Just to say: thank you dear readers, for your comments, for your friendship..and for helping me killing time, so that I might remember that time before time, where our steps used to rhyme,and see the blue of distance within and without.
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Maybe it was Fate. It doesn't matter. If there are departures there is also a return of what is lost. The circle is broken-which means we can step in, and we can step step out. Which means there is a me and there is a you (volo ut sis). It drifts away like a dream, like the fading of your picture on the silk. But this much is real: what is distant is also near; what is near is also distant.
Nothing left but this screen before me, like a mirror. But when I look at me, I shall think of you.
I think the best photographs I've seen are by Thesiger. The question remains: do nomads have photographs, images? Is this not, precisely, Guenon's point: those who live in time, the city dwellers, are forever trying to 'stabilize' themselves by the monumental or the fixing of time. Cain and Abel...
Crossing Tower Bridge every day, I invariably came across Japanese tourists and it was always the same story: this obsession for recording the moment. I felt like saying, for fuck's sake, why don't you just enjoy the time you have with your loved one at this place. Christopher Booker was right: after the 1970's: conservation. But let's be more specific...
'There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus.'
Photography, it was thought, would offer 'direct access to the real' -or at least a trace of it, like a footprint.
Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.
Consciousness. Yes. On the screen, the surface. To be aware of being seen. I think this is why Muslims (or at least the dougal) don't like photographs.
Here it is Roxana:
Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles ; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world that denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.
'What photographs do out there in space was previously done within reflection ("the mind's eye")..it removes appearance from the flow of appearances..[when ] only that which narrates can make us understand.'
[Public] photography offers information severed from all lived experiences.'
'Has the camera replaced the eye of God? The decline of religion corresponds with the rise of the photograph. '
One wonders just how much of the trace of religion passes over into the modern period without us knowing it. But certainly the aniconism of Judaism and Islam is relevant here: only God knows our true name, the spirit cannot be captured, frozen. The nomadic vision is an ongoing moment. Movement and stillness. A broken circle.
God judges us, and this is the same as saying He remembers us or forgets us, sees us in the right light.
'The industrialised, 'developed' world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility. Such opportunism turns everything-nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics-into spectacle. And the implement used to do this -until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone-is the camera.'
~
9/11: "I thought I was watching a movie"
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The spectacle and capitalism! De Bord! showmanship. That's what it's all about. Display. Instead of actually living life, quiet reflection, a real dialogue, conversation, we have this atomisation, fragmentation. Like the quote out of context: the overturning of authority, the dissolution of experience, ..everyone wants to be seen or be an i-reporter...the disappearing world (Adam Smith was right here: trinkets and baubles, illusions and deception sustains capitalist development). Blogging and the Internet: same thing, isn't it?
~
But here's the dope:
~
A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anaesthetise the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit the natural resources increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers) . The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images.
Television with its flickering series of trivial momentary unreflective uncomprehended images, pictures the state of the prisoners in the Cave who can see the flickering shadows of things whih are themselves copies of real things. ---Iris M.
At first sadness and sorrow, followed by a nervous twitching in my own, as if out of sympathy. It is said that when the right eye is infected the left will also become so-out of "sympathy"; then the terrible thought accompanied by the slight curling of the upper lip (like the portrait of Dorian Gray) : it's not me. Self-disgust that such a thought could arise. Will God record our every thought or will he let some go? Not every image is worth holding on to. The chaste gaze must know what to pay attention to, when to let go...
And then the one enduring thought, something one hopes has come from one's deepest self, a reflection of the most real part of our lives, like the silver in the mirror that lovingly brings things to the surface: an infinite thankfulness for those eyes that have looked so tenderly at me, that have looked out for me. And I feel as something has grown in me, a knot of the heart has been untied..to grow in lightness (Calvino). ..our humanity is deepened, enhanced, by looking at, and being looked at, in the right way, by the eyes of the loved ones.
I haven't read these books but word has it that they're good. Thought you might be interested as well (if you have any recommendations yourself (including films) do say. Hey! doesn't have to be "deep", just interesting.
This looks very interesting. Some audio clips: the rest
This is the same person who wrote a fascinating piece on Sibelius
Roxana says this is unwatchable-which means that it is good ! (Nabil, if you're reading this: have you downloaded it yet?! If you're from a law enforcing agency: I'm only joking)
anton, fl, sohaib, ali, Beth?
The not-yet-interesting fl has this -which is nearly as good as Japan's 'Ghosts of My Life'.
This was one of my favourite songs of the year
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Okay, you didn't think I'd let you get off that lightly, did you?! (This is worse than Vogon poetry, I hearyousay !)
