a day of strange coincidences

Shine, sweet freedom.

I wanted to say something about how a post comes about and also to talk about co-incidnces (even old siggy...62!) because the moderns don't really believe in such things. Incidentally, I remember saying 'good luck' to a muslim before an exam and he turned around and said, full of arrogance, 'I don't believe in luck'. Er...yeah, okay.

So, so, n, this is how it came about....

I was walking past the Church on a wonderfully crisp and clear morning. And I thought to myself: how good things are (it's good to look down when one has such thoughts). And what goes up to make a good life? Love (think Corinthians, here), friendship, eyes to see the world, money, a mind to read books, a restless heart, a good slice of luck, an independent spirit. And what freedom! Then one can remember the giveness of these things. A strange thought occurred to me: I shouldn't think about this for too long but just, as the Buddha says: walk on!

Okay, I do recall, however, that I'd post this song because I was feeling so exuberant.

Well, get on the tube (usual place..a stickler for meaningless rituals). Open the book on the Jewish princess. My eye alights on the word "genius" and then rests. A thin rainbow has formed across the white surface of the pages...a small, diagonal one that cuts across the text. I don't look up to see where it's coming from or where it ends (don't look for the source..enjoy the moment). I look around to make sure that no-one is looking at me and then just stare and stare at this rainbow. It is interrupted by a framed white square rushing by the page but otherwise is constant. Fragile and childlike.

And then it strikes me, ten minutes later: "remember the colours" from the last post! I repress a smile in case the farangis think I'm cracked. At Stratford it goes. I'm not disappointed. It had to. That's the way of rainbows.

Off to Dillons (okay, you can call it Waterstones). Leaf through some books. Jean-Luc Marion's catches my attention. Read a few pages on the gift (don't , for once, copy words down because, like the rainbow, I want them to remain free). A gift is a gift if it is not thought of as a gift, a gift is a gift if it escapes causal relations, is not an 'object' , doesn't establish a 'relation' with the 'subject'..there is no 'economy' of the gift (this was beginning to sound like 'negative theology')...

Back to Charing Cross (which, after the British Library is a kind of spiritual home to me). Sit at the same place I always sit, the usual latte and my own fish sandwiches in silver foil. Rituals, rituals..pick up Skidelsky's biography of Keynes (looks good) and notice that they're playing old eighties tracks. And then, ten minutes in, what do they play but old Macdonald! How bizarre!

What happens then is that I usually scurry down some words and try and link things up, the scaffolding to what I've felt or what's been floating past me. So, I was tempted to look up Heller on Goethe's theory of colours or Corbin's opaque book 'Temple and Contemplation' which has a section on colours.

But today none of that matters. Look back on Charing Cross road, the beautiful neon lights in the blue-black darkness..and then it's gone. Down Denmark street (per script) to meet the Mongol and Nav for tea and reminisces on how we screwed up at the L.S.E. (some things never change!). Cinnamon roll. Sublime. Tea from the Italians. A few laughs and farewells...and then we slip off the page...Omnia mea mecum porto.

Sweet Freedom - Michael Mcdonald

the colours

remember t h e colours. Be close to the colours!

remnants of hearing, seeing

In the wellspring of your eyes
like the fish-nets of the labyrinth
A net snared a net
we separate entwined
~

It is time that the stone grew accustomed to blooming,
that unrest formed a heart,
It is time it was time
It is time.

~

kept from harm by a word found in nobody's heart.

~

with a variable key
you unlock the house, in it
drifts the snow of the unsaid

~

yet we could not
darken over to you:
the law was
light-compulsion

~

do not work ahead,
do not send abroad,
Stand
in here:

deep-grounded by Nothingness,
free of all
prayer,
fine-fitted to
the pre-Script,
unoutstrippable,

you i take up
in place of all
rest

~

a tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone.

