The time of necessity has been replaced by the time of possibilities, a random time, open at any moment to the unforeseeable irruption of the new,..., an open process, not determined in advance, in which surprises, unexpected strokes of good fortune and unforeseen opportunities may appear at any moment.
---M. Lowy, cited in Z. Bauman's Consuming Life

A sigh is still a sigh,as time goes by.

Each moment, each second, is a passageway, that takes us there, or brings about a Fall. Mostly you write about what you don't know, but only vaguely intuit. No unified thoughts,or single-minded determination, no unquenchable thirst, no greatness of soul, just second spaces and second thoughts, just floating, without direction, like so much else in your life...

You watch a film, expecting something deep, profound. But isn't that a quick fix, isn't all art? Not the 'thing' itself, the pure unmediated experience, fresh, open, vivid but, instead, a mirage-and what a comforting seduction at that too! Like books, words, sharpness of the mind, people you write to, hopelessly two-dimensional. The illusion that it's there, within reach, without discipline, without seriousness of purpose, without sacrifice; that by simply waiting a time before time will be opened up for you.

Well, the puritanical, the necessary, only has a momentary hold on you. Too abrupt, too harsh, as if only the broken could see. Art is still not a sign that points to reality but a reflection of it that shows. An image is still an image of something and not a random mark.

Some moments are lost; others are regained. Time would never leave us alone. Light and shadows are with us always, the world still 'a tent of scattered stars'.

We are involved in the mystery of lived time, our being here and elsewhere. What is true is 'beyond' but its reflection is also here.
--Iris M.

The Perfect City

In appending new forms the backward society takes not their beginnings, nor the stages of their evolution, but the finished product itself. In fact it goes even further; it copies not the product as it exists in its countries of origin but its ‘ideal type’, and it is able to do so for the very reason that it is in a position to append instead of going through the process of development. This explains why the new forms, in a backward society, appear more perfected than in an advanced society where they are approximations only to the ‘ideal’ for having been arrived at piecemeal and with the framework of historical possibilities...

In a similar spirit, personal liberty in Dubai derives strictly from the business plan, not from a constitution, much less ‘inalienable rights’....

The Russian girls at the bar are the glamorous façade of a sinister sex trade built on kidnapping, slavery and sadistic violence. Al-Maktoum and his thoroughly modern regime, of course, disavow any collusion with this burgeoning red-light industry, although insiders know that the whores are essential to keeping the 5-star hotels full of European and Arab businessmen.When expats extol Dubai’s unique ‘openness’, it is this freedom to carouse and debauch-not to organize unions or publish critical opinions-that they are usually praising...

Dubai’s police may turn a blind eye to illicit diamond and gold imports, prostitution rings, and shady characters who buy 25 villas at a time in cash, but they are diligent in deporting Pakistani workers who complain about being cheated out of their wages by unscrupulous contractors, or jailing Filipina maids for ‘adultery’ when they report being raped by their employers.

---from Mike Davis, New Left Review.

If Dubai goes belly-up, don't expect the black sun to be saddened.As long as I get my camera, I couldn't give a fig about 'educational city' and 'media city'.

z words

why does everything begin with 'a'...and end with 'z'?

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--.
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
---Rilke.

there are words you do not know, lands you will not see, lives that fleetingly pass by yours, like a dream you once had. the simplicity of it. the fierceness of the heart, the steadiness of the mind. you bring the whole weight of your experiences to bear on this question: is knowing everything?an arc of chances was opened to you: but this, and not another. thisness, not thatness. you heard and pictured your circular thoughts. fear struck: what if there is no beginning, no end? if this is your only voice, what you really sound like?

what do you say when there is nothing left to say? tokens, rituals, emblems, symbols. anything but the thing-in-itself. the slow depletion that shows up in your sad eyes, the brown freckles that are proliferating, rising to the surface of your skin. and yet, the unconquered, undimmed flame. there are words you will not utter, except in the darkest night, the longest moment, when the heart is defeated, like Z, z-words...

the narrowing down of conversation, the winnowing of truth from your face, the slack that has gradually unfolded, the deepening shadows. their inner structure revealed. like an animal, you think of nothing but the elemental: food..survival..breathing...water. many have died from the lack of water; none, absurdly, from the lack of love.

the heavy weight of the past

Tons Of Joy: Wrestling champ ‘Daula’ pins down his English adversary ‘Clark’, to the patent dismay of the referee, at a fundraiser for the Lahore Warplanes Fund, the Police Spitfire Fund and the Minto Park Fund, in Lahore in the late 1930s]

photo via chapati mystery.

Ubo's uncle was a wrestler and so I've always been fascinated by the story he told about him (he, himself, was going to be named 'Rustum' but when he eventually came into the world they quickly forgot about that notion!) Would love to make a short film on wrestlers (and/or on the circus).