It’s a modern day heresy to accept other people’s words and thoughts, 'sayings' , or proverbs as our own since to do so only indicates the presence of a feeble, lazy mind, a dangerous falling back into heteronomy;authenticity demands that we think for ourselves, by ourselves, and that thought be independent of the world, tradition, or anything ‘given’. Conscience, a ‘knowing together’,is hardly possible any more as thought becomes more isolated, more abstract. Weisen/Wissen has almost completely displaced Kenen/Kennen.
We, insofar as we are modern, have lost the ground beneath our feet, and our instinctive feel for things peters out, replaced by the ever more wild and fantastical flights of imagination of an inner-worldly sensibility.It is not surprising, then, that our attention spans are so short and that the great storytellers are so rare. For in truth, we have lost the ability to listen and are less inclined to incorporate a truth that is not our own-in all senses of the word-into our lives.
The auditory imagination penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, fusing the most ancient and the most civilised mentality
—-T.S. Eliot
The eye is the organ of temptation; the ear of instruction.
—-Aristotle.
The ear sets into motion creative thought, helps us re-call, re-collect. It is “the eye that listens”, something that prepares us for the whole drama of life, that ‘oceanic feeling’ which is a sense of oneness. The first thing a child hears is the call to prayer that is whispered in his ear. Sight, our ability to make distinctions,is something on which our survival depends, and comes much later.
The essence of music is conflict, subversion and the capacity to bring even dissonance and different voices into a whole. The mechanical pattern that it establishes through repetition brings a certain sense of security-a music that comes ‘home’- but in such cases it is only a pattern of life, not a way of life.
Sound: the pressure of the vertical on the horizontal.
A note makes us take stock of the past and think about the future; neither one nor the other will ever be the same after the emergence of that note. In the same way, each person is unique and throws some light on the mystery of all those who have gone before him and all those who will follow him. Neither the past nor the future are inevitable. But the note, the music, always remains elusive: "music does not become something, but something becomes music."
---citations from Daniel Banenboim’s Reith lectures
But [the hoopoe] tarried but a short while; and [when it came] it said: “I have encompassed [with my knowledge] something that thou hast never yet encompassed [with thine].
---Q:27:22
Birds are better than us human beings. At least they are not attached to any one place, at least they have the freedom to go wherever they want...one day I will fly from here...
--Swami.
Welcome! goshawk slim, ghazi-eyed
How long fury, digging in your heels?
Make love’s writ eternal
Jess of your talon
never loose the scroll’s bond
Swap intellect for a heart
that you may know as One – eternity unending, unbegun
Steadfast, shatter nature’s mew
Nest in the cave of unity
Once there, yours the bough,
the Lord of the world your friend
Welcome nightingale in love’s bower
Cry ever love’s pain and fire
Sing soft heart’s psalms
that the heartless lose their ghosts
Throat like David’s, spirit wise,
the harmony of your kind a guide
How long will you dress lust in mail?
Fire the iron like David, make it tear
Once so soft will your love burn bright.
---Attar's Conference of the Birds
Those who are of an evolutionist persuasion are wont to look at things exclusively from an angle of material continuity. But what else is there but matter they say! And yet, we are reminded that they belong to "communities" like us. And how is it possible that a bird could have, in some respects, more knowledge than a Prophet? This is beyond the understanding of the moderns....
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
----G.M.Hopkins
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
--Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
Bark [a freed slave] buys all the children of the street golden slippers...
Since he was free, he possessed the essential human wealth: the right to find love, to walk to the north or to the south...What good was his money..what he was experiencing, like a profound hunger, was the need to be a man among men, with ties binding him to other men...but no-one had showed that in any sense he needed Bark. He was free but in an infinite way, so that he felt weightless above the earth. He lacked that weight of human relationships that inhibits free movements, those tears and farewells, those reproaches and those joys, everything that a man strokes or tears apart every time he forms a gesture, those thousand chains that bind him to others and make him heavy...Like an archangel, too airy to live the life of men but finding a way to cheat by sewing lead into his girdle...pulled earthwards by outstretched hands...
---Exupery, Wind , Sand and Stars.
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning. ---Nietzsche
COAL all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the trees outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. I must have coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the pitiless stove, before me the pitiless sky, so I must ride out between them and on my journey seek aid from the coaldealer. But he has already grown deaf to ordinary appeals; I must prove irrefutably to him that I have not a single grain of coal left, and that he means to me the very sun in the firmament. I must approach like a beggar, who, with the death rattle already in his throat, insists on dying on the doorstep, and to whom the cook accordingly decides to give the dregs of the coffeepot; just so must the coaldealer, filled with rage, but acknowledging the command "Thou shalt not kill," fling a shovelful of coal into my bucket.
