The Time Machine

I don't care much for the times we live in.
----From 'the Time Machine'

The swami said, you know, despite everything, it's best to live in the time and place that was allotted to you. This span of the universe is yours, and had you not existed right here, right now, the universe would have been radically different, unrecognizable even.

She knows I am going. This is, perhaps, a subtle way of saying that I should stay put. I now know what Augustine felt like as he left Carthage.

I think over this for two days. Writing will not help, will not change reality. As I pack-half my life has been spent doing so-I only know that once again it is time to disrupt the settled ways.

Borderlands.

I look for the perfect end, which is to say: a repeat of the beginning. The 390, Gower Street, walk past Denmark street, cross at the same point, diagonally, Charring Cross. Border's. Fish sandwich, on brown, with grain mustard. Latte, paper cup, without having to ask for the holder; The New Yorker, NYRB, Harper's if it's in. Grey skies and drizzle. I don't get my usual seat but okay, I'm willing to make this concession. Over the years this routine, this place, has passed the test of time.

Now I must choose a book, at random, scour its texts and try and find some hidden meaning in it; towards the end this will become a frantic search, I know it, a search for a word, a turn of phrase that will resolve everything, put everything in perspective; I will scribble down something furiously and hope to decipher it later on, hoping that sparks will fly, dimly aware that I am only a clerk, a transcriber of other people's thoughts and that any quickness of mind is not mine; it will leap out at me from the pages, and then I will say to myself: what a co-incidence, how uncanny: Freud, you old devil.

But the truth doesn't work like that. Or if it does, then one has to be able to read its signs.

'Gold, silver, to gel-blaze the dark places.
Black has its own gleam. Pascal's
name is a blank to many people; so
also are yours and mine.
there must be unnamed stars but all are numbered
de profundis. Check these on the web
spun by their own light. And does such knowledge
firm up allegiance to the stoic heavens?

~~~~~~~~

The angular
sun on windows or windshields like swans
taking off and alighting..
Let me be, says the dying man, let me fall
upwards toward my roots.

~~~~~~~

For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
admonitory sparse berries, attrubent
stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:

for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;
for all departing, as our selves, from time;
for random justice held with things half-known,

with restitution if things come to that.

~~~~~~~

Something here even so. Our well dug-in
language pitches us as it finds-
I tell myself
don't wreck a good phrase simply to boost sense-
granted its dark places, the fabled burden;
its loops and extraordinary progressions;
its mere conundrums forms and rites of disclosure;
its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight;
its earthen genius auditing the spheres.

~~~~~~

..Whether the appearances, the astonishments,
stand in their own keepings finally
or are annulled through the changed measure of light
Imagination, freakish, dashing every way.
defers annulment.

~~~~~

dark moon's non existent seas

~~~~~

How strange you have to be to stay faithful.

~~~~~

[On suffering]

No courage can do more. There is a gap:
let us pass through it; the many voices-
of peasants and soldiers-are reinstated,
the pageants move, stooping, to hallow them.
Nothing tells this story of thee or another.

~~~~~

I grasp the possible
rightness of certain things
that possess the imagination, however briefly;
the verdict of their patterned randomness

~~~~

Now here's real alchemy-the gorse
on roadside terraces, bristling with static,
spectator of its own prime, inclement challenge

or salutation brusquely in place,
hermetic at full display and rallying,
as best becomes it, spicy orator.

