r r r r r r r

I have no idea of what's being sung here or who the singer is, but it reminds me of something...can't quite put my finger on it...



1

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

2

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

3

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

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

before you were, you were. if i recollect. nothing reminds me of you, except you. and if by chance you'd stayed a day in my white room, you'd have forgotten me by now, for sure. like a cloud. the sea, like time, brings things to the surface, then lets them fall. a bell records the lost moments of our lives.

the metaphysical implications of departure...

did you land safely, old dougal?
(der...click on the red...just in case...)
~~~

less profound stuff to follow...

I was not a poet, but now I am, in a way. In a way, mind you. I wasn't an infidel, but now the cloak of unbelief is upon me. I wanted to learn you off by heart, mine your soul. Cross my heart and hope to die. I got as far as a few letters before you withdrew your hand, so the rest remains unfinished...

at the crossing of the border there is no border.

what is far is also near. I want to move deeper into today. each thing shines in its own way.

"what she noticed so shrewdly is that the ordinary is so extraordinarily mysterious". common life, brought back to the ordinary prose of the world, the ordinary specialness of people without the need for theology or metaphysics. first things first.

The strength of a man's virtue or spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life.

and the eye that sees them refuses
to see further, glances of the
surfaces that
speak and conjure,
rests
on the frail
strawness of straw, metal sheen of tinsel.

---Denise Levertov, Saul Bellow, Denise Levertov.

straw man. it's true. the fire within, seeks the fire without-an I for an I-finds it's form there, sparkles, speaks, splinters, breaks, curls. but remains straw. not the gold of cathedrals, but the summer breeze.

the sea

Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
---Iris M.

Post-colonial literature. Always hated that phrase. And not too fond of thinking through the prism of gender, religion, race etc., etc. although, of course, that's not to detract from the possibility that where people are 'coming from' is sometimes important. Just don't think it's always or necessarily the case. Dislike even more people who try to draw radical distinctions, as if to say that distinctions are always a product of clear thinking and that reasonableness precludes one from saying: "I'm not sure" or "maybe I am/was wrong".

So, what are you to say of Iris, Hannah? That you like their writings because they're women, english, jewish? What poppycock. Nonsense on stilts! Or Isak D., Penelope Fitgerald.,Berberova, Denise Levertov, M. Robinson? Sparkling prose, concision of expression, deepness of thought, the gem-like simplicity of storytelling...or are you just in touch with your 'feminine self'? So strange as well, from, you know, someone from your part of the world.

'Knowledge of a value concept is something to be understood, as it were, in depth, and not in terms of switching on to some impersonal network'

'Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love'

'grow by looking'

'contexts of attention'

'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'

'empty moral words ('good') corresponds to the empty freedom of the will: the world is devoid of normative characteristics' the scientific view 's compatibility with existentialism

'a moral philosophy should be inhabited'

'we have lost the vision of a reality separate from ourselves'
'the disappearance of the permanent background: Reason, Religion, History'

'a re-orientation, a different kind of energy, from a different source'

'habitual objects of reflection' habitual acts of reflection. second takes. slowness.

'many aspects of goodness'-not a false, empty unity.

'the suppression of the self relates to the real-and what is good'

'freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision'
(you love the word experience there)

'an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism'

'a sacrament provides an external visible place for an internal invisible act of the spirit'

'the quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding'

'without some more positive conception of the soul as a substantial and continually developing mechanism of attachments, the purification and re-orientation of which must be the task of morals, 'freedom' is readily corrupted into self-assertion and 'right-action' into some sort of ad hoc utilitarianism'

provisionally fixed points

A Buddhist saying goes something like this:

At first you view everything as the same: mountains, rivers, trees.
Then you see everything as different, distinct.
Then you see everything as the same again.

If you agree with this, then it ceases to be "Buddhist".

Isn't there a danger, a very real political danger, that an emphasis on 'sameness' stifles difference, uniqueness, and forces people into a homogeneous mass. How can there be tolerance if there isn't a respect for differences? How can there be 'right seeing' if you try to reduce everything and everyone to your fixed scheme of things? 'Otherness' is not a concept but is radical alterity, something beyond a mere 'idea'. Don't you think there's something just a touch fanatical about these reductionist strategies. And isn't universalism just one view amongst others? A view that deliberately ignores its own particular historical determinations and contours?

If one holds a particular view at any one point in time is that being ideological? If one maintains that universalism is actually a better approach -and here one is forced to concede some ground to the relativists and add: at least for you-is that being ideological?

I don't know, I can't speak at the level of theory, only from my limited experience. And it's this: most of what people claim to be ineradicable differences just doesn't hold under closer scrutiny. If that was the case then Rumi wouldn't touch so many people in the 'west', so many people in the so-called muslim world wouldn't be drawn to western music and films.

If one must be aware of the dangers of 'sameness' then one must also be aware-if awareness is what we're after- of the dangers of a parochialism, prejudice and bigotry that insists on irreduicble differences. Adam Smith's 'impartial spectator', or what Amartya Sen calls 'open impartiality':

We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgement concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them at a certain distance from us.
---TMS.

Sameness, then, is really about fundamental equality (not fundamental difference). but it is also an equality that recognizes difference. Sen's example: a disabled person has the equal right to live a good life, to pursue the things he or she has reason to value, but that can entail unequal obligations on the behalf of the state (more resources, say). To create equality in a fundamental 'evaluative space' one may have to accept inequalities in less important ones.

At the religious level you're with St. Paul insofar as he says: neither Greek, nor Jew (or what "we"-and who is this 'we'?-might say: God is neither of the East or the West).

Ultimately, this principle appeals to you -whether one wants to consider it 'religious' or not makes little difference I think:

tawhid: unity in diversity. The famous muslim position: the haqiqah (inner truth) is one; but the sharia (outward paths) are many.

black sun

beautiful, beautiful song (via theovergrownpath)

~

the black sun like a river in the night, shimmering, sparkling sorrow.like time unredeemed. the river slowed, with great effort turned back against rock, grew dark with fear, so that he might see the moon's face gently rest on his. why does the moon remain so light? is it because she's so unfaithful?

moon, moon, moon.when will you fall? your light, falling everywhere, glancing off trees, on shadowless earth, with the swiftness of the clouds. winter moon,with your pale fingers in the long grass, a marriage of silver and green.stone of light, mortal goddess that speaks to the poet,inspiring him with Love.you, yourself, are a reflection of me, as I am of you.you, who stand alone with circular thoughts,whose cold gaze is the destiny of the sea.perchance you know something of my soul?

there is no way to your calm heart; and neither east nor west holds your gaze.have i not darkened my face long enough for thee?

Black Narcissus

Rest in peace, Jean.

Two great films, that made me think: what isn't meant to be, isn't meant to be (which isn't the same thing as not wishing that it was otherwise). Isn't 'the man who shot liberty..' also about that? The strange way in which destiny is parceled out?

note on previous post: "my problem with the west" (yeah, I know, I can't get over it!) but that was death of the west, not death to the west!
~~~