~

by the sense of light
you grasp the soul

~

unrecognized,
for you
alone

~

we the overdeepened, set apart

~

to stay at home in the being two of despair

[a broken circle! the circle stands empty, a symbol of nothingness...which is to say what? that it is something or nothing? a bounding, binding circle that embraces what is lost, the circumference of our understanding; the circle: from 'I' to 'you']

~

look, i rise, look, i fall
am an other, am no other.

---these were the beautiful words of Paul Celan

~~~

W.S. Merwin:

Into the blue

What is near at hand is infinitely distant. It is not the light from without that fails, but that from within.
~
The perfect painting is where the human figure has disappeared. Just wave upon wave of blueness.
~
Meno:
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?
~
~
Rebecca Solnit:

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

the end of time

END

...How can there be an end to that which has no beginning?

Crow, so often dark and wayward, fell and fell, as if it was the most natural thing to do. "I'll send my soul into your dreams" said crow.

And then something wondrous happened. Crow spread her wings, seemed to change shape, and became so large that fox thought the sun was blotted out and that everything was hidden, folded in his shadow. Fox thought: this stone is crow, this old tree too; This glinting stream is , the skies are crow. Fire, snow.

It was like the eclipse of the sun, eclipse of the heart, that he had witnessed long ago...just standing still in the hushed silence as everything around him fell, as he lowered his gaze, let his face darken.

But then a thought-and this was fox's perennial problem: he had too many thoughts- came to fox and he was so bewildered by it that for a moment he forgot everything else, forgot to trust his senses or his heart. For was it not the case that crow was now inside him?

Fox lost track of time and wasn't so clever after all. "Crow has fallen for me", thought fox. And with that, he took one almighty leap towards solitary falling crow and swallowed her whole..all in one deft movement.

~~~~

And now many years have passed. Crow is no longer, or at least is nowhere to be found. But old, ridiculous fox still lingers here and there, tarries by the old tree where crow once sat. And a strange sight he is indeed!... this fox that walks alone in the forest with two shadows...And fox, this bare-forked animal, just says to himself , quietly:

Blacker in black, I am more nude

Only when I am faithless am I true

Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.

By dark

By dark it will be time for me to go again. Don't look my way, just as you didn't when I arrived. But don't let the dust settle on the dark mirror. Ashes to ashes. It doesn't always have to be that way. Keep a door open for me. Nothing settles, capstones shift. A Jewish thought, a sound thought.

Today, you tell yourself, greyness doesn't matter, the learning of books falls to the side. How right you were after all, Bulleh! What remains? Not thought, not cleverness, neither philosophy nor theology, slowness or quickness. Music, poetry, art? Yes, all that is unsaid, mysterious. But more than this: the curvature of your hands as you hold water, the capacity and the willingness of your hands to form a circle in your life. Again, and again.

This one thought was with me from morning. By dark it would be gone. I saw raindrops fall and flash in a puddle; concentric circles overlapped, but remained circles, with their own still point, their own reflected worlds.

I looked for G. Hill and W.S.Merwin (for anton) but the first words that came my way were:

Aus dem zerscherbten
Wahn
Steh ich auf
und seh meiner Hand zu,
wie sie den einen
ein zigen
Kreis zieht

which someone translated as:

I stand
up from the shatter of madness
and watch my hand
trace the one
single
circle.
---Celan.

days

Mourning Light

There will never be that stillness

Within the pulse of flesh,

in the dust of being, where we trudge,

turning our hungry gaze this way and that,

the wings of the morning

brush through our blood

as cloud-shadows brush the land.

What we desire travels with us

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water

God's flight circles us.

---Denise Levertov.

Released through bars of sorrow
as if not a gate had opened but I
grown intangible had passed through shadows,
from dark of yearning into
a soft day, western March.

Nothing can capture that dark light. Stunned and bedazzled by the black sun. I never knew that Rothko's paintings were so beautiful.