You realise just how few links and connections you have to the past. Which is okay, that's just the way it is; you can only work with what's been for(given) you, the inheritance of dark light. No need to grasp at what isn't yours. Each of us in a particular place and time. We can plunge into it, deepen our awareness of it, find our own voice against it and within it, and even imagine distant shores, possibilities...but even when we do, those imaginings still start from where we're at. Not everything is possible. Some lines meet, others don't. People you might have loved pass by you all the time. Different paths, or different times. Same difference. You don't care much for origins. But the centre, the centre of things, that's a different story...

A grey line on wite paper. Erased, reversed. Still leaves a mark, a trace. Grey, softly drawn on the plane white, fades and fades, until there's a meeting of two minds, the breathing of one spirit.

November ends. Still unforgiven. The winter months upon us now, the slow hardening of brown earth, the chains of frail winter light that touch abandoned things, and leaves them unredeemed.

lust, caution

She not only gets inside me, she worms her way into my heart like a snake. Deeper. All the way in. I take her in like a slave. I play my part faithfully so I, too, can get to her heart...

---adapted from Lust, Caution.

how do we differ? in what we're a slave to? some to money, others to flesh, the mind; bow down to the gods of success and status. and we're all slaves to time. so where is your uniqueness, which qibla do you turn to? flesh will grey, sag, rot, the mind slow, thought slip, picking on garbage, forsaking universals or particulars; success is another word for anxiety. tell me, why was there a snake in the Garden (and therefore in every garden)?