lyrics to follow (if Miguel can be bribed)

Death of the West

Man is nothing, time is everything.
----Karl Marx

He watched the old familiar world gradually recede until it only existed as an emblem in his mind. Empire after empire fell, one after another, into oblivion. Every nation has its limit. The dissolution of all that he had come to love and know seemed to strangely match the predicament of his own inner state. How to shore up against the forces of change that were accumulating like a dark brooding cloud over the horizon? Already the ruin of Europe hung in the air like a dire prophesy and what remained of the pomp and fading imperial splendour served only to remind him of the superficiality and fragility of all civilisation. There was a hollow ring to that word in these late autumn days. Western man had decided to live "in" time and must, therefore, face the consequences. History, not nature, would be his unraveling. Was this anything but another in a series of spectacular falls?

The bourgeoisie would surround themselves with mountains of things to ward off any such sober forebodings, as if they were magic charms or foodstuffs that could pacify the gods of destruction; he, on the other hand, would isolate himself from the world, withdraw into a life of quiet study and devote himself to becoming a fastidious observer of the mores of a people in decline, a witness to the closing of the doors, a chronicler of the last days, insulating himself from the outward current of events that would sweep over the continents, re-shaping destinies. A life dedicated to the study of the limits, the world's turning points, to the internalization of all that is inescapable, this would be a sublime attempt at dying before one dies, a way of resisting "the violence from without". To write a book that told the story of the end of the world.
But how to begin....

How to comment on the passing of time when we ourselves are in time, when we are time?

[B] ut time is a word to indicate something inconceivable, a sound symbol, and to use it as a concept, scientifically, is to utterly misconceive its nature....time has an organic essence as it is bound up with the living and the irreversible. Space is nothing but frozen time.

The Faustian soul-whose being consists in the overcoming of the visible, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity-puts its need of solitude, distance, and abstraction into all of its actualities, into public life, its spiritual and artistic forms-worlds alike. Faustian Grace asks for nothing but for unbinding of the Will..to be able to will freely.

In the late days metaphysics will only be experienced in the mind and not through the sense, as a concept... "those evenings of the brain" (Emily Dickinson)

Milton's Paradise Lost , many surahs of the Koran,...all come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold intensities, dry mysticism. And yet, even so , a wild piety flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent fervour that the City can produce after attaining so unconditional mastery over the soul of the Land is here concentrated, with a sort of terror lest it should prove unreal and evanescent, and is correspondingly impatient , pitiless, and unforgiving.


