Primrose Hill

You have never seen the Spiritual Sun.

I have - I saw him on Primrose Hill

--Blake

The entangled web of our lives. How we seek clarity! Are these not the marks of your absence, like so many scars? Is that our destiny-to be defined by what we lack?

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I do not miss the land, Jonah, I am not English after all! There are no mystical correspondences between the land and my soul. No words bind me to a place. Northerners like us cannot speak with a sun-and-wheat consciousness. Jerusalem is elsewhere, not here. If you look for it you will not find it. If it comes it will be like a flash of lightning, a dark hieroglyph that breaks up the whiteness. But if not, then not (as the Lahoris say!)

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I remember walking in Lawrence Gardens with the swami once and she stopped at a tree and said: this is where my father used to sit. And for a moment no other tree in the whole world mattered. It was as if everything of value was concentrated in this one place. Trees hold so many voices. As if we could lend them some of ours to make up for their silence. And they could repeat them to us when our faces grow dark, and our voices falter.

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We walked on. And this is the place where it was declared that the second world war was over. And we thought to ourselves: what was that?! And this is where the British used to dance and this is where we would see them strolling with their dogs.

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What else is a place but a bundle of memories? What else is the heart but a rag-and-bone shop? Who is the collector, who the buyer? No, I do not miss London, the grey skies or the darkness before the rain-for that is still with me somewhere. No, today more than any other day what I remember is not London but the loved ones there. And though they seem to be the most distant of dreams, as if a dream within a dream, still I know that in life that is what is most real. I have seen the Sun.

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It is the moon that disappears

It is the stars that hide not I

It's the City that vanishes

Torschlusspanik

Chi m'a tolto a me stesso
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss' io.

Bulleh, who knows who I am?

I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it has gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twighlight world one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
------Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Before one knows it one gets the feeling that certain lives have slipped away, as if from the dense knot of being one had only unraveled a certain thread, leaving the other, cancelled versions of our selves, in a state of cold limbo. Bi-location: the desire to be in more than one place at the same time, to be more than one-self, to surpass the narrow horizons of time that delimit a particular style of soul. We desire contradictory things: often rounded, always open (Goethe)...a broken circle, a script that is continuously being re-written. Nothing oppresses us more than the idea that things had to be the way they are, that certain doors will forever be closed to us.

The modern sensibility is nothing but a revolt against all that is 'given,' of any notion of a fixed identity. But we delight in and mourn the fact that we are unknown to ourselves and others. And this in itself is not so strange: Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me. And in acknowledging so much that is part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons...) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start...recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us from the 'outside' events through the course of time can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened.
---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

The Other Adam Smith

The unbearableness in the unbearable lightness is that we do not find it unbearable.

On the other hand, I find all the hand wringing over our alienation or 'atomisation' just a bit odd-as if there was some originary community, tribal unity, that in the beginning there was an order of being, an order of the soul. And yet, the poet and the metaphysician in us cannot ignore that nostalgia either. The shadow of the Garden falls across our face. The desire for something absolute, not fragmentary. And yet, in the beginning wasn't there a fundamental openness to the world, to other people, to all that was strange? As if that was what beginning meant? The Fall is also our freedom. So we live our unreconciled, amphibious lives-neither here nor there, like so many broken circles...

Nussbaum on commensurability

There's some strong motive to reduce things to a system, to see a coherent pattern, to intuit unity. As if we could reduce everything to our own terms of self-understanding. Which is really our lack of negative capability, our lack of grace: to keep things open, to accept mystery. So, we want to see Beauty, Truth, not this particular instance of beauty, this specific truth. As if what we could love is only Love itself. The economist and the fanatic alike think in this way: there is only one source of value, there are no discontinuities. The strong poet, however, wanders amongst ruins, lives with disruptions-not with the cold eye of reason but with sorrow and regret and fear. But if we live in the flatlands, as children of God, then what of our specificity, our panache.


Adam Smith

We see ourselves through the eyes of the others and our mirrors to each other.

If you've been reared on the libertarian caricature of Smith you're not going to like this. All I can suggest is that you go back to bed and dream it all away. Isn't that what you've been doing anyway?

