stirb und werde

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."

---Ted Hughes.

~~~~

Fluttering, zig zagging around the candle, some see this as infidelity on the part of the moth; but for others, this is a true symbol of his faithfulness. What he seeks is not light, but fire; the desire to be burnt to the core, disappear in a flash, be blinded, lost. This is the nature of the moth. This is the nature of the flame.

medusa

Better to be a diamond with a flaw than a stone that is perfect.

The gods are always falling for the beauty of humans. As if the very fragility, the very ephemerality of it was what tempted them. A constant perfection tires the eye, wearies the heart. What is precious is always at the limits of itself -and therefore on the verge of fading back into something greyer. A love that faileth is the only one they can take seriously, the only one whose game can delight.

In the knowledge of death we are superior to God
--Allama Iqbal.

The mortal coil. Perseus ends up on an island amid a vast ocean. He is brought there in a box (a bag?). Of the three , he pursues the mortal Medusa. Should this surprise us? The Gorgon lives on the frontier lands of the world, the borders of what is hidden and what is seen and known. She is the antithesis of Perseus , the winged one: lightness, speed, and invisibility. If Perseus cannot be seen it is because of the gift of the gods-for her, it is a curse.

The head of the Gorgon writhes with serpents, her hands are bronze. There is no subtlety to them, no flexibility. But still, mystery of mysteries, we are told she is " beautiful Medusa" (and the blush in her cheeks in Caravaggio's painting suggests as much). She is sad and funny, but don't ask why. Some say her hair is straight, others that one could lose oneself in her tresses.

The quality that makes for living things-mobility, flexibility, suppleness, warmth, bodily grace-all of that turns to stone [in Medusa].

Watching a re-run of one of the old Star Trek episodes. In it the Medusans, a race of sublimely intelligent , disembodied people have to be transferred from one place to another. But their form is so hideous, so grotesque, that it must be hidden from the eyes of Man and kept in a black box (bag?). One glance is enough to drive a man to madness, to murder. There are some realities that one must turn one's eyes away from, that can blind us. There are some truths that can only be viewed obliquely, through a dark glass. Is there any way in which we can attune our vision to such a sight? Perhaps to see such ugliness would only remind us of our own and that is itself a form of death. Are Medusa's eyes anything but a mirror?

But it is Perseus who has the mirror (the shield). Art is always a re-presentation of reality.

Then the ambassador who wants to see the Medusa and not just know its mind, its supreme intelligence, asks: who is to say what is beautiful and what is ugly. May it not be that we cannot see the Medusa because it is dazzlingly beautiful? Only the ambassador knows how to chose the right words to speak to the Medusa, as if the beloved behind the veil could only be spoken to in this particular way, not that.

Our eyes must rove since they cannot absorb, take in, the picture of something that is so spectacularly beautiful. Both the absence of light and an excess of it produces blindness.

From Calvino, On Lightness: Perseus, who is carried by the wind, the clouds, slays Medusa- the one who turns souls to stone, whose gaze is the weight and inertia of the world. But still he carries her head with him in a bag: as if to say that in a ‘thoughtful lightness’ one cannot look directly at reality but only its reflection. One doesn’t refuse reality, but carries the opacity of the world with one. Melancholy is not a dense, brooding inwardness, but a sadness that has taken on lightness.

Maneater - Hall & Oates

the drowned, reflected world

They are a long inspection of a drowned, reflected world, in which no sky is visible except by reflection; the water fills the whole frame. ..In these paintings, emptiness matters as much as fullness, and reflections have the weight of things. ..to conjure up the negated object, with the help of allusive and always indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence, which involves an undertaking which comes close to the act of creation.

What showed on its surface, the clouds and lily pads and cat's-paws of wind, the dark patches of reflected foliage.the abysses of dark blue and the opaline shimmer of light from the sky, were all compressed together in a shallow space, a skin, like the space of painting . The willows touched it like brushes . No foreground, no background; instead, a web of connections


The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!

---August 11th, 2008.

(K. Clark on Monet, and R. Lowell)

snoitcelfer yarts

I was going

to gather flowers

my love waited

among the trees

the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart

---G. Hill

The park itself is unremarkable-except for a remote, older corner of it. It is as if this part of the park was more ancient and everything had been built around it, a world within a world. It had not only survived all the changes but, like an old tree, endured beyond all sadness. One could pause to think: how many promises were made under these trees, how many hearts broken? Here people had met and held hands and laughed together. How mysteriously ordinary it all seemed. Here the branches of the trees stoop to touch the water, twigs gently pressing on the surface, like fingers caressing the beloved's face. The water is black and to peer into it is to look at another world lying beyond a black mirror. Each thing in the world-ourselves included- has its other life, its double, and we only momentarily catch a glimpse of it...

~

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light, glimmering individuals, and finally they disappear into the hidden depths...and then the sun is miraculously reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together and brought to the surface in a loving embrace..and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself endlessly, eternally, reminding us that what is lost is also found...

~

Perhaps the ceaseless movement of the stream allows the images to form; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change who knows if there'd be a reflection at all. Or do we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time against the permanent invisible presence of the sun?

