the divine into human affairs other faiths, or rather the possibility of other faiths, are not a pressing question. To ignore other meeting places and transitional stages between nature and grace-as Gustave Thibon puts it-in favour of the cross is not wholly surprising. Islam, on the other hand, emphasises a continuity of Revelation and is therefore essentially pluralistic. From its perspective it a truth that must already contain the truth of Christianity within it whereas from the latter’s point of view Islam will necessarily always be an outsider. Perhaps it is this that accounts for Islam’s supreme flexibility-a religion that could take in not only people from many different cultural backgrounds but whose theology could express itself at once in terms of Greek metaphysics and nomadic thought, a synthesis of civilisation and the desert (Medina and Mecca); more than anything else, the ‘world’ and the body were not looked at in a negative light but were themselves ‘ladders’ or bridges leading back to the holy. It is that sense of equilibrium and balance that minimised the fissures in the soul and the extreme tension (as George Steiner has it) between flesh and spirit, Revelation and History, time and the end of time that one detects in Christianity. One only has to compare this to the sublime: "the whole earth is a mosque" to get an idea of the differences in contemplative attitudes.
But having said that, here are a few of my favourite words by an extremist-Simone Weil. I invariably find it exhausting reading her even in small doses, since it is as if one needed a superhuman effort to pay attention to a single point and that one is being made painfully aware of the inadequacies of one’s own soul; a quiet thought dawns on us: had we realised but one point, had the intelligence of mind and attentiveness of will, we would be as radically de-centred, de-created as her.
1. There is every degree of distance between the creature and God.A distance in which the love of God is impossible: matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete there that it destroys itself: there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just possible.
2. We can say that we exist (to be placed outside) not that we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist.
3.Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. We must also renounce the past and future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of the past and future around a present that is always falling away.
4.Time is the door to Eternity, not a substitute for it.
5. [S]in springs from the desire to appear and dominate.
6.When speaking of God’s ‘dependence’ on creatures one can say that things are true in the order of love and false in the order of being.
7. We only attain to real prayer only after we have worn down our own will by keeping rules.
8. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future.This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure.
9. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love Him.For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of His love , without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.
10. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
11. To transfer the source of our actions outside ourselves. To be impelled. The purest of motives (or the basest: the law is always the same) appear as something exterior.
12. To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the blank page and the poem.
13. Idolatry comes from the fact that, whilst thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop.
14.It is because of this monotony [of evil] that quantity plays so great a part.
15. Necessity is God’s veil. Limitation is proof that God loves us.
16.Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
17. We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend. All that I conceive of as true is less true than those things of which I cannot conceive the truth, but which I love. The desire to discover something new prevents people from allowing their thoughts to dwell on the transcendent, indemonstrable meaning of what has already been discovered.
18.It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part ..if this condition is not fulfilled then every change in our thinking is illusory.
19. No human being should be deprived of his metaxu , that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture etc) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.
But be that as it is, there is something disconcerting-from the Christian perspective-about a religion that is so concerned about the good of this world and the good of the next. Behind such a concern there is always the hint of a suggestion that what we have here is a concession to worldliness and sensuality, a conformity to the strictures of an organised religion and not to the unbound spirit. Hagarism.
This confusion of perspectives is, of course, not always a result of bad faith. From a vantage point that stresses ‘the one thing needful’ or the truly singular cosmic intervention of the divine into human affairs other faiths, or rather the possibility of other faiths, are not a pressing question. To ignore other meeting places and transitional stages between nature and grace-as Gustave Thibon puts it-in favour of the cross is not wholly surprising. Islam, on the other hand, emphasises a continuity of Revelation and is therefore essentially pluralistic. From its perspective it a truth that must already contain the truth of Christianity within it whereas from the latter’s point of view Islam will necessarily always be an outsider. Perhaps it is this that accounts for Islam’s supreme flexibility-a religion that could take in not only people from many different cultural backgrounds but whose theology could express itself at once in terms of Greek metaphysics and nomadic thought, a synthesis of civilisation and the desert (Medina and Mecca); more than anything else, the ‘world’ and the body were not looked at in a negative light but were themselves ‘ladders’ or bridges leading back to the holy. It is that sense of equilibrium and balance that minimised the fissures in the soul and the extreme tension (as George Steiner has it) between flesh and spirit, Revelation and History, time and the end of time that one detects in Christianity. One only has to compare this to the sublime: "the whole earth is a mosque" to get an idea of the differences in contemplative attitudes.
But having said that, here are a few of my favourite words by an extremist-Simone Weil. I invariably find it exhausting reading her even in small doses, since it is as if one needed a superhuman effort to pay attention to a single point and that one is being made painfully aware of the inadequacies of one’s own soul; a quiet thought dawns on us: had we realised but one point, had the intelligence of mind and attentiveness of will, we would be as radically de-centred, de-created as her.
1. There is every degree of distance between the creature and God.A distance in which the love of God is impossible: matter, plants, animals. Evil is so complete there that it destroys itself: there is no longer any evil: mirror of divine innocence. We are at the point where love is just possible.
2. We can say that we exist (to be placed outside) not that we are. God who is Being has in a sense effaced himself so that we can exist.
3.Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. We must also renounce the past and future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of the past and future around a present that is always falling away.
4.Time is the door to Eternity, not a substitute for it.
5. [S]in springs from the desire to appear and dominate.
6.When speaking of God’s ‘dependence’ on creatures one can say that things are true in the order of love and false in the order of being.
7. We only attain to real prayer only after we have worn down our own will by keeping rules.
8. We want the future to be there without ceasing to be the future.This is an absurdity of which eternity alone is the cure.
9. It is God who in love withdraws from us so that we can love Him.For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of His love , without the protection of space, of time, and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun.
10. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.
11. To transfer the source of our actions outside ourselves. To be impelled. The purest of motives (or the basest: the law is always the same) appear as something exterior.
12. To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the blank page and the poem.
13. Idolatry comes from the fact that, whilst thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop.
14.It is because of this monotony [of evil] that quantity plays so great a part.
15. Necessity is God’s veil. Limitation is proof that God loves us.
16.Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
17. We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is more real than what it does comprehend. All that I conceive of as true is less true than those things of which I cannot conceive the truth, but which I love. The desire to discover something new prevents people from allowing their thoughts to dwell on the transcendent, indemonstrable meaning of what has already been discovered.
18.It must be work in which the body constantly bears a part ..if this condition is not fulfilled then every change in our thinking is illusory.
19. No human being should be deprived of his metaxu , that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture etc) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Trench Lines
On this day we must remember not just the fallen but the wonderfully subversive, those who broke the lines, those without rank, who are always falling, falling. The Christians are complaining that the poppy should be white: there can be no redemption through blood. What an irony! They should be shot...like the muslims who want to change the name of Lawrence Gardens to Jinnah Gardens or Khuda Hafiz to Allah Hafiz.
Break of Day in the Trenches
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 (5)
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 (10)
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, (15)
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 (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberg
Break of Day in the Trenches
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 (5)
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 (10)
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, (15)
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 (20)
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe, (25)
Just a little white with the dust.
-- Isaac Rosenberg
Devil's Blues
Marriage: one year of flames, thirty of ashes.
---From The Leopard
A friend tells another : Latest research shows that married men live for longer than unmarried men .
Other Friend: no, it just feels like that!
Just spoke to Monty and his trouble with finding a woman to settle down with. As the saying goes back home: marriage is like a sweet: those who eat it suffer from regrets at tasting it and those who don't live with a constant panging for it. Everyone's got a theory on this. Some are charming, all are ridiculous.