'silence is not absence'. then what is it? idols vacantly stare into eternity, the smooth everlasting golden smile of tranquility a balm for the weary. the way out is not a way out. still. not for you. not overcome by "the desire to sleep overcomes all desires". what fiery heart you hold, that knows no sighs? what strange creature is this...that knows no bonds, that takes no captives?

~~~

a man walked in the street, holding three pieces of string. attached to them were a goat, a monkey, and a dog. the monkey to entertain, the dog for companionship. and the goat? the goat to remind him of death.

senian

Some thoughts on Sen:

Underlying this skepticism towards the mainstream is not just dissatisfaction with what some see as an overly abstract, formal, and technical approach but, also, a much deeper suspicion: namely, that economists’ approach to human behaviour has- with their simple models and rigid conceptual framework-often been a spectacularly narrow one, an approach that is merely a "limited fragment of the whole"...

In 1987 Sen wrote a profound book entitled ‘On Ethics and Economics’ that reminded economists who were unaware of their own tradition that the origins of economics-or at least one of the origins- lay in moral philosophy (or what might loosely called ‘political economy’). It is worth recalling that it was only around the 1930’s , or possibly the early 1900’s if we include Pareto’s work, that economics made some headway in purging itself of psychological content and ethical considerations-or what some thinkers, perhaps taking the lead from the logical positivists, called "metaphysical nonsense". This development is famously encapsulated in Lionel Robbins’ words:

"It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition"

Sen’s observations here are acute: not only should we be aware of the plural nature of the substantive theories of utility (is it happiness, desire-fulfillment, or pleasure?) but in practice, the tendency to assume that utility is both one’s welfare and the maximand in choice behaviour leads to the unlikely conclusion that one always sets out to maximize one’s welfare. This seems unreasonable because we may have limited cognitive capacities and foresight, or we may have limited information, time, and experience to make a sound evaluation of what is good for us; and even if do know what is good, we may still prefer what is bad, or lack the will to choose the good...

Amartya Sen’s work has reached a fairly wide audience in no small part as a consequence of his critique of utilitarianism, the dominant tradition in welfare economics, and his pioneering of another perspective which he called the "capability approach".

stand forgotten

"The striving for perfection leads an artist to make spiritual discoveries, to exert the utmost moral effort. Aspiration towards the absolute is the moving force in the development of mankind...realism is a striving for the truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical"

The old pond was still
A frog jumped in the water
And a splash was heard.

Reeds cut for thatching
The stumps now stand forgotten
Sprinkled with soft snow.
---Basho.

To say the most, in the shortest time; the line that connects two spaces. Learning what not to say. To keep silent. Let things come to you. Know when to jump. Thoughtlessly.

Snow melts.
Reveals stones.
Sometimes green earth.

Different Trains

This is so utterly haunting and moving that it's stayed with me for a long time-and has been in the background of all the 'crow' posts. In some ways I'm a bit reluctant in sharing it with others. And that I find strange. But since anton posted something beautiful I wanted to as well, for her...

Cd's came in: Messiaen's End of Time (Tashi); Nils Okland's 'Straum'; and Hildur Gudnadottir's 'Without Sinking'.

Someone, listening to the beautiful track Aether,asked: is this soul? Perhaps. But whose? Or is it experimental or traditional? The meeting of spontaneity with received lines of transmissions.

the life of a koala

From today's Guardian:

The koala is assuredly a creature of leisure. It has the smallest brain proportionally of any mammal, sleeps most of the day, and dedicates much of the rest to chewing gum leaves. The first description published in England 200 years ago, in fact, introduced the koala as the "New Holland Sloth". In his Arcana; or The Museum of Natural History (1881), the naturalist George Perry was severely censorious of the koala's "sluggishness and inactivity", and thought its "clumsy appearance" was "void of elegance".

"We are at a loss to imagine for what particular scale of usefulness or happiness such an animal could by the great Author of Nature possibly be destined," concluded Perry, although his respect for that particular author compelled him to concede: "As Nature however provides nothing vain, we may suppose that even these torpid, senseless creatures are wisely intended to fill up one of the great links of the chain of animated nature, and to shew forth the extensive variety of the created beings which GOD has, in his wisdom, constructed."

Koala: he who doesn't drink.

Why do we want to see human traits in animals? He/her, not "it". Of course, even in inanimate things we divine a spirit, attribute a degree of sense-perception to them, or associate them with certain feelings: trees, rocks, colours. Metaphor: only connect! Since everything is prior to human beings, and since humans are central, everything is, in a certain fashion, contained in him, present in his soul.

Creative empathy and "oceanic feelings": the ability to imagine the lives of others, founded, perhaps, on a continuity of being. The desire to penetrate the veils that separate us: to move across the frontier is to enter a trance, a bewildered state, take leave of oneself (leaves of one self), shun familiar landmarks and signposts. The shaman who finds strength in customary visions.

Berserk.Our coat of arms.

Primo Levi: The Periodic Table: a style,a temperament, corresponding to a particular element and its properties.

"If you know how you sound, God help you"
(Paula Fox)

Discontinuity:

Much of those "other lives" is boring, horrid, senseless. Very few koalas, as far as you know, drink latte or read The New Yorker. Life is a distancing, a separation, a curving away from matter; human life a zig-zag jolt, a spark of intelligence that breaks free from the cyclomania of nature, seeks the wilderness, the wild blue, knows what a horizon is and is not just constrained by it.

The dull hours of insects is truly frightening. And most people have boring, insipid lives, filled with inane chatter and pointless meanderings. The need for entertainment, diversions, to forget the slow slippage into the inorganic, the seepage of reality. What do koalas dream of when they're stoned?

redire ad creatorem

I've seen your face before, my friend
but I don't know if you know who I am
Well, I remember, I remember, don't worry
how could I ever forget
It's the first time, and the last time we ever met.

The importance of exactness; the ability and desire to say the right thing, at the right time, in the right way; to pluck out the right word, image, from the stream of impressions. Hold your nerve, the memory of the absolute past was always there for you, lovingly left in your way for you to stumble upon, just under the surface, or like fish or deep shadows in the water.

The last time opened the door to the first time; just as the first moment held the memory of the last moment close to itself, memory and desire intertwining, falling, toppling into one another. When time ceases to be time there shall be no "first" or "last".

With the force of gravity removed, objects go flying off into space. But is that not what happens in love as well?

first meetings:

'And in the dark our nakedness was radiant
As slowly it inclined...
You slept, the lilac stretched out from the table
To touch your eyelids with a universe of blue,
And you received the touch upon your eyelids
and they were still, and still your hand was warm'

"If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met"

In itself, a passer-by whom you have seen at some time in your life means nothing new..but within the terms of the image, a moment of life, one and unique, her form is recorded, truly seen, perfect and simple.

Reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life, to carve out time, until only the moment remains, and only the most perfect image stands, still, fresh, open, trembling, a rolling sky-blue, the sparkling of eyes, the flash of fire, the slow burning of the blue in the red, the thawing of ice by the spring breeze, the inky waters stirring, the stuttering of words on your lips. A new time entering the old, sliding into it in the dark, the shock of the return, unscripted and unbroken.

loose sally of the mind

There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection...The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter." Well, yes, that's just it. An essay, she writes, "can be polished till every atom of its surface shines" – yes, that's it, again.

In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay".

---from Zadie Smith, The Guardian.

'Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible'
---W.B. Yeats.

Life is made up of very small things that happen. How did I get here? Look, and look again into the rusting mirror. Hard to imagine that it is metal, was polished once, saw other faces. Increasingly you think...you like that phrase, the sudden change of direction, the slow unhinging, casting off of weight, the mind curving out, enlarged, cat-like...increasingly you think: how difficult it is to start a novel, with all that baggage, excess, skirting around the main thing, the accumulation of detail upon detail. Just as a face is not "known" (take note, my oldest friend), only recognized, glanced at, and then deeply familiar. You will mark a few words with a pencil, lead on paper, grey mingling with the white, distill it down to a few choice phrases or quotes, get down to the basics, the elemental... pornification.

this is where you are, and this is where it's at..and it seems to me that you can start anywhere and still end up there. if it's written, you can't change it. mineral ink. slowly decomposes.

various people notice different things. why do you always want to know what people have had for breakfast, what they wear to sleep, the most ordinary of things? people who sleep on their stomachs are a strange breed.

the words in a certain way, the selection of language has everything to do with the silences that exist in between the words, the quality of that silence. the silence in the trees, in the mind, between atoms and stars, was there when i spoke to you. the chaste heart that knew better, that had seen the desert of time, and imagined a tulip, scarred but whole.

(the borrowed finery is paula fox's)

the two and the one

The phenomenon called 'I'
Is a single green illumination

Of a presupposed organic alternating current lamp
(a composite body of each and every transparent spectre)

The single illumination

Of karma's alternating current lamp

Remains alight without fail

Flickering unceasingly

Together with the sights of the land and all else
(the light is preserved. . . the lamp itself is lost)

The phenomenon called "I"
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic alternating current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts)
a blue illumination
of the karmic alternating current lamp
which flickers busily, busily
with landscapes, with everyone
yet remains lit with such assuredness
(the light persists, the lamp lost)

In the twenty-two months, which I perceive
lie in the direction of the past
I have linked these pieces on paper with mineral ink
(they flicker with me,
everyone feels them simultaneously)
each a chain of shadow and light
mental sketches as they are,
which have been kept until now