Your Misfortune (None of My Own) - Thomas Newman

the fool

He receives a heart which is a wild garden, he who loves only the trim parklands. And the fool takes the princess away into slavery.
---Exupery

He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.
----Proverbs:28:26

Was I the only one who wasn't serious?
---from The Wings of Desire

There was a way of things that escaped crow. Much of what the world took as wisdom...it didn't matter: knowing isn't everything. To think deeply but unable to live a deep life. Was it the times...time himself, that appeared like a fox in the snow, that was to blame?

"You know many things, fox", said crow emphatically.

And with the saying of it, fox instinctively knew that crow would fall; it was only a matter of time, no doubt about it.

"Oh yes, crow, it helps me find my way around here...my shadow was drawn to yours"

"I always wondered what you looked like. I thought you lived in a hole!"

~

"And I, for my part, thought you only lived in the open, free as the clouds. How can you, one who knows the one thing needful, talk to a one such as me?"

~

Crow was happy at fox's kind words; humans had only seen her blackness, marveled at her ugliness, only mocked the coarseness of her voice, recoiled at the wildness of her heart. Crow looked down from a great height and saw the world thaw, saw something glimmer in fox's eyes and thought: distance is not a question of space.

~

But then crow became sad. It was not that fox was from the wrong tribe or that fox's coat was a forbidden colour; it was that so much had been unsaid between them before this moment and so much would be unsaid after the moment had passed as well. "I don't control fate", said crow, gently. "This moment together is like a dream that we will forget. Already it is becoming a story".

~

But still, crow, who had an ancient affinity with fox, took an almighty leap and...

[But how does the story end?

How can there be an end to that which has no beginning? ]

~~

Your Misfortune (None of My Own) - Thomas Newman

a god of small things

more and more appears among us to the side. one should observe precisely the little things; go after them.
---e. bloch.

vastness, the sublime, are not so much as terrifying as boring.

dark purplish clouds stretch out across a cold motionless grey sky, a realm of frozen possibilities; death-like, but also, strangely, enlivening because the light is so clear. i look at my watch: 4:40 on a darkening winter afternoon must be the most perfect time in the world....always reminds me of sparklers and the faint smell of burning in the air...

from heathrow an elderly woman gets on the train with me. she pulls out a book at the same time. the god of small things vs richard ford's lay of the land-which is beginning to tire me with its chattiness and bagginess. we both, by chance, change at acton town and i know that she knows the secret: this is the only way to avoid the steps. she's english. i'm sure of that. serious reading spectacles, hair short and proper, the works. but also, curiously, she wears jeans and ankle-high black lather boots. pragmatic stock.

on the phone she speaks what appears to be fluent german. would have been good to have the dougal here to decipher. she runs out of german and switches back to the words she learnt in her childhood. the uncanniness of having other people's lives fleet past one's eyes, their trajectory briefly overlapping with yours. uncanny: at home and strange. the strangeness of other people mirroring your own. augustine: we are strangers to ourselves.

there's something of celia in her looks, i think to myself. then at mile end we both change again and move to exactly the same place on the platform (no doubt to get off at woodford). i look out for her now, amongst the crowded carriage and hard english faces with their tight lips, short noses and grave thoughts...the strange unphilosophical inwardness, shyness of the english.

i need her to stay on this train. is this how god will judge us: by our needs or our desires? after half an hour together we've already thrown off the exotic airs that travelers have about them as they return to the interpreted world. so i need her to remind me that i'm still a stranger here. her eyes have acclimatised now and don't move about so nervously now, having given up the vain attempt to take everything in. i see her looking wistfully at the other passengers. i look out dreamily into the night, beyond the reflected images, as the last clouds sink back into the enfolding darkness...

she reminds me, with her drowsy, droopy lower lip and her puffy cheeks of the swami. odd that we pick out in the other people we come across resemblances to people we know. i sometimes think to myself: because i've never seen roxana, nichole, or anton i'll never see traces of them in other people.

the train doors open and i lose her in the rush. it is cold and i am grateful for the warmth of my own body. i wish for nothing more at this moment than to be a child again, waiting in the darkness with my knife, my yellow cardigan, watched over by a god of small things, calling out to the blackness: who's there?

