11/11

Colour seems to be a little exhausted just right now.
---Klee.

As you look out over No Man's Land there is literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness...No one can describe it. You might as well as describe the ocean.
--From , 'The Missing of the Somme'

Perhaps we will look back on these times as a sort of interlude, as a time when the relative stable world of the bourgeoisie wasn't such a bad option after all...

What is there left to see? Life here in the West has exhausted itself, played itself out, is done for.

Agony stares from each grey face.

What they take to be the most serious of matters is, for us, a mere trifle. We live in a time when the carnival is the norm. And each one is taught (taught..the irony!) to revolt. But the shock of the new doesn't shock any more and, increasingly, the desperate attempt to escape reality hides a profound disillusionment. Life is reduced to a game or to matter of utility or power. Is there anyone who can still think like a human being?

We are on a raft, a raft in vast and strange ocean. The memory of the ancients lingers on-but only just-in a turn of phrase, an occasional fragment of a story. Memory but a trace, as ephemeral as the breaking waves, as fickle to be summoned up by the most insignificant of things..a particular slant of the light, the smell of burning leaves..With one hand held to the forehead we protect ourselves from the glaring , blinding, sun; with the other, we jot down what we can see. One hand points to distant horizons, the Atlantic of Time stretching before us; the other brings us back to what is close at hand...the black and the white. One hand is hopeful, optimistic, open; the other hand, crab-like and pessimistic, writes of home.

The Allama would say that only Wordsworth saved him from losing his faith. And with us? Neither poetry nor small words will do; only the gaze of the beloved, the love of family and friends comes our way, as if like a silent breath from the Western Front...


For a long time I dwelt under vast porticoes
Which the ocean suns lit with a thousand colors,
The pillars of which, tall, straight, and majestic,
Made them, in the evening, like basaltic grottoes.
The billows which cradled the image of the sky
Mingled, in a solemn, mystical way,
The omnipotent chords of their rich harmonies
With the sunsets' colors reflected in my eyes;
It was there that I lived in voluptuous calm,
In splendor, between the azure and the sea.
-----Baudelaire