wanderlust

Every three years or so you feel like just packing up your bags and walking away from everything. Taking leave.

Met a friend yesterday who is getting remarried. Grinning, he said: it's time to settle down now. It's a thought that fills me with dread. "Unfenced existence", the poet said...and yet its incredible how middle class everyone is in their sensibilities. No startling insights, just the dull hum of the everyday.

Peripatetic. Thinking and walking. Aristotle. Must tell R!

"They [the Sophists] were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale...

Many professions in many cultures, from musicians to medics have been nomadics...

The walker has the detachment of the traveler, but travels unadorned and unaugmented..."

She reverses the fall from grace. Walking as an unraveling, unfolding of complexity, a return to the body, to original limits, an unburdening...to be in the open, alone with one's thoughts, and make them mine without fear or restraint (Rousseau). Rootlessness, flux, breaking up: which is at the very heart of individualism...orientation, not destination.

"Walking, not as an analytical but an improvised act" [he says, writing from his chair]

Walking, solitude, wilderness. Ideal walking: grounded, experienced, engaged with the world, not just impressions or sensations on the blank screen of the mind. Present and detached. Present to who, though? "It was a way to be among people for a man who could not be with them, a way to bask in the faint human warmth of brief encounters..and overheard conversations"

This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing-it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant. (Kierkegaard)

"A solitary walker is unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveler rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of the group"

---from Rebeca Solnit

Plato for primaries

Please forgive me anton!

I was talking to R about Aristotle today (not that I know anything about him, but I like saying the word 'Aristotelian' to her). She seemed quite charmed by it all and even concurred that he was, as the Muslims used to say, the 'divine Aristotle'. Well, she seemed quite happy at the time.

R (or Winston-a striking resemblance to Churchill!) listens very intently when we discuss her plans about attacking Japan and destroying the Japanese people.

Very soon the conversation turned to Plato. What would she say? Was he, as Popper wrote, a sort of prototype for the closed-world thinker? Or could he be seen as a mystic? The answer, I found, was simple but profound as she looked to one side sheepishly, and then back at me, and then threw up her undigested milk all over my shoulder! No use crying over this particular spilt milk when the universal Form is endless and unchanging.

So endeth R's second lesson to little man.

Thought this was fairly interesting

someone said

Wahr spricht, wer Schatten spricht
you want to speak of love?
then speak from the shadows,
of your love that wasn't true.

what will you have of me?
for it must be of.
this, a melancholy time between us
but what else could time be?

a shadow falls across your face.
it is not mine,and never was
speak, then, as a stranger
as someone once said.

it would not be here
if you were here.
what is remembered
is love.

I am far, but burn softly for you.
who sits in your shade is hard as wood.
your silent look glazed on my heart
whilst fruits fall into his hands.

(bits from Paul Celan and Ken Irby)

an elemental soul

went to listen to listen to some drummers at a local shrine. starts at 12 and goes on until the early morning...

just off the main road, we passed through a large rusting gate and down a gently sloping road. on both sides stalls had been set up: food, bracelets, religious pendants, drugs, tea. one side of the wall was painted shocking bright red and deep forest-green. on the other there were beggars, turbaned missionaries, and fakirs lounging about in an induced reverie...

we walked up two flights of steep stairs (no hand rails) until we came to a door that led, mysteriously, into an open rooftop courtyard-as if into another world. in the courtyard, which was quite small, a large number of people (mainly poor young men, some with fake armani t-shits) sat huddled at the feet of the drummers...

we made our way through the crowd. to one side a number of candles had been placed in a hollowed out stone wall, next to small tree. a few men stopped in front of it and put their hands together before the smoky fires, prayer-like, as we took our shoes off. the fires, protected and protecting...

a beautiful summer breeze rustled through the leaves of two huge trees nearby. s said it was a blessing. an old man with a large wooden stick gently tapped people on the shoulder to make sure they didn't stand up, as another sprayed some scented water on us. and all around was the sweet smell of drugs (hash?), generously shared...

the beat: incredible, and often piercing. the aim to induce ecstasy-ex-stasis: to get 'out of oneself'. occasionally the drummer would throw his head back and sweat would fly off in all directions. the dancers swirled around them, their movements often frenetic, crazy, semi-structured. some were spinning as if on an invisible axis whilst others vigorously moved their heads from side to side or raised their outstretched arms to heaven...

well, quite an odd experience for someone from my background, for someone with a dry, elemental, grey soul, an almost puritanical temperament that likes to think that religious intensity is not something that can be orchestrated or generated without silence and solitude. but, but, this is the religion of the land, and there are 'many mansions'...

R's lesson

'Do you love me?', he asked her.

She just looked back at him quizically, one eyebrow sarcastically raised, with that mischievous smile of hers, that twinkle in her eyes. As to be expected: silence-or a few indecipherable utterings.