He's now been asked for a list of appropriate characteristics:
"I feel like fucking Schindler here" he says.
"Well, you should say your preferences are for men then! And, what did you say?"
"A girl who speaks Japanese"
"Why did you say that?"
"Because I know there is no such girl"
Well, that narrows it down! What else?
A girl who wears a monocle.
Monty, this ain't the 1920's and you're sitting in some rural back sticks. Think practical for Christ's sake.
You're right. Educated, fun and sophisticated.
Now you're talking champ. What did they say to that?
They said they knew some girl who gets a French manicure!
Worse comes to worst , we can always dress the mongol up and get him to wear a skirt.
I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that!
He's got grief but we can both laugh about it. If he's listening to anything now I hope it isn't Skip James. I tell him about the indomitable Mrs. P who had eight kids but would greet each of them -even if after a long time-with a distant handshake. She saw her son was in the doldrums at not being married at such a late age: son, if you think it's bad now, wait till you get married. ..I've never seen her laugh so heartily.
---From The Leopard
A friend tells another : Latest research shows that married men live for longer than unmarried men .
Other Friend: no, it just feels like that!
Just spoke to Monty and his trouble with finding a woman to settle down with. As the saying goes back home: marriage is like a sweet: those who eat it suffer from regrets at tasting it and those who don't live with a constant panging for it. Everyone's got a theory on this. Some are charming, all are ridiculous.
He's now been asked for a list of appropriate characteristics:
"I feel like fucking Schindler here" he says.
"Well, you should say your preferences are for men then! And, what did you say?"
"A girl who speaks Japanese"
"Why did you say that?"
"Because I know there is no such girl"
Well, that narrows it down! What else?
A girl who wears a monocle.
Monty, this ain't the 1920's and you're sitting in some rural back sticks. Think practical for Christ's sake.
You're right. Educated, fun and sophisticated.
Now you're talking champ. What did they say to that?
They said they knew some girl who gets a French manicure!
Worse comes to worst , we can always dress the mongol up and get him to wear a skirt.
I'll do anything for love, but I won't do that!
He's got grief but we can both laugh about it. If he's listening to anything now I hope it isn't Skip James. I tell him about the indomitable Mrs. P who had eight kids but would greet each of them -even if after a long time-with a distant handshake. She saw her son was in the doldrums at not being married at such a late age: son, if you think it's bad now, wait till you get married. ..I've never seen her laugh so heartily.
Open Work
Impressionism: a blurring of contours, a vibrancy and dissolution of form, a greater inter-connectedness of forms, a reaching out. But, eventually, just as an image in the water is reconstituted once the ripples have subsided , so each form becomes distinct , isolated.
Sculpture: Lippold: a continuous metamorphosis with no apprehension of totality or a unified image, but broken-up, mutually exclusive perspectives.
Ezra Pound: 'Brancusi had set out on the maddeningly difficult exploration to get all the forms into one form-this is as long as any Buddhist's contemplation of the universe. ...Or putting it another way, every one of the thousand angles of approach to a statue ought to be interesting, it ought to have a life (Brancusi might permit me to say 'divine life') of its own.
G. Mathieu, D'Aristotle a l'abstraction lyrique: 'The move from ideal to real to the abstract to the possible mirrors the changes in our perspective of the world, in our scientific concepts.'
Cubism: A rejection of the classical world (see Robert Hughes as well, Shock of the New) , of Euclidean geometries, Cartesian rationalism. Discontinuity and the lack of a coherent image of the universe, the shattering and disappearance of the familiar..vitality over form, life over thought, the biological over the mathematical. Can this be a Zen-like experience , pure consciousness without subject or object or must it necessarily be a re-presentation? Can we (the west) abandon itself to contemplating drifting clouds , the shimmer of water, sunlight on a dew drop? Do we seek a pattern, an order of the soul and the world? We take a step outside of ourselves to do so. Half of us wants to reduce everything to the mind, half of us wants to escape...
An open work is still a work, on pains of a dissolution into complete and utter randomness, a splintering of our vision , an incommunicable and unintelligible truth. Language buckles under the pressure...
---after Umberto Eco
Sculpture: Lippold: a continuous metamorphosis with no apprehension of totality or a unified image, but broken-up, mutually exclusive perspectives.
Ezra Pound: 'Brancusi had set out on the maddeningly difficult exploration to get all the forms into one form-this is as long as any Buddhist's contemplation of the universe. ...Or putting it another way, every one of the thousand angles of approach to a statue ought to be interesting, it ought to have a life (Brancusi might permit me to say 'divine life') of its own.
G. Mathieu, D'Aristotle a l'abstraction lyrique: 'The move from ideal to real to the abstract to the possible mirrors the changes in our perspective of the world, in our scientific concepts.'
Cubism: A rejection of the classical world (see Robert Hughes as well, Shock of the New) , of Euclidean geometries, Cartesian rationalism. Discontinuity and the lack of a coherent image of the universe, the shattering and disappearance of the familiar..vitality over form, life over thought, the biological over the mathematical. Can this be a Zen-like experience , pure consciousness without subject or object or must it necessarily be a re-presentation? Can we (the west) abandon itself to contemplating drifting clouds , the shimmer of water, sunlight on a dew drop? Do we seek a pattern, an order of the soul and the world? We take a step outside of ourselves to do so. Half of us wants to reduce everything to the mind, half of us wants to escape...
An open work is still a work, on pains of a dissolution into complete and utter randomness, a splintering of our vision , an incommunicable and unintelligible truth. Language buckles under the pressure...
---after Umberto Eco
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Wild Ones
The unsurpassable JJ:
The first Europeans to visit the atoll of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific were deserters from Captain William Bligh’s ship the Bounty in 1789. Bligh came and caught them; soon afterwards Fletcher Christian led a more successful mutiny. In 1967 Marlon Brando bought a 99-year lease on this ring of low-lying islands for $270,000. It was his own private colony, a fantasy of freedom that connected him to the 18th-century Bounty mutineers and their contemporaries, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence.Brando tried to make Tetiaroa the home of an international thinktank, to create a self-sufficient refuge from the coming nuclear catastrophe, to breed Atlantic cold-water lobsters in the warm waters of the Pacific. At one time he lived here in a single room. Some of his nine children, especially his eldest son Christian and daughter Cheyenne, spent a significant part of their lives here, and at Punaauia on neighbouring Tahiti. In 1995 Cheyenne hanged herself at Punaauia, after losing a custody battle for her son Tuki. This happened five years after Christian Brando shot dead her Tahitian boyfriend Dag Drollet at the Brando home on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. At Christian’s trial, Marlon testified, “I think perhaps I failed as a father.”
As a father, Marlon Brando improvised, if you believe his biographers. He followed his moods, his feelings. Sometimes he lavished attention on his children, and sometimes he forgot them for years. He lived in the same aleatory way that he acted.Brando was one of the grandest and most grotesque exponents of the only purely American contribution to art: improvisation. To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive - unmechanical, unpredictable. Brando was the greatest actor in the history of cinema because he would bring the complex fluency of real life to performances, despite the rewrites, cuts, endless takes.
And he did it by ignoring narrative in favour of irrelevant, inexplicable, surreal gestures - improvisations. In The Godfather, as Vito Corleone, he plays with a cat while he discusses beatings and murder. He sniffs a flower, raises his eyebrows - and these little asides dominate the film, more memorable than any of its slaughters. In On The Waterfront he picks up Eve-Marie Saint’s white glove and, instead of giving it back to her, puts it on. It’s the very redundance of Brando’s asides that made him live more intensely than any other actor, because in life we don’t only, or often, do things actors are trained to do, things that are “relevant”, “telling”, that “create a character” - we do not act, or not all the time.