~~~

Along the snowy paddy ridge
crows shuffle on in a row

Body bent on the snowy paddy
a crow utters two calls

Head down on the snowy paddy
a crow eats snow pecking at it

Head up on the snowy paddy
a crow takes a look around

On the snow in the snowy paddy
a crow waddles, waddles

Reaching the end of the snowy paddy
a crow eats snow pecking at it

At a height of the paddy snow
a crow has her mouth agape

His beak in the paddy snow
a crow keeps himself still

Onto a dry ridge of the snowy paddy
a crow gives himself a jump

With a rudder over the snowy paddy
a crow makes a slow flight

Over the snow ridge in succession
crows fly up toward the west

Left behind in the snowy paddy
a crow keeps his legs apart

The crows flying toward the west
are now just like sesame seeds.

---Myazawa Kenji

~~~

Snow settled on the rooftops of Kyoto ^
Her heart restless now ~
A prisoner of fate [ ]
A life lived in circles @
She made a --- for it
Slid away from me \

One got away >>>
Leaving the many #
For the time being...

Caught a sight of her reflection,
next to mine " '
Waited patiently for the right time:
Never was me & you
+ my heart, and hope to die.

So we turned away from one another ()
Tears and snow fell
*
*
*
There was no ?
It was the time of the end.

~~~

Early morning quiet. When everyone's left, so no-one's left. The slow creaking of the house, like a ship in frozen waters. The slow winter sun, enters the room. Extends its fingers to the table. Strikes the glass like an idea. Circles it. The light is not reflected or refracted, not absorbed or sharpened or splintered; the light becomes more intense, quickened into a dazzling singleness of purpose. Holds the colours at bay, near to its surface, for a perfect moment,then re-emerges as a line of beauty. And the empty glass breathes again.

selections

"I draw great comfort from the thought that any situation or state is only a becoming, for it is up to me to give it direction, to orient it for better or worse; it is up to me to guide myself be consulting the compass of the moment where, even when distraught, the needle always ends up pointing to the magnetic pole of aliveness...

Cosmgonic myths and initiatory legends suggest the existence of worlds that a timeless fluidity entangles, superposes, locates in hidden recesses where the most certain laws of our Aristotelian sciences and of our geometrical apperception, as inherited from the Great Watchmaker, are abrogated...

Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-four hours a day. Once revealed, the scheming use of freedom by the mechanisms of domination produces a backlash in the form of an idea of authentic freedom inseparably bound up with individual creativity. The passion to create which issues from the consciousness of constraint can no longer be pressed into the service of production, consumption or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of existence of creativity; not an isolated state, but the unmediated experience of subjectivity. Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation and is the first moment of its practical realization: the precondition of poetry, of the impulse to change the world in accordance with the demands of radical subjectivity. (2). The qualitative exists wherever creative spontaneity manifests itself. It entails the direct communication of the essential. It is poetry’s chance. A crystallization of possibilities, a multiplier of knowledge and practical potential, and the proper modis operandi of intelligence. Its criteria are sui generis. The qualitative leap precipitates a chain reaction which is to be seen in all revolutionary moments; such a reaction must be awoken by the scandal of free and total creativity. (3). Poetry is the organizer of creative spontaneity to the extent that it reinforces spontaneity’s hold on reality. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence"

R.Vaneigem

the people

Listening to HARDtalk last night, which isn't so hard. Laughable, actually. A bit like some parts of academia: think that questioning everything is the way to go, when sometimes it would be better to sit down, be quiet, and just think, 'gather one's thoughts', or simply acknowledge what you've always intuitively thought was right.

Shlomo Sand. First reaction: sceptical. Always sceptical. But you warm to his views-and he has a kind face. Why should it sound so strange that states and their historians have concocted stories, myths, fabrications to mask the violence of the inception of the state? What is a people? Who is a black man (and is he black)?

What does 'Pakistan' mean? Sorry, bro', but it was never meant to be an Islamic state and never will be (inshallah). And why stop there? Why not declare it, as some are clamouring for, a Sunni state? How to talk of a community that is not defined in terms of religion or ethnicity, and that simultaneously shuns the false universality of the market, the abstract, thin, notion of Man? Not to be lured by the past, the origin: always the purest moment-and everything after that is a veritable Fall- but also to not be swayed by the technicolour futures of the self-styled progressives.