~

Maybe it is something more mysterious altogether: my desire for it to be this way. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns do exist. But they are not the sun.

~

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream will return to its former self, to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without the warmth, the illumination of the sun the stream is nothing but a memory museum, a collection of stray reflections that exist only in the mind. Empty, abandoned and alone. And when the storm subsides there is no trace of the red or the blue, there is no trace of a me, or of a you. But yes is still yes, and yes is still no.

for the end of time

ah

for the end of time.

and what will tell you the meaning of "ah"

the sound, the sayer?

the silence in the fields?

what is meant by "for"?

this longing

for the end of longing

that some call death

and others life.

the light falls around us

never in us

it's there

in the seeping of the days

the darkening of your face

fall

now

like a cloak to the ground

silently.

"oh" and "ah"

No! I refuse! My heart shall be a tower
and I must set myself upon its edge
and in that nothingness must be once more
all world, all pain, all that cannot be said.
A solitary thing, still lost in huge excess
time after time darkening and lightening-
the last surviving image of all yearning,
cast out into infinite restlessness.
And still this fixed, ultimate stone face,
consenting to endure its heaviness...

---Rilke


It's great to live only by the spirit, to testify day by day, for eternity, to the spiritual side of people. But sometimes I get fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel there's some weight to me. To end my eternity, and bind me to earth. At each step, at each gust of wind, I'd like to be able to say: 'Now! Now! and Now!' And no longer say: 'Since always' and 'Forever.' To sit in the empty seat at a card table, and be greeted, if only by a nod.... And to drink and eat.... [i]t would be quite something to come home after a long day, like Philip Marlowe, and feed the cat. To have a fever. To have blackened fingers from the newspaper.... To feel your skeleton moving along as you walk. Finally to suspect, instead of forever knowing all. To be able to say 'Ah!' and 'Oh!' and 'Hey!' instead of 'Yes' and 'Amen'

--Wings of Desire.

the forgetfulness of a summer day

Sad, forlorn flower, distiller of liquid gold. Light condenses, thickens. Time slows, falters. You think to yourself: it is the light within that fails, not the light that falls all around us.

~

Some lives are brought to completion by the sun's gentle hand, by the sun's brilliant gold, bronzed by decay, by many, many suns. But the black sun leaves a shadow across the face.

~

The great flat land of summer, where distinctions are erased and time's sting forgotten, where there is no "me", and there is no "you". We play like children, our laughter as simple as the gold of cathedrals, our steps rhyming like those of the first people under the gaze of God.

~

What is remembered? A summer's day, a dream within a dream. That which is most real. I think I remember you now, dreamy-eyed and clownish though I be. I think I know you, even if I know nothing else. Why do you pretend, why do you make believe? You are like a child that lived for one hour, that was as free as the forgetfulness of a summer day.

Persian soul

(photo courtesy of roxana)

b[e(e)]

“Your Lord inspired [awha] the bee,” so begins a delightful parable in the Qur'an. It describes the labor of one of nature’s most productive Bricoleurs — the bee. Addressing the bee, the passage continues:

“Prepare for thyself dwellings in mountains and in trees, and in what [humans] may build [for you by way of hives]. And then eat of all the fruits and follow humbly in the paths ordained by the Sustainer. Then, from the bee’s innards a drink of many hues pours forth; in it is a remedy for all humanity. In all this, behold, there is a message indeed for people who think.”
--Q. 16:68-69

The parable of the bee is instructive. As a matter of habit, this insect draws from a diverse variety of sources – pollen and nectar – in order to produce a synthetic product that reflects all the colors and fruits of its immediate habitat. While the honey produced is in some way aggregate of many diverse types of nectar, it is simultaneously something very new and unparalleled. In the end, the bee not only produces a delectable substance but also furthers reproduction through cross-pollination that in turn generates new flowers and restarts the cycle for the future production of honey.

Similarly, in the reconstruction of ideas from fragments, it is often the case that ideas that were once the end products of a constellation of thoughts are now deployed in the reconstructive process as means for different ends….

“Bricoleur” is an appropriate descriptor for Ghazali. Extensive research has shown that he derived inspiration from a broad spectrum thinkers who preceded him…Not only did he reconstruct ideas, but he did so with an originality that was secreted into innovative interpretations.

…A Bricoleur “speaks” not only with things but also through the medium of things.

(This was taken, borrowed, from Moosa's book on Ghazali)

If anyone has a link to the picture of the actual cave image please pass it on. Ta!

Alabama

There's something epic about this, something that goes beyond the specific incident.

Of course, for the monkeys the world is full of plotting Jews, impure women and decadent music. But this sickness isn't too far from the mainstream either. And you can't just wish it away. What is twisted is not so easily unknotted.

"The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

About American music and Africans:

Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...

Now, here's a proper monk:

Round Midnight - Thelonious Monk

Life is a Cabaret

Listen!
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means that someone wants them to be,
that someone dreams those specks of spit
magnificent.
---Mayakovsky.

The bourgeois's hat flies off his pointed head.
The air re-echoes with a cry.
Roofers plunge and hit the ground,
and at the coast-one reads-seas are rising.
The storm is here, the savage seas hop