From: Spengler, 'Decline of the West'

Danse macabre:

Hans Jonas makes the intriguing point that the modern world, which starts with a birth, the Renaissance, is actually haunted by a sense of its own fragility, contingency, it's own "death" (Holbein's 'death of Christ'?). The world ceases to be animated by spirit(s) and life becomes mechanical. There's a kind of heroism in this-and a nihilism too.

It might be said that a heightened awareness of finitude brings forth beauty, tenderness. Also gestures of defiance: monumentality and constant revolution. But it can also, surely, lead to resignation: if death is always with us, then life is meaningless.

In what sense, then, is this death of the west different from that of the orient, say?

fana

It's become difficult to write of things you do not know. Who are you, who am I? Not easy to speak above the silence, utter more than the necessary. In former times you could be burned alive for what you said. Speaking carries no such weight now. That's true. But still there are words that are like flames, that make me seek out annihilation.

Each ego preserves its individual force, but if we want to attain perfection, the self must be annihilated-just as religious fanatics annihilate themselves in the face of the divine.

I fell asleep. Forgive me. Unfaithful, renouncing my heart, my city, like a bird that dreamt of a star and open blue skies.When I awoke I dreamt I was somewhere else, not quite myself. Led down brilliant white streets in Cordoba by the memory of you, my own forgetfulness, the deep lustre of your eyes. The whole world was in flower, and you were the soul of the world. Or some unknown street in Buenos Aries, stumbling to speak the word. In Bukhara, where potato means plum, and darkness falls around me, close to the hat bazaar. I am lost in every city, but there I saw you, and became someone else.

קלאָץ

the mind is spent
the mind is gone
counterfeit coins in the slot machine
intelligence alludes you, the hedgehog wins.

On its own this slowing down, this meandering into the trivial, would be manageable, understandable, even. but other troubles stalk you. the quiet fierceness of your heart, blank as snow. you live in an empty room now, or so it seems. a life adjacent to yours. eyes just a bit sunken perhaps. hands still fumbling. the uncertainty that jostles for space, loosens you up. words falter. betrayal is in the air.fewer doors are open. need to walk through them carefully. in a dream you walk on glass. and when you wake up? not much different.

that dopey drooping lower lip of yours, caused no hearts to swoon. you fall over yourself repeatedly, clown. rather than once, over someone else.

early morning mist rises from the filthy stream. there is beauty if you look. by mid-afternoon it will be gone, but still as real. so it is with many things.

the nets are down, and fish sing with such bittersweet longing. Unsure if being caught is a worse fate than being free. exit signs abound. but what is the way in to your heart?

a name without a face, a face without a name.

A letter. Z or X. You read by the window, standing up, letting each word slowly roll over. Natural light is good for you, you know. Words and images slip by you. Very little sticks nowadays. The world on a piece of paper. But this much you know: what is given with an open heart is held, with firm hands. Inscribes itself in your soul. You catch your breath. All else falls away.

positive spin

It's everywhere, this Cult of Positivity, at least in America, the birthplace of Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and est, where 30,000 beaming "life coaches" ply their trade and a pessimist is no more likely to be elected president than an atheist. George W. Bush provides a sterling role model. Asked on his most recent birthday about the potential nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea, as well as the U.S.-instigated civil war in Iraq, he replied, "I'm optimistic that all problems will be resolved."

Google offers more than a million entries on "positive thinking" covering almost any kind of challenge you might encounter. Dieting? Robert Ferguson, the "Master Weight-Loss Coach," tells us, "With a positive attitude you can do, have and be everything you want in life!" Bereaved? You can put the fun back in funeral by replacing it with a "celebration" of the deceased's life. Need money? Attract it to your wallet with positive mental affirmations, such as:

I love having money. . . . I am open to receive money. I give generously to myself and others. I am generous. I feel great about all the money I spend. Note: Be SPECIFIC about amounts of money [you require].

Cancer? See it positively, as a "growth opportunity," and hopefully not just for the tumor. A representative of the American Cancer Society rebuffed a researcher in the mid-Nineties by saying that the organization didn't "want to be associated with a book on death. We want to emphasize the positive aspects of cancer only." Laid off? Forget the economy and concentrate on reconfiguring your attitude, as explained in the 2004 bestseller We Got Fired! . . . And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us.

One measure of the cult's success is the growth of the "self-improvement" industry, most of which promotes techniques for upgrading your attitude and visualizing success through affirmations that open you to the abundance of the world -- like this one, for example, from a current financial self-help book:

Place your hand on your heart and say . . . "I admire rich people!" "I bless rich people!" "I love rich people!" "And I'm going to be one of those rich people too!"