Without the mediation of the other, we have no determinate moral selves.. we do not have a moral self outside of the human community. Spectatorship is the condition for the possibility of agency since we are aware of ourselves through being aware that others are aware of us. What does it mean to be truly aware of another human being? What is this ability to take a step outside of ourselves, our capacity for second thoughts?

The chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved...We are incomplete-not relative to a higher being-but relative to each other

Of course, if you're of a religious persuasion you might think that that 'horizontality' is itself a reflection of the dependence of the 'I' on a higher being ( 'height' is a height beyond height, like the darkness beyond darkness, the silence before the word). But this 'dependence' is based on an absence, a sacrifice. Without that second space, without God saying 'I want you to be', there would be no awareness of it. If we are an 'image' of God then part of us is an image of radical otherness. There is another Adam Smith, just as there is another b, another you. Black suns.

Hermit

....The aniconic spirit is restless in its search for the immediate, the primitive and direct experience of reality..the anarchic. It desires, above all else, to be free of nostalgia, memory, legend, myth, and history: to escape itself, to break free from time...Is such an unmediated experience even possible , or is it merely a dream for those who live in these particular times? Is the pursuit of Utopia bound to lead to a catastrophic disaster, to despair and fanaticism?

Schama: the frayed seams that connect and separate two spaces (dihliz)...not boundaries but a visible glimpse of some glowing seal of light over which everything else is unstably superimposed. His 'black on grey', for example, was still soaked with light and yet still somehow tethered to the known world.

Human beings are halfway between nothing and infinity: therein lies his majesty, therein his tragedy. Is it the human being that is this wild horizon, this barzakh, this thin glimmering band of light that separates the black from the white? But why talk only of separation? Are we not bound and free , is there not continuity and discontinuity? Where does night begin and day end?

Rosenberg: In sum, what the new American artists sought was ...the formal sign language of the inner kingdom-equivalents in paint of a flash, no matter how transitory, or what had been known throughout the centuries as spiritual enlightenment.

Perhaps we should, then, think of the intervening light in a different way: as the light within the light, the 'divine darkness'? What is it that Rothko is looking for? The silence of the deserts, the glaciers? But, then, what of his commitment to the human angle? To look to the skies, to leave the cave, must we neglect what lies behind our backs, under our noses?

Gregory of Nazianus: The world is held together by the power and reason of God; one soul, united...["and the creation of the universe is as a single soul"]..creation is a system and compound of earth and sky and all that is in them...more worthy of admiration when we consider the harmony and unison of the whole, tending to the perfect completion of the whole. Outward beauty, as with the moon, is a ladder...'Beauty is the splendour of the True' .

Rothko: The urgency fro transcendent experience was understood , and given official status. The importance of channels, tradition, bridges, ladders. Can we, those without an inheritance, live up to that task?

Heller: The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh.the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more than their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity. It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism.

It is sometimes possible to think of Rothko's paintings as the moment just after the first creation but just as easy to think of them as the afterglow of the final explosion....the absence from our lives of commonly accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade empty shells of fragmentary memories, ..hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning. We may yet reach the moon..

---Heller

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision.

___________

The hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances. The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” The hut immediately becomes centralized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, even everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude. The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery. And there radiates about this centralized solitude a universe of meditation and prayer, a universe outside the universe. The hut can receive none of the riches “of this world.” It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases it gives us access to absolute refuge.

---From anton, via Bachelard

Quintessential

Quintessence. n. 1. Most refined part of any substance, refined extract; purest and most perfect form, manifestation, or embodiment of some quality or class. 2. (Ancient Philosophy) Fifth substance (besides the four elements) forming heavenly bodies and pervading all things. 3. Hence quintessential [Medieval English] in sense 2., f. F, f med. L. ‘quinta essentia’ fifth essence.



The quintessential is all that eludes definition.



Each act, each act of perception, discloses something of our style of soul-whether we would know it or not. Each movement of the hand is a self-revealing gesture of the soul and bears witness to what and who we are. The poet would say:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

There is no disjunction between thought and action, self and the world and a semblance of unity is achieved. We strive wholeheartedly to find this innermost self, and this image of perfection and completion haunts us; to touch all that comes our way and imprint on it something of our unique essence. But this emphasis on knowing who we are is doomed to failure for our path, unlike that of the stars, can only be traced when it has run its course. It is a line still being drawn…the ink is not dry.