On land and crash thick dams .
Most people have a cold
Trains fall of bridges.
--Van Hoddis.

Life is a cabaret, the world is a stage. There are no more carnivals since everything has been turned upside-down, inside-out. Now we celebrate the non-carnival day, the utterly boring and predictable Sunday where nothing happens.
The exception has become the norm, and everywhere is the circus..at first the circus, the half-way sphere of outsiders, an unregulated world, was far from the flatlands of bourgeois sentimentality and respectability. Now:the periphery is the centre.

The Feuilliton, the Vienna cafe: all is linked in the dancing swirl of gaiety and lightness. the short essay: wit, brevity, topicality, contemporaneity, satire..all the characteristics of the age. Karl Krauss would say that the breezy superficiality and subjectivism of the press would bring down the solid world of the bourgeois. We live in an impressionistic age, where all we see are snatches of a life. the London papers are designed to keep one's interest for at least (but not more than) half an hour.

Mere fragments, these sketches are of rootless individuals, ..a fragmentary life. Existence for the modern man consists of atomized glimpses into the lives of others and bits of conversation overheard.

Life is a cabaret.
Don't think too much about it.
You penniless little ..
Before you know it, you'll be gone.
So sing with me this ridiculous song.
Life is short, life is fleeting.
Before you go, turn on the heating.

The philosopher emerges when man ceases to take himself or life seriously. Laughter as wisdom (Nietzsche). The Name of the Rose?

A desire to shock the establishment out of its conformity, its conventionality. But what happens when the shock doesn't shock? What happens when the shocking is the establishment view of things? The spirit of the Cabaret is that of the ships, the bars of international ports, fun fairs, working-class streets. It is a war of the sea-gypsies against the brown-eyed land-dwellers. The salons of the modernists, the avant-garde, produced a spectacle, a parody of social and artistic values. Nothing is sacred and everything is dissolved in laughter and ridicule. The Cabaret programme itself is discontinuous, thus mimicking real life, fed by swift actuality.

Laughter implies distraction and entertainment and an attack on the worn-out prototypes of the Beautiful, the Grand, the Solemn, destroys the Religious, the Sacred, the Serious. [After a while, after the initial thrill of revolting against something, these attacks become all too predictable and rather tedious]. Popular culture and the Variety Show, with their entertainment and humour, are a form of critique of Art and the socio-political. [ The times they are a changin'..yes, how very conventional Bob!]

Improvisation, ruptures, the discontinuous , speed and shock, shock and awe. At last: to give the body a home, to reject the metaphysical. The modern must shatter the classical [let's play the moonlight Sonata backwards..yes, how very original Leonard]. Realism must give way to the dream, the banalities of ordinary life must be smashed (philosophy with a hammer) , the real must be exploded into the surreal. You want reality...you can't handle reality. The deranged and the dissident, dissonance and the degenerate..the sea-gypsies have landed but it is a ship of fools.

At the Cabaret Voltaire there is liberation through laughter, the absurd, of all that cannot be systematized by the accountants and the calculators, by authority. The sleep of Reason brings forth nightmares. Life is life. A process, a journey, a series of bizarre happenings, a montage. Is the Cabaret the modern, the urban, form of Romanticism?

Hugo Ball: the next step is for poetry to discard language ..abandon the word, a radical, raucous negation of the past.

Is it so surprising that the Sprachkritik should arise out of the ruins of Empire, from the splinters of the belle epoque and, most importantly, from the cafes and the Cabaret? Existence precedes essence...Life is a cabaret, old chum.

[from Lisa Appignanesi's book. Reminds me of the snippets of Qutb:the "decadence" of Jazz?]

suspicious minds

If everything begins with doubt, with a question, how does it end?

Sometimes one grabs at what is close at hand, what is close by. First things. Not always a bad idea. But doesn't the hand also reach out for what it doesn't "know", beyond the dark mirror, beyond itself?

Gently, now. Not "seizing". Have you grasped that. Volo ut sis.

From Iris:

A mother asks her son, a merchant setting off for the city, to bring her back a religious relic. He forgets her request until he is nearly home again. He picks up a dog's tooth by the roadside and tells the old lady it is a relic of a saint. She places it in her chapel where it is venerated. It begins miraculously to glow with light.

Keats says that "what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not." It must be truth. Simone Weil quotes Valery: "The proper, unique, and perpetual object of thought is that which does not exist." Here we may make sense of the idea of loving good. "At its highest point, love is a determination to create the being which it has taken for its object." Here indeed we come back to the Ontological Proof in its simpler version, a proof by perfection, by a certainty derived from love. The good artist, the true lover, the dedicated thinker, the unselfish moral agent solving his problem: they can create the object of love. The dog's tooth, when sincerely venerated, glows with light.

Suspicious Minds - Elvis Presley

In the land of the pure

EXCERPTS FROM THE CURRICULUM DOCUMENT, 1995
Prepared by the National Bureau of Curriculum and Textbooks
Federal Ministry of Education

Social Studies: At the completion of Class V, the child should be able to:

. "Acknowledge and identify forces that may be working against Pakistan." [page 154]

. "Demonstrate by actions a belief in the fear of Allah." [page 154]

. "Make speeches on Jehad and Shahadat." [page 154]

. "Understand Hindu-Muslim differences and the resultant need for Pakistan." [page 154]

. "India's evil designs against Pakistan." [page 154]

. "Be safe from rumour mongers who spread false news. " [page 158]

. "Visit police stations." [page 158]

. "Collect pictures of policemen, soldiers, and National Guards." [page 158]

. "Demonstrate respect for the leaders of Pakistan."