In 2000, the self-improvement industry -- including books, CDs, seminars, and coaches -- took in $3.35 billion. In 2005, it grossed $5.62 billion, with the coaching market alone growing by almost 500 percent.

---from Barbara Ehrenreich.

If you've lived in cynical old england or are a Lahori then you'll find this type of feel-good, in your face swaggering pomposity either hugely irritating or hilarious. Old world pessimism, sin and fate, reticence, ambivalence, and tentativeness are not going to get you very far, not going to lead to "success" are they, you loser?

Be aggressive!Well, steady on N, old chap. Assert your what? I tried it, honest I did. Looked in the mirror and said to myself: I will allow the power of positive thinking to change my life. Be aggressive, b. Be. Well, yes, I know, quite sad about that student who I hit on the head with a glass bottle. Khair, I think he'll be okay. Think positive +++

Yesterday some of these 'leadership' bozos were here. A day before some of the students (or should I say customers now?) had wanted me to speak about 'business solutions to social problems'.

Fuck off!

Sorry, fuck off! :-)

And so there they were, assembled under a tent like members of the Nazi youth movement, wailing away about how they all wanted to be leaders, gradually being whipped up into a frenzy of excitement by some monkey with an American twang, flapping their arms, stamping their feet, and hollering like wild beasts. Oh dear! I need to buy a book to help me help myself. Nearly as bad as Christian missionaries who harp on about how Jesus loves you (really? and how do you know that, bud?) Where are those 72 virgins when you need them?!

And now the Dean wants to "motivate me" to do some research! (please, it's easier if I just watch some Oprah). There he is, like a Cheshire cat, all fluffed up, grinning away, so pleased with his grand role in the universe. Makes me sick, I tell ya'.

sign of the times

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.
-----Ecclesiastes

Und alles Drangen, alles Ringen
Ist ewige Ruh in Gott dem Hernn.
----Goethe

As I turn to write of my woes,
the paper is infinitely still,
the pen is but a flame.
----after Amir Khursrau

I SPIN, I spin, around, around,
And close my eyes,
And let the bile arise
From the sacred region of the soul’s Profound;
Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new!
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green! the land how fair and blue!
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again!
How the whole globe swells within my brain,
The stars inside my lids appear,
The murmur of the spheres I hear
Throbbing and beating in each ear;
Right in my navel I can feel
The centre of the world’s great wheel.
Ah peace divine, bliss dear and deep,
No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
---Dowden, E.

The words form Ecclesiastes are, I think, my favourite from any religious text. To some they may suggest a perfect hramony, an unchanging centre to our being, a place where still waters run deep. Each thing, each part of our identity, must find its proper place and time, be at one with its destiny. Peace would be an acceptance of the part of Being that is parceled out to us. But to me these words speak of just the opposite. Turn , turn and turn we must, but in the heart and not the body. Each thing has its time and place, its 'season'. Qalb: a constant uprooting. For anything to grow we must dance ourselves out of those former selves, must die into becoming.

A star-to our minds- gives the impression of permanence, but is in truth nothing but fire and light, a spark in the darkness that lives on through many a death, a flicker of time itself. The mountains melt beneath our feet, all is perishing just as so many new vistas open up before us. This is the the way it has always been, the way it always will be; ours is only to read the sign of the times and move on.

Let me run, run and
never find
---Shah Latif

~
there are always signs. even the lack of a sign is a sign of something.

north by northwest

The creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and of your colours are many wonders for those who reflect.
---Q:30:22

May our love not be centered upon ourselves! May this love not incite us to love only those who are like us or to espouse ideas that are similar to our own! To only love that which resembles us is to love oneself; that is not how to love.
---Tierno Bokar.

He who only sees ratio only sees himself.
---William Blake.

It is important to find one's own space (not to 'own' space), to find one's name, but it is equally important to find the right direction and pace; there's a skill in that...working with time and not against it (and for that one surely needs a sense of the timeless?).

There are many things that cannot and should not be said, spoken of. Stop, look, listen. Look both ways. But there are many beautiful, wondrous things, many different types of good-and beauty always shines through.

Every direction you find is chosen by you or chosen for you. The line between is incredible. Some stars are constant, others less so. Each lives in relation to another.

I didn't know Asim well. In fact, only met him a few times. But I do remember thinking: this kid's got talent and that he was sharp and outspoken. Even though I didn't agree with what he was saying on this one occasion I do remember him being very articulate and independent-minded. In fact, just the type of student that we need, and just the type of student that is discouraged by those who think of intelligence solely in quantitative terms and along one dimension.

I don't know what this painting means, but I like it for the surreal sky and the irony of a man busy in (or crushed by) the world when there are ladders leading upwards.