Brando didn’t make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America’s art, its self-expression - and its disaster.
In his art, Brando created sublime images of a spontaneous, unguided, free existence. In his life, he catastrophically demonstrated the tragedy of American freedom. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness led to loneliness and injustice. Like the Bounty mutineers, like the founding fathers, Brando created a colony of chaos. His greatness and failure start to make a kind of sense only when you compare him to his peers, Parker and Pollock.
Brando, born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, was 80 when he died six months ago. Charlie “Bird” Parker, born in 1920 in Kansas City, and Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, would be 84 and 92 now. They could still be here. But the best alto saxophone player who ever lived and the painter who dripped colours on to canvases laid flat died within barely a year of each other, in 1955 and 1956.
Charlie Parker was addicted to heroin, and a lot of other things - whisky, cheap wine, anything that might substitute for heroin. He was hospitalised at Camarillo in California after a breakdown in 1946, but wasn’t drug-free for long - his trumpeter Miles Davis broke with him after Parker repeatedly spent the band’s money on drugs. Bird’s classic recordings date from 1946 to 1948. When he died, of unascertained causes, in New York on March 12 1955, watching the bandleader Tommy Dorsey on television at a Rothschild heiress’s house, the doctor who examined the body reckoned the dead man was 53 years old - an overestimate by 19 years.
Jackson Pollock started drinking when he was 15, and by the late 1930s was so dependent on alcohol that he was hospitalised in Westchester, New York, in 1937. Jungian analysis, marriage to the painter Lee Krasner, and moving out of Manhattan to the far end of Long Island freed him to paint his definitive works between 1947 and 1950. But he went back to drinking and his last years were disastrous. He crashed his car near his home on the night of August 11 1956, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger.
Marlon Brando’s own addiction was less lethal, or at least not so quickly - he was a compulsive eater. His gorging was already established when Truman Capote wrote a cruel profile of him in 1957. Capote watched the star of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One order a meal of “soup, beefsteak with french fries, three orders of vegetables, a plate of spaghetti, rolls and butter, and apple pie with ice cream”. In his latter years stories circulated about how when Brando went to health farms, he paid people to throw burgers over the fence.
For Parker, Pollock and Brando, to be a purely improvisational artist was unbearable - American freedom was unbearable. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were attainable only in art - in life, the void had to be filled with addictions, narcotic crutches, gluttony.
The belief that America will be found in the improvised, the spontaneous, the truly free, dates to the late 19th century, to the birth of what was in effect a new nation after the civil war. The war between the northern and southern states was fought over the meaning of the American constitution: for Lincoln’s Union, the existence of slavery insulted the universal right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The north’s victory did not, of course, truly secure these things for African-Americans. But it did force a question: what was the nature of this American liberty for which young men had died? The idea of American democracy became charged and new: it gave birth to modern American culture. You feel the exhilaration of what a truly democratic America might be in the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Mark Twain. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” declares Whitman in Leaves Of Grass (1855-92), his epic poem of democracy. In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye to Pynchon’s Mason And Dixon, in mapping a fluvial, free-flowing adventure - child’s play as improvisation, with Huckleberry Finn the original hero-improviser.
Twain openly associates Huck and Tom’s world with black culture, saying in the preface to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer that it describes the beliefs of “children and slaves” before the civil war. This aligns Twain with the most important cultural revolution that took place in the US. The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians. The origins of jazz are difficult to reconstruct but early composers saw the roots of the form in slaves’ work-songs. James P Johnson, “father of stride piano” in the early 20th century, said he took the call-and-response style of his Carolina Shout (1917) from listening to stevedores, whose shouts derived ultimately from west Africa. But jazz is a response to America, not a rejection of it.
After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.
In 1945 that nation was, in theory, triumphant. America had just won a war for democracy. For the first time, it knew it was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet racial inequalities crippled Whitman’s “Life immense in passion, pulse and power”, and social and political conformity strangled his “word Democratic”. Even jazz had been made corporate by the big bands, as the genuine jazz orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman had been eclipsed by the banality of Glenn Miller, a music devoid of black or blue, remote from improvisation; dead, mechanical.
The new music that appeared in New York, first at Minton’s in Harlem and then at clubs on 52nd Street - “The Street” - in the wake of the second world war, rejected this sterile America. It aggressively invented its own nocturnal country. It insisted more than ever before on the improvisatory nature of jazz. Bebop was played by small groups, not big orchestras, and mythologised the solo - which had to be played fast and complicated, with the most exquisite technical achievement, yet also be rough-toned, raw-sounding. This was virtuoso music. Its supreme virtuoso was Charlie Parker.
He reputedly got his nickname because he insisted on picking up a chicken that had been run over by a tour van in order to cook it, but calling him Bird conveyed what people felt about his music - it soared. Parker posed extreme challenges to the musicians who played with him because he took off on solos that were impossible to follow, somehow returning to sense when he seemed to have unleashed mere chaos.
Miles Davis, later to record the classic Kind Of Blue, began his career as a teenage trumpeter who abandoned his studies at Manhattan’s Juilliard School to play with Parker. “Bird would play the melody he wanted,” he remembers in his autobiography. “The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct … Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was ‘fuck what’s written down’.”
The similarities between the art of Charlie Parker and that of Jackson Pollock are so staggering, so deep, so unarguable, that it’s tempting to suspect Pollock of obfuscation when he claimed not to like bebop. In fact it would be a still more radical improviser, Ornette Coleman, who put a Pollock painting on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Yet Pollock insisted that he only really loved traditional jazz - and he did love it. His surviving collection of 78s reveals an erudite and passionate fan of black music who listened constantly to early Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and his contemporaries Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. Pollock called jazz “the only other creative thing happening in this country”. Art critics have never really taken seriously its influence on him. It’s as if American modernism can’t handle the idea that Pollock’s most significant influence was black music.
The romance and myth that surround Pollock are so vulgar, critics seem to feel. The formal achievement of Pollock’s painting, they argue, is unrelated to the cheap, glamorous image of the painter dancing around his canvas to sax and drum solos before dying violently, a romantic burnout. Funnily enough, respectable jazz writers are similarly suspicious of the romantic cult of Bird. His dependence on heroin, they fear, falsely made musicians think they needed to shoot up like him to play like him.
But Pollock and Parker were what they were - they meant it. They lived and died their epics. They risked everything to find the authentic America beyond all the phoney talk.
Listen to Parker’s Scrapple From The Apple, recorded in 1947, and look at Pollock’s 1950 Number 27, today in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The best way to describe the structure of Pollock’s abstraction is to compare it to Parker’s music. There are several kinds of mark on Number 27, different in tone - like different instruments. There are percussive splashes, sharp bursts of white. There are underlying black bass notes. Over all this float curling green sensual arabesques - the sax solo.
Improvisation is what matters to both these artists. Listening to his jazz records, Pollock made paintings that are pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint. It is his instinct alone that leads him out into space. Yet, miraculously, in the great works of 1947 to 1950, he discovers a harmony in this freedom - his paintings are not a mess after all, but coherent, enigmatically so. Pollock is able to improvise structure. Parker has this same miraculous ability to take the music on a wild walk yet never lose sight of where he started. “Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time,” remembers Miles Davis. “It was like he had planned it in his mind.”
This deep sense of form is what makes Pollock and Parker of a kind. Bird sounds sweet, and Pollock’s paintings are beautiful. Tellingly, it was one of his late, romantically failed paintings, in which despair overcomes him, that Ornette Coleman reproduced on the cover of his turbulent Free Jazz. The best Pollock paintings never have that sense of breakdown. They possess a savage grace.
