an unknown word

one loves this ordinary moment, this pause between the brilliant acts of her life.
---James Salter.

between the acts, the slit of time. she makes you pay an entrance fee. split the difference. the change, you can keep.

an unknown word creates a future; a colour that cannot be named reminds me of her. and now? there are other places that are. in memories or a dream. why should what is outside be more or less real? the sea-dark mystery is not an image. a reflection, perhaps, of a past time. in midwinter. when light holds. time at bay. standstill. before you. the slanting light on/in late afternoons, this afternoon, high in the trees, gentle gold caught in a soft net, like misplaced words. ready to fall. for her. in her. will you release me into the night, from the prison of the days?

'It’s as if the dreams that you have at night are in the day, and there’s no difference between the night and day, because the dreams are projected out in front of you and you can see them going on in the space that is the day...It’s a different way (gentler...)... of working on the problem of not having any barriers or operating rules in which you gauge time or how you operate within that, or what time is, or what you are...you’re not there, in a way'.

---Leslie Scalapino

"In this moment" "before" "anyone, ever" "died" "before we were born?"
"in this moment forever before"
"Before we died" "In this moment, now" "In this moment before, it is
not before" "In this very moment" "where is it" "where we
haven't died" "or died inside" "In this moment we haven't" "in this
moment, no one" "in this moment, no one has ever, died" ("But I have
been born") "in this moment" "where, where is it" "in moment" "who's here"
"Catch it catch it" "moment where we are"

---Alice Notley.

~~~

e-mail received:

plz fw this emial
Yosef Rashidi engineering student is in danger
he has senteced to hang
fw this as he gets famous he will have more chance to live in pricon

my other heart

My other heart tells me no, when my true heart would say yes. Every journey takes her further away from me, as each moment that passes brings her closer. I'd forgotten her, she being no more, and yet more, than a memory or a silverdark word, a letter in my heart unopened. The nervous light of Sunday hangs around forest-green leaves, waiting, falling, fading, weaving another pattern before my eyes.

I imagine, as I imagine us
Each time more stylized, more lovingly
Detailed, that I am not myself
but someone I might have been.

getting it backwards

with you there is no turning back, the past doesn't contain enough of you. the story that wasn't a story. no entry, as you would have it, no summer fruits to be plucked from southern trees but the north in your eyes that is all promise.

what other men do with other women
is for me neither orgy...
but is mere occasion or chance distance
out of which you might move and speak my name
as i speak yours, bargaining with sleep's

miscellaneous gods for as much
as i can have: an alien landscape
the dream where you are always to be found.
---Geoffrey Hill.

the Not Yet

There is something about the Utopic longing of modernity that is deeply appealing; not the possession of Truth or institutions built around the notion that some people do, in fact, possess it; not the attempt to build heaven-on-earth, for that often leads to disaster ("He who would play the angel ends up playing the beast"). But the open society that is an odd mixture of principles and uncertainty (a direction, rather than a place).

A democracy is founded on the notion that everyone's opinion counts. Is "founded" the right word? Doesn't the ability to ignore foundations, to not think of the "origin" as always the most perfect, define modernity itself? Isn't that, precisely, what the mullahs and the traditionalists call the nihilism, the uprootedness of, modernity: there is no cosmic, natural or divine order any more:the truth is lyingly added.

And "opinion," not the Truth! Doesn't the storyteller also have to be a truth-teller? Here, democratic institutions mirror and re-inforce the openness, vagueness and plurality of culture. Not just a pragmatic idealism (piecemeal change) but creativity as a tapping into the not-yet, a resistance to closure and finality..the introduction of beauty into time. In this sense, the market is also seen as a positive contribution to the dissolution of established hierarchies and inherited distinctions. Preferences are not just 'given' but refined through choices, constraints, interactions (Frank Knight, Hayek).

[Gosh, you never thought I'd be quoting Hayek did you?!]

Listening to Gould's Stokowski recording. Interesting idea that rehearsals are better than the actual live performance because in the former there is a chance for improvement, change, new insights. But the what of jazz and the 'open work' (Eco)?

Came across this lovely piece of music via Danny Norbury, via anton.

the

the thing
the thing is
the thing is not
what
the thing is not what
you
the thing is not what you think
but is
neither true or phalse
writes your name
the name
on my tongue

But the poet during his professional stroll is left with something: "This," he says to himself, "is the way a fragile flower's patient efforts succeed for the most part, very fragile though protected by a forbidding tangle of thorns. With few other qualities-blackberries, black as ink-...

,

When we live we occupy a certain space.

And when we don't live?

~~~~

Crow, blue, yellow...no colour comes for you this day. Rooted to the night, your cold eye stares like a star into the abyss. Love alone., The great strength that comes from the harshness of your claws; the great weakness from the harshness of your heart. I must remember to forget. The world that flutters inside you comes from a single word she says.,

~~~

The soul stands in the presence of its God in awful isolation.

The terrible distance of "its"

~~~~~

Why do you say 'we' when there is me, you, the world and all that time in-between?

~~~

You resisted the "polytheism of experience", favouring a puritanical soul instead. For you happiness was a pagan concept. But this black theological coat, how heavily it weighs on your shoulders. Growing more heavy, taking on lightness.

~~~

night

needs no stars

nowhere are you asked after.

~~~~

Linked in the chain

between Gold and Forgetting

Night.

~~~~~

blacker in black, am I more naked

apostate only am I true

Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin.

(I don't understand German. Don't ask).

~~~

In the springs of your eyes

I drift on and dream of spoils

A net snared a net

embracing we sever.

Celan.

~~~~~

You saw an image form, and stood in the shade. Found a kind of peace there. Held your breath (or died) and looked in many directions. Some laws are binding. Black searching-out the gold, a light that would gently burn so that departures would be muffled, soft as ash. The strangeness of it all. A dream I can't remember. Together alone.

~~~

With all my thoughts I went

right out of the world:

there you were,

you my gentle one,

you my open one.

---G. Hill.

Pariah

The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all, we hardly know our own depths.
---Rebecca Solnit.

To exclude the strange, to make the strange familiar by naming it as the excluded. Maybe, as the kid says in Lord of the Flies, 'the beast was within'. Purity and danger, the old story. And the danger must be clear and present, externalized, contained, never admitted. The ritual of chaos is made part of the social and cosmic order.

Lawlines, like stones placed around a tree. How far back does this craziness go? The oriental: passive, feminine, irrational; the Jew, Woman, the leper, the mad, the poor as contamination, (un)timely reminders of our animality, degeneracy. How we need our barbarians! Would we be a 'we' without them? Is humanity only a negation and a staging of, the making a spectacle of, the sub-human?


fascinating story of the cagot .

R's brief encounter with a rather strange oriental

Little orange monkey, spying that R was quite sad (well, at least it looked like that from afar) , decided to come down from the great skies and cheer her up.

So, monkey came down, like a spider on a vertical silvery thread, rattling and shaking as he did.

That's all very dramatic, thought R to herself.

At first R just kicked little orange monkey in the face.

"Go away!"

"That's not very nice", said monkey and he wondered if all girls would kick him like this.

"Well", said R, somewhat irritated, "I was thinking Very Deep Thoughts"

"Oh", said little orange monkey, quite surprised. "I'm so, so very sorry, please forgive me, how could I, what a fool I am" and so on and so forth.

R couldn't stop laughing at this strange creature's subservient attitude. "Oh do stop, you're making my stomach split with laughter"

"But I am a god", said orange monkey in his most serious voice.

"You?! You're not a god because no matter whether I laugh or cry you still have that same silly smile on your face"

"Is a god judged by how he reacts to a human face? asked monkey, quite sure that he'd asked a question that was far too difficult for such a silly little girl. These are the highest problems, the ultimate questions, thought monkey.

By now R had begun to forget those very deep thoughts; it was far more fun to ridicule this...whatever it was. Are all men so stupid and pompous, she wondered to herself.

"You're not a god. Why, you're just a Chinaman. It says so here: 'Made in China'. I'm quite good with words, you know"

But what am I , who am I?, asked little orange monkey. And for the first time in his life he was unsure of himself. Why, in her presence, has my identity suddenly become a problem?, he asked himself.

Little orange monkey decided to dance near R's heart so that he could forget himself even more. So he shook and rattled and made all the noise he could.

"Oh do stop that, for heaven's sake!", said R, giggling. "I'm ticklish, and besides, it's no use, you're not from here".

Orange monkey, feeling quite defeated, thought it would be much better to go back home. 'No use talking to women,I see', he pondered. 'They don't understand cricket and most of then drink this horrible herbal tea'.

But as he was leaving, R reached out a hand to stroke his face. And it was done with so much gentleness that little orange monkey fell by her side.

And now R was sad again, because it seemed as if she had killed little orange monkey. Face to face at last, how strange this was.

They are no longer a wonder to each other; they are in the very heart of wonder.

"But I do know who you are, and I've always known your name, my dear little monkey. I'm quite good with words, you know"

(quotes from Rosenzweig-believe it or not!)

orr

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.

The Blank Good Life

When you get there, there is no there, there.

In Late Antiquity, happiness meant nothing else than to withdraw from the world of appearances, to retire to shady suburbs, die with an open book in one's hands. And we, we modern Eloi, have lost even the desire to flee or dream. Sit, and sip lemonade under imageless pale blue skies, as ice clinks and melts and a tune from the 1970's is heard buzzing from a radio in the distance.

'The body,as it is swallowed by the blue, a vanishing-act watched by absences'.

--Robert Hughes.

When we live we occupy a certain space.

And when we don't live? Hockney, Icarus.

If you're happy and you know it then you aren't happy.

From a letter by Mozart:

'To live respectably and to live happily are two very different things, and the latter will not be possible for me without some kind of magic; for this, something truly supernatural would have to happen'

'Any happiness commensurate with man is always hubris...magic is not a knowledge of names but a gesture, a breaking free from the name'
---Agamben.

In a room full of mirrors. And still there's nothing real about you. The more you see, the more you see through. A life-any life-is made up of an awful lot of blank spaces. Time before, and time after. But more: time within time, like the dream of a monk.

How do you weigh up a good life? An instant, an ascending curve to truth, beauty? Or, less ambitiously, does the avoidance of x, y, z constitute the good life? How do you take account of, speak about, things which have no dimensions?

A-12

'The rule of specialists and experts has several drawbacks. They tend to grow rather crazy and attach a quasi-religious importance to their specialized conclusions'.
---K. Clark, Moments of Vision.

From Lesley Chamberlain:

He [Herzen] despised the dullness of carefully ordered, secure lives..."no-one rejects the settled life"...the stylish, non-specialized amateur, vs the provincial with his narrow certainties..."character nurtured itself in the stream of the world"..a freedom from absorption in the theoretical, abstract world of the mind, from set-thinking, nature, governments...

The ability to oppose mechanism: in life, in thought.

"That I am will always be for me higher than I know"

strange how the summer term always seems to end in A-12. the graduating class, on their way. less concern, now, with what they'll end up doing. but it's always fascinating to enter into a reverie whereby you imagine each one in ten years time. Of course, in that imaginary world you are still the same age, still invisible, looking at them as you do now-the way one can watch a fire for ever- as they scribble down their answers to some obtuse questions....

this scene is repeated, as if life could go on for ever. is it possible to imagine discontinuity? or would one prefer to heap up more years of a meaningless life rather than 'think' about the inevitable? if thought emerges from within life then cannot life assert itself once again?

there are no "types", just individuals with their quirky traits, tell-tale features. a shoulder blade here, a twinkle in an eye there, a slouching gait, lazy shuffling steps, the odd inquisitive mind (but rare).

what will be remembered? very little, you guess. which is probably always the way, and perhaps not such a bad thing after all. many have and come and gone before; many will do so in the future. from a distance chance is fate. what does it hold in store? not that you really care. that would be ridiculous. but it's always one of those eerie moments that opens onto the utterly mysterious.

whatever it was, it doesn't arrive.
---The Apartments.

navigate by the stars

humanity finds itself in the position of a captain whose ship has been built so strongly of steel and iron that the magnetic needle of its compass no longer responds to anything but the iron structures of the ship; it no longer points north.
---Heisenberg

Snow, drift.
Down.
far, darkly
into the night.

Or to the sea.
Weightless.
Relinquish your love
of Earth.

Snow, striking
like the cold fever
of burning suns
in your eyes.

Snow, holding
the lost future,
like a shimmering face
with blank expression.

It/you falling
generally particularly
in ever-widening angles
obliquely into oblivion

White, fall.
like a spell.
Erase my name now,
from your still heart.

~~~

Drift, Autumn,
drift;
fall, colours,
where you will.
---Auden.

They drift about the darkening city squares,
coats blown in evening winds and fingers feeling
familiar holes in pockets, thinking: Life
has always been a counterfeit, a dream
where dreaming figures danced behind the glass.
---Denise.

the art of drifting is not an art, unless the dark movements of the blood were not an inheritance but a kind of pattern that one could know. as if to say, "as if to say". the drift from grey to gold, and back again. to gold seen and felt in the immediate everyday...

drifters are losers, because they lose themselves.

No Man's Land

all you wanted

It's a kind of world that's not a world.
It's just the pieces.
---The Apartments.

By the sense of light
you guess the soul
...
and by the sense of darkness, the late summer light that holds back? places are given up, apartments let go. what was yours was never yours. your final gesture before you leave for another place is to switch off the lights. the hardest words spoken softly, and no hands on your heart.

same as it ever was

Jerry asked me if I'd ever think of voting for the Respect party.

Well, firstly, it's hardly a party and more like a protest group. Secondly, it's too closely associated with Muslims and so the answer has to be no. Everyone nowadays, it seems, has a grievance, is a victim of some form of power or the other. Of course, it has to be said that in lots of cases there's a real cause for concern: there is sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia. But is the way out of that really to lay emphasis on each sub-group's rights, a politics based on difference?

Post-modernism, cultural relativism, respect for the 'otherness' of the other, a radical alterity that cannot be subsumed by the dominant tradition, that cannot be reduced to the Same. In the same vein, to ignore differences leads to homogenization or, even worse, to a deliberate policy of estrangement and marginalization. 'We, the people' soon becomes we, the upper classes, or we, the ruling elites, with all deviants and renegades consigned to the periphery or even worse...

One nation, one people.

Something troubling about that. The Palestinians are not a people and therefore not a nation. The state and money the only markers of identity (the only "gods", to use Simone Weil's words) and all resistance is about refusing the state's narrative and the false universalism and individualism of the market, a refusal to be incorporated into the 'subjectivization' of the State.

But surely there's a difference between the 'rebel citizen' and the person who falls back on to their local identities (race, religion, gender)? Is the entry of these factors the destruction of politics itself?

Well, it might be countered, this idea of citizenship itself is a partial viewpoint masquerading as the universal. It has a particular history, trajectory, context and texts.It is one view amongst many other views (or so the fundamentalist will argue). Why should it be given priority over others. What if we do want to organize society on the basis of religion? What if that's what the people want?Where's your freedom now?

I think this is mistaken (which is not to negate or forget the horrors of state power).

Firstly, universalim is not one view amongst others because whilst it allows space for other views (of course, some space, and on its own terms) the partial viewpoints set out from the beginning to restrict the freedoms of other groups. So, to the extent that a muslim politics favours the 'pure' over women, minorities, the heterodox and the infidels it veers, in my opinion, to something like the negation of the political. Which is not to say that a universal muslim perspective isn't possible (M.Taha).

Secondly, universalim isn't necessarily a negation of the particular. In fact, if one is concerned about equality then one has to take differences into account. If, say, one holds that disabled people should have the same capability set as abled-body people then one is asserting that equality is important at some fundamental level and at the same time that one may be required to treat them differently (in terms of resources allocated, for example) so that they can be afforded that equal respect.

The Same, then, is an aspiration and a move to it is surely the way forward for any progressive politics.

I want to be alone

Still think that Daniel Bell's 'cultural contradictions' has many insightful things to say. Of course, one could argue whether it's a cultural contradiction, or a political one..or is it really just a tension within the political tradition, one that has been there since the beginning of modernity: namely: between equality and fraternity on the one hand, and liberty on the other? The market and the republic?

Thought this was very interesting. Reminded me of David Goodhart's thought provoking 'Too diverse?'

So, can one still cling on to values that are conservative whilst simultaneously espousing liberal economic ones? Is there a deep connection between the Romantic individual who is fundamentally distrustful of hierarchy, order, anything that is merely 'given' and homo economicus who values autonomy above everything else? [not taking into account the conservative radical].

Wasn't a 'market society' supposed to be a society of equals, the market as a paradigm for social relations (Charles Taylor)? The market as a dynamic political force that disrupted and overturned the structures of dominance (the state, organized religion, feudalism (Braudel))? Ultimately, a de-politicizing force so that one could be left to one's private pursuits: fishing, reading, etc., