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The Last Day.
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Life returns to the city. I venture out..or, rather, downwards. Find the old bookshop/art gallery I was looking for. It is hidden below KFC of all places. I admit to myself that the strangeness of Lahore is totally inexplicable. What am I doing here. For the mysterious to retain interest it has to be at least partly knowable. My association, on the other hand, amounts to little more than the shards of loved ones' memories from a bygone age, and the beautiful, tragic, fading winter light that barely holds everything together...
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The walls of the gallery are washed brilliant white. The narrow corridors and the low curving arches give the impression of entering a labyrinth, the catacombs. Strange that the word should find a home here. Alpha and Omega. I find a painting I like: dull browns and blues; it is a city and its underground reflection. Reminds me of St. Paul's on a rainy winter December, from the Number 8.
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Appropriately, the place is called the Crow Eaters! I don't give a second glance to most of the books (Islam and Pakistan studies dominate). But I do stumble across Ruskin's Unto the Last. I make it a point to be sure that his words are the first I read this year. After all, the entanglement of fact and value, ethics and economics, is just what I need to concentrate on...
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For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
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Notes From the Underground:
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The Mundus: a sacred or accursed place in the middle of the [Italist] township. A pit-originally a dirt hole, a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind, along with those condemned to death,..[and any] infant which he did not lift from the ground and hold up above his head so that it might be born a second time...
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A pit, then, 'deep' above all in meaning. It connected the city, the space above the ground,..land as territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of fertility and death, of the beginning and the end, of birth and burial.
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The pit was also a passageway through which dead souls could return to the bosom of the earth and then re-emerge and be re-born. As locus of time, of births and tombs, ..cavern opening to light, ..the mundus terrified as it glorified..life and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination..
4 comments:
"...the entanglement of fact and value, ethics and economics, is just what I need to concentrate on..."
Ruskin is an excellent start. You can't go wrong with Ruskin. But I do heartily recommend the Croatian writer,Dubravka Ugresic, who isn't 'dark' at all but reassuringly chipper in 'telling as it is.' The essays in Nobody's Home sometimes sound just like you writing!
Try this:
‘Only in times of fixed, frozen values – political, religious, moral, aesthetic – has the writer enjoyed (and in some places still enjoys) a special status, the role of ‘the voice of the people’ and the position of moral arbiter. Today, in the contemporary post-political, post-modern, market-orientated cultural zones an intellectual is simply a ‘player.’ First he must fight to be heard at all. If he should step outside his local environment, he will soon discover his voice is only one of a million other voices. Our intellectual will further discover the ironic but liberating fact that he is nothing more than a product of the market, that his books are products and that consequentially the degree of intellectual subversion is gauged by its market impact……’
Dubravka Ugresic: from her essay, ‘Transition: Morphs & Sliders & Polymorphs’ in Nobody’s Home.
C, oh dear..sounds like me..how depressing!
I wonder if we read to get away from ourselves?
Ruskin. Yes, it's very good stuff-so far. Strange, now that I think of it, that the last few posts should be tied to one book-Peter Fuller's Lost Illusions. That's where I remembered Cecil Collins from.
C, btw, do check out the music on a previous post. You have to click on the highlighted word, 'music'.
Ciao,
b.
Oh, dear,b, we seem to have got stuck in 2007, which is when you started this thread. Never mind. We don't aim to be contemporary, eh?
I Just had to respond to your mention of Peter Fuller - one of my many 'gurus' in relation to arts and crafts.(He was the bosom friend of Richard Dormer, art critic of the Daily Telegraph inter alia. Fuller died in his 40s,tragically early - can't remember the cause.
I take it that the book you're referring to is his Images of God: the Consolations of Lost Illusions? I recalled reading this a few years ago,and in fact have some notes I made at the time. As is usual here, the book itself is nowhere to be found on the shelves - may have to buy another copy.
Sone quotes herewith: PF speaks of "...the plight of good art in a society, like ours, which is characterised by the absence of a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides." Artists, he opines, must therefore invent their own symbols, always in danger of "a collapse into subjectivism and solipsism."
b, in any one blog, you tend to throw out ideas and quotes like sparks from a catherine wheel so I find it difficult to identify the MAIN POINT(S):):) Still I believe that this question of what art is for and what it is doing in our day and age is one which you often address, so maybe the above quotes will be germane.
ciao, amigo...
Hello, C.
Yes, it's one of my favourite art books. (It would be interesting to know what yours are). The chapters on 'Taste', Ruskin and Morris are amongst my favourites but he also makes Gill sound fascinating (despite his perversions).
This idea of a lack of symbolic order is, of course, a staple complaint of conservatives and traditionalists alike. But even so, there seems to be something in it.
I think one could talk quite meaningfully about the dissipation of art into so many subjective impressions. "What does it mean?"
ans. what eevr *you* want. Or, it is a reflection of the artists psychological state.
Well, all art is that to one degree or the other, but it can't be *only* that!
Have you read Jonathan Jones' online 'wild ones'?
Also, there's a fascinating book by Eco on the open work (I've only read one chapter and posted notes somewhere here on the blog).
the MAin POINT.
er..um..there probably isn't one!
Why do we always look for one?
Salaams,
b.
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