If they rejected cacophony and chaos, Pollock and Parker were scarcely virtuosi in the way that classical European artists and musicians were; accomplishment is not what they are about. No Raphael, no Mozart. Both deliberately roughen and dirty their surface. Pollock uses house paints. He drops cigarette butts into the drying paint. Parker rejects the harmonious tones of earlier sax soloists and introduces a raw, hoarse sound. For him, as for Pollock, American art must be rough in texture. This is part of being democratic. It’s as if they both defy themselves to produce beauty under impossible circumstances. Why do they risk themselves like this?
It is to find the true American voice. Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America’s lost music - the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.
“Resist much, obey little,” urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.
It was impossible to sustain this. Neither Pollock nor Parker maintained their 1940s achievements through their final years. Almost immediately, their radical interpretation of America’s affirmation of liberty turned to cliché. Most of the art produced in its name was colossally inferior to theirs. The Beats tried and failed to translate bebop spontaneity into writing; so what if Kerouac’s On The Road was composed free-form on a single roll of paper? It’s a dutiful read.
In art and music, the best followers of Pollock and Parker deliberately reversed their terms. Miles Davis created cool jazz. Jasper Johns painted Flag. Meanwhile the authentic, non-racist, egalitarian American freedom glimpsed by two dying men just after the second world war mutated into hipster kitsch, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison … Apocalypse Now. It is hard now to believe American democracy ever inspired great, beautiful, modern art, the best of our era.
Marlon Brando seemed to forget, as much as film audiences, what that was, that lost vitality. Brando was the artistic equal of Pollock and Parker. His performance on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947-8 transformed American culture as decisively as they did - and more universally. Modern painting and modern jazz are minority arts. But after the raw, working-class, violently unpredictable American voice of Stanley Kowalski transferred from stage to screen, it became globally iconic.
Tennessee Williams was an acquaintance and drinking companion of Pollock and Lee Krasner, and spent a summer with them in Provincetown in 1944. He called Pollock “dark”. The outwardly boorish Pollock may have been a model for the character Brando was to elevate into an American myth.
Recognition that Brando was above all an improviser is sometimes obfuscated by his association with the realist postwar director Elia Kazan. Brando is seen as a realist, when in truth he is an abstract artist. This is why his best films are the ones he made for Coppola and Bertolucci in the 1970s. Neither of these directors is a realist, and the characters they gave Brando are mythic, monsters.
Brando was allowed to improvise as much as he wanted: he refused to learn lines - dialogue had to be concealed around the set of The Godfather on cue cards. Bertolucci encouraged him to improvise most of his speeches in Last Tango In Paris in their entirety. When Paul - the ageing American Brando plays - embarks on an anonymous sexual relationship with a young French woman, and remembers his childhood, it is Brando’s own childhood he describes: growing up on a farm with alcoholic parents. Paul has been a boxer, an actor, a bongo player - Brando plays bongos, and was the martyred boxer hero of On The Waterfront. When he’s helped up at the end of On The Waterfront, you can feel the weight of his body, as when you contemplate a Michelangelo pietà .
There was a mysterious grace to Brando’s best acting - just like Pollock and Parker, he seems to discover form in randomness. The reason that his playing with a cat is so hypnotic in The Godfather, rather than simply being a bit of James Bond villainy, is that instead of being held in place to prevent it squirming away, the cat genuinely loves its Godfather - it nuzzles him spontaneously. In fact it was a stray cat that Brando, whose farm childhood gave him a feel for animals, found at the studio and befriended.
As Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he reaches the end of Mark Twain’s river. He is so disintegrated into cruel, mad impulses that Martin Sheen’s character says, “I’d never seen anyone so broken up.” Apocalypse Now describes, with hallucinatory precision, how the counterculture became the mainstream. It is the hippy photojournalist Dennis Hopper who falls for Kurtz’s fascist bullshit, who calls him “a warrior-poet”. From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.
Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here - nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, “Have you ever considered any true freedoms?”
The first Europeans to visit the atoll of Tetiaroa in the South Pacific were deserters from Captain William Bligh’s ship the Bounty in 1789. Bligh came and caught them; soon afterwards Fletcher Christian led a more successful mutiny. In 1967 Marlon Brando bought a 99-year lease on this ring of low-lying islands for $270,000. It was his own private colony, a fantasy of freedom that connected him to the 18th-century Bounty mutineers and their contemporaries, the authors of the American Declaration of Independence.Brando tried to make Tetiaroa the home of an international thinktank, to create a self-sufficient refuge from the coming nuclear catastrophe, to breed Atlantic cold-water lobsters in the warm waters of the Pacific. At one time he lived here in a single room. Some of his nine children, especially his eldest son Christian and daughter Cheyenne, spent a significant part of their lives here, and at Punaauia on neighbouring Tahiti. In 1995 Cheyenne hanged herself at Punaauia, after losing a custody battle for her son Tuki. This happened five years after Christian Brando shot dead her Tahitian boyfriend Dag Drollet at the Brando home on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles. At Christian’s trial, Marlon testified, “I think perhaps I failed as a father.”
As a father, Marlon Brando improvised, if you believe his biographers. He followed his moods, his feelings. Sometimes he lavished attention on his children, and sometimes he forgot them for years. He lived in the same aleatory way that he acted.Brando was one of the grandest and most grotesque exponents of the only purely American contribution to art: improvisation. To improvise is to be free. It is to be truly alive - unmechanical, unpredictable. Brando was the greatest actor in the history of cinema because he would bring the complex fluency of real life to performances, despite the rewrites, cuts, endless takes.
And he did it by ignoring narrative in favour of irrelevant, inexplicable, surreal gestures - improvisations. In The Godfather, as Vito Corleone, he plays with a cat while he discusses beatings and murder. He sniffs a flower, raises his eyebrows - and these little asides dominate the film, more memorable than any of its slaughters. In On The Waterfront he picks up Eve-Marie Saint’s white glove and, instead of giving it back to her, puts it on. It’s the very redundance of Brando’s asides that made him live more intensely than any other actor, because in life we don’t only, or often, do things actors are trained to do, things that are “relevant”, “telling”, that “create a character” - we do not act, or not all the time.
Brando didn’t make a good film for a quarter of a century, but to the end he had a profound influence on modern culture. He is one of three artists who define what is distinctively American about American creativity. No American art, literature, music or performance has mattered since the late 1940s unless it accepted their influence. The two others were Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker. The American trait they epitomise better than anyone else is the compulsion to improvise. Improvisation is America’s art, its self-expression - and its disaster.
In his art, Brando created sublime images of a spontaneous, unguided, free existence. In his life, he catastrophically demonstrated the tragedy of American freedom. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness led to loneliness and injustice. Like the Bounty mutineers, like the founding fathers, Brando created a colony of chaos. His greatness and failure start to make a kind of sense only when you compare him to his peers, Parker and Pollock.
Brando, born in 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska, was 80 when he died six months ago. Charlie “Bird” Parker, born in 1920 in Kansas City, and Jackson Pollock, born in Cody, Wyoming in 1912, would be 84 and 92 now. They could still be here. But the best alto saxophone player who ever lived and the painter who dripped colours on to canvases laid flat died within barely a year of each other, in 1955 and 1956.