My mode of arrival must decide the matter; so I ride off on the bucket. Seated on the bucket, my hands on the handle, the simplest kind of bridle, I propel myself with difficulty down the stairs; but once downstairs my bucket ascends, superbly, superbly; camels humbly squatting on the ground do not rise with more dignity, shaking themselves under the sticks of their drivers. Through the hard-frozen streets we go at a regular canter; often I am upraised as high as the first storey of a house; never do I sink as low as the house doors. And at last I float at an extraordinary height above the vaulted cellar of the dealer, whom I see far below crouching over his table, where he is writing; he has opened the door to let out the excessive heat.
"Coaldealer!" I cry in a voice burned hollow by the frost and muffled in the cloud made by my breath, "please, coaldealer, give me a little coal. My bucket is so light that I can ride on it. Be kind. When I can I'll pay you."
The dealer puts his hand to his ear. "Do I hear right?" he throws the question over his shoulder to his wife. "Do I hear right? A customer." "I hear nothing," says his wife, breathing in and out peacefully while she knits on, her back pleasantly warmed by the heat.
"Oh yes, you must hear," I cry. "It's me; an old customer; faithful and true; only without means at the moment."
"Wife," says the dealer, "it's someone, it must be; my ears can't have deceived me so much as that; it must be and old, a very old customer, that can move me so deeply."
"What ails you, man?" says his wife, ceasing from her work for a moment and pressing her knitting to her bosom. "It's nobody, the street is empty, all our customers are provided for; we could close down the shop for several days and take a rest."
"But I am sitting up here on the bucket," I cry, and numb, frozen tears dim my eyes, "please look up here, just once; you'll see me directly; I beg you, just a shovelful; and if you give me more it'll make me so happy that I wont know what to do." All the other customers are provided for. Oh, if I could only hear the coal clattering into the bucket!
"I'm coming," says the coaldealer, and on his short legs he makes to climb the steps of the cellar, but his wife is already beside him, holds him back by the arm and says: "You stay here; seeing you persist in your fancies I'll go myself. Think of the bad fit of coughing you had during the night. But for a piece of business, even if it's one you've only fancied in your head, you're prepared to forget your wife and child and sacrifice your lungs. I'll go."
"Then be sure to tell him all the kinds of coal we have in stock! I'll shout out the prices after you."
"Right," says the wife, climbing up to the street. Naturally she sees me at once. "Frau Coaldealer" I cry, "my humblest greetings; just one shovelful of coal; here in my bucket; I'll carry it home myself. One shovelful of the worst you have. I'll pay you in full for it, of course, but not just now, not just now." What a knell-like sound the words "not just now" have, and how bewilderingly they mingle with the evening chimes that fall from the church steeple nearby!
"Well, what does he want?" shouts the dealer. "Nothing," his wife shouts back, "there's nothing here; I see nothing, I hear nothing; only six striking, and now we must shut up the shop. The cold is terrible; tomorrow we'll likely have lots to do again."
She sees nothing and hears nothing; but all the same she loosens her apron strings and waves her apron to waft me away. She succeeds, unluckily. My bucket has all the virtues of a good steed except powers of resistance, which it has not; it is too light; a woman's apron can make it fly through the air.
"You bad woman!" I shout back, while she, turning into the shop, half-contemptuous, half-reassured, flourishes her fist in the air. "You bad woman! I begged you for a shovelful of the worst coal and you would not give it me." And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever.
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea.
And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before- dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding though the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes
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Stop. Look. It isn't like that. Attentiveness to the drowned words, the tentativeness of the hands, the second spaces in you. Listen. Each element is in you: diamond,quicksilver,and gold and fire. No season is forever. It passes. Time passes. What remains is like the image of the moon on the dancing stream: a broken circle. Softly, gently, the moonlight falls on your face; as at the stroke of midnight, two faces, two worlds are indistinguishable. Then, there is no talk of what is 'inner', what is 'outer'. Yes. No?
Crow. Oilblack. Many types of black. More. Light strikes, glistens off it. You remember the colours, name the world. It opens, unfolds, for you. You for it.
Went to the bookshop with Nabil (I think this is the first time he's left the green zone in ages). 'Readings' is a weird little place, very cheap second-hand books (subsidized by the hair-transplant business next door..I kid thee not!)Seven million people in this village and this is as good as it gets!
I'm not knocking it. Sometimes one can find all sorts of treasures (Nina Berberova's Book of Happiness, Catherine Chalier's 'What Ought I to Do?', and Edward Curtis's photographs of the Red Indians). But mostly it's crap: shelves and shelves of Dan Brown, murder mysteries, one whole wall for 'romance' . There's such an eclectic mix (I think they're shipped over by weight or are just books no-one else wants..via China or Malaysia). So, for instance, you might find T.S. Eliot next to Tantric Sex or something on 18th century knitting patterns in Denmark next to Chomsky, the Kama Sutra next to a biography of Rumsfeld.