Rain

Here Comes the Rain Again - Eurythmics

The Revolutionary Road

Never think of a surface except as a volume
---Henry Miller

...all that rose to the surface was more surface. What he had instead of a being, I thought, is blandness.
--Roth

Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts..

I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.

That would be enough for me, just the natural playing out of the pleasing present...

Some life is only life..just as to some questions there are no answers. Just nothing to say.

---Richard Ford

All life is the way we escape life. I can't remember who said that. It doesn't matter. You can pile up all the quotations you want, read your little "philosophical" books and pretend to sound profound. And it won't make a jot of difference. It was all fake. "It"? A con of the first order. The false pieties of a sad and accountable life. The truth? You can't handle the truth.

Plough on. But don't take it to the end. Circles are good. Get up. Sleep through the day in a dull stupor. Contempt for the bloodless, soul-destroying respectable families with their incessant mind-numbing prattle and cliches, their fenced-in existence. Clench your fists, roll your eyes. But then you relax. You relax! And it's got you. Doesn't suffocate you any more. You are what you choose. Comfort, your god. Even your polite little rebellions, your irony, were so predictable, scripted.

It was interesting. Yes, in a way it was. The surface, I mean. But don't kid yourself. That's all there ever was. Smile, now. Grin and bear it. Even your empty moments weren't really genuine. 'Cos you thought there was a road out, a way to redemption and grace and ease.

wolken

The world is a bridge; pass over it but don't build a house on it.

---hadith.

~

"..along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dusk. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveled on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea to lose themselves in it. After a journey of thousands of kilometers over what seemed to be an immense island, shielded by the moving waters to the North and to the South by the congealed waves of the sands, passing scarcely any faster above this nameless country than had empires and peoples over the millennia, their momentum was wearing out and some already were melting into occasional large raindrops..."

What is a cloud, and how can one find one?

One would say that it is the silver dust on a Chinese mirror. By chance.

~

Where does the cloud live?

~

In a glass bottle.

~

I said: "You should dwell in my heart"

She said: " The faerie indeed belongs to the bottle!"

These clouds, silver, dragon, or grey, are all that England has given me: a reminder of other places, other times. An emblem of all that is lost. Only that which is lost lives in the open, and can be found again.

~

After the rain cleared the sunshine burst through with a radiant brilliance and brightness, as if the light had been waiting to clarify the world at that very moment. Suddenly the earth became weightless. And silent. A few birds glided on, making their way through their invisible tracks, ancient pathways that we've forgotten, and the breeze rustled through green leaves so that all was a play of shadows and light, sound and solitude. I looked up to note the clouds rolling eastwards, as if down a stream, or as if they were being drawn towards some unknown centre by a great magnetic force.

I thought of Brecht's poem. I stood there for an age, like a stone statue that sees the world passing him by but cannot say a thing. When I looked up again the clouds had disappeared.

Listening to this sublime music , guarded, reticent, reluctant to cede anything to the Will...like folded wings, a self engrossed in its own thoughts, centred on its own being, and yet here too there is the aspiration to speak with a human voice. Sometimes we feel like being human, just human, the way a cloud's a cloud. Nothing more, nothing less. Do clouds, too, dream of breaking free, of finding a language like ours?
---First written, Sunday, July 1st, 2007

Ahavat Israel and the Jew World Order

For Kubla
~
Every writer, every person has their blind spots, their insensitivities. Are you going to chastise Rumi for his political incorrectness when he calls the world an "old hag"? Every sun has its blackness.
~
There is no doubting the barbaric acts of the Israelis in Gaza. But you know, once, just once, I would love to hear a muslim say something about the hundreds of thousands killed in Darfur or Iraq under Saddam or the rape of women in East Pakistan. Why this selective righteousness? It's so fucking tiring and predictable.
~
Of course, no writer is perfect. I think the allama would say (and did say): if you've understood Iqbal then walk on...there is no need for Iqbal.
~
Perhaps you will find this interesting.