Khair..., rest in peace, Asim.

....

man-eater

"Tell me about my nature", said the princess to the old blind man. And since she was very fond of hearing people talk about her she continued in the same vein: "Describe to me my true form, my very essence in first the most precise language, and then in the most perfect poetic idiom"

But the old man, who was no fool, resisted and could only stammer, "how can I describe such wonders?A blind man cannot even describe an elephant, so how to speak of your soul?" And the princess was pleased. Pass the word: the princess is pleased.

"But still", she said coyly, "my hair, is it straight or curly? Compare me to the moon again" Or have you lost your tongue as well as your sight?"

The blind man was not flustered since he had grown accustomed to such vanity. He just said, "How can I, who has neither seen your face nor touched your body, speak about that of which I have no knowledge?"

The princess was not so pleased by this answer. But she liked to tease him so because she knew that one day he would say what was in his heart.

"But, dear old man, everyone in the land talks about how fair I am. Why, then, are you miserly in your praise, why so reticent when it comes to expressing what needs be expressed?"

Then the old man saw in a vision a black crow, imagined her bosom rise and fall as if she was scared, her claws scratching and tearing his flesh, his eyes. Remembered his blindness. "I see it now"

"Tell, do tell!", she exclaimed excitedly.

"We, the two of us in this cage"

On hearing this crow knew the game was up and flew away as fast as she could. But now crow was in him, and he was in crow.

the fall of red

you walked, no, to be more accurate, stumbled into the red room. and everything was tinged by that strange alluring glow. bewildered, spinning deeper and deeper, you were found then lost -and it was hard to tell which was sweeter. there was neither east nor west, north or south, in the red room. and nothing was far from your hands, nothing was withdrawn from your gaze. the luxuriant, abundant life slowed down for you to savour. and there was a room within this room, a red glass in which could be seen the red of faded roses, of warm fires, burgundy tapestries, the rich deep reds from Bokhara and from all corners of the world.

you walked into the red room. you walked into her heart and found that red had fallen all around you.

making nothing happen

for Roxana:

How to represent that which cannot be represented (a black square: Malevich, an empty space?)?

The visible must always point to the invisible, just as music holds on to silence in its very heart....

How does the word become life? Is Revelation, a 'sending down' , not also a ladder back up? Creation, an image, is a separation and will therefore always point to transcendence, to what "is not", but it is also, at the very same time, not nothing, but precisely an image of that reality.

The modern is a search for a space that could contest, oppose, stand in complete alterity to bourgeois hegemony. But it is, itself, enmeshed in it via representation. ....a "preparing the ground for the ruthless incorporation of marginal and underdeveloped states." [the irrational, the rebel, become commoditised].

This is a colonisation of the marginal, the spontaneous, the uncontrolled...a way of disciplining fluidity, rage, of immobilizing energy; to domesticate the 'other', to bring all understanding back to one's own system of self-understanding.

The contradiction of capitalism:

capitalism requires an open space, a frontier, one that can supply raw materials and buy its goods; the modern is nothing but this setting up of hierarchies and distinctions.This is the first stage of colonialism, of 'solid modernity', of Protestant 'sobriety' and discipline...modernity as the control of space. But this gives way to the other dimension of capitalism: the need to transform labour into a proletariat and with this will come the most decisive changes: the incorporation of the 'other' into one's midst, the eradication of all boundaries (cultural, political, economic); late modernity is about transgression, equality, a constant making and re-making of oneself, 'liquid modernity'...the 'divine recklessness' of Protestantism.

The world in the image of New York:

when time has conquered space then only a singular undifferentiated space remains, a grid , a set of relations; power is diffuse, the centre does not hold and "periphery" and "centre" are interchangeable (this is an image of a religious concept: God is a centre that is everywhere and whose perimeter is nowhere..the modern world could only come on the back of a number of theological insurrections and inversions); the very concept of "limit" loses much of its meaning. In the Empire every man is 'King' and pushpin is as good as poetry...it is the empire of signs and universal equivalence.

More than anything: labour, life, process, are introduced into the public realm (where they will eventually devour it); all that is solid melts into air; from now on it will be time, and those who control her, that hold the power..."time is everything, Man is nothing" (Marx). Art must, in this sense, aspire to transience, to its own wilful destruction for how can art which is 'space' , flatness, the 'timeless', 'presence' , depict movement, life itself? How can it re-present that which eludes it? Is not all pictorial art a "freezing of the music"?

Klee:

The organizing powers have come to need a more convincing account of the bodily, the sensual, the liberated, in order to extend-maybe to perfect-their colonization of everyday life..."