What caught my eye, though, was a book called Dancing with Cats. I mean, these people are so effin' sad... and to think: there's actually a readership out there ! But yeah, like, whatever. (Come to think of it though, I'd love to see a cat break dance or spin on his head).
Next to the Gardening section there was Architecture, then Philosophy (all very orderly here), then a section called 'Chicken Soup'. Yep, a whole cabinet! I cracked up. But no, it's even worse. Get this: these are actually some sort of Christian books that read: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit. What, did some evo suddenly realise that this was all a bit too corny and donate them to the unsuspecting Paks (winning "hearts and minds"?)
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Nothing else to report today. Antonio roped me into playing football and I got tackled by some 6-year old kid! A student asked me what I think of substances (no, not the medieval Substance). But I did get my JordiSavall Cd's.
I've simply got to close this blog down soon... when you run out of things to say, you'll say anything....
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.
Take thy beak from out my heart,
and take they form from off my door.
When the northern light fails, memory of the sun seeps from my heart (the gold in the black); there is a blizzard all around, but deep in the heart of winter is a hushed place where snow falls ever so softly, silently. Sightless and speechless, the remembrance of what was lost is like the solitude of the stars, the silver tracery of the spider.
Lost in the wilderness, disoriented and bewildered, the cage of your heart offers a strange kind of captivity. As if your keeping of my soul in a blue glass bottle, or a picture of my face close to your heart would bring solace to the eye, peace to my senses.
Crow realized God loved him- Otherwise, he would have dropped dead. So that was proved. Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat. And he realized that God spoke Crow- Just existing was His revelation.
But what Loved the stones and spoke stone? They seemed to exist too. And what spoke that strange silence After his clamour of caws faded? --Ted Hughes.
With thanks to Roxana, as always, for pointing me here.
There's a tendency to romanticize physical labour by those who haven't done any. The old, solid world of industrial manufacturing or the 'timeless' work of the labourer, the peasant, are seen in the light of a dense network of social values: commitment, loyalty, solidarity-as against the free-floating alienated worker who has no connection to 'the land' , a tradition of craftsmanship (Sennett), or place.
True. But if we are to be on guard against an unrealistic idealism let us also take note of the unidealistic realism that holds sway over our brothers..a 'realism' that says we are self-interested individuals and that only, a false universalism (of the market) and a false conception of human nature.
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After this nothing happened. ---Plenty Coups.
Why is there so much interest in a post-apocalyptic state, in what barely survives the deluge? Perhaps part of it is a sense of cultural exhaustion; perhaps it has something to do with a terrible foreboding that our time is up, that the delicate environmental equilibrium is on the brink of toppling into a blackness and forgetfulness that will rival any Dark Age....
Post-American landscape..like Mayan cities, reclaimed by forest, abandoned zones. 'A third of Detroit has evolved past decrepitude into vacancy and prairie..an urban void.'
1900: 250,000 1950: 2,000,000 2007: 900,000
Nothing is inevitable.
Is the fate of all one-industry towns? Is this what awaits "sock city" in China?Of the 1.6 million whites after the war 1.4 million have left. 80% of the population is black. 'Even 300 bodies a year were exhumed from the cemeteries and moved because some of the people..don't think the city is good enough for their dead.'
'Detroit was building the machine that would help destroy not just this city but urban industrialism across the continent..the manufacturing belt became the rust belt. The new American cities trade in information , entertainment, tourism, software, finance..dematerialized economies. they are abstract. Even the souvenirs in these new economies often come from a sweatshop in China'
'Detroit will not be rebuilt but forced to become something else'
'The city was the infernal realm, the burning lands, the dragon's lair at the centre of a vast and protective urban sprawl.'
On the Rivera Mural: 'black, white, red, yellow figures lounging on the bare earth. To my eye, though, they look like deities waiting to reclaim the world, insistent on sensual contact with the land and confident of their triumph over and after the factory that lies below them like an inferno.' ---Rebecca Solnit, Harper's
How one becomes what one is. ---Nietzsche.
Poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Song leads us home to where we have not been...Is G-minor, in the western scale, intrinsically triste or does its desolation stem from its use? ..Language will conserve, with uncanny tenacity, names of trees, of fauna, from lands they have long abandoned. They preserve configurations of mores and institutions long past and almost indecipherable to the present. The muted ritual is now eroded, but was once pivotal... ---from George Steiner, Errata.
Alexander, in 'The Land of Darkness', with his cook, Andreas. Lost and found.
the hole, the well, the cavern: the symbol of refuge, a place that no-one else can see or find, where I cannot be seen, can be nothing. Spengler was wrong here. The inverted triangle, the symbol of the primordial waters-still waters run deep- of the heart, of all that is most inward. Amongst the ripples of time and stillness, there is a sudden flaring up, totally unscripted: at the moment of deepest perception a realisation that the night is also a sun. A place of silent reflection, gathering...where one collects one's thoughts, where black suns live....