The 'wilderness' of the wild west: barren, pure, stark, something to be colonised, made over.

Here he is, speaking at NYU.

Queen of Spades

We die from a lack of imagination.
----Isak. D.

You see the world, live in it, amidst strange people, at a slight angle to the universe. Gently open the door for other people, even when it was closed on you. Because.Untimely departures. Are there any timely ones? Read the schedule. Play the game, show your hand.

Before your time. Someone called your name. With a true heart.

Dark with time, yet still a queen.But not,alas,of hearts. A life weaved around those "if's" and "but yet's". Ec-centric, off-key, out of sync. Look out, but also in. Look out, dear one!

I feel at ease and sad; there's a radiance in my sighs,
My sighs are all of you,
Of you, and you alone...My melancholy
Is untouched by torment or distraction,
And my heart is burning and loving once more.
---Pushkin?

Not a "search" for an image but a finding. Finders keepers. You grow into it. The key: into the most perfect image, mystery coming to light. What is superfluous, falls away. A simple line. A word. Quintessential. The image that is unfinished, and yet whole. Degrees of absoluteness.

I kept your soul in a blue bottle for safekeeping; you, my image close to your heart. Trapped in each other. The glass broke, and the child was a child no more.

a sight for sore eyes

Guess what"

"What?"

"I saw a fox!!"

"Are you sure it wasn't a dog?"

Oh, what does it matter. I saw it. I did. Off Snakes Lane East, just on Glastonbury Avenue. She crossed my path or I crossed hers. But useless to talk of "mine" or "hers" since when it comes to paths there are only rights of way, sidestepping or an aporia. There she was, slinking her way through suburbia, dinking her way past the debris of human lives gone awry, past the boarded fences of the Russians, who always sat in their concrete backyard, bare-chested, drinking heavily and fondly remembering frozen homelands. And then a swift turn, a scampering back to the darkness-as if to say: I can only take so much human light. Through a hole in the fence, to the open fields. And gone.

But that was many years ago now. Every time I pass that corner I stop in my tracks and point to that exact place. There! Her absence as strangely real as her fleeting presence. In that space I still see the contours of the fox, like the impression of a footprint in the snow reminds one of someone long after they've gone. As was shown in 'The Time Machine': even though you can't see or touch some things they're still there, it's just that they exist in another dimension-and that dimension is called time. Grown-ups have such difficulty in accepting what lies beyond their own limited vision. We die from a lack of imagination. Even though so many weird and wondrous things drift past us all the time, would we but notice them.

Well, what do you know! There she was, after all these years, at the train station. I was going to call out to her but didn't. But she didn't even look up and probably didn't remember me. Just turned up her snooty nose and walked away with that quick pitter-patter of hers, as silently and nonchalantly as ever. Ha! Such is the way of foxes. It's in their nature...

I stood there agape. How difficult it is to say 'we' today. But as she turned with that wonderful red coat of hers I did hear her say:

"Don't you know, foxes can't be tamed!"

(July, 27, 2008)

express yourself !

I can, therefore I must.
---Zizek.

Express yourself. Just do it! Go with the flow. If you don't, it must be machismo on your part (so dated!) or some form of repression (you aren't Catholic, are you b? Or a conservative, a fundamentalist?). Or is this a White Man thing...the white man couldn't abide the Red Man's secretive nature, his reticence. One wonders if he feels the need to expose nature herself?

Physical, social, and psychical nudity is the order of the day.
---E. Enriquez.

Confess! (so says the Inquisitor)...a confessional society. Bare it all, let it all hang out, bro'. That's what it's about, isn't it. Exorcise your demons: the therapeutic society, making yourself desirable? And yeah, let's not talk about limits, or private and public realms and how capitalism destroys them (no, that would be too close to home). Art, religion..it's just a choice, a lifestyle choice, a preference ordering.

'The rush to the numerous beauty salons springs partly from existential concerns, and the use of cosmetic products is not always a luxury. For fear of being taken out of use as obsolete, ladies and gentleman dye their hair...'How can I become beautiful?' runs the title of a booklet recently launched on to the market..it shows ways 'to stay young and beautiful both now and for ever'.

No, not Qutb, but Kraucer in the 1920's.

Here's some more:

'..history is no process at all but a hodgepodge of kaleidoscopic changes-something like clouds that gather and disperse at random. There is no flow of time'

A pointed, spiked life. A few instants, 'moments', 'events', loosely held together. 'Things themselves are experienced as insubstantial [and] appear in an evenly and flat grey tone, ...float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money' (Simmel)

This relentless drive to commodititzation (what M.J. Radin calls 'commodification'). What is your market value, your net worth (as the Americans say). An idea has passed its shelf life..I don't buy what you're saying. Publish or perish.

Isn't the internet fueling such tendencies? Not only in terms of 'expressiveness' (and one would have to ask: an expression of what..the 'subjectless subject'?) but also in terms of 'one-click' buying. I want it, and I want it now. Not genuine expressiveness in a public world, but a selection of traits to be displayed, as if they were a shopping list. Not a real conversation which requires listening, revision, continuous attention.