~~~~~

There is a kind of sullenness that summer
alone possesses. It passes; will have passed:

not to speak of your heart, that rules and lies
in webs of heavy blood, a clobbering fetish.
Parables come to order; the hurt
is mortal though endurances remain,
as they have to, insufferably so;
hindsight and foresight stationed in their ways.

~~~~~

Durer's Eyes

The way in which we draw boundaries around things, how we define the limits, the periphery, tells us what we are, what is.

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We need to set up and maintain all that is not-I, all that is of lesser value and reality. How we need those barbarians!

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The depth of reason is only realised in the play against what it is not-unreason, madness, precisely. And the supra-rational?

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Madness: A new rite of exclusion, an expression of the desire to set apart the impure, the corrupted-whether in body or mind...

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Leonardo: he was interested in everything because he was interested in nothing..

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Durer: Restless, nervous energy. Lacking all self-repose. A life on the edge of a precipice, and one that understands just how precarious this is; far too aware of itself, in fact, to be at peace.

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It's comforting talking about madness-especially if one isn't mad oneself. The genius of the Romantics against the philistines; mountain people vs the plains.

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The problem with mad people is that they look at the world too intensely. Searching for a pattern when they need to let go. How many of Europe's leading lights ended up crazy: Cantor, Nietzsche, Van Gogh...

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To be small and stay small

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"Assuredly there exists ..work of the kind one can do in a dream? I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese, that is to say, a person who dreams everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid."

From a Boat Trip:

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"Odd similarity between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in and would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there..here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is this why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths?...

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A girl sitting with us on the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end."

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Wasler remains for the last 27 years of his life in an asylum; there is a black and white photograph..footprints in the snow lead to tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away.'

Connaught Place, Delhi

The intellectual joy of not belonging.
----Nietzsche.

The intellectual joy of belonging.
----b.

Watched the second half of the match at G's father's apartment. An old man who had recreated a part of Delhi in this leafy suburb of London. Musty, dank corridors and a slightly decaying exterior; plush interiors. The only way to live! He talked fondly of how Lahore was much better than Delhi and Bombay-but that was sixty, seventy years ago, when he was 16. He has no friends here and no family (apart from G). The only time his eyes light up, though, are when he talks of the coffee house back in Connaught Place. His dark eyes seem glazed over, as if they were fixed on a distant object..or a far away place.

By a strange co-incidence the swami has also heard of the coffee house.
"Why, I had cold coffee for the first time in my life there when I was 13, it was 1945; it was bitter and I nearly spat it out. But my uncle, a literary man, said (with a simple but withering glance of his eyes) that it would be terribly poor form to not drink it."

Of course, there was the old coffee house (and Pak tea house) back in Lahore. A place where vagabond penniless dissidents, writers, and intellectuals read poetry to one another. Habib Jalib was a regular:

This country, this country of unsurpassed beauty.
But yes, how ugly are its people!

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At Putney station, old but busy. There's more than a hint of winter in the air tonight. For the first time the warm yellow lights in other people's houses look comforting. Life returns to the interior. For the first time one wants to look inside other people's windows and wonder about how a totally different life to your own can carry on so close and yet so oblivious. Tonight, mothers will tell their children not to stay out too late. The enfolding darkness and the bleak buildings-never have they looked so devoid of light-remind one that reality-whether petty, dramatic or profound, is indoors. The sky is blacker than ever. The station lights come on with a ping and a flicker and there is an audible sigh of relief. (It's as if this was Blackpool!).

For a moment we're all sailors on the top deck. We're shipwrecked. The old man was right. Surround yourself. Keep it out. We strain our eyes, search and search in the dimming light. Is there a human soul out there?