Augustine would say that we can only know what we are, not who we are; that only God can know. There are acts which the left hand should not know, that should be done in silence, that must be suffered…and lest it be forgotten: God created us with Two Hands.

Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long enough?
—-A Passage to India.

But this is not a simple return to innocence-it is an achieved naivete, an ability to sustain ourselves beyond sadness. The innocence of doves and the wisdom of serpents.

Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom.

When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself a space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the warp and woof of the universe, that sets us riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. It is the thisness of this human being that is the intersection of beauty and the idea.

We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown, unknowable... We trace the footprints, search for clues, chase shadows, hang around your old haunts..as if by finding your true name we would find ours. How old I have grown looking for your signs!

But I have become a question to myself, not an answer. There's no time for that. Dark flowers bloom without asking why. In city gardens and deep forests alike. Dark flowers bloom, fed by the light of a black sun.

First Hand

(with apologies to those who may find this image somewhat sacrilegious)

Much of what we know is secondhand, derivative. Much of what we comprehend is lovingly passed down to us, from one hand to the other, and taken on trust. The first hand groped in the evening dark for something strange. Not a shape or form, nor a particular face either.

One hand reaches out for the stars; the other jots thoughts down and in doing so creates the human world. The hand tries to grasp what it's all about: the tree of knowledge. But the first hand is also a registering of a presence, as in the first cave paintings. This is me. I was here. It is more than this. The wall is the membrane that divides worlds, it is a veil that separates the beloved.

And on that first cold night the first hand searched and searched and it was the search itself that made it utterly mysterious, wholly unforeseeable; and he finally understood that what he was looking for all this time came from the tree of life; it was nothing else but the simple hand of another human being.

It's Blowy Out Here

Every time we pass his house he says the same thing, It's blowy out here.

He's an old, frail man, more bone than flesh. Only the white shock of hair reminds you that he was young once. He was okay last year, Ubo informs me, until his fall. And is there no recovery from a fall, I ask. No, once the cells start to degenerate there is no way back.Those words, 'no way back', haunt me since there's something menacing about things that aren't irreversible.

He walks gingerly to the garden gate, shuffling his feet as he does so. And each time he taps the gate three times with his trowel. And those same words. It is as if the needle of a record has come stuck. How strange that we say "in the groove" when this means precisely the opposite in this case. I wonder, is this ritual a form of senility or is it the ritual that staves off its onset? There is something unkempt about his appearance and the hint of wildness in his eyes, untamed, defiant, though not quite the 'unconquered fire'. He has lost his mind -how ordinary language reveals so much!- and seems to wander back and forth in his little cemented garden like a jilted lover or an exile.

The storm strikes up at it's appointed hour. There is something mechanical, predictable about its arrival. It must be 2 or 4. Why always an even hour? The wind is in a revengeful mood tonight, tearing through the trees' outstretched arms, howling across the empty fields. It has come from the north to destroy us, like a barbarian king or a trowl. I imagine it picking up its strength across vast, undefined seas, sucking in the blackness around it. When man's activity comes to a grinding halt then, and only then, does one hear the great silences that allow us to perceive the striking up of nature's forces. And it takes a kind of strength to face all that loneliness on one's own. And I think to myself, maybe it wasn't madness I saw in the old man's eyes...

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air

And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst

Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey like men.

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear

Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

---Ted Hughes

(Photo: courtesy of Roxana. Thanks!)

Tulip in the Desert

And men loved darkness rather than the light
---John, III:19

Ay, it is sweet! Half hidden,--half revealed--
You see the dark folds of my shrouding cloak,
And I, the glimmering whiteness of your dress:
I but a shadow--you a radiance fair!
---Cyrano to Roxanne

I’ve seen before
how you beautify empty places,
and it seems that with your grave,
silent, aspect you bear witness,
reminding the passer-by
of that lost empire.
Now I see you again on this land,
a lover of sad places abandoned by the world.