Anyway, here's the princess herself:
~
~

“Let me begin, going on from what I have just stated, with what you call “love of the Jewish people” or Ahavat Israel. (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism, when it was first used in Hebrew language and literature, etc.) You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person… The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believe in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believe only in itself? What good can come out of that? –Well, in this sense I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.”
---From a letter to G. Scholem
(Courtesy of formoflife.blogspot.com)

~~~~~~

Hockey Mom to Biden: I'm so glad we share a love of Israel.

Why? More settler mentality, I'm afraid. Let's not talk about hope, freedom, democracy-all those fine words-for the Palestinians, shall we?

Listening to "Dr." Israr, who looks just a little crazed, somewhat like a criminal on the run. Well, more of the usual maulvi nonsense: 'you should hide your beauty from even your father, from your brother'. Oh, please dr. , I don't know what type of fucked up family you've come from but please, spare us..."In america incest is a major problem..."

I wonder, is this because you are so ugly yourself or is there actually a theological point to your ranting? (I'm beginning to sound like Herzog here, writing imaginary letters). And then: the great sins of the modern world: secularism (yawn) and the Joos, the founders of the New Jew World Order. (hey, what was wrong with the old jew world order!). "I mean, America has a trillion dollar deficit' (the old bugger's been watching the Palin/Biden debate) and we know who controls the banking sector, don't we. The Jews. 'Look, you can see it on the dollar note, with the sign of the one eye, the sign of the 'dajaal' (anti-Christ)."

I was half expecting him to whip out the protocols of the elders of Zion. What is so utterly depressing in not the vast numbers of chumps who passively absorbed the circus clown's message, but that there's a huge number in the mainstream who are equally delusional.

Hmm, you can see why I want to distance myself from the brotherhood, can't you?

Political Fragments

Today I read of some young children who were found lying next to their dead mothers' bodies, too weak to even stand up., waiting in their houses...for what?

"I never write about politics"is the complaint. But how to do so? One can only write about the lack of politics in these times. Bourgeois 'politics' is the 'administration of things'. At the other extreme, revolutionary politics, the call for justice, hope, rightness, must always remain fragile, fragmentary, poetic...the imaginary space that sits uneasily with borders, states, and the world's prose: politics as the language of the possible and the impossible. Anyway, what would such writing comprise: a catalogue of losses and spectacular defeats, a story of stateless peoples which included all the ambivalent feelings one has to the word 'state'?

One cannot dismiss a great writer because of their politics-or their lack of politics. But one cannot completely ignore it either. Exupery, Berlin, Levinas..which makes me wonder if 'white' people can really be revolutionaries? (not because they're white, but because their story is inextricably wound up with the dominant power and narrative). I still feel there's more poetry in Asad's 'Road'-at least 'till the point where he converts-but below are some great excerpts from Jean Genet's 'Prisoner of Love':

In 1910 and 1917 the Palestinians were unwittingly the dream or day-dream of Polish and Ukranian Jews who probably knew little about Palestine except that it was the promised land, the land of milk and honey-though as yet the idea of evicting its inhabitants hadn't occurred to anyone. It was a place of dreams, where everything still had to be built, and the Jews of 1910 dreamed of it as empty, or at worse peopled by unsubstantial shadows who didn't really exist as individuals. But none of the Palestinians knew that his garden was an empty space dreamed of far away and destined to be turned into a laboratory, while its owner was only a passing shadow.

I spoke of courage with reference to the physical struggle of the Palestinians, applying the word to mental effort and energy. But the word bravery is more suitable for physical defiance of death and danger. The Palestinians, by challenging the contempt implied by the word terrorism and terrorist and by their indifference to the fact of being cast as the devil, showed both courage and bravery.....

The Palestinians , those card-players without cards were regarded in Europe as outcasts without any real identity, without any legitimate link with a recognized country, and above all without a territory belonging to them and to which they belonged, with the usual proofs of existence: cemeteries, war memorials, family trees, legends and, as I was to find out later, strategists and ideologues.