Collective actions, ritual gestures, shared images of authority, a common symbolic order, jostle uneasily with the needs of individual spontaneity, freedom. How to abstract from the world-this world, any world? How to rekindle that divine spark in this cold universe? The modern turns inwards, the Kingdom lies within...the letter killeth...

But this "second turning inwards" that starts with Descartes is riddled with problems: can there be meaning or understanding that is not social? Can there be a private language?

The disruption of the collective world, 'the given', will allow the world to flow again. Modernity is nothing but the re-discovery of the infinite, of Nature not as 'essence' but as becoming; it is a turning away from the cosmos, a search for 'outer' space....modernity must construct itself as an endless series of images and who is to say if one image in the spectacle is any more real than another? All that matters is the process, the constant breaking up of images (this is the 'nomadic' element in late capitalism); velocity: to leave the social world behind...when one wants process and judgement.

Modernity, by losing 'the other,' loses the creative tension that has sustained it; appearance ceases to be appearance once the reality behind it is overthrown.

The Unhappy Consciousness.

Modernity: the tragic confrontation of self-sameness, the absolute, the unchangeable, the timeless, and the undivided self, order, light, harmony, proportion, "sight", the static with contingency, the fragmentary, music, transience, the dynamic, dissonance, aporia, the endless whirl of difference.One wants to see the stars and feel them, to discover a pattern to life, but also to disrupt uniformities, sameness. ....hide and seek, lost and found. We need mortal thoughts, a timely way of knowing, truth that is incarnated in the body and not just the mind...the word must become flesh....

The "unhappy consciousness" is unable to accept this two-foldedness in its unity; we strive for purity and eternity and detachment or for to be a thing amongst other things that come and pass (essence vs existence, realism vs nominalism); to be or no to be when to be and not to be is closer. Man is suspended between being and nothingness, a donkey with angel's wings said maulana; we can never reach either nothingness or the divine. Man, the barzakh, is this great amphibious being.

Because of this radical undecidedness he sides with, identifies himself, with the changeable consciousness but he cannot follow negation to its logical end; contingency only derives meaning against the background of an essential nature, difference against sameness, distinction against unity; time against the timeless; that we are finite, that we can think of ourselves as so, only has meaning if there is the infinite..it is the infinite that is placed in us that allows us to think in the first place (Descartes)..I am, therefore I think.

Jackson Pollock:

the line doesn't represent objects or delimit a space, not the "binding" of reality or structure but "pure, disembodied energy." This is modernism's worldlessness. Endless difference, American unbound, improvisation as the quintessential american art, Bergson's "pure duration", endless sensation and desire. This is not, perhaps, unrelated to teh growth of capitalism: man defined as having finite resources but infinite wants, happiness as the search for an end that has no end, that is always just out of reach: non-satiation.

Marks, traces that are not to be read as making a subject, but rather as texture of interruptions, gaps, zig-zags, a-rhythms, and incorrectnesses...the absence of a continuous psyche from start to finish.

Pollock: " a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion"...a way of divesting oneself of the "I", a form of escape, renunciation, to show something that has a likeness to nothing...a way of being "in" the world so that one does not know one is in it; to be musical, precisely: one is immersed in feeling and there is no confronting 'other' ...Malevich again: the desert.

The attempt, the paradoxical striving to realise the un-formed; to be unfounded, un-found...the desire for openness and a wilderness that is not constrained by forms but in the paintings, is not openness to like emptiness, and might not freedom be too much like confinement, a compulsion?

"something which cannot be recognized as part of the universe is made to represent the universe." Interlacement and intermingling negates "belonging of things in the picture to any one conceptual space- to any one part of the world or imagining of Nature.

Everything is connected to everything else.

But once we make a mark can we ever escape metaphor?

Discontinuity, aimlessness, abrupt reversals, dissonance,...do not lead to endlessness or their own dissolution; instead, dissonance is the truth of Harmony. Harmony is unattainable.

To cancel Totality by the criss-cross of meanings.

--taken from T.J. Clark's chapter in Farewell to Reason.

the last days

you want to hear this in complete silence, in a room, high up, close to the clouds.

you were listening to this on sunday, as the last tired attempt of the sun to break through the day failed. instead, steps of light, like so many keys. ancient sun that has shone on Aristotle and Buddha, now plays with dust. the older the music is the more universal. and yet, at the same time, everything sounds russian. music that deosn't come 'home', but reminds one of home. Deja vu.

the light glinting through the solid world, the stilled air, like light through a crystal, its oblong patterns reaching your desk, softly falling on your face as you write. you have to stop. you catch a reflection of yourself at work, scribbling like a clerk, the looseness of your hand, the words flowing off to nowhere, writing for the sake of writing, to pass the time...the letter killeth... you think of the pointlessness of a marginal life.

some lives you see, some you don't. you dream of your life being rewound, stretched back twenty minutes at a time, until you reach a peaceful region, beyond words, beyond the full stop, a time before you were, when you were only a thought, the empirical 'I' drawn down to a minimal self, until you see yourself by the light of the black sun.

the anti-western manifesto

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free..