Question: what is meant by 'experience'?

But to have desires without reflection, silence, and only those types of desires ...isn't that to be like the gambler in a virtual world, a frictionless dream world of 'zero drag'

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilising old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.
---J. Franzen.

'Love abstains from promising an easy passage to happiness and meaning. A 'pure relationship' inspired by consumerist practices promises that passage to be easy and trouble-free, while rendering happiness and meaning hostage to fate'
---Z. Bauman.

Infinite London

London had always seemed to me to be the most prosaic of cities. Sturdy, pragmatic and not especially inclined to flights of fancy; not a city in which the imagination might be let loose, or in which dreamers dream of revolution or love, but neither is she a mathematical, abstract city. But I now increasingly come to think that London is nothing but a city of memory and desire, a thousand cities whose histories continue to exist side by side, sometimes overlapping and intersecting, at other times running parallel to one another.

There is the London that is loosely connected to the old villages that went up to make London Town-and one can still detect remnants of this in the commons and heaths. Then there are the larger historical narratives that are written on her, each leaving its indelible mark: Roman London, Medieval London, Tudor London, Victorian, Edwardian-then there is the city that has been shaped by politics and international events: war and financial speculation, the crusades. In addition to this the city is shaped by her geography-and especially the silver ribbon that runs through her heart: the Thames.

But there is also a hidden city, an underground, submerged history and this includes all those interconnecting and lost rivers and tributaries: the Trent, the Walbrook-they are like reminders of archaic words whose sense we have long forgotten, ancient by-ways that signify a truth that remains out of sight.

The city shapes and is shaped by people’s desires and memories and some of these have, in turn, been shaped by other climates, other geographies: Jews and Bangladeshis, West Indians and now the latest wave of immigrants: Poles and Lithuanians, Albanians and Russians.

And then there is a London that is fractured, splintered , along class lines: not just an affluent west end and a working class east, but also within the east or the south areas that are are thriving, confident and brash and areas that are dilapidated, in slow decline-and one feels one could continue with these subdivisions right down to a single human heart.

It is hard to envisage a metaphor for a city that is constantly in the process of escaping all definitions, a city whose past never quite dies. Perhaps it is a periodic table with each part of the city just a permutation of the other. But perhaps it really is the tube map. In this case it is reality which produces the map. At first one imagines all the terminal stations and what lies beyond; then one thinks about all of those great white circles where so many of the other lines intersect. Are all of the places on any one ‘line’ connected by some sort of mysterious idea so that, for example, places on the furthest southern and northern extremities on the northern line come to share the same history?

Yesterday the air was arid, still, the sunshine bright but somewhat tired, weak. Walking through a part of the tube system that I had never seen before I had the strange feeling that I was back in the 1970’s. There was something about the darkness of that passageway, its flickering light and quietness that made me think in such a way. There are other parts of the system that are futuristic (the Jubilee line) and still others that are decidedly 1950’s in their layout and ambience. Could it be that the tube is really a series of worm-holes?

In the bus one could hear a cacophony of voices. As always, there is infinite pleasure to be derived in trying to match an accent, a word, to a particular place. London’s infinity is not her networks of communication but in the myriad languages that are spoken. I return to my book, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is impossible to read more than a few pages at a time. The words weigh heavily on me -not in an oppressive way but like a great lead box whose key is slowly being turned, an unlocking of secrets. And I find myself closing it but keeping my finger on the page so as not to completely let go of the connection with the words on the paper:

The shallowness of a life of sanity.

The heart of darkness is not in social organization but in the blood.

the magic porridge pot

this is, like, the dream/nightmare of any self-respecting Man (we're talking of Real Man here, not some lady-boy or Aitchisonian, mind you). endless supplies of delicious, hot porridge (if you thought the dream was being married to the woman on the cover of the book, i feel sorry for you my friend..wannabe talibans are not my thing..not yet, anyway..in any case, she ain't devout enough..i can still see her hair and her wrists, and fuck, any woman that allows all that food to waste has serious problems).

~~

there are only two types of people in the world: believers and infidels. the former comprise: kashmiris (and maybe jews), people who wear hats, and people who like porridge.

~~

and damn the political correctness brigade to hell..i'm gonna say it. on the other hand there is everyone else ( excluding anton and roxana, who i forgive these november days).

~~

and the moral of the story, b?

....

the order of the soul

For mani, gnostic mani.

Are we but tired sparks in a gnostic world? Bright flashes that have cooled, worn out by time, lack-lustre, a darkening mirror?

A line from Solaris, when Kelvin is told there's no going back to the cosmos. Like when you reach the turning point and the days become visibly, palpably shorter, darker, heavier. Or when someone walks away, revealing only their back and you wonder if you'll see their face again...

To say or think 'order of the soul', or order of being makes one flinch. Now we only have an empty word for 'good', in which one can pour what one wants. Order is oppressive, burdensome, and must be broken up, resisted...verticality opposed by a flattening spirit.