[A fatah dissident]:The Palestinians wanted to be an entity-wanted to leave an image of themselves as a single whole, historically, geographically, and politically. Even when they were scattered to the four winds they wanted to form an indivisible and unchanging block in the midst of the Muslim universe and of the universe itself.

"But" , said Khaled Abdul Khaled, "you told me America used to be covered with forests. And that they've got very powerful machines. So why, instead of putting up skyscrapers, turning out all that crap like orange-squeezers, didn't they build the same sort of thing underground?Then they could have left the trees as they were and gone down in lifts."

"Is the electric chair a real chair?"J.G. "more like a throne. The condemned man sits in it with his hands and arms on the rests."Why don't they kill him lying down..and who else is present?"

An old Palestinian woman said to me " to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second, to have been handsome for a thousandth of a thousandth of a second, to have been that, or happy or something, and then to rest-what more can one want?"

When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by..the operative image is one that is left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future... An image is a starting point for actions...

The [Hebrew] words were separated by immeasurable spaces filled with several layers of time-a time as dead and incalculable as the space between a corpse and a living eye looking at it. In the space between each Hebrew letter, generations have been born and spread abroad, and its silence shattered us more than bullets and bombs.

In the gestures and manners of the fedayeen, and in their assurance, I saw, despite the defeat, the sort of euphoria that exalts newly successful "stars" and makes them attractive. And it also seemed to me, though less certainly, the loss of serenity singing through every angry man or people in revolt is really a more difficult and serene kind of serenity; and that rebels deserve honours and not the opposite...without knowing exactly how far the rays of the revolt reached, he felt he was being seen, watched. And from long away; ..this brightness protected him, but worried the Arab regimes.

I got used to the fedayeen, sure that they thirsted for justice and wanted a fairer life,as they still said. Those reasons for rebellion still existed, but underneath them, unsaid and much stronger than those hopes, illusory or otherwise, were orders received which never appeared in their books. Such imperatives included a love of fighting and of physical confrontation..for glorious death if victory was impossible.

[with Mubarak, the Sudanese lieutenant]:

M: " Rebellion kills other people, but it gives life to the rebels themselves. Because they go all out, they live life to the full..At the moment they live in a dream but how long will it last? But it's better to be a revolutionary movement, a total one, even in a tiny little province than to cultivate a garden..Because a revolutionary movement is eternal, and we have to believe in eternal recurrence...although as a movement it is linked to time, the Palestinian movement mustn't be content with conquering a ridiculous morsel of space. ..their revolt has given them something: the carbon dioxide inhaled by the pretenders, the king and the emirs and the white house of Europe is oxygen to the Palestinians.

The fedayeen's existence was so powerful it could afford these sudden, almost courteous evanescences, relieving me of too insistent and tiring a presence.

On every anniversary of what's known as the Liberation, Israel comes and sees how the trees are getting on. Each tree bears the name of the person who planted it. For a few hours they do their best to bring the dead village to life again. They tell the young people about one detail after the another..thinking they're remembering, they actually improve on the facts and invent a village so cheerful and happy and far from their present sadness it only makes it worse. But gradually, as the imaginary village comes to life, the sadness disappears, and young and old make awkward attempts to dance their ancient dances....on the ground and on trees and strips of material they draw and paint a past reality, a present fantasy.

For the Palestinians of Maaloul the anniversary is a Renaissance, a feast for the dead. For one day there's a village again-it may only be a lifeless facsimile but it's extremely vivid. Not just a thing of the past but a reincarnation, as New York is of York.