--Galatians:3:28

an interesting (and infuriating) comment on "my problem" with the word 'western' prompted me to wonder if we don't all face some difficulty in accepting difference. over here you're viewed as somehow too western, not in touch with islam or local traditions; and strangely, you're thought of by others as not western enough...this, especially by those who think that criticism or scepticism towards market fundamentalism or foreign invasions by "our boys' is tantamount to being a fifth columnist. at a more personal level, which is what some people want to reduce it down to, there are those who think that unless you are culturally similar/identical, you cannot truly 'belong'. some of these voices are quite sinister, others just plain ignorant.

which box to put you in, then? you are a muslim, after all, and therefore you simply have to be anti-gay, anti-women, right? and don't try and give us any of your pansy reasoning-we've seen through you. it's us or them. put the pretence of ravel and bowie to one side, show up this fake socialism of yours for what it is: a vehicle for your inability to come to terms with 'western' -freedoms, then the anti-western manifesto is bound to shine through.

and then even what you're drawn to is east of the west. very subtle of you: tarkovsky, rothko, levinas, icons, chopin (perhaps)... and there's something suspect, something not quite kosher about your liking of jewish writers/thinkers (we won't allow you to say 'thinker' on its own...reasoning is 'western' or it's nothing).

for sadia...

a folded silence

It is indicated that in heaven there will be no idle chatter. There's a tendency to think of this in moralistic terms-and a Puritan might think this very way. But I think it is something more profound and points to a clarity of thought and words, to a narrowing of the gap between a spontaneous ease and grace with words and a deep reflection. Words will be light but also measured. It is as when talking amongst friends or people we really know, for then there is little to say, no need to spell everything out. Some things are conveyed in silence, in the gestures of our bodies, a nod that acknowledges, a shrug that is quizzical, a hand that strokes the familiar stones, remembering... Aquinas' question: Do angels talk to each other?

And I'd dearly like my friends, both
Young and old up there to gather
All of us in German babbling
Paradisal words together
---Goethe

The Secret is the limit to our being. The aniconic spirit depends on being able to say: I am not what I am. Each person's mysterious inner self remains what it is-a Name with God, unfolded, partially glimpsed-as if in a dark mirror.

Who knows who I am?

Bulleh, John Clare?

We live in times that emphasise a false, vacuous openness. There can be no secrets: what is inner and what is outer any more? The solid world is being dissolved in a cacophony of voices and chit-chat; all the silent places have been filled with music, every text must be thoroughly and systematically analysed, broken down, deconstructed, and commented upon.

How can what is unsaid be so esteemed, why this reverence for the dark; how can what you will not find written down in any book be a law? These are things that are lived and lovingly passed down from one generation to another, hand to hand-they are understood and not known. And how can these silent moments binds us? Is not love such a binding?

Of this the 'left' and the 'right' can agree. This profusion of words, this verbal hyperinflation, produced and sustained by modern technologies, is drowning out all sense. In this, it mirrors the narrowing down of the human by the Communists and the fundamentalists and their thinking-by-slogans.

Gawain knows what to say and when to say it. This is not an abstract formalism but a heightened sense of awareness: of the possibilities of language and of an attentiveness to others. And this includes the ability to move diagonally from terse statements to a flight of poetic imagination. Tell it, but tell it slant. Fictionalised speech is still human speech, still open to the wonderful ambiguities that inhere in the marrow of our humaneness.

Must we, then, now learn again to name things we love and do not possess? Not sweet paradisal words but an elegiac song for all that is destined to pass away, all that is touched by finitude. One cannot but help think that we only love things that can die (even the gods fall for the mortals). When all is said and done, can anything surpass this transient spectacle?

The smell of fresh coffee. The darkening of the clouds before a storm. The last flaring of the sun on a late summer's evening. The peace of a Sunday morning. The alternating patterns of shade and light cast by a tree. Walking alone under tents in the night. The greying wisdom of an old dog. The final page of a book. Winter fires fragmenting. Your sad smile.

Who, then, would exchange these things for the eternal affirmations of heaven?

king for a day

Precious time is slipping away
But you're only king for a day
It doesn't matter to which God you pray
Precious time is slipping away
It doesn't matter what route you take
Sooner or later the hearts going to break
No rhyme or reason, no master plan
No nirvana, no promised land.

the fog clears, density breaks, earth returns to her former simplicity, voices become more distinct, as if coming into focus, fine tuned at last. the clarity that evaded you comes to you in dreams, in fits and starts. you see the swami in a dream, both of us ankle-high in mud, near a house by the sea...the great grey god of childhood opens up from the wooden fences...fare thee well, little one; one of us goes, one of us stays. that's the way it is. but even if you travel far carry my picture with you and let not your face darken with sorrow.