Charlie Parker was addicted to heroin, and a lot of other things - whisky, cheap wine, anything that might substitute for heroin. He was hospitalised at Camarillo in California after a breakdown in 1946, but wasn’t drug-free for long - his trumpeter Miles Davis broke with him after Parker repeatedly spent the band’s money on drugs. Bird’s classic recordings date from 1946 to 1948. When he died, of unascertained causes, in New York on March 12 1955, watching the bandleader Tommy Dorsey on television at a Rothschild heiress’s house, the doctor who examined the body reckoned the dead man was 53 years old - an overestimate by 19 years.
Jackson Pollock started drinking when he was 15, and by the late 1930s was so dependent on alcohol that he was hospitalised in Westchester, New York, in 1937. Jungian analysis, marriage to the painter Lee Krasner, and moving out of Manhattan to the far end of Long Island freed him to paint his definitive works between 1947 and 1950. But he went back to drinking and his last years were disastrous. He crashed his car near his home on the night of August 11 1956, killing himself and a passenger, Edith Metzger.
Marlon Brando’s own addiction was less lethal, or at least not so quickly - he was a compulsive eater. His gorging was already established when Truman Capote wrote a cruel profile of him in 1957. Capote watched the star of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One order a meal of “soup, beefsteak with french fries, three orders of vegetables, a plate of spaghetti, rolls and butter, and apple pie with ice cream”. In his latter years stories circulated about how when Brando went to health farms, he paid people to throw burgers over the fence.
For Parker, Pollock and Brando, to be a purely improvisational artist was unbearable - American freedom was unbearable. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were attainable only in art - in life, the void had to be filled with addictions, narcotic crutches, gluttony.
The belief that America will be found in the improvised, the spontaneous, the truly free, dates to the late 19th century, to the birth of what was in effect a new nation after the civil war. The war between the northern and southern states was fought over the meaning of the American constitution: for Lincoln’s Union, the existence of slavery insulted the universal right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The north’s victory did not, of course, truly secure these things for African-Americans. But it did force a question: what was the nature of this American liberty for which young men had died? The idea of American democracy became charged and new: it gave birth to modern American culture. You feel the exhilaration of what a truly democratic America might be in the poetry of Walt Whitman and the fiction of Mark Twain. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” declares Whitman in Leaves Of Grass (1855-92), his epic poem of democracy. In The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876), Twain anticipates every modern American novel, from Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye to Pynchon’s Mason And Dixon, in mapping a fluvial, free-flowing adventure - child’s play as improvisation, with Huckleberry Finn the original hero-improviser.
Twain openly associates Huck and Tom’s world with black culture, saying in the preface to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer that it describes the beliefs of “children and slaves” before the civil war. This aligns Twain with the most important cultural revolution that took place in the US. The most profound reflection on the nature of American freedom after the civil war was, and is, that undertaken by black musicians. The origins of jazz are difficult to reconstruct but early composers saw the roots of the form in slaves’ work-songs. James P Johnson, “father of stride piano” in the early 20th century, said he took the call-and-response style of his Carolina Shout (1917) from listening to stevedores, whose shouts derived ultimately from west Africa. But jazz is a response to America, not a rejection of it.
After the civil war, democracy and freedom were purportedly extended to everyone. What did freedom mean? Early jazz is both pessimistic and utopian about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The blue notes that drag the music down are a melancholy undertow of history; the blues insists on the heaviness of life in America, the facts of oppression. But the wild solo improvisations that Louis Armstrong emphatically put at the heart of jazz in his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings in the 1920s imagine a real American freedom, a utopia of self-fulfilment. Jazz musicians did not repudiate America for its manifest failings: instead they projected an image of true, creative democracy, an America that might be.
In 1945 that nation was, in theory, triumphant. America had just won a war for democracy. For the first time, it knew it was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Yet racial inequalities crippled Whitman’s “Life immense in passion, pulse and power”, and social and political conformity strangled his “word Democratic”. Even jazz had been made corporate by the big bands, as the genuine jazz orchestras of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman had been eclipsed by the banality of Glenn Miller, a music devoid of black or blue, remote from improvisation; dead, mechanical.
The new music that appeared in New York, first at Minton’s in Harlem and then at clubs on 52nd Street - “The Street” - in the wake of the second world war, rejected this sterile America. It aggressively invented its own nocturnal country. It insisted more than ever before on the improvisatory nature of jazz. Bebop was played by small groups, not big orchestras, and mythologised the solo - which had to be played fast and complicated, with the most exquisite technical achievement, yet also be rough-toned, raw-sounding. This was virtuoso music. Its supreme virtuoso was Charlie Parker.
He reputedly got his nickname because he insisted on picking up a chicken that had been run over by a tour van in order to cook it, but calling him Bird conveyed what people felt about his music - it soared. Parker posed extreme challenges to the musicians who played with him because he took off on solos that were impossible to follow, somehow returning to sense when he seemed to have unleashed mere chaos.
Miles Davis, later to record the classic Kind Of Blue, began his career as a teenage trumpeter who abandoned his studies at Manhattan’s Juilliard School to play with Parker. “Bird would play the melody he wanted,” he remembers in his autobiography. “The other musicians had to remember what he had played. He was real spontaneous, went on his instinct … Bird was a great improviser and that’s where he thought great music came from and what great musicians were about. His concept was ‘fuck what’s written down’.”
The similarities between the art of Charlie Parker and that of Jackson Pollock are so staggering, so deep, so unarguable, that it’s tempting to suspect Pollock of obfuscation when he claimed not to like bebop. In fact it would be a still more radical improviser, Ornette Coleman, who put a Pollock painting on the cover of his 1961 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Yet Pollock insisted that he only really loved traditional jazz - and he did love it. His surviving collection of 78s reveals an erudite and passionate fan of black music who listened constantly to early Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and his contemporaries Billie Holiday and Coleman Hawkins. Pollock called jazz “the only other creative thing happening in this country”. Art critics have never really taken seriously its influence on him. It’s as if American modernism can’t handle the idea that Pollock’s most significant influence was black music.
The romance and myth that surround Pollock are so vulgar, critics seem to feel. The formal achievement of Pollock’s painting, they argue, is unrelated to the cheap, glamorous image of the painter dancing around his canvas to sax and drum solos before dying violently, a romantic burnout. Funnily enough, respectable jazz writers are similarly suspicious of the romantic cult of Bird. His dependence on heroin, they fear, falsely made musicians think they needed to shoot up like him to play like him.
But Pollock and Parker were what they were - they meant it. They lived and died their epics. They risked everything to find the authentic America beyond all the phoney talk.
Listen to Parker’s Scrapple From The Apple, recorded in 1947, and look at Pollock’s 1950 Number 27, today in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The best way to describe the structure of Pollock’s abstraction is to compare it to Parker’s music. There are several kinds of mark on Number 27, different in tone - like different instruments. There are percussive splashes, sharp bursts of white. There are underlying black bass notes. Over all this float curling green sensual arabesques - the sax solo.
Improvisation is what matters to both these artists. Listening to his jazz records, Pollock made paintings that are pure improvisatory expressions, with no given form, no figurative constraint. It is his instinct alone that leads him out into space. Yet, miraculously, in the great works of 1947 to 1950, he discovers a harmony in this freedom - his paintings are not a mess after all, but coherent, enigmatically so. Pollock is able to improvise structure. Parker has this same miraculous ability to take the music on a wild walk yet never lose sight of where he started. “Eventually Bird would come back to where the rhythm was, right on time,” remembers Miles Davis. “It was like he had planned it in his mind.”
This deep sense of form is what makes Pollock and Parker of a kind. Bird sounds sweet, and Pollock’s paintings are beautiful. Tellingly, it was one of his late, romantically failed paintings, in which despair overcomes him, that Ornette Coleman reproduced on the cover of his turbulent Free Jazz. The best Pollock paintings never have that sense of breakdown. They possess a savage grace.