~~~~

Well, of course, this is nothing that new. All sorts of distinctions abound: men against women, rich against poor, whites against blacks, the religious against the infidel etc. But prejudice and biases are one thing, and the institutionalization of practices, the brainwashing of children, the re-inforcing of the structures of dominance are quite another. Related, but distinct. No?

So, Americans and the flag, cocksure that they're on a "mission" to establish the New Jerusalem, Jewish settlers, Indian bigots, Christian fundamentalists, neo-liberals. Preachers. The lot of them.
Vile? Yes. Of course. But surely what's dangerous here is not just their warped, indoctrinated view, but their actions; their sheer hatred and expression of hatred for other people and the world.

[and that ends this little "rant", Roxana. :-) ]

Feeling Blue

An artist of the floating world. He thinks to himself: What is real anymore and what but an illusion? Am I any less real than those around me, was I the only one who wasn't serious?

Do the lanterns hanging above the heads of the characters represent the state of their souls, each encapsulating something of what is quintessential, each a veritable world in itself ? At one level the painting seems to me to be about the gaze and how we avoid looking at what cannot be looked at. The void. The clown's abstract look into the distance, the man in the beret-the Frenchman-with his sharp, this-worldly look, the man on the extreme left of the picture, isolated, radically cut off from the world and society (indicated by the vertical beam that acts as a symbol of separateness)...each has a way of looking at, engaging with, reality.

The man on the left-the pimp- holds himself, as if for reassurance. He is wrapped up in himself and quite oblivious of the others. It would be true to say of him what Augustine would say of man in general: he doesn't even know that he lacks , or what he lacks. There is only a quiet, almost resigned, desperation about his whole demeanour. The lantern above him bears an uncanny resemblance to the moon. Is this a co-incidence or are we to infer some sort of mystical union between the universe and the self? In this case, someone, something, that is sad, reflective, heavy with thought. Maybe, then, the painting is about our connections and relations with the stars and ourselves and maybe that order has come unhinged...we are left to freely float in an alien universe.

I think, however, that the painting is really about the connections and relations -or rather the lack of them-that we have with other people. It is about people who are isolated from one another and the world. And what of the central figures, the only ones that seem to form some sort of worldly relation to one another? Who is the woman defiantly looking at us? A prostitute, an outsider who is someone beyond the pale of normal human relationships that go up to make the solid world of bourgeois respectability. The man with his back to us , a client , is a person from such a world and he freely intermingles with the undesirables, the marginals. What does this tell us? That the only exchanges between human beings are artificial, tainted with self-interest, a search for nothing but the meeting of bodies?

But perhaps the woman doesn't really belong to this group either. As a misfit, she is closer in spirit to that other painted figure, the clown. Both are theatrical performers, both see the illusionary nature of reality and help others find joy in contingency. But I think the figures-perhaps stereotypes is a better word- are also linked in a different way: the cigarettes. Perhaps it is the three figures who we see smoking who are linked by some inner bond, some common outlook. But if they are, it is not something we can divine and it remains hidden, only a symbol like some undeciphered hieroglyph whose meaning escapes us.