The scene: A man has been thrown down an unused well in the middle of nowhere, a vast and inhospitable desert. The relentless, monotonous sun has dried everything out-both above ground and below it, reducing life to a carcass, an empty shell...under its glaring light the world is but a vast system of mirrors: the nothingness within a reflection of that without, the man's abandonment a shadow of the fate of the well itself...
"...[a]t one point something happened that I never could have imagined. The light of the sun shot down from the opening of the well like some kind of revelation. In that instant, I could see everything around me. The well was filled with brilliant light. A flood of light. The brightness was almost stifling...The darkness and cold were swept away in a moment, and warm, gentle sunlight enveloped my naked body. Even the pain I was feeling seemed blessed by the light of the sun...I could see the stone walls that encircled me. As long as I was able to remain in the light , I was able to forget about my fear and pain and despair. I sat in the dazzling light in blank amazement.
Then the light disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Deep darkness enveloped everything once again. The whole interval had been extremely short..the flood of sunlight had gone before I could begin to comprehend its meaning.
After the light faded, I found myself in an even deeper darkness than before. I was all but unable to move...A very long time went by, it seems. At some point I drifted into sleep. By the time I sensed the presence of something and awoke, the light was already there...Without thinking I spread open both my hands and received the sun in my palms. It was far stronger than it had been the first time. And it lasted far longer. ..In the light, tears poured out of me. I felt as if all the fluids in my body might turn into tears and come streaming from my eyes, that my body itself might melt away. If it could have happened in the bliss of this marvellous light, even death would have been no threat. .. I experienced a wonderful sense of oneness, an overwhelming sense of unity. Yes, that was it: the true meaning of life resided in that light..."
----Murakami.
A vision of the world without us, not merely a place that excludes us, but a place emptied of us. The light, now a faded yellow against sepia-toned walls, seeming to be enacting the last stage of its transience , its own stark narrative coming to a close. ---Mark Strand on Hopper's Sun in an Empty Room.
That is to say that we make them with the ordinary, everyday things, whatever greets us when we wake up in the morning, whatever we're hoping for. I am just recording what I see on my daily round. ---Frank Auerbach. But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed. --Alain Badiou. MS : to mix in the right portion (as a way of removing disproportion)mixis, miscere : promiscuous, miscellaneous. Mestizo (mixed breeding)mustang.
ML: medley, melange, meddle.
MSR or MSL (Hindi): mixed with divinity (misr)mishran: addition, a kind of mixing. Mushrik: one who adds.
Sebastian Smee on Freud: ....'not so much about "penetrating character" or illustrating personality traits; it is about the strongest possible representation of a specific human presence. And bound up in that is an understanding of other people's privacy, their essential solitude.'
" I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
Love is never directed to this or that property of the loved one, but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of a generality: universal love; the lover wants the Loved One with all of its predicates, its being such as it is [whatever the person is is not a matter of casual indifference to their qualities, but neither is it a forgetting of those in favour of an 'essence' or 'spirit'..it is the person as a person...does one have to tear the words assunder to see that it is a question of an everlasting question: what....ever]
'The portraits do not presume to know their subjects definitively ...instead, they do something far more subversive and in the end, moving. [He] powerfully registers their unknowability. In doing so, he grants them great depth of human freedom...."when you find things very moving the desire to find out more lessens" (Freud)'
'It is as though he (Freud) has continued to paint beyond the point at which Freud (he) had achieved an adequately realistic image..a point that is somehow surplus to requirements; representation that goes beyond itself.'
Do we grow within our limits and not beyond? Is heaven a perfect, unchanging circle? ..or, is it: "verily towards thy limit, for thy limit is God"?
Absence makes the heart grow...
Agamben: Saint Thomas and Halos:
In the Kingdom of the Messiah everything will be exactly the same as it is now, except for a slight displacement....the tiny displacement does not refer to the state of things, but at their periphery, in the space of ease between every thing and itself. This means that even though perfection does not imply a real mutation it does not simply involve an external state of things, an incurable "so be it." On the contrary, the parable introduces a possibility there where everything is perfect, an "otherwise" where everything is finished forever.
The Beatitude of the chosen includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. However, something can be added in surplus (superaddi), an "accidental reward that is not necessary for beatitude" (Aquinas) and does not alter it substantially but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior).
The halo is this supplement added to perfection. Something like the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.
The halo is thus the individuation of a beatitude, the becoming singular of that which is perfect...the singularity here is not a final determination of being, but an unraveling or an indetermination on its limits: a paradoxical individuation by indetermination.