If they rejected cacophony and chaos, Pollock and Parker were scarcely virtuosi in the way that classical European artists and musicians were; accomplishment is not what they are about. No Raphael, no Mozart. Both deliberately roughen and dirty their surface. Pollock uses house paints. He drops cigarette butts into the drying paint. Parker rejects the harmonious tones of earlier sax soloists and introduces a raw, hoarse sound. For him, as for Pollock, American art must be rough in texture. This is part of being democratic. It’s as if they both defy themselves to produce beauty under impossible circumstances. Why do they risk themselves like this?
It is to find the true American voice. Improvisation, for Mark Twain and Louis Armstrong, was the free American way. Parker and Pollock took this seriously, and tried, in a society at once conformist, racist and unequal, to find America’s lost music - the music that only ever existed in late-night smoky rooms for a few minutes, the music the Constitution promised. In place of the phoney freedom for which the Rosenbergs were executed, the new American art of the late 1940s imagined a bodily, sensual, shared freedom.
“Resist much, obey little,” urged Walt Whitman, and American modernism took this to heart. Everything must start anew, from the unruly self.
It was impossible to sustain this. Neither Pollock nor Parker maintained their 1940s achievements through their final years. Almost immediately, their radical interpretation of America’s affirmation of liberty turned to cliché. Most of the art produced in its name was colossally inferior to theirs. The Beats tried and failed to translate bebop spontaneity into writing; so what if Kerouac’s On The Road was composed free-form on a single roll of paper? It’s a dutiful read.
In art and music, the best followers of Pollock and Parker deliberately reversed their terms. Miles Davis created cool jazz. Jasper Johns painted Flag. Meanwhile the authentic, non-racist, egalitarian American freedom glimpsed by two dying men just after the second world war mutated into hipster kitsch, William Burroughs, Jim Morrison … Apocalypse Now. It is hard now to believe American democracy ever inspired great, beautiful, modern art, the best of our era.
Marlon Brando seemed to forget, as much as film audiences, what that was, that lost vitality. Brando was the artistic equal of Pollock and Parker. His performance on Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947-8 transformed American culture as decisively as they did - and more universally. Modern painting and modern jazz are minority arts. But after the raw, working-class, violently unpredictable American voice of Stanley Kowalski transferred from stage to screen, it became globally iconic.
Tennessee Williams was an acquaintance and drinking companion of Pollock and Lee Krasner, and spent a summer with them in Provincetown in 1944. He called Pollock “dark”. The outwardly boorish Pollock may have been a model for the character Brando was to elevate into an American myth.
Recognition that Brando was above all an improviser is sometimes obfuscated by his association with the realist postwar director Elia Kazan. Brando is seen as a realist, when in truth he is an abstract artist. This is why his best films are the ones he made for Coppola and Bertolucci in the 1970s. Neither of these directors is a realist, and the characters they gave Brando are mythic, monsters.
Brando was allowed to improvise as much as he wanted: he refused to learn lines - dialogue had to be concealed around the set of The Godfather on cue cards. Bertolucci encouraged him to improvise most of his speeches in Last Tango In Paris in their entirety. When Paul - the ageing American Brando plays - embarks on an anonymous sexual relationship with a young French woman, and remembers his childhood, it is Brando’s own childhood he describes: growing up on a farm with alcoholic parents. Paul has been a boxer, an actor, a bongo player - Brando plays bongos, and was the martyred boxer hero of On The Waterfront. When he’s helped up at the end of On The Waterfront, you can feel the weight of his body, as when you contemplate a Michelangelo pietà .
There was a mysterious grace to Brando’s best acting - just like Pollock and Parker, he seems to discover form in randomness. The reason that his playing with a cat is so hypnotic in The Godfather, rather than simply being a bit of James Bond villainy, is that instead of being held in place to prevent it squirming away, the cat genuinely loves its Godfather - it nuzzles him spontaneously. In fact it was a stray cat that Brando, whose farm childhood gave him a feel for animals, found at the studio and befriended.
As Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he reaches the end of Mark Twain’s river. He is so disintegrated into cruel, mad impulses that Martin Sheen’s character says, “I’d never seen anyone so broken up.” Apocalypse Now describes, with hallucinatory precision, how the counterculture became the mainstream. It is the hippy photojournalist Dennis Hopper who falls for Kurtz’s fascist bullshit, who calls him “a warrior-poet”. From Twain to Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando, American artists took freedom, that word America touted so emptily, and tried to find a meaning in it; an American ethic of self-expression.
Apocalypse Now is the death of this illusion. There is plenty of freedom here - nothing else except freedom, and self-expression. Americans fire from helicopters for fun. The war is a riff. When a marksman shoots into the night to the sound of an electric guitar solo, it could so easily be a sax. At the end of the river, Marlon Brando improvises a monster so disorganised that some feel the performance itself is nothing but chaos. He lisps, “Have you ever considered any true freedoms?”
Late Thoughts
I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart.
Your eyes have grown dull, your tears cloudy,
Your hair is grey.
You don't understand the songs birds sing
Anymore, nor stars, nor summer lightning.
Don't hear it when the women strike
The tambourine; yet you fear the silence.
I have come to take your place, sister,
At the high fire in the forest's heart'...
'You've come to put me in the grave.
Where is your shovel and your spade?
You're carrying just a flute.
I'm not going to blame you.
Sadly, a long time ago
My voice fell mute.
Have my clothes to wear,
Answer my fears with silence,
Let the wind blow
Through your hair, smell of the lilac.
You have come by a hard road
To be lit up by this fire.'
And one went away, ceding
The place to another, wandered,
Like a blind woman reading
An unfamilair narrow path
And still it seemed to her a flame
Was close..In her hand a tambourine
And she was like a white flag,
And like the light of a beacon.
-----Anna Akhmatova
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Moments of Reprieve
I am being made to suffer for things I did not even do.
There is an element of despair in his voice. Without seeing his face I cannot place it though. Behind it is the thought: how much blacker must things become. The mongol says that he's just being his usual 'drama queen' self and not to take him seriously. This is a fantastic way of brushing off other people's-and one's own-problems but it just doesn't stick.
Is there a suffering that would make sense, and can there ever be just the right amount of suffering in the world, I ask Mongol. We can never just accept it as our fate, as something beyond the horizons of our understanding or our control;
to say that it is out of our hands now is to resign oneself to the unthinkable...
"Is this not another form of evasion?" he replies. As if thought about pain could lessen it any, as if looking at something from a distance was not looking at all. Is pain one or is it two? Questions are never answers, are they?
In a conversation with C, we wonder if anyone has written convincingly about death ...whether anyone can do so. I'm sure she'll come up with something. Khayyam doesn't work. Better to get drunk than read about it.
Finally, the stark winter days are upon us. The sun has refused ascendancy and is tired by mid-morning, lightly skimming all that it touches with its gentle spirit, never inhering in anything, unable to unite anything. The underground arteries of the world congeal, matter knots itself together, minerals age in the veins of our blood.
But before the light closes in on itself, there is a sudden flickering of sunshine on the rust leaves and they glimmer and dance for a moment; bathed in this moment of bliss they undergo some inner transformation. And then it is gone. And the darkness takes over. But there are such moments...
There is an element of despair in his voice. Without seeing his face I cannot place it though. Behind it is the thought: how much blacker must things become. The mongol says that he's just being his usual 'drama queen' self and not to take him seriously. This is a fantastic way of brushing off other people's-and one's own-problems but it just doesn't stick.