Khalid sahib has this playing on his radio as I enter the office. Khayyam, how true you were..it lasts a day and then it's gone. the tune, in tune, the song in your heart that enters the day, that holds you still, that lifts you out, unhinges you.

Why am I so fond
of the double bass
of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding
In perfect accord
To one another
Across the pond--
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew's harp
I hear in the dark?)

they tell me nothing's gone.
Though I am forty one, not forty now,
the time I put away was child's play...

Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil..
seven horizontal tulips blow
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen, now no one need
distinguish them from the weed..

I keep no rank nor station.

---Van Morrison, Lowell, and Menashe.

Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.
-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing , we turn to our friends.
-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constrained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.
-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people, and between people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a commitment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occasionally felt that way. No, the first formulation was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God reveals His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in reality nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is restored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:
metamorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary...only equals laugh."Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

think about those last lines again...from a white male...are they true? apart from laughing at oneself is laughter fundamentally about inequality, about laughing at those who cannot answer back and about those who laugh at the seriousness of the men in pointed hats? should we, then, talk about "appropriate" laughter, for surely we all recognise-at least on reflection, if not immediately- that sometimes laughter is in bad taste?

free fall

heart
stone
silence

soul
mirror
clouded

lips
parched
songless

name
caste
a number

hands
heavy
untrue

heart
fall
snow, snow.

~~~

Fairness: not to think that the reasons for some decision can be read off from the benefits; not to look at side constraints like rights that dominate all other considerations; but a weighing up of different reasons and claims.

Broome's example: you want to send a candidate to carry out a difficult task in which the actor will probably die a horrible death (even though she saves lots of people). Who do you choose? Each candidate is almost identical in all respects except that one, R, is slightly more skilled and has a slightly better chance of being successful. In terms of expected benefit, she's the man for the job. But even so, the others do not have a claim to the good of not being sent.

It may in fact be the right thing to do, leads to more 'good'. But it isn't necessarily the fair thing to do. A fairness requirement might insist that we give due consideration to each person's claims (doesn't each person have the same claim in this case?). Then how to weigh fairness-claims with expected benefit? I mean, if R could save millions of lives wouldn't it be better to send her? If the task was saving a cat at a considerable risk to the human rescuer then wouldn't a lottery be fairer? Some falls are relatively free, others 'costly'

~~~

i find. i find i have less and less to say and it's enjoyable in a strange way to feel so cramped, so empty of words and thoughts. the joker in the pack of serious cards. even less patience for arguing or discussing...always was, i guess, a bit sceptical of people who question existence (of course, some people in terrible circumstances are forced to-but may God protect us) and of those who want to dissect or 'expose' the falsity of religion. Of course, we're all free to fall in out own way but there's got to be, to paraphrase Brando, another way of thinking about freedom?

the places between

Between "yes" and "no", words and silence; between me & you; of what passes, and of what remains the same. the moon was half full. was that a yes, or a no? when it completes its cycle it starts again, retracing the ancient way, love's necessitarian, but under different stars, a different fate.

in the animation of the universe
there is duty and delight,
joy and sorrow
of the year it passes it returns it does not
change what changes isn't desire
within the animation of the universe

today, driving in the dense fog in the early morning, you could barely see in front of you. the grass brown and frozen, reeds stilled at an angle to the universe, the trees still blissfully asleep. a few white lights on somewhere in the distance. we're all at sea. suddenly, a figure emerges from the swirling mist, from nowhere or a dream, a cyclist wrapped in a patterned shawl, drifting, floating towards you. against the fog his silhouette is clear, well-defined, and for once you see the whole person. but in a flash, he's gone, engulfed by the fog again, his shawl trailing after him.

you lose orientation, veering off on to the side of the road. slightly bewildered. things that are normally small seem a lot larger now and what was afar now seems close. what is distance?

tentative steps. "do not walk across the lawn" the sign reads. but I can't see the lawn! lost in this no-man's land, and our steps don't even rhyme. how to find one's way in this shape-shifting world, how to find my way back home?

The stars are

Although I do not sing

About them—...

Why sigh for a star

Better bay at the moon

Better bay at the moon . . .

Oh moon, moon, moon

~~~~

came across a blog that was quite disturbing. one of those reading clubs that for some odd reason i imagine to be very popular amongst white american women of a certain class. and the main emphasis seemed to be on book lists and the number of books read over the year.. 100, 150 even!

fragments from John Riley and Samuel Menashe