What does it all mean, he wondered to himself, as if there was a meaning.

A storm picked up. Morning was approaching, but outside there was only darkness, the land engulfed in a film of unholy, unredeemed silence. Most of the objects were still sliding out of their shadowy existence. But he could still make out the old cardboard covering the hole in the wall starting to give way. He hoped it wouldn't let the crows and other birds in.

And the wind blew through the apartment, through all of the open doors, spreading itself, pushing at the lace curtains, shifting the wall clock slightly, rattling the knives and forks that had been carelessly left out the night before. It whistled into the study, bringing with it layer after layer of dust. And that was that, he thought, dust, dust from beyond the city perimeter, from God knows where, was all around us, accumulating on the unread copies of the biographies: Tolstoty and Keats, and Matisse. Bachelard, too. There was nothing to be done. This great democratizing force which didn't spare the greats and which would hardly stop for him, was like another night within the night.

For a moment, he thought she'd relented, her eyes transfixed on his. But when he turned away he saw that she was looking at the fan in the same way, as if it was a kind of god; the slow circular movement of the shadows, the early morning lights glowing without religion..all this captivated her. Those at the beginning of life, and those near the end, realize the beauty of stepping in and out of circles. Nothing is permanent, little man, she seemed to be saying.

He walked to the door.

She laughed, as if to say: bring my milk on your way back, there's a good chap.

So endeth R's first lesson.

mr. somewhere

He opens his eyes. What appears to his gaze is something he seems to have seen already, every day: streets full of people, hurrying, elbowing their way ahead, without looking one another in the face, among high walls, sharp and peeling. In the background, the starry sky scatters intermittent flashes like a stalled mechanism, which jerks and creaks in all its unoiled joints, outposts of an endangered universe, twisted, restless as he is.
---Mr. Palomar.

...

re-collection

Since we're talking about strange dreams...