The halo: a zone where possibility and reality become indistinguishable..the being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility.
Mixed in a new birth...this imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to make itself 'whatever', is the tiny displacement that every thing must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo.'
Freud's portraits are soaked in particularity. They are full of human contradictoriness. They do not insist on one aspect of character, any one physical fact. They include as much as possible...forever feeling the contrast and inter-play between so much densely packed life and the threat, the promise, held out by the inanimate.
"I'd like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it...[I want my pictures] to look awkward, in the way that life is awkward"
'Freud's account of human flesh , insisting on its gravity and animality, speaks to widespread contemporary veins of pathos and abjection..it as though each sitter had suddenly learned of a disaster, and that disaster were himself.' (NYRB)
Despite the worlds inside of me, thwarting me away I've noticed in other eyes, time's closing in
You look for the lines that connect, that intersect. Sometimes for the lines that spiral out of control, that run off on a tangent. At others, at other times, for those that divide space. The search for a pattern to life is life. Or, rather, one's approach to that search is. Following lines into the unknown. To understand or make? The ink is not dry!
Today, early in the morning, I thought of the shadows cast by the buildings, the trees (all merging into one) and wondered if they'll be exactly the same size next year on this particular day. Or maybe there's another cycle, say in 12 years. Is time, then, just a cycle within a cycle of which I am a part? Are we alone in seeking out that still point, that vertical that opens out into another space?
I walked on, noticing the trails of silver pathways made by some mysterious stranger's footmarks through the dew. The silence that is the traces of other people's lives. The intricate, fragile pattern, this filigree and shadow..
Missed the sufi night, with AbidaParveen singing sufikalaam of AmirKhusrau. But did hear a Romanian group that sounded something like this:
Here they were, the Romanians, the mirasis of Europe. Little did they know that they'd entered a city of jokers and clowns! (Interestingly, a French colleague said just the same thing to me over coffee on our rooftop cafe as I was listening to this:
"What surprised me here was just how non-serious everyone is, how they make fun of everything"
So, here they were, these funny Romanians, on a cold night in Lahore with a small-ish crowd comprised of some voluptuous girls in tight jeans, a few maulvis (incredibly), young brash kids, a number of farangis and Afghani girls and what appeared to be some druggies sitting on their haunches, their grey shawls wrapped nonchalantly around them.
A few comments like : they'd be a good in a circus or I'm sure they'd make a lot of money playing at marriages, but then the crowd just got up when the horn section got going and danced crazily like some sort of Romanian peasants! And this was, I thought, a great two fingers up to the maulivs or Americans or anyone else who think that this city of lazy pimps, bastards, poets and prostitutes will ever change. No, Lahore is Lahore. Eternal Lahore. Indestructible Lahore. Like a cockroach!
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The Baroque does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfillment. We have no sense of release, but rather of having been drawn into the tension of an emotional condition. --Heinrich wolfflin, Renaissance and Barock, 1888.
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Addendum. Well, the bastards did strike last night-as feared. Thankfully, no casualities... only a small bomb blast.
Every act of perception is the infinite in the finite.
God is a precept, the world is a concept.
All truth lies at the intersection of what is 'given' and the open, tradition (or continuity) and creativity, revelation and history; each person is the insertion of a new perspective into the framework of relations that is the world. Each Revelation is the breaking up of the old world.
Levi-Strauss: series and structure, the mathematical infinite and the absolute. In our cultural attitudes: structural and serial thought; the ancient quarrel: philosophy and poetry (which is "wandering"). The philosophical stance has been the archetypal, natural view since the Middle Ages: the traditional systems of expectations and formation. 'Classical' thought -against the polyvalent and an emphasis on the contingent, temporality, is based on a world defined by gravitation and abstraction; serial thought on a world that is perpetually expanding...
The classical is the definitive, the concluded message; it is the closed-like ordering of thought. The order of the work is the mirror image of an imperial and theocratic society.
Underpinning the poetics of the necessary and the univocal is an ordered cosmos, a hierarchy of essences and laws which each individual must understand in the only possible way, the way determined by the creative 'logos'.
The reception and interpretation is always modified by particular and individual interplay with, and the response to, an 'object' and this brings time and existence to it. Culture, individual tastes, inclinations, and perspectives are a prolongation of the object, an essence, into time. But this is not the same as an "unfinished work", "acts of conscious freedom". The modern is the substitution of Freedom for Truth, the Protestant search for the truth rather than the Catholic possession of it. The open is not the unfolding of a pre-conceived plan and it is not just a question of the number of new dimensions of meaning it throws open: the open belongs to a qualitatively different set of experiences, a different world-view and a different world.