If you wanted to go into a home you went round a tree with a door painted on it. To go upstairs the young Palestinians climbed up into the branches. For a day the word resurrection really meant something and so did nostalgia. This wasn't the sort of longing that precedes the struggle for a real return. But it reminded you how in Brittany and other Celtic regions the fairies, driven out by the Romans and then the Christian clergy sprang up among the trees and by the springs...some humans are frightened by their singing, laughing, jests, of which they still understood a few words or even whole phrases. And so the very real state of Israel finds itself shadowed by a ghostly survival.

Eclipse is a word full meaning. In addition to the sun, which is even more evident when eclipsed by the moon, every event, man or image eclipsed by someone or something also emerges regenerated; however brief their disappearance, they emerge clearer and brighter than before...in french the reflexive verb s'eclipser, literally to eclipse oneself, hovers between the usual meaning, to slip away, escape, and the figurative connotation to disappear because of the brightness of another.

Leaders ceremoniously leapt to their feet whenever a martyr came into the room. ..All men are mortal ..But if all men are mortal, not many of them have the courage to know it, and those who flaunt their knowledge are even rarer. ..And it seemed to me that in the oblong shape that followed them like a shadow there was a sign, like a knowing wink. The white world moves forward without a shadow. I saw at once the oblong pit behind the young Palestinian.

But I knew the leaders no longer rose as a gesture of mourning.But did this revolt, that had been an outlaw for so long, really want a law that would have Europe for its Heaven?

One comes away wondering how real, authentic this account is. But that is only because it is difficult for us to imagine in these days that other people were really like this, that such people really existed (the same argument is made about the 'Romanticised' picture of the Native Indians). In this topsy-turvy world, the very unreality of things is, for us, almost a proof of its reality.

Blue is the distance of the soul

Moro Em Lisboa - Madredeus


Call it what you will, Cuban blue or the sea, sorrow or longing. For what is irrecoverable, irredeemable, the colour of absence, this irreducible distance that is silence, is not bridged by memory or desire.

It is far away. It is close at hand. All one can know is that yearning makes the heart grow deeper.

old man

It now transpires that this, my favourite painting, is not by Rembrandt after all! The hands, so crudely done, cannot be the work of the master. It must be wonderful to have that skill and insight: the ability to discern that something isn't quite right, through the patient accumulation of learning but also through instinct. To be able to tell that the spirit doesn't belong here but is derivative.

And yet, does it make a difference? Isn't the worried look on the face, the furrowed brow, enough to convince us? Must there be a unity between hand and mind? There is something deeply satisfying, reassuring even, about a pre-existing harmony of hand-eye-mind; as the poet said:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

It is said of the hands in The Jewish Bride that nothing more delicate has been painted in the history of art, and that nothing better depicts the deep strain of humanism in western sensibilites.

And yet, if this is Rembrandt is it possible to imagine that his wavering hands have lost something of their precision, their magical ability to conjure something out of the dark? If the hand registers our presence-as in the earliest Cave Art-then perhaps we are being drawn to a truth that Berger explains as: the human is no longer self-evident. Is he, then, painting the sentinet body's awareness of itself? If so, one can afford to forego attention to 'the whole' and can focus on the essential, as if a few details of a life illustrates what we fundamentally are. Under such circumstances proportion or fidelity to reality is not important throughout the composition. Meaning is not a pattern, not something that permeates each and every instant of our lives. It is a moment, a naked moment, in which we reveal to ourselves our secret...

Instead, the aim is to deliver us to the sense that here is a man doubled up by time, utterly withdrawn from the spectator's gaze, alone in his finitude.

Pain sharpens our awareness of such space. It is the space of our first vulnerability and solitude.

On a painting by Degas, Berger has this to say:

Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognized and admitted. We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel, or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance...do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, our legs, shoulders, elbows and hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known?

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer's wholeness in a golden church.

News From a Distant Star