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I'm lost in thought for some reason and remain silent for a long time. On the district line our train pulls into a station. I look across at another train that seems to be at a greater height than ours. Between its rusty wheels I see a shimmering arch of light. For a minute it appears as if there is another world beyond those lights and I'm nearly spirited away there. Then the train pulls away, revealing a plastic white light. So, this is reality! Don't look too hard at it.

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What I did hate, though, and what finally set me at a run out of town after dark at the end of the term..without turning in my grades, was that the place was all anti-mystery types right to the core,-all expert in the arts of explaining, explicating and dissecting, and by these mans promoting permanence. For me that made for the worst kind of despairs ...Teachers, let me tell you, are born deceivers of the lowest sort, since what they want from life is impossible-time freed, existential youth forever,. It commits them to terrible deceptions and departures from the truth.

...Muslims, let me tell you, are a race of people who understand impermanence. More so even than sportswriters.

----- Richard Ford, The Sportswriter.

At the End of the World (in other words: Woodford Library)

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A Fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it it should always be.
for
On the day the world ends
Women walk through fields under their umbrellas
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet,
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world there will be,
No other end of the world there will be.

----C. Milosz

Woodford Library. 12:25.

C asks me to write from "wherever". This is as close as it gets. These are the type of places I always feel most at home; from searching for history books for my school projects, to the quiet, anonymous places like this one. They are like an oasis in a desert, a refuge from the "uniform of the times". And then there's the Punjab public library-a dusty, opaque place that, like the library in Eco's 'Name of the Rose' is full of mysterious unread books and ancient manuscripts. And 'Mecca', the British Library, whose exalted silence reverberates throughout the hallowed space. The great, monolithic bookcase at its centre, withstanding the dissolution of time. We are defined by what we escape from, but also by the place we call home, to where will always return, almost instinctively. Here, there is only the life of the mind, no religion, no ethnicity. Human, the way a cloud's a cloud.

From George Steiner:

The persistence, resilience of the idea of the timeless; the stability, the deep continuity in consciousness: our ability to express, communicate, gesture meaning-to see it in other cultures that stretch back in the mists of time: the language-animal. Are we entering a catastrophic break-not of a past but the past..the Trenches mark the end of communicable experience. The contract between word and world is coming to pass, expire. Technological changes are sweeping in a new metaphysics. An ontological nausea means that we are at the end of the world and we must bring an end to saying, meaning (Beckett). Only science counts..all else is 'non-sense'. The scepticism of Freud: do we say what we mean, do we mean what we say? What is left but the 'rag and bone shop of the heart'?

A young kid goes on a holiday with his friend, Paul, to the South of France. Only one returns, the other drowns.

'I don't believe Paul's death was the only thing that contributed to my breakdown but even now, thirty years later, images of that glorious summer day still come, clear and uninvited, into my mind, and I am standing on the beach-an 18 year-old with everything to live for-looking at death for the first time.'

A single moment can give shape to all others.

Jim Webber, 104, after working for 90 odd years has just stopped working as a gardener to spend more time on his own plot, so that he can grow red tomatoes.

'He has seen the ancient rhythm of farming life turn into a high-tech industry , and the village community disperse. And amidst all this dizzying change, one thing has been a constant: his garden. "Digging is good for the body and the soil". He plants trusty varieties such as 'Onward' for peas, 'Majestic' for potatoes, and 'Crimson Globe' for beetroot.'

When time is running out, stick with the familiar, with what you know.

But what do you know?

Meno:

'How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?'

Rebecca Solnit:

'The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This is the light that got lost..the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not reach us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the colour blue.'

A Magical Orange Grove in a Nightmare

Sitting here writing this from a run down Barkingside Library. 20 min. to say something before being "timed out". Time is money! I'm going to miss these places, like Walthamstow library or the triste bungalows where old men with their sun-burnt, creased skin wear checked shirts with too many buttons undone and the silver-haired women still find meaning in discussing trivial things. [The grey men with double barreled chests work diligently in the bleached-out gardens, the wives, all seventies-like with their shades and flowery dresses fold napkins or leaf through glossy magazines, turning the pages with their index finger. This is how retirement was envisaged, a quiet winding down to the background of radio commentary and the occasional appearance of a bee to remind them of summers long past. But it's no good. This sucks. Big time. This is just one long suffocating Saturday afternoon.