The new perspectives introduce the subjective element but in a specific, predictable, closed way...from the 'outside' as it were. Allegory, for example, is a definite range of rigidly pre-established possibilities just as traditional folk songs are the weaving together of pre-fabricated materials in a number of given ways. Is complete freedom possible ? As finite beings can we even conceive of such a thing and are infinite , undetermined possibilities meaningful unless they exist against a backdrop of what is determined...the 'muddy centre'?
Whether it the classical Renaissance or Byzantium flat, inert space, the Jazz age with its creativity and soaring inventiveness is literally worlds apart from their timeless perspective. [H]ere it is precisely the static and unquestionable definiteness of the classical Renaissance form which is derived; the canons of space extend around a central axis closed in by symmetrical lines and shut angles which cajole the eye towards the centre in such a way as to suggest an "essential" eternity instead of movement . Baroque form is dynamic; an indeterminacy of effect (in its play of solid and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination; it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. Its search for kinetic excitement andillusionary effect leads to the situation where the plastic mass in the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive , frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perpetual transformation....(outside the canons of authorized responses. Not to name , but only suggest. The single direction that is dogma, values , is questioned).
An ordered world based on universally acknowledged laws is being replaced by a world of ambiguity", one without 'directional centres' and different "types of ambiguity"...an inexhaustible network of meanings.
The classical perspective: the god of the spectator: the whole world converges on him, the world is detached from him..the brain can isolate a given view, frozen in time; but its experience of the world outside the eye is more like a mosaic than a perspective set up, a mosaic of multiple relationships, none of them wholly fixed. Any sight is a sum of different glimpses..the viewer and the view are part of the same field. Reality, in short, is interaction. ---Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New.
The misconception which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of independent existence. There is no such mode of existence. Every entity is only to be understood in terms of the way in which it is interwoven with the rest of the universe. ---A.N.Whitehead.
Field of possibilities: not one rigid form of interplay. Devolution of authority, static order, the given, to personal choice. Multiple logics (cause and effect breaks down..dis-orientation, discontinuity, complexity).
In the modern scientific universe as in architecture and in Baroque pictorial production, the various component parts are all endowed with equal value and dignity and the whole construct expands toward a totality which is close to the infinite. It refuses to be hemmed in by any ideal normative conception of the world. It shares in a general urge towards discovery and constantly renewed contact with reality.
The spirit of Baroque: the emancipation from bounds. The background in a picture reveals its kinesis, depth-experience..the horizon is the symbol of the "unlimited space-universe"..where heaven and earth meet, music flows from it. It is the same with the fascination with clouds: the Alpine spirit that desires nothing more than to be alone with endless space, to be alone in Paradise. Personality is a soul left to its own decisions.
With the open the emphasis shifts from the essence to appearance: impression, sensation, "an empiricism which converts the Aristotelian concept of real substances into a series of objective perceptions by the viewer.
The role of the art object is one of potential mystery, to quicken his imagination. The open work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning , different ways of being understood..a pure expression of personality ---Novalis.
To name an object is to suppress pleasure. It exists in a halo of indifference (aniconism). But the open work is still a work and not just a series of random events or experiences. Reality may be without a teleology, without a pre-determined end. But the aim is to seize the multiplicity of duration-broken up into an infinity of instants-and transform it into the organic wholeness of all synthesis.
Goethe. Often rounded, always open. A broken circle.
The universe does not have a fixed futurity, a [p]redetermined, unalterable order of specific events which, like a superior fate, has once for all determined the directions of God's creative activity. In fact, divine knowledge regarded as a kind of passive omniscience is nothing more than the inert void of pre-Einsteinian physics, which confers a semblance of unity on things by holding them together, a sort of mirror passively reflecting the details of an already finished structure of things which the finite consciousness reflects in fragments only..the future certainly pre-exists in the organic whole in the whole of God's creative life but it pre-exists as an open possibility, not as a fixed order of events with definite outlines. ----Allama Iqbal.
The discontinuity of contemporary physics , the victory of nominalism over realism..to be without a definition. Complementarity: different models describe different behaviour. A move away from solidity, habit, regularity and "matter" to events and probabilities and discontinuity ("jumps")
How can anything present itself truly to us since its synthesis is never completed? How could I gain the experience of the world since none of the views or perceptions I have of it can exhaust it and the horizons remain forever open? Open to continual renewal ...a flight from the old , solid, concept of necessity. A centre must emerge, a centre is allowed to emerge. ---Merlau -Ponty.
The open work is still a "work" and not a series of random coagulations or pure improvisation; it is a structural vitality.