In one sense, though, the story revolves around the clown and he is the central axis around which the others might be understood. Since here we are presented with a uniqueness and singularity that we can read (the man on the extreme left is also isolated, but he remains a closed figure and we can never be sure of exactly what he is thinking. It is this mysteriousness, these thoughts of his that are incommunicable, that places him beyond the frame). Where one might expect an angel or a hero one finds a clown! At the still heart of the universe is there only a cosmic joke? Is this what the clown sees and is this what he is trying to look beyond, to out stare the nothingness? The lantern above him is hell-like.

Behind the characters lies nothing but different shades of blue; they are engulfed by it. Is this, then, the wreckage of human history. Perhaps there is nothing left to say. In the last days there can be no further developments, as each person becomes what he or she was in truth, each is reduced to their own essence and nothing else, and this thought fills them with horror.

The figures to the right are obviously from the upper-middle classes. Again, one can see this in the lanterns which give one the feeling of opulence and restrained splendour. Here, again, we are made acutely aware of how people inhabit utterly separate and distinct worlds. And one begins to notice the infinite distances between the lanterns, the abyss of desert spaces. Robert Hughes was right to say that Hopper had recognized that in America the great frontier had moved inwards. I see the woman as talking to herself, trying to explain something but the husband's gaze has left her and his thought is elsewhere. Even in what one might expect to be the most intimate relation there is a terrible chasm. It is as if Hopper is saying even in what is most familiar, the sure world of marriage, there is little else but the avoiding of eye contact, there is, in these 'evenings of the mind', a deep chill in the heart and one cannot help feeling blue.

Through blue summer evenings, I’ll go down the pathways,

I’ll let evening breezes bathe my bare forehead.

I’ll speak not a thing: I’ll think not a thing:

And, I’ll go, far, far away, like a gypsy...

(this was copied from a book)

Comfort Food

Well, well, well. There seem to be some rumours swirling about amongst my reader(s) that I have a food disorder (don't try and hide..I know who you are!)

So, so, a story..which I shall call 'Do not go gentle into that night'.

I'm feeling sick. I think I've swallowed some ants. Don't ask me how-we had some stale rye biscuits that had to be disposed off and throwing anything away in this house is a cardinal sin, nearly as bad as losing money. Losing anything under ten pounds will get one branded an utter disgrace for the rest of one's life; any larger amounts are written off. A loss of a thousand pounds, for example, is taken with stoical calmness. The ant explanation has produced great hilarity-but everyone knows that the ant killed an elephant.

If anyone is ill in our family the cure is invariably related to food. Headache? Take some 7-up; Poor stomach? Kichiri. Fever, did you say? A broth made from old chicken bones; Acidity? A glass of milk; Facial paralysis ? Quail ! (I kid thee not); Depression? Chocolate; Leg blown off? "Don't worry, you'll be fine, have you tried some haleem?".

When Saida moti (Saida-the-fat-one) was unwell the doctor told her to eat two slices of white bread. (Eating 'English' bread is something of an insult amongst the plebs back home). She came back holding her stomach. "What's wrong?" they asked. It transpired that she ate two loaves, not slices! It's still not clear to me in that story why a doctor should make such a ridiculous recommendation (unless he was from our family, of course). Ubo's old joke: a man goes to the doctor with an upset stomach, having stuffed himself silly. The doctor says: take these two pills four times a day. To which the man replies: doctor, if I had space in my stomach to eat those I might as well have had an extra bar of chocolate!

Uncle M was a hopeless speedster, recklessly driving his Vespa scooter between cars, dodging the horse-drawn carts and donkeys alike. Well, one day he had an accident. A crowd soon gathered around him as he lay there sprawled on the road. There's nothing the Lahoris like more than a road accident. They will usually just gawp at the smashed vehicles for hours on end , discussing what happened in the minutest details with all of its ramifications. Passers by on the other side of the road will invariably stop what they are doing and be drawn to the crowd like flies around a sweet pastry cake.

A few weeks ago there had been an accident in a place not to far from this one. Around the site of the crash the following conversation could be heard:

"Did you see the accident, a man and his seven children, all gone. Just like that" said one.
"It was the Will of Allah," said another.
"Well, why did he have so many children in the first place?" butted in a third.
"Not all of them looked like him, if you understand my drift" chipped in another, as he winked to his friends.

And so this discussion went on and on, and that was a real pity because the man in the accident was actually alive when these stories were circling over his head like so many black vultures.