Occasionally a pigeon will fly too close to the earth and then the human being will take evasive action by instinctively raising his arm towards his head; some of them duck their heads, others hold their arms so that their forearms shield them, as if they were protecting themselves from an overbearing sun.

Sometimes when the human being is walking thoughtlesly and aimlessly he will cross the space of a pigeon unknowingly; in such cases the birds become startled and suddenly take flight. The human is amazed by this and very often laughs. More often than not he will hop about and enter a cosmic dance with the pigeon...this helps him redicscover his animal soul.

Children, on the other hand, have not forgotten the ancient rituals and stomp their feet on the ground when they approach the space of the pigeons-giving them ample warning.

A white bird floats effortlessly in open skies; both marvel at the generosity of the other. She follows love's trackless way, guided by her instincts, her upward movement like a solitary intuition in the mind of the universe. At a distance cloud and bird merge into one.

Crow was white. Once.

And...

Beauty of woman and of wise hearts, and gentle knights in armour; the song of birds and the discourse of love; bright ships moving swiftly on the sea; clear air when the dawn appears, and white snow falling without wind; stream of water and meadow with every flower; gold, silver, azure in ornaments.

Everything depends on our capacity for lightness, for the openness that is 'and'...as if our reality was the strength of our desire to join, to connect.

Stray

For those who were, but were not.
For those I loved, and loved not.

Black dog, black dog entered our country

And they pointed to me.

(after Steve Reich)

"You are a stranger here, Black Dog".

True, but the Stranger passed through here once, said Layla's dog

"A dog's tail can never be straightened. And your soul is black"

Yes, but so it was with her hair. So were her eyes, said Qitmir.

Black dog howled at the moon for some apparent reason.

"Oh, do stop that child, you're making a fool of yourself again,"said the killing moon. "Do you think you can make me fall from the skies like that?"

Yes, fall for me.

The moon laughed: "it's not like that" [and then again, gently]: "it's not like that. I follow a fixed path up here and cannot be swayed this way or the other"

Black dog looked perturbed and scratched the earth with his paw... But I thought you controlled the tides and all that comes and goes?

The moon was exasperated. If she had been a woman or a small child she would have put her hands on her hips. "That's not how it works; everything moves in a circle"

Black dog came to realise that the moon was a lot more mysterious than he had at first thought and that most of the time he didn't really understand what the moon meant. It was at times like these that he felt like saying, well, old chap, what are you actually saying, but knowing the moon's bad temper he resisted. Puzzled and tired, he walked away....

One day black dog came across a well. He asked china dog- who was now famous after Dylan's poem and who knew about these things- What's that?

"A dark mirror" said china.

Oh.

And then black dog, being of the inquisitive type, stood on his hind legs and peered into it.

"What do you spy?", asked china.

I only see darkness.

"There you go!", said china, triumphantly.

Wait! I can also see the moon. But how is that possible?! Have I lost my senses or is it now night? Am I one or two? Is it lonely down there? Che fai tu, luna, in ciel?Dimmi, che fai, silenziosa luna? She seems so peaceful, like a dream within a dream.

Black dog knew not to trust china, who had studied too much philosophy and lost his mind. But he did remember his old friend Pythagoras, who had said that God loves odd numbers.

China, how can one reach the moon, how can I grow in lightness? asked black dog. Will words or thoughts take me there? How can the moon appear in the day?

China dog just sat and thought and thought. And then eventually he said:

If your heart is not deceived by the mirage, be not proud of the sharpness of your understanding; for your freedom from this optical illusion is due to your imperfect thirst.

And with that black dog became sad and he began to wonder if had really been alive all this time or whether he had died a long time ago and was only remembering these events. How to break the circle?

As the carcass was dragged off, its glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproof of the things that you throw away, that you wish to be rid of. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was tossed down into a corner that the dustman visited every day. As he sailed down from the window, he seemed for a moment to take shape again and you could have seen him dancing in the air, a quadruped with long whiskers and his right forepaw raised as if cursing. And then he too found peace in a pile of livid dust.

Crying - Roy Orbison