the other day i was looking out on the Thames, near a bridge (think it was Blackfriars) and this huge wave was bubbling up just like in the picture above, but more circular in its movements. and as the waves silently fell and rose i gradually saw that that the water was actually full of sparkling rubbish-and it was incredibly beautiful, poetic, even. further down, the water had frozen over and people were sifting through russian fur coats and other stuff. nothing was wasted, if I recollect correctly.

~~~

Iris M:

stages of emancipation..seeing corresponds to objects with different degrees of reality and different levels of awareness, seeing by different parts of the soul...

K. Clark:

intuition and intellect:

'+' 'withdrawal into that hortus conclusus of the spirit'

'+' mystical unity.

'Nearly all the painters who have grown greater in old age have retained an astonishing vitality of touch. As their handling has grown freer, so the strokes of the brush developed an independent life'

'There is nothing more mysterious than the power of an aged artists to give life to a blot or a scribble'

'Then they began their furious battle with time, not staining, but scarring the white canvas of eternity'

'Beethoven's late quartets are classic examples of the old-age style in their freedom from established forms and their mixture of remoteness and urgent personal appeal'

they have arrested the moment when the body and soul fall asunder (Eliot), caught enough of the body to make the moment comprehensible, and seen how it is disintegration reveals the soul'

All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.
---Hokusai.

Remnants of hearing, seeing

when you speak there is a silence in your voice, a silence that is a kind of sadness. or was it my name on your lips? but when you are silent, there is a kind of sadness in my heart.

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

I remain unrecognized by you, for you,alone. I must remember to forget you, and not say 'you' or 'I'. when we meet, i will have nothing to say to you, and you shall not call after me. but you will do something utterly simple and ordinary, like unfold your clothes before me, and that will be a kind of revelation.

late style

He has retreated to a point where he can see the world in an internal reflection, a very clear and penetrating simplification that he could never have achieved in the midst of the hurly-burly.
---Ted Hughes on George Mackay Brown.

Rachel's manifesto:

There will be food for every child under heaven
And no child shall have to cry
to make known what lies deep in their heart.

...

the idea of north

There is no return. There is no return because you never went away. The point of no return points both ways. And yet there are no journeys. How could it be otherwise with you?

A mirror was placed before us. You, the crackling silver by which I see myself. You, the distance of the soul's truth. If my qibla was you, then so was my infidelity. The silver inherits the black.

'In Rembrandt's Prodigal Son we feel that the whole of humanity has been enfolded in an act of forgiveness, beyond good and evil'
---Kenneth Clark.

'Spontaneity is a response to the conditions of life'
---Stokowski.

Sobornost:
from cathedral, gathering, community.

'Knowledge arises not out of confrontation with the world but a coming-together'
---Lesley Chamberlain.

Some recommendations from my friends:

book: Stoner

film: Mother and Son

music: Biber's Mystery Sonatas

One can, conceivably, do without books and films and music. First things first.

North.
When beauty is an idea, then desire is an image. Where is that imageless land where I shall find you again, and where you cease to be you? The idea of north is the absolute, the absolute future that is north of the north. There hardness is engulfed by softness and the light gently falls all around us. Then, with all seriousness, you will speak my name, in your barbarian tongue.

Benjamin and the 10,000

"Anyone, anywhere, at any time can listen to the B minor Mass upon one condition only - that they possess a machine. No qualification is required of any sort - faith, virtue, education, experience, age. Music is now free for all. If I say the loudspeaker is the principal enemy of music, I don't mean that I am not grateful to it as a means of education or study, or as an evoker of memories. But it is not part of true musical experience. Regarded as such it is simply a substitute, and dangerous because deluding. Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener."

---Benjamin Britten, via the theovergrownpath

"A unique existence at the place where it happens to be"...the time and space parceled out to us.

---Walter Benjamin.

Was thinking about this the other day, how I'm storing up books and music like an undiscriminating collector, sifting and scrounging, and how little time I actually spend either listening, truly listening, or quietly reading. As if one now had to steal a few moments for oneself and cram in the experience, or 'consume' these 'products'. And yet, of course, it really isn't an experience-for that would entail some deep, committed relation to the music/books, some time to slowly reflect, connect and absorb. Stop, look, and listen, we were taught as children.

Experience is not the transfer of bits of information, something that can readily be 'downloaded' in a file. Even if one had access to 10,000 books, or a 100,000 books what difference would that make?

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

The Undetermined Animal, मुद्रा

What gives such disturbing power to his [Leonardo's] drawings is that 'something within him'...was analogous to an objective truth of nature...We can see from his studies of grasses and of plaited hair that their vital interlacings were all part of the pattern of his being and that the intensity with which he gazed at whirlpools was the result, rather than the cause of this pattern....

That Durer should have looked with heightened perception at the human hand is exactly what his whole work and character would lead us to expect..all his life he saw humanity through the deeds of its hands, whether carving or arguing or praying.

---Kenneth Clark.

The stylized gestures of the soul. Sangeeta explained some of her hand gestures just before the performance. The path from illusion to truth was represented by two movements: her hand swerving like a snake to a finger pointing upwards-which is quite familiar to muslims, of course.

a quiet moment

all these things can be said, but why say them?
---Thomas Merton.

me. you. "&", perhaps.

blue flowers

Real people in background.
---Penelope Fitzgerald.

What goes on unnoticed, in and around you. Vision is the illumination of solitude.

Dinner with the usual suspects, down in Affers's basement. Served at 11. These reunions are becoming terribly weird and just so slightly uncomfortable. A lost friend returns after ten or fifteen years (last month I saw someone after 23 years!) and we all get together, remember our school days fondly, laugh at the same things (has anyone really changed that much over the years?); ask the same questions: where are you now, what have you been doing?

R recalls how he was fondled by one of the teachers (this is the hardest thing to explain and I'm sure anyone who reads this will misunderstand. If you've seen the History Boys you just might). The 'conversation' turns -as it invariably does-to prostitutes and 'dancing girls' and a subset of the group that goes to Thailand and the Far East...

M.M. said something interesting: that for this subset group it's not really about the cheap booze (though I'm sure that that plays an important role); it's more that they simply enjoy being in a group...in fact, they could go for the Hajj or Umrah and still have a great time.

And the strange thing was that no-one batted an eyelid when he made that almost scandalous remark, as he swiftly moved from talking about hedonism to religion. And it's not as if there weren't religious people amongst us (Hasan is, I think, a very quiet man who practices sufism and another, R, calls himself 'Rumi,' such is his devotion to the mystic).

As I left in the early hours, driving through the backstreets to avoid the police (I don't have a licence or a valid id card), the beam of light from my car's headlights suddenly picked up a small bunch of flowers that had been carefully, lovingly, planted in a very ugly street. Rumi commented how he loved such flowers in spring. To me they looked quite unreal, but maybe the light was playing tricks. As I turned the car they were plunged back into darkness. "So it is with our lives" , I thought to myself. Increasingly, we meet people now and only have a brief snapshot view of their lives..what went on before, what goes on after, God only knows. And the same applies to my friendship with bloggers.

I asked rumi, do you remember we took a photograph of the class on the last day of class? Who would have thought-and who could have known-how things would turn out? On that sunny day, when we threw ink at eachother and signed our names, who amongst us could have even guessed what lied in store? Some have ended up in prison, others have married and divorced, and still others have had heart atatcks and heart ache. Most of our teachers have passed away and are just a memory. And as I said that, I remembered the scene from a few hours earlier, and how it was announced that the 'fondler' had also died. Some of the guys cracked open another beer and just smiled to themselves.