And so it came to pass that the incident about the passers by and their stories itself became a story.Uncle M was mindful of this story and what had happened to the unfotunate man. Already he could hear the muttering of the crowd that had assembled from God knows where. "Take him to Services hospital" said one."No, he'll be fine. Leave him be" boomed a deep voice from somewhere in the mass of faces. Pretty soon everyone had their own idea of what the best course of action was and speculation then arose as to who exactly this man -a man who looked rather too important to be riding a scooter-was.

As luck would have it, a family friend, Dr. Rashid, was passing by and took one look at Uncle M and said to the crowd, "don't worry, he'll be fine. Just quickly get two boiled eggs and he'll be on his feet in no time". But the banter of the crowd did not subside."He looks as white as a ghost" said someone, shaking his head."Is he going to die?" asked a small child."Why was he driving so fast, he could have killed someone" remonstrated an old man. My uncle felt the blood draining from his legs. Was he to die like this amongst the rabble? The sun blinded his vision but he mustered all of his strength and managed to just lift his head off the floor. He gasped for breath and knew he had but a few words left in his body."

But what did you say, dear uncle?"I asked. To which he replied:

"For the love of God and his Prophet, someone listen to Dr. Rashid!"

Two boiled eggs was not an offer one could refuse lightly...

Different Trains

I thought there might be something special on the way out; was half expecting it. Strange thing is hope. Something out of the blue, remarkable; something worth noting. Instead of the memorable, the dazzling moment of departure that holds memory close to itself, there was only a series of events that can best be described as comical or ridiculous. Perhaps that is the fate that awaits us all..a cosmic joke. Eight days have passed and there is little to tell. Not quite sure if it is words or my sight that fails me. Whatever it is, there's no surge of interest in the mundane: welcome to the flatlands, the plains...like Goya, there's the apprehension of a growing inner silence.

I think to myself: I must remember this stretch of the tube journey. How futile! Concentrating on the tube map-and in particular the red ribbon that is the Central Line, serves no purpose (already I'm thinking in a different way, pragmatically). How may times have I passed through these places , with their solid, square but innocuous sounding names? Ordinary places like any other, no doubt. Each the same, perfectly shaped, as are the regular lives that inhabit them. But then it occurs to me: at each station I could just as easily decide to stop as I could continue; at each juncture there would be two 'Me's': the one that stayed and the one that carried on.-and who is to say which one is the real me? How alluring it is to put a stop to this and walk into a different future, one shaped by a different set of words, expectations, experiences! I imagine myself at Tottenham Court Rd. and the possibilities that open up there..then, later, I think dreamily of Holland Park and Russian Icons, of the random people I will bump into, and then the people on the blog who might read of the first life but not the second.

The train hurtles on but I'm in a kind of dull stupor now. Silence has a tendency to empty you out like that. Life in England specializes in hollowing you out-but at least one is left with one's own nothingness.

'The water in the harbour had the usual harbour litter, orange peel, a fine web of seemingly dusty, semi-iridescent scum hung with small leaves and bits of twig. It made me think of classical lands and of people making journeys in ancient times to famous cities, to study rhetoric or philosophy or to put a question to the local oracle. The harbour water would always have been like this, ordinary, unremarkable, until it had been left behind on the journey out'
---V.S.N.

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board..they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing, dreams mocked to death by Time.

Even the dark and terrible banality of [the world] can recede to a vanishing point when you understand, and are understood by, another human being.

'The door swings open:
O god of hinges,
God of long voyages,
You have kept faith.
It's dark in there.
You confide yourself to the darkness
you step in.
The door swings closed.'
---Margaret Atwood.

the red and the white

I do not know, whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind –
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

I listened to the rustling
of spring rain,
washing the reddish buds
of chestnut-trees, –
and a tiny spring ran down
into the valley from the hill –
and I was missing
the whiteness
and the snow.

And in the yards, and on the slopes
red-cheeked
village maidens
hung up the washings
blown over by the wind
and, leaning,
stared a long while
at the yellow tufts of sallow:

For love is like the wind,
And love is like the water –
it warms up with the spring,
and freezes over – in the autumn.
But to me, I don't know why,
whether the sun
accomplished it,
the rain or wind –
but I was missing so
the whiteness and the snow.

--Jonas Mekas

another place

For flowerville, antonia, anton...who likes to look out to the sea.

Through the blue summer evenings, I'll go down the pathways,
I'll let evening breeze bathe my bare forehead.
I'll speak not a thing: I'll think not a thing:
And, I'll go, far, far away, like a gypsy...

We stand here alone. Surrounded by wind, sand, and sea. Grey reflections, flecks of ash in the eye of God. We stand here together, alone. Motionless. Gazing for ever at the distance between us, the space within us.