---Leopardi (or Roxanne to Cyrano)

Why so downcast, my soul
why do you sigh within me
---Psalms.

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.

---Anna Akhmatova


Autumn drifts by, but the heart is not sad. I hear the voice of loved ones calling me all the time. And though the blue flames of love mourn the loss of the red still blossoms fall, spring arrives, ice melts. I am lost but have made a home here! And still, within the ashes of the world a spark may be found. In the desert of the heart are hidden many gardens, and deer roam freely and aimlessly, guided not by your footprints, but by your scent. In the spent clouds lies dormant, to this very day, many a flash of lightning. In the wilderness is a tulip, scarred but at peace.
--after Iqbal

The Lives of Others

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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



We gaze and gaze, sometimes dreamily, sometimes with an intense longing. We fear the closing of doors, the flame cooling, our bodies taking form. Behind the right door is the star prize, if only we would know it. As if the truth was just around the corner. But so many go unopened...the lives we did not live, that were cancelled out. Had we but taken a step to the left instead of the right the universe would have been like this, not like that.

Sometimes we come across an old building, or a particular face and think to ourselves: my life must have once been part of her story, I must have lived in this place once before. As if we could hum a tune without knowing the words. The memory of you real but fading, disappearing, like a photograph kept in a chest in the attic for assurance, a room within the room of the heart...

Every word is a doorway to a meeting.

But only one word takes us there, only one unlocks the door. Then, and only then, do we unfasten our hair, loosen up our being, unfold our hands. And then there is no door, no inner or outer. Then, when everything silently falls away, how shall we speak face to face?

1

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2

Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what's happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can't remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can't recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3

And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

-Bertolt Brecht, “Remembrances of Marie A.,“ in Die Hauspostille (1927) (S.H. transl.)(Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, p. 232)

The Black and the Blue

Multitude of the skies,

golden riddle of millions of stars,

cold, distant, lustrous, beautiful,

silent, unfeeling, unwelcoming.

Fulness of knowledge is their course,

emptiness of chartless ignorance,

a universe moving in silence,

a mind alone in its bounds.

Not they moved my thoughts,

not the marvel of their chill course;

to us there is no miracle but love,

lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face.

Sorley Maclean, Multitude

Second Sight

Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect he does.

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?

---W.H. Auden

Time is the great healer.
What if it is time that inflicts the wounds?

----from Wings of Desire


From Octavio Paz's 'Double Flame':

Alienation: we are absent from our true selves, other beings, phantoms, inhabit our shells. Are we what we imagine ourselves to be? Sometimes we 'catch ourselves', and other times we are 'besides ourselves,' or we convince ourselves by saying 'I was not quite myself' . Who were we in those times?"

The Judeo-christian concept devalued nature and transformed it into an object..At the same time it broke the organic relation between man and the polis. Lastly, modern reason generated excision."

Excision: "having placed spirit and matter, soul and body, faith and understanding, freedom and necessity in opposition, excision finally encompassed all oppositions within one: absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. "

Given alienation can one look to the state as a way of resolving the tensions? "Excision is not healed by time but by something or someone representing non time."

A human being is what he seeks, what he desires. Even when we finally catch up with ourselves we move on, separating himself again, desiring some new future. We are created restless. Man is the child of time. Will love, then, be an object out of time or someone that time itself brings forth?

Cracks: there are moments, but only moments, when the dichotomies melt away: subject/object, I/you, now /forever. Some have called this Revelation, others love...

"The beloved is then both terra incognita and the house we were born in." We are strangers, we have never left this land. All is new, all is old.

Hegel: ' In love life discovers itself in itself. Love does not vanquish death but makes it an integral part of life.' Living is continual separation, a series of deaths, of falls. Gravity and grace.

Breton: The intersection of two series-chance (or fate) and our own subjectivity or desire. 'Objective chance,' a 'necessary accident', is a form of outer necessity that opens a path into the unconscious'. We are determined by what is outside our will (and knowledge) and are magnetically drawn to that space where the beloved will appear. What, then , of free will? The most random of events is then invested with the most significance. As if the whole meaning of our existence would have been something else had there been a slight displacement of events or their timing. And if this is so, might it not be that the most trivial of events can lead to an unraveling of the thread as well?