But there is something else: an order of light. A unity of vision that lovingly embraces the fragments, knowing that nothing was in vain, that the past is still with you. Love: a flame, the wood, the smoke?

Clarification..to clarify. To see rightly, with love and justice. To be at the right distance. Lost and found, the heart fading, soaring. Muslim readers will know that the "eye did not rove". Prayer is for, and simulataneously is, a "good thing of this world".

"An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of 'faith'. Consider what it is like to increase one's understanding of a great work of art."
---Iris M.

To which one can only add, if there can be an addition, that that is not a negation of the self, but a deepening of it and the person. A greater level of connectivity with the world. Unity is not a number.And there are false unities.

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual reality which is beyond them. For the spiritual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

Not "detachment" or "alienation", not "suffering," but Iris's: the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.

the commons of silence

Today, early morning. Clear light. A few simple words, a simple tune in your head. Cohen. No need for anything grand. Listen to the crow scratching at my window. What does he want? The soft silence of the trees. Leaves. Just enough words. Walk in your own time, your own good time. Poetry, religion:a different dimension. Goes without saying. Convinced of it. Inwardly. A circular argument. Thought is tangential.

Stop. Look. Listen.

Speakless to speechless. The hardness of 'K' falls away. Tricks of the trade.The small space of silence that you find. Your space. Not belonging. As if you could keep it in your pocket. Like a b&w picture, for safe keeping, for another time.

"People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions...

Silence is necessary for the emergence of persons"
---Ivan Illich

double vision

Seeing two, when there is only one.

'An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new and unique image of the world, a hieroglyphic of absolute truth...'

'a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, the ideal...'

'I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work for the sake of 'self-expression'. Self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response...'

'..for thought is brief, but the image is absolute...'

'You remain for ever under the spell of its beauty and of your initial rapture...'

A few words, out of context, fragments that glimmer, open a way. Simple words. "It's" beauty, and "your" rapture..the meeting of beauty with an idea, of beauty with the self. And: "initial" rapture, as if the stone thrown in the pond produces a dynamic equilibrium, broken circles, each circle an area of concentration, attentiveness, interpenetrating the other; the point, the centre of everything.

A frog jumps into a pond
Splash!
Silence again.

sufi andrey

a hope, today,
for a thinker's
word
to come,
in the heart.
---Paul Celan

[why write? Not for self-expression, or discovery or any other such nonsense. certainly your thoughts are drying up without any commenters. why is it only women who write to you? and women who stop writing you? press on. or off. you read: "i have a cold"; "i hate my mum"; isn't silence better than blogging?]

not a double life, but half a life. can't you think of any real numbers, b?

there is no mention of the word 'sufi' in the Qur'an. yes, but there is no mention of the word 'moron' and yet still you exist.

From 'Sculpting Time':

it's all too easy to be satisfied with glimmers of intuition, rather than sound, coherent reasoning.

It is considered that time per se, helps to make known the essence of things. The Japanese therefore see a particular charm in the evidence of old age. They are attracted to the darkened tone of an old tree, the ruggedness of a stone, or even the scruffy look of a picture whose edges have been handled by a great many people. To all these signs of age, they give the name sabi, which literally means 'rust'. Sabi, then, is a natural rustiness, the charm of olden days, the stamp of time. Sabi, as an element of beauty, embodies the link between art and nature.

the saddest smile

'I can only identify the inner by my knowledge of the outer'
---Iris M.

the saddest smile, also the most enigmatic. for me, for you? the saddest smile, that remains inward.

so, there it is, there you go.
i remeber it well
you didn't turn around to say:
i need you, i don't need you.
i remember you well...

you held the world up for me
even though it wasn't real!
a clown in the moon
or the moon in the clown
still, always my clown.
the ritual of departures,
that some call life.
the tyranny of not knowing you
against the easy familairity of the hours.
how did it come to pass:
which is to say: how does time pass?

what is real, what most so?
the innermost: the universal: Truth, Freedom..?
or orange pyjamas? too late on the scene, a witness to ashes and grey embers, like the memory of a stone, a door that wasn't opened for you, a dream within a dream. is that not a kind of reality?

why is saying 'regards' a way of saying goodbye? that's no way...

v. re·gard·ed, re·gard·ing, re·gards
v.tr.
1. To look at attentively; observe closely.
2. To look upon or consider in a particular way: I regard him as a fool.
3. To hold in esteem or respect
4. To relate or refer to; concern
5. To take into account; consider.
6. Obsolete To take care of.
v.intr.
1. To look or gaze.
2. To give heed; pay attention.
n.
1. A look or gaze.
2. Careful thought or attention; heed:
3.
a. Respect, affection, or esteem
b. regards Good wishes expressing such sentiment.
4. A particular point or aspect; respect.
5. Basis for action; motive.
6. Obsolete Appearance or aspect.

[Middle English regarden, from Old French regarder : re-, re- + guarder, to guard (of Germanic origin; see guard).]

taking leave. what is taken?

"what M is trying to do is to see D not just accurately but to see her justly, lovingly"

---Iris. M.