From 'the consolation of the elemental', The Independent, July 1, 2005:

AG. What is the consolation that we seek into going into the elemental world?
..the rhythm of the ice forming, freezing, melting, breaking, the sense one had that those things have been going on for time out of mind...
When I think of Suffolk I think about hedgerows, trees, plantations, the amazing huge sky over and above this quilted mas;that's a relationship with a place that is qualified by human history. But what's wonderful about the sea is that it is not like that. It's an element which is endless and uninscribed.

the beach: It is also a deep memory of the early times, the sense of sun and wind on the skin. I love the way we regress at the beach...the human perceptual world is limited by a horizon but there is always that human need to imagine what's beyond it. [A place] where they witness that they themselves are part of a field of witnessing.

IM: Another Place seems to suggest the power of collective dreaming. All these figures are facing out to sea. The work has power because they're facing the same direction and thinking the same thing.

AG: I believe it has something to do with the weather being the thing that everything suffers but is also the elemental condition that carries on, and in it there is another form of consolation.

IM: To abandon all hope of progress is a meanness of spirit.

Sunflower

Why does the princess smile?
Why does the prince weep?
---the swami.

Sunflower, dream of the sun, dreams of the sun. Gladly accepting the gift, gently weaving the time of the sun into the earth. Sunflower, the heart's alchemist, transforming invisible light into a colour of the world. Measurer of the hours, of the days in the eternal life of the sun.

Sundial, made by human hands, turns gold into shadow. But what is natural absorbs, accepts, reflects, shines. Flower of the sun, radiant even in sadness, breathes in and breathes out, seeks affinity, is attentive.

Ah, sunflower, how distant your light seems to me today. As if it was a memory. Or a fading image. Frail light, no longer the dazzling seam of imperial robes, no longer the resplendent glory of kings. You have become something utterly simple, elemental. Neither possessed of inner strength or of intrinsic value, and unable to shrug off your weariness of time, unable to set hearts ablaze and yet still we wait for you to turn your face our way, still you mean the world to us.

I think one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to was Lucio Fontana at the Hayward. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any images of his 'Harlequin' online.But this is what I remember of it:

Fontana's harlequin, patchwork being, with a patchwork heart, like a sufi of old, ancient shaman. That golden mosaic running through him, a diagonal of burnished gold-or was it gleaming, glimmering?-that held him together, that went through his heart. The quintessential line of thought, beauty. Perhaps harlequin was struck by lightning, the golden flash of insight and intuition fused, has made its way to the surface, like the veins of gold in a rock, a truth that inheres in the body, that pierces it, a gash, a wound, the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary...

And I think to myself: what a mystery it is to ponder: who placed it there? Are you not, too, like this Harlequin, with your golden band and streak of morning sunshine in your eyes, all the time weaving a blue ribbon in the hearts of men?

Gold is a constant element, gleaming solidly in the underground vaults, on the breasts of queens or the arms and regalia of warriors on the mead benches.

How far away is the black sun, she asked.I don't know, but about this far away from home.

a new york state of mind

....[c]ontrasting urban ecologies of capitalist and precapitalist cities. In the latter (he uses Naples as an example), there is no delusion of total command over Nature, just constant ecological adaptation. The city is an imperfect and carnivalesque improvisation that yields to the fluxes of a dynamic Mediterranean environment. ‘Things are allowed to remain in a halfway real condition, and delight is taken in the way things come to their own equilibrium and completion.’ Although the objective hazards (volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis) are arguably greater than for any other large European city, Naples is on familiar terms (heimisch in Freud’s sense) with the ‘old dragon’ of catastrophic nature. Anxiety does not infuse daily life on the slopes of Vesuvius.

In the ‘Americanized big city’, by contrast, the quest for the bourgeois utopia of a totally calculable and safe environment has paradoxically generated radical insecurity (Unheimlich). Indeed ‘where technology has achieved an apparent victory over the limits of nature . . . the coefficient of known and, more significantly, unknown danger has increased proportionately.’ In part, this is because the metropolis’s interdependent technological systems—as Americans discovered in the autumn of 2001—have become ‘simultaneously so complex and so vulnerable’. More profoundly, the capitalist big city is ‘extremely dangerous’ because it dominates rather than cooperates with Nature.

The Uncanny is precisely that ‘nothingness [non-integration with Nature] that stands behind the mechanized world’. Although Bloch is acutely aware of the imminent dangers of fascism and a new World War, he insists that the deepest structure of urban fear is not Wells’s war in the air, but ‘detachment and distance from the natural landscape’.

The subject is teetering on the brink of absolute nihilism; and if this mechanization with or without purpose, this universal depletion of meaning, should come to fulfillment, then the future void may prove equal to all the death anxieties of late antiquity and all the medieval anxieties about hell.