The work of art..is a form, namely of movement , that has been concluded; or we can see it as an infinite contained within finiteness..the work therefore has infinite aspects, which are not just "parts" or fragments of it, because each of them containing the totality of the work , and reveals it according to a given perspective. so the variety of performances is founded both in the complex factor of the preformer's individuality and in that of the work to be performed..the infinite points of view of the performers and the infinte aspects of the work interact with eachother , come into juxtaposition and clarify eachother by a reciprocal process, in such a way that a given point of view is capable of revealing the whole work only if it grasps it in the relevant , highly personalised aspect. Analogously, a single aspect of the work can only reveal the totality of the work in a new light if it is prepared to wait for the right point of view capable of grasping and proposing the work in all its vitality. (Citations from Umberto Eco, The Open Work; Spengler, Decline and Fall, Allama Iqbal, The Reconstruction)
Today’s politics is more and more the politics of jouissance, concerned with the ways of soliciting or controlling and regulating jouissance. Is the entire of opposition between the liberal/tolerant West and the fundamentalist Islam not condensed in the opposition between, on the one side, the woman’s right to free sexuality, inclusive of the freedom to display/expose oneself and provoke/disturb man, and, on the other side, the desperate male attempts to eradicate or, at least, keep under control this threat.
--Zizek
Two things I find very boring: rants about immorality/decadence (read: the lewdness of women); and rants about fundamentalism/backwardness. Politically: you love life or you love death! Or Bush: they're jealous of our freedoms.
So, let me (with your permission) engage in a bit of ranting of my own. Tourism. These adverts on the televison are surely designed for morons who want to "experience" something "real", so that they can 'escape' the humdrum of their own lives. The more exotic, the better: Indian elephants or Bali dancers...wow! nothing like a bit of culture and traditional dancing..perhaps we can even throw in a whirling dervish to satisfy your spiritual leanings). Authentic. the real deal. Been there, done that. Check.
There is now a television show called 'Shopping for religion'..I kid thee not! And everyone's a sufi now! One of the funniest things I saw at the Tate was a short film on Mumbai. People turned up in their droves-mainly the usual seekers of 'the mystical'. But they left in horror after five minutes. No colour, no Bollywood glamour, or 'shining India'..damn, not even any elephants. Just the grim reality of slumland, just five million people who have to shit on the streets because there aren't proper facilities.
And then there are the unreal cities in the Middle East with their 'education cities' and huge shopping malls and their own brand of the virtual city-devoid of any politics, real people, or sense of place. A snazzy version of Singapore, really, where you can play golf and talk about derivatives., or ski indoors and then grab a Starbucks coffee. The Friends generation. Or worse: the swarm of yobs-aka. British tourists- that descend on the Greek islands to lose themselves in excess.
One last thing: no offence to any Scousers: but Liverpool as a city of culture? This is how cities now have to market themselves (I've even heard that the late B.B. hired Saatchi & Saatchi to improve the brand image of Pakistan!).
The next time I hear some air-head talk about having "fun" or "sample the local culture" I think I'm going to reach for my gun, in my backward sort of fundamentalist way...
Eutropia, where everyone dreams of living another life, but can't forget the one that is quietly slipping away. So, that other life is only (imagined) slightly different from the present one. On the dark side of the moon other people are living our lives, only where we turned right, they turned left. They live in a glass darkly, and stare and stare, ingazing, their lives more broken for always seeming whole. Or, alternatively, everything and everyone is interchangeable; someone else will take my place and I will think someone else's thoughts. The possibilities remain unchanged this way; there is only a shuffling of the cards: nomos. Then the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard.
The great difficulty of residing in the modern epoch lies, paradoxically, in the triviality that nothing could be easier.
----Rosenzweig.
'The people keep indoors and stare for hours at crooked mirrors showing exotic things among familiar objects on their dressers.
What lives within is near. All else lies far away. The things within, so busy, overfull and everyday, stay inexpressible. It is as if the island were a star
too small and Space, fiercely dispassionate, had crushed it unaware. It circles on and unilluminated and unheard proceeds alone
through darkness in an orbit of its own intent on making end to all of this, continuing blindly and outside the course of other galaxies, of other stars or suns.
-----Rilke.
(p.s. I thought of this picture and typed it into google images. There it was, under 'blacksunpress.com'. Did someone else have these thoughts before me? Are there other black suns out there?)
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I've grown quite fond of the little wooden box (chest) at the dining centre, and picking a Lipton tea bag out of it, the ritual of adding 'everyday' milk at a specified place. How important the everyday and the ordinary are! Hell is discontinuity!
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But then I thought: what else is the university but a place for encouraging habitual forms of thought and a hopeless conformity to some weak version of the bourgeoisie's notion of respectability? Second-rate monks!"I'm a theorist". Yes, but of what?
~
To take up Badiou: isn't every situation structured in dominance: the namings, classifications, and divisions that go to make up: the known? The life of the mind is a harsh and stark road. Is it not better for some of us to undo and unlearn this and return to life, to laugh again instead of this pretense, pettiness, and inflated self-importance?