Is there a suffering that would make sense, and can there ever be just the right amount of suffering in the world, I ask Mongol. We can never just accept it as our fate, as something beyond the horizons of our understanding or our control;
to say that it is out of our hands now is to resign oneself to the unthinkable...
"Is this not another form of evasion?" he replies. As if thought about pain could lessen it any, as if looking at something from a distance was not looking at all. Is pain one or is it two? Questions are never answers, are they?
In a conversation with C, we wonder if anyone has written convincingly about death ...whether anyone can do so. I'm sure she'll come up with something. Khayyam doesn't work. Better to get drunk than read about it.
Finally, the stark winter days are upon us. The sun has refused ascendancy and is tired by mid-morning, lightly skimming all that it touches with its gentle spirit, never inhering in anything, unable to unite anything. The underground arteries of the world congeal, matter knots itself together, minerals age in the veins of our blood.
But before the light closes in on itself, there is a sudden flickering of sunshine on the rust leaves and they glimmer and dance for a moment; bathed in this moment of bliss they undergo some inner transformation. And then it is gone. And the darkness takes over. But there are such moments...
Dislocations
While I sat on the tiles,
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse,
Uncle Devereux stood behind me.
He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.
His face was putty.
His blue coat and white trousers
grew sharper and straighter.
His coat was a blue jay’s tail,
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.
He was animated, hierarchical,
like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press.
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....
My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color
---from Uncle Devereux
This seems like an impossibly prosaic, pedestrian piece of writing but is redeemed in the last line...a 'line of necessity' that summarises being.
When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag
-pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad
--from Waking Early Sunday Morning
Time runs, the windshield runs with stars. The past
Is cities from a train, until at last
Its escalating and black windowed blocks
Recoil against a Gothic church. The clocks
Are tolling. I am dying. The shocked stones
Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones
That snap and splinter and descend in glass
Before a priest who mumbles through his Mass
And sprinkles holy water; and the Day
Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay
---from Between the Porch and Altar.
For sheer speed and lightness this is a gem, spiked through with a lightning charge, or a song whose meaning resides in the ability to sing it at the right tempo.
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse,
Uncle Devereux stood behind me.
He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse.
His face was putty.
His blue coat and white trousers
grew sharper and straighter.
His coat was a blue jay’s tail,
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.
He was animated, hierarchical,
like a ginger snap man in a clothes-press.
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease....
My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles
of earth and lime,
a black pile and a white pile....
Come winter,
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color
---from Uncle Devereux
This seems like an impossibly prosaic, pedestrian piece of writing but is redeemed in the last line...a 'line of necessity' that summarises being.
When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag
-pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad
--from Waking Early Sunday Morning
Time runs, the windshield runs with stars. The past
Is cities from a train, until at last
Its escalating and black windowed blocks
Recoil against a Gothic church. The clocks
Are tolling. I am dying. The shocked stones
Are falling like a ton of bricks and bones
That snap and splinter and descend in glass
Before a priest who mumbles through his Mass
And sprinkles holy water; and the Day
Breaks with its lightning on the man of clay
---from Between the Porch and Altar.
For sheer speed and lightness this is a gem, spiked through with a lightning charge, or a song whose meaning resides in the ability to sing it at the right tempo.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Ashes
he knows the use of ashes.
he worships god with ashes.
he knows, He knows
he worships God with ashes
---This Mortal Coil
This, which flickers at night
in the skullcap of my thought,
mother-of-pearl snail's trace,
or mica of crushed glass,
isn't light from church or factory
to nourish
red cleric or black .
All I can leave you is
this rainbow in evidence
of a faith that was contested,
a hope that burned more slowly
than hardwood on the hearth.
Keep its powder in your compact
until, when every light is out,
the sardana become infernal,
and a shadwoy Lucifer sweeps down on a prow
on the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine
flowling his pitch-black wings half-
severed from effort to tell you : it's time
It's no inheritance, no talisman
to survive the monsoon's raging
on the spider's thread of memory,
but a history lasts only as ashes
and persistence is pure extinction.
The sign was right: he who saw it
can't fail to find you again.
Everyone makes out his own: pride
wasn't flight, humility wasn't craven.
The thin glimmer striking down here
wasn't that of a match.
Montale, Little Testament
Monday, November 06, 2006
Musical Notes
In the beginning was the deed not the word. But before that was sound. Do we ever have access to that hidden origin, is it possible to speak about the impossible? Is life anything but the search for that unseen centre, anything but the attempt to translate the mystery back into words, culture? We think about it, conceptualise it but music -like life-flows on, saying everything and nothing. Life without music would be a mistake.
Is music anything more than pleasure? A way of forgetting or a way of remembering a deeper past? And she holds beauty and reticience, the enduring and the ephemeral, the physical and the metaphysical in both hands.Harmony is beauty and number, passion and discipline. A sound thought. Where does thought begin and where does it end? Music doesn’t start with the first note, but rather from the silence from which it emerges. Something always precedes the origin. What is the relation between 0 and 1 except one of strict discontinuity. But it is, paradoxically, a relation neverthe less. Is this relation a ‘law’ or does it follow its own trajectory with any freedom? who can answer such a question. All one can say is that if the note is not sustained then it will ‘fall’ back to nothingness. Without an effort of will and memory it dies and this is the beginning of a tragic story. Gravity and grace, snakes and ladders…the old themes.
Music is always in the process of becoming: it never is ; its fleetingness is an escape from the world, all that is not present, but it is also an evocation of what can be or what was and points , therefore, to hope and memory.
Possibilities: All music is generated from the same twelve notes, the same fundamental structure; the universe is composed by some combination of them. We instinctively grasp the mood of some music because we too are a series of such notes. Unity and diversity. The hands, heart and mind work together in a blessed state. Humaneness is not a completed score, but a performance. Structure and logic, without the human touch, descends into the totalitarian and all that stifles creativity. That ‘giving’ , the human quality par excellence, is what helps a note as it is about to die; it is why a note can transcend life. Is music an attempt to control time, to find that special moment, that peaceful place, and freeze it or is it a striving to be time itself, to unlock closely guarded secrets and unbind the will.
--from Daniel Banenboim
Is music anything more than pleasure? A way of forgetting or a way of remembering a deeper past? And she holds beauty and reticience, the enduring and the ephemeral, the physical and the metaphysical in both hands.Harmony is beauty and number, passion and discipline. A sound thought. Where does thought begin and where does it end? Music doesn’t start with the first note, but rather from the silence from which it emerges. Something always precedes the origin. What is the relation between 0 and 1 except one of strict discontinuity. But it is, paradoxically, a relation neverthe less. Is this relation a ‘law’ or does it follow its own trajectory with any freedom? who can answer such a question. All one can say is that if the note is not sustained then it will ‘fall’ back to nothingness. Without an effort of will and memory it dies and this is the beginning of a tragic story. Gravity and grace, snakes and ladders…the old themes.
Music is always in the process of becoming: it never is ; its fleetingness is an escape from the world, all that is not present, but it is also an evocation of what can be or what was and points , therefore, to hope and memory.
Possibilities: All music is generated from the same twelve notes, the same fundamental structure; the universe is composed by some combination of them. We instinctively grasp the mood of some music because we too are a series of such notes. Unity and diversity. The hands, heart and mind work together in a blessed state. Humaneness is not a completed score, but a performance. Structure and logic, without the human touch, descends into the totalitarian and all that stifles creativity. That ‘giving’ , the human quality par excellence, is what helps a note as it is about to die; it is why a note can transcend life. Is music an attempt to control time, to find that special moment, that peaceful place, and freeze it or is it a striving to be time itself, to unlock closely guarded secrets and unbind the will.