--------From Mike Davis, 'The Flames of New York' with references to Ernst Bloch's 'The Anxiety of the Engineer'


The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview that values permanence, grandeur, symmetry, and perfection. ...Wabi-sabi is an intuitive appreciation of a transient beauty in the physical world that reflects the irreversible flow of life in the spiritual world. It is an understated beauty that exists in the modest, rustic, imperfect, or even decayed, an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.
------Juniper.

The static idea of perfection of the Greeks, the Doric column, proportionality compared to wabi, "deliberate imperfection". Rowan Moore, writing about how the Twin Towers stood in stark contrast to the spirit of its Japanese architect, would say that the Towers were built to last for ever, to resist the changes of Nature in a sort of timeless space. All architecture is frozen time but this perfect abstract symmetry is nothing but a product of the human mind-a mind cut off from Nature, a grey matrix that is a reflection of the squares of the mind.

The Swami, returning from NY, had nothing to say about the sky scrapers or the city, as if her memory had become a desert. The regularity of its shapes, the grid which was a map for lost lovers, seemed to stunt all thoughts. But eventually she said:

there is something oppressive about buildings that have lost the scale of the human. One may initially be impressed by them-as one is by the outward forms of a civilisation-but very soon this feeling fades away to reveal an unnameable disquiet. Logic, mathematics, without the human touch, subjectivity, turns into a totalitarian nightmare, closed to Nature. One's eyes soon grow tired. But look, and look again at a fleeting cloud. Is this not a more perfect shape? Where the human hand becomes invisible, there you will see perfection.

North by northwest

For there’s a limit to gazing.
And the gazed-at world
Wants to blossom in love.
---Rilke.

Facing the right direction, and not being in the right place, is what counts. An elemental soul and an angelic soul: the human being is the cross where they meet. By virtue of the former nature is his 'brother'; by virtue of the latter consciousness or awareness breaks out of its dream-like state.
---from Ostaad Elahi

PENDANT LES GUERRES de l'empire,
Goethe, au bruit du canon brutal,
Fit le Divan occidental,
Fraîche oasis où l'art respire.
Pour Nisami quittant Shakespeare,
Il se parfuma de çantal,
Et sur un mètre oriental
Nota le chant qu’Hudhud soupire.

Comme Goethe sur son divan
A Weimar s’isolait des choses
Et d’Hafiz effeuillait les roses,
Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan
Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées,
Moi, j'ai fait Émaux et Camées.–

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872)

DURING THE WARS of empire,
Goethe, to the cruel sound of canons,
Made The West-Eastern Divan,
A cool oasis where art respires.
For Nizami he left Shakespeare,
Scented himself in santal,
And at the feet of an oriental,
Took down the song that Hudhud sighed.

Like Goethe on his divan
In Weimar secluded himself
And plucked the roses of Hafiz,
Without thought of the hurricane
Lashing at my shutters,
I, I made Émaux et Camées.

[translation © yusuf zanella, 2006]

Borrowed from 'Traveller'

The East within the East, the place that is east of the East. When one reaches the edge of the world what happens? One falls off! When the heart reaches a certain point, then? It falls.

The Dalai Lama: there is a fundamental goodness, gentleness running through the universe. This thought is like a shiny ribbon bookmark between so many words....it allows one to close the book..and to open it again. The ultimate aim of intelligence is to have a good heart.


We live amidst a storm, but tonight, perhaps only tonight, all is peace inside.The East's mind has fallen asleep, stilled itself, and the west no longer has a heart. Too ancient and too modern by far, b! Then how to live? Not East-West, for even though I know that path my temperament, as Ghalib says, precludes me from following it. At a slight angle to the universe, then. Lean over the devastated landscape. Keep your balance. Find your orientation. North by northwest.

We live in tumultuous times..but when wasn't time just so!? Even in a casual stroll the world floats by, so many distraught faces, churning out anxieties, catch the somber mood. Everything is touched by a sense of impermanence. We are surrounded by mortal things or is it our gaze?

Why begrudge the times we live in? There was something in our soul that matched them, a kind of necessity that meant we should live here and now, not there and then. No matter how hard we deny it, we look in the glass and admit: so, this is me, this is finally me....

And yet, something stirs in our being unbeknown to us, like the flaring of the evening sun when the day is done: the hunch that we were destined for something else, another life; the hope that this straw catch fire, that the face in the mirror is not ours, that we have not found our name...Our body trembles before this silence and the mind delights once again, we are drawn to other times and other places, north of the future. The circle breaks. Like a raft precariously afloat on a vast sea, miles from land, our hopes may dwindle but familiar voices reach us, refuges are remembered, time regained. We learn to see again, to look in the right way. We must make a world of it, start again, gather ourselves once more. For this we came, always fading, always soaring....