We seek the completion of a pattern that we are dimly aware of. But in another sense what we desire above all is an open space that we could not possibly have imagined or foreseen. Love is blind.

'Objective chance' creates a literally magnetized space: the lovers, like sleepwalkers possessed of second sight, wander about, meet each other.' We stumble, are at a loss for words. Some things are written in the stars, but they require our complicity as well, for there can be no compulsion in such matters...we are bound and free, and that means you, and that means me.

Drift, Autumn, drift;
fall, colours, where you will

The Dying Animal

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what is was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that man dying.
---Larkin.

You've changed.

What did you expect?

But you're not the same person I once knew?

True. Today the skies are grey, yesterday they weren't. And who knows of tomorrow?

I'm not sure I know you any more.

Same here!

Does the past, then, not count for anything?

Of course it does, but it does more than count: it lives. We are undetermined animals, remember?


We seek a pattern. Who is it amongst us who hasn't searched to make sense of it all, to put one's name on the things and people that have streamed in from the future to meet us? Isn't there something in us that intuits unity, that is besotted by the origin, the symbol of order in that first time, first space, something fundamental that recoils at the possibility of discontinuity? Anarchy is only a falling away from the order of the sun, a black spot. Essence precedes existence.

But sometimes we also want the heart to break; sometimes we want nothing more than to break free, to fall, to fly. We want what cannot be achieved-except by grace: to be a broken circle.

Why bring up the ancient quarrel again? Do we find our name or make a name for ourself?

But we are not mind alone. Nor is our mind a mere reflection of a Parmenedian universe, something fixed, static, timeless. Kunfayakun is not over! Still the world trembles, still the mountains flow. Capstones shift.

I am dying. You, like the earth, are dying too. Even if I say we is it not true that we die alone? What solace is there to be had? Philosophy won't take you there. Nor will art or science. We live amongst shadows. But at least we can say not the dying animal but a dying animal, dazzlingly unique in all her distinctiveness, truly aware of all the colours: black, blue, green....

Second Thoughts

Woken, I lay in the arms of my own warmth and listened

To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark

Likening your poise of being to an upland county,

Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.

the occasion as ageless

As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly

So once, so valuable, so very now.

Against a leonine summer- putting first things first:

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

from W.H. Auden

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The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find ;

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas ;

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

---Marvell

The End of Islam, the End of Lahore

Yesterday was, without doubt, one of the most depressing days here. What was termed a 'debate' was really a farcical show, another attempt to lampoon the "decadent" west. And here we had two teachers, both with their fucking American twang, quoting Nietzsche-the nihilism of the west-and Plato (the noble lie.."they didn't teach you that, did they?") and Chomsky. A heady brew. The west is in crisis, it has no moral foundations. Pornography, incest...what's your problem with that?This university is funded by amriki money, to produce 'brown saahibs' (Macaulay was wheeled in). And all this in front of the students.

"But how should we respond to the cartoons?"

Follow the will of God. And for that you need to go to the best interpreter, and that is mufti K-A...

More than that, other colleagues were attacked on the platform. The social sciences themselves were irrational, an eye-wash. The social scientists themselves devoid of any logic. We can essentialize, we must. In our tradition we talk of the kaffir and the muslim. Why should we even be concerned with words like freedom, peace, tolerance. They're out to get us. Look at Bosnia, look at Chechnya. And all this from people who teach Business Studies and Sociology! Oh, the irony.

Now, you might think I'm making this up given that it's so absurd. But that's exactly how it was. And this ain't no crummy university but supposedly the best or one of the best in the country. But what was really shocking was the way in which the vast majority of the students lapped this up, laughing and stomping their feet like clowns.

A few dissenting voices, old Lahore speaking. But I can't but help feel the game is over. I felt like saying, but have you actually ever listened to Bach. No, it won't do. This place is buggered. There's no two ways about it. Fanatics everywhere want people to take sides. But I prefer not to. Let us remain true to our roots and be unsure. As the Allama once said:

Even if the Divine reveals His Face

I'll still take "perhaps" and "maybe".