--from Daniel Banenboim
Handedness
Every great and profound experience would like to be insatiable, would like repetition and return to last until the end of all things, the restoration of an original situation from which it emerged…the transformation of the most upsetting [and joyous] experience into habit: This is the essence of play.
—-W. Benjamin.
Each people’s gestures are determined by their response to the environment they live in and are a product of the type of work they are engaged in. These gestures are carried over into all walks of life , from art to dance to language. These gestures become so internalised that one can meaningfully talk about a style of soul emanating from a particular region-a fundamental ’speech’ or set of gestures that is unique to a certain place. Through repetition the distinction between geography, history and nature gets blurred.
Could it be that there is a religious vocation or temperament, say, that orders the body and the soul? And within these fixed categories -be they determined by work, landscape, an inner constitution or some combination of these elements- is there a further stratification along family lines? (I was once recognised by a cousin who had never seen me by the way in which I kept my head in my hands). Just as a household may have a ‘taqiya kalaam’ ( a set phrase) , might it not be the same when it comes to rudimentary gestures, the way one holds one’s hands?
A distinct landscape (urban, mountains, rural etc) can be associated with a particular relation with the body. It is said of the Bedouin Arabs that their expressions (linguistic and non-verbal) had remained unchanged-like the landscape itself-for thousands of years, chiseled down to a few quintessential self-revealing gestures of the soul. One is reminded of the hand positions of Buddhist statues that depict the interior state of the soul or the hands in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
But beyond this deep continuity between the land and gesture there is the desire to re-create it , to see it before our very eyes, and this is manifested in our Utopian projects, our sense of play. The city is, in this sense, not just an ordering of the soul, a pattern for the mind to follow, but a space that reconfigures our awareness of our bodies and those of other people. A way of binding and separating: the body politic.
—–Based on Plekhanov.
I’ve started so I will not finish. I’m struggling to complete even a single book. These are the books that I am currently wading through-some half completed, others only barely a chapter old and discarded: Herzog, Three-arched Bridge, Cabaret, Philosophy and Law , Goodbye to Berlin, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Lawrence’s Essays, Dangling Man, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Language and Solitude, What Ought I To Do?
Today I ‘ve given them all up and turned to Tallis’ Hand with its endlessly fascinating insights, though why one should renounce style in favour of ideas remains a mystery to me. The hand as the agent of action, knowledge and communication. On the handedness of the universe see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lopsided.shtml
—-W. Benjamin.
Each people’s gestures are determined by their response to the environment they live in and are a product of the type of work they are engaged in. These gestures are carried over into all walks of life , from art to dance to language. These gestures become so internalised that one can meaningfully talk about a style of soul emanating from a particular region-a fundamental ’speech’ or set of gestures that is unique to a certain place. Through repetition the distinction between geography, history and nature gets blurred.
Could it be that there is a religious vocation or temperament, say, that orders the body and the soul? And within these fixed categories -be they determined by work, landscape, an inner constitution or some combination of these elements- is there a further stratification along family lines? (I was once recognised by a cousin who had never seen me by the way in which I kept my head in my hands). Just as a household may have a ‘taqiya kalaam’ ( a set phrase) , might it not be the same when it comes to rudimentary gestures, the way one holds one’s hands?
A distinct landscape (urban, mountains, rural etc) can be associated with a particular relation with the body. It is said of the Bedouin Arabs that their expressions (linguistic and non-verbal) had remained unchanged-like the landscape itself-for thousands of years, chiseled down to a few quintessential self-revealing gestures of the soul. One is reminded of the hand positions of Buddhist statues that depict the interior state of the soul or the hands in Leonardo’s Last Supper.
But beyond this deep continuity between the land and gesture there is the desire to re-create it , to see it before our very eyes, and this is manifested in our Utopian projects, our sense of play. The city is, in this sense, not just an ordering of the soul, a pattern for the mind to follow, but a space that reconfigures our awareness of our bodies and those of other people. A way of binding and separating: the body politic.
—–Based on Plekhanov.
I’ve started so I will not finish. I’m struggling to complete even a single book. These are the books that I am currently wading through-some half completed, others only barely a chapter old and discarded: Herzog, Three-arched Bridge, Cabaret, Philosophy and Law , Goodbye to Berlin, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Lawrence’s Essays, Dangling Man, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Language and Solitude, What Ought I To Do?
Today I ‘ve given them all up and turned to Tallis’ Hand with its endlessly fascinating insights, though why one should renounce style in favour of ideas remains a mystery to me. The hand as the agent of action, knowledge and communication. On the handedness of the universe see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lopsided.shtml
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Infinite London
London had always seemed to me to be the most prosaic of cities. Sturdy, pragmatic and not especially inclined to flights of fancy; not a city in which the imagination might be let loose, or in which dreamers dream of revolution or love, but neither is she a mathematical, abstract city. But I now increasingly come to think that London is nothing but a city of memory and desire, a thousand cities whose histories continue to exist side by side, sometimes overlapping and intersecting, at other times running parallel to one another.
There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian…then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames.
But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook…they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.
The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.
And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline… and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.
It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?
Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970’s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950’s in their layout and ambiance. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?
In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:
The shallowness of a life of sanity.
The heart of darkness is not in social organization but in the blood.
There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian…then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames.
But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook…they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.
The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.
And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline… and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.
It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?
Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970’s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950’s in their layout and ambiance. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?
In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:
The shallowness of a life of sanity.
The heart of darkness is not in social organization but in the blood.
Time Out of Mind
Everything in the universe is running down, falling away, disappearing: childhood, meaning, time: entropy. Knowledge increaseth our sorrow. Are there other beings, with wider sympathies, deeper insights, than our own limited range of perceptions? Does it matter? To us, to them? As flies to wanton boys. As we possess more unity and truth, more esse, than a stone, so may it not be the case that there are other beings whose reality escapes us, whose truth transcends our own and whose knowledge of the cosmos and her laws is greater than ours…mankind: just a stage in, not the pinnacle of, creation?
In every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, those ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their place. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightening position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deathly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
We have finally been able to locate ourselves, set our co-ordinates with some degree of precision. But at the same time we oscillate on the edge of an abyss. Our increased awareness of our finitude has not lessened any the sense of infinite horizons. The same holds true for time, and not just for space: things millions of years old exist side-by-side with us; through the fissures in the architecture of time we obliquely note the presence of different timescapes. And this we find compelling, monstrous, fascinating, bizarre, and repulsive in equal measure.
—-from H.P. Lovecraft
Something can represent multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. We intuit unity. Pure multiplicity, absolute contingency, is something the mind abhors. We must find a pattern to things and yet we do not know where this compulsion comes from. Is it a form of psychosis or our highest achievement?
In every place where human activity is interrupted, where there is a blank on the map, those ancient gods crouch huddled waiting to take back their place. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far…some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightening position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deathly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
We have finally been able to locate ourselves, set our co-ordinates with some degree of precision. But at the same time we oscillate on the edge of an abyss. Our increased awareness of our finitude has not lessened any the sense of infinite horizons. The same holds true for time, and not just for space: things millions of years old exist side-by-side with us; through the fissures in the architecture of time we obliquely note the presence of different timescapes. And this we find compelling, monstrous, fascinating, bizarre, and repulsive in equal measure.
—-from H.P. Lovecraft
Something can represent multiplicity from one angle and unity from another. We intuit unity. Pure multiplicity, absolute contingency, is something the mind abhors. We must find a pattern to things and yet we do not know where this compulsion comes from. Is it a form of psychosis or our highest achievement?
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