[the names have been changed to protect D]

change the names, change your mind. repentance. how will you give a label to these thoughts? a reassessing, a redifining, re-vision. nothing is given. capstones shift. how will you escape the world? by a leap of the will? into the blue. a different world, or the old one where i meet you five minutes earlier, where you wear a hat for me, over your straight/curly hair, to make yourself known.

'love is knowledge of the individual'.

this-ness. not: that-ness.

'we grow by looking' looking out for one another, and in for one another.

'the idea of a patient loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like 'obedience'.'

like being in a white room, where everything is made clear. or even there, will you turn your face from mine and say:

'we are not always the individual in pursuit of the individual'?

cat and mouse

without mouse there is no religion.
not as Aurelius imagined it:
a ribbon of chaos thrown into the order of things,
the spherical form of the soul tardy, frayed.

but without mouse there is no chase or hunt
no frenzied mind, no swaying heart.
just the slow uncoiling of time
around a hole of oblivion.

a slice of luck, decaying.
the trap abandoned but ready to spring.
just cat, alone and bemused,
licking his own lips, unable to speak.

Before Descartes

All the smiles were from your side; all the tears, from mine.


There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

----Wallace Stevens.

Like the reflection of the bridge in the torrent,
dance in the depth of affliction.
Keep your place firmly, yet dance,
separated from yourself.

Time has no loyalty; the single
moment is our treasure.
Dance in the loyal covenant from the beautiful ones.
Constant seeking is delight-why do you think
of getting over it?
Give up walking-dance at the sound of the caravan bell.

---Ghalib.

Goethe's thoughts:Urphanemon: the original-beyond which is the inanimate, the unthinkable and the speechless, where all understanding sinks below the surface,shut off from the light: it solidifies into a rigid abstract idea; beyond, in the other direction, it becomes mere sensation,contingency, appearance, 'senseless': a particular thing unrelated to either anything else in time or space or the universal. The whole phenomenal world seems and is at this balancing point, this fulcrum-neither pattern nor point, but both. Insofar as we too are a 'thing' amongst others-a perceiving thing- our position corresponds to theirs. We are destined to fade and soar as well. This blueness-is it sadness or joy?

Thus Simone Weil could say that we're at a level below which we'd be incapable of being loved by God and above which we'd be burned by the love of God...between zero and infinity. A step in the wrong direction and we'd be blinded. Not too close, nor too far apart. Everything is this. Veiling and unveiling. Hiding and seeking.

Selections from Goethe's Diwan:

Life's such a wonder of contradiction,
Give thanks to God when he squeezes you so,
And thank him when he lets you go.

~~~
Wave upon wave flows, countless, infinite
Your lips ever poised to kiss,
Your soul outstreaming its sweet note
your loving heart outpoured, your throat
Thirsty for wine's deep mysteries.

~~~

Is its leaf one self-divided,
Forked into a shape of strife?
Or have the two of them decided
On a symbiotic life?
this I answer without trouble
And am qualified to know:
I am single, I am double,
And my poems tell you so.

~~~

Now may one hear it still from afar,
words reach their goal,
though sound and music fade.
Is it not still the tent of scattered stars
the high transfigured world that love has made?

~~~

And this one reminds me of a scene from Bergman's Seventh Seal..a late summer's evening under the northern skies, a final dazzling of the sun's light before the day is done, a cool breeze through the long grass, the deepening shadows...

And I'd dearly like my friends, both
Young and old up there to gather
All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together
Yet in other dialects men and
angels make communication:
secret grammars, speech of roses
And the poppy's conjugation.

~~~

Carried by restless passion
till in visions of eternal
Love we vanish, fading , soaring.

the greenish gloom

the black in the green. of the time that remains. we, who have no right to call ourselves we. questiae juris? our name erased from your lists, marked down eternally as the Muselmänner, as fate would have it.the iron in your soul, now in my blood too. after we embraced,the darkness in your heart a shadow in my eyes. and the stars, they hold your gold and precious metals as well, you say? what can we abstract from this?

in a place between that is not a place. stateless, without an identity. i have become an ikon of sorrow. not an exception, one of many, discarded, cast down, looked over, beyond your gaze. have you ever asked yourself why you are so cruel? the human heart, like the earth, is not a mine to be possessed and what riches there are, are gifts, not mine, not yours. not an abstract value in your mind. violence isn't power.

"Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

They were dying slowly -- it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now -- nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air -- and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young -- almost a boy -- but you know with them it's hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede's ship's biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held -- there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck -- Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge -- an ornament -- charm -- a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas"

..mining, outside the social scheme of classic civilization. That fact proved sinister as soon as the methods and ideals of mining became the chief pattern for industrial effort throughout the Western World. Mine: blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust-there was indeed something devilish and sinister about the whole business. Life flourishes only in an environment of the living...

does the defect arise out of the fact that every other type of primitive environment contains food, something that may immediately be translated into life-while the miner's environment alone is-salt and saccharin aside-not only completely inorganic but completely inedible?