Conversations with the swami

This spiral of stars is a riddle of the universe, not its answer.
This wisp of a life lasts no longer.

If we knew how many years lie between us and the stars, would that lessen our pain any?

This moon that shines so brightly for the poet and the broken-hearted alike, for one and all, that is so generous and even-handed, it burns not for me.

The Hindu, the swami, would turn up at eleven in the morning, the busiest part of the day, when the world is just beginning to be absorbed in itself, barefoot and clad in orange robes; on his forehead were three white lines and he had a very creased and sun-worn face. No child had seen his eyes and whenever he approached they scuttled in all directions; it was said that he put muslim children into the sack cloth that was slung around his shoulder.

What, all children?

No, just those who were sad.

But did you 'actually' see him do this?

I am one such child.

He who has the power owns the truth, but whoever is without it lives the truth.

Life is a dream; within that dream we have one special dream and that dream is what is, ultimately, the most real in life.

Never try what you don't like.
Never like what you don't try.

A stone never tries to be anything but itself.

To see the beauty in a garden of wild flowers is no different from taking an ethical stance-in both one perceives different 'colours' and unity; each human heart is such a garden, each contains a universe of its own. We see and know but one infintesimal part, mistaking whatever catches our eye for the sum of her being.

Perfection. If you look for it you will never find it but if you don't you will see it everywhere and all around you: in a simple flower or a great tree; in an old dog with his greying hair no less that in a meandering stream glinting in the light of a spring morning. And then the Swami, seeing that I was unconvinced pointed upwards and said: look at the clouds and see that wherever there is no human being , there one sees the hand of God.. and that is perfection. Take away the 'mim' and there is only the One.

I will be a bird; one day I will fly from here and never look at the decietful eyes of a human being; I will never look down, only up. I will burn in the sun's presence but still will I be Bird, lost and found. Let me fly, let me fly, and never find....

Sometimes, I could go in anywhere, not
to see the stars, not to be as we
are always, not only under them
but in them.

Life Insurance.

Duns Scotus is now a dunce !

What you once thought was the cheez now seems idiotic, childish. Elmer Gantry! You hear so many people make such grandiose claims and you don't know whether to laugh and cry. I started the lecture by saying we're only trying to give shape to our ignorance: Rumsfeld: we don't know what we don't know.

Rationality binds us to one truth, or to one level. Freedom of thought, real freedom, would mean we could talk about rationalities. Even better, we would not talk with so much certainty, would understand when to talk, and when to be silent. To say I don't know is to liberate oneself, is to be able to dance lightly again. Bloggers, of course, will not understand this.

God is not a concept.
---Ibn Arabi.

The wonder, the utter strangeness of the world, reduced to a formula, an equation. The universe behind your eyes, unknowable. Science, too: all that causality! Like the bourgeoisie, enamoured by boxes, labels, insurances against the uncertainties of life, or the philosopher who makes a technique out of knowing. But how strange that a child can talk and smile and love without knowing!

God is not a mathematician.

I do not know you.
I have never known you.
I will never know you.
Perhaps because I have never known myself.

The dark before the dark, the silence before the first note. Black, black to the core, which is really the light beyond the light. The night is also a sun. Perhaps we will cross paths and then, like a stranger, I will tip my hat to you, and I will steal a glance. But don't bank on it. There are no assurances.

But I have spent too long, relied
too much on understanding, not
to be ashamed to call a helper in
because it fails, or shut my mind
to what the mind receives...

I plead the permanence
of ignorance, that we acknowledge it.
It goes where we goes, gets there first, and waits
to be the find we make wherever we think
to have gone: the day's adventure, the same surprise...

Belief, which visas us our entry there ,
comforts our incoherence, offers to teach
some simple terms, the easy speech of the land..

We hear this language spoken and understand,
but it remains the special speech of the place,
resisting translation , unable to say what we mean.

Reality is what we are ignorant of.

Let me not have a life to look at, the way we look
at a life we build to look at, in the world belief
gives us to understand, a snowman life:
hurry to pack it solid, buttons on
and a proper hat, finished before dark,
before the rain to wash it away. We dress
our lives as we might dress a doll self,
getting and giving...

--William Bronk.