Outside, on the high street, the heavy-bosomed women with their sturdy arms, arms that have grown used to carrying things, and their stern, implaccable faces. Everything about them speaks of a certain defiance of gravity and time. Redeemed by the solid pragmatism that runs to their very core. Teenage kids screech by, all gell and spikes, a spiked existence. Elongated strides and the clink of bling: the first strivings of the ego].

Simple people for whom reading the Guardian qualifies you as being an "intellectual". Will miss the Village bookshop as well. No, England's gone. There's no two ways about it.

The whole thing-literature, novels-all seemed to him an amusement, far away, too, scarcely to be taken seriously.
---V.Woolf on Hardy.

He was a human being, not 'the great man'.
---L. Woolf.

'He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality...[His poems] remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone., who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him,a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious , ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.'
---C. Tomalin

This post was supposed to be about madness and has ended up about sanity! No time for that now. Later.

Crow Country

O.E. hroc, from P.Gmc. *khrokaz (cf. O.N. hrokr, M.Du. roec, M.Swed. roka, O.H.G. hruoh), possibly imitative of its raucous voice. Used as a disparaging term for persons since at least 1508, and extended by 1577 to mean "a cheat," especially in a game (1590).

Last week saw a news item that showed a woman teaching migratory birds-who had somehow lost the instinct to get up and go-how to stir their consciousness from its dark slumber, unsettle themselves from their ordinary lives, so that they could once again learn that simple and elemental truth: all of life, all its heartache and mystery, revolves around departures and homecomings. Lost and found. There's no other game in town.

I have a terrible sense of geography. I look at the map and can recognize Delhi, Melbourne, London, and Rome. Beyond that, a few places perhaps: California, Montana. Vaguer still: is that South Africa, Argentina? But home ? That's a question of a completely different order...

True places don't exist on maps, never do.
---Melville.

City of Man

'We either value African life, understand a black life as equal to a white life and the poor as equally deserving as the wealthy – or we do not. This reformulation of Frantz Fanon's "a given society is either racist or not" or better yet of Malcolm X's "If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress," is a reminder that there are no fractions when it comes to human dignities and freedoms.'

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---Ngugi...courtesy of the Dougal.

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The three richest people in the world own more than the poorest 48 nations. One billion people live in slums (UN-Habitat); Millions die in Rwanda, Congo, and Darfur and hardly anyone blinks an eye. Is this still a city, a city of Man, or bare forked existence?

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Today I was told by a white Rhodesian that she was "sure" that if she fell to the ground that I, before extending my hand to her, would start a religious debate instead of helping her. One depressing thing to ponder on is just how persistent our prejudices and hatreds are: Sunnis for Shias, the rich for the poor, white for black...On this crooked timber..?

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I think one thing is true though. The Allama was right: for all its idealism Europe has never really overcome its race consciousness. After the Trenches, the Bomb, the Gulags and Auschwitz one is surprised by any talk of civilisation and freedom (one excuses clowns like Bush and his 'Infinite Justice').

Eternal City

Already the flowers are sagging in the warm air. The roads are deserted and the sky is cloudless, dreamless. It is only 9:15 but already one feels the day is done, the dull and flat afternoon is already grasped in these moments, the step becomes slack. Nothing happens in summer; everything is bleached, canceled out: sun-and-wheat consciousness. Time only passes in winter.

The northern soul sometimes seeks the order of the sun and its ability to unburden us, open us up. But mostly, it is absence and blue horizons that have a hold. The pulse amplifies into a terrible , overbearing presence. Is this what eventually drove Van Gogh mad?

Ubo, who doesn't have a pessimistic bone in his body, who would dismiss a dark thought as impractical, said to me: we are like strangers in this world, each of us as behind a glass case; we can see and feel for others, we can see their lives but not reach out to them. Nor can we comprehend their suffering, as they cannot ours.

I wondered: is this why the world sometimes seems a spectacle, somewhat unreal, a show of puppets-beautifully painted, no doubt, but puppets nevertheless? What would shatter that glass, and what would it be like to stride freely, aimlessly or with purpose, like a giant in that other space..to shake hands with an angel.

And then, returning to this theme, and without tilting his head (which would have indicated he had reflected on this matter) he said something like: but that is the tragedy and the beauty of life.

The Allama would say: the trouble with this life is that it has too many limitations. The trouble with the next: it has none. And there is no greater limitation than Time ("Do not vilify Time for Time is your Lord"). Seal sings: Time is the space between me and You.

The Eternal City beckons, but so does the one that is close at hand, that is destined to pass-perhaps even more so. The nihilists see themselves- if nothing else- correctly: they love life, we love death. It is said that those who are waiting to go to Heaven remark: 'we tasted fruit like that back on Earth'. One cannot help think that there is some longing expressed in those words. We fall in love with what is lost.

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

The Path

About 100,000 years ago I must certainly have been related to swans and wild geese, because I feel so drawn towards them.
----To Jussi Jalas, 24th August 1940

Faith, like a bird, sees its trackless way, unaided by the intellect.
----Farid.

A white sheet of paper is full of ways.

Old people have walked down the path so often that it ceases to be a path-and they, themselves, have become invisible. V.S.P's 'Life at 80' is sublime on this. Dying people see it. Theirs is a late style . The threads of time become the curves of time.

'Architecture for me has always begun with drawing. When I was very little my mother said I used to draw in the air with my fingers. I needed a pencil. Once I could hold one, I have drawn every day since. The buildings do appear on paper the way you say, but they are not the result of gratuitous brushstrokes. The pencil is guided by so many thoughts stored away in my mental library. But, when I have looked at the site for a building, considered its budget and thought of how it might be built, and what it might be, the drawings come very quickly. I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say...

When people ask me if I take pleasure in the idea of someone looking at my buildings in the future, I tell them that this person will vanish, too. Everything has a beginning and an end. You. Me. Architecture. We must try to do the best we can, but must remain modest. Nothing lasts for very long...'

Right angles separate and divide. Personally, I have always loved curves, which are an essential feature of the natural world. It is not easy to draw curves, to give them the spontaneity they demand and then to organize them in space in such a way as to achieve the visual architectural effect that one is looking for. Like Matisse, I maintain that my curves are not gratuitous; they have a meaning. At one point, even Le Corbusier, who had proclaimed the virtues of right angles, began to despise them. In the end he admitted that we were right. One day he said to me: What you do is baroque, but you do it very well. You have the mountains of Rio in your eyes.'

----Oscar Niemeyer (still working at the age of 100!)

From the New Yorker:

Sibelius, For an instant God opens up his door and His orchestra plays the fifth symphony.

The 8th, started in 1924, remains uncompleted even though he worked on it up until the time of his death, 1957. Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can't go on like this.

He burns his manuscripts. What must it be like to lose one's work like this (Huxley?). Is there a desire to be unknown, to not be named, that rivals the desire to be an immortal, a star that resists the withering hand of time? Remember, he comes from the outskirts. The human scale of the other, smaller, marginal Europe (Kundera)

Rachmaninoff: I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

'The Finns are descendants of an errant tribe'. Mahler: The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing. Sibelius: A confession of faith at different stages of one's life.

The 5th: repetition of themes with small variations. 'Music becomes a search for meaning with an open-ended structure-an analogue to the spiritual life.

2nd movement: the swan hymn: 16 swans flying over Ainola: One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon..That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider..nothing in the whole world affects me-nothing in art, literature, or music-in the same way as do these swans and wild geese and cranes. Their voices and being.

'The swan hymn transcends the depiction of nature: it is like a spiritual force in animal form. When the horns introduce the theme..it's as if they had always been playing it, and the listener had only begun to hear it. Its intervals split wide open, shatter and re-form.

The symphony ends with six far-flung chords , through which the main theme shoots like a pulse of energy. The swan becomes the sun.'

Three days before his death he would walk in the forest, awaiting the return of the cranes, hoping to relive that moment. To be a radical in this day and age is to be a conservative, to retrace ancient byways, to draw invisible lines. Even if the path cannot be discerned any more, still it is worth living just to know that it once existed, that it was open for each one of us, and that for time out of mind you and I have glimpsed it and gasped at such a spectacular vision.

Their cries echo throughout my being. One of them broke from the flock, circled the house, cried out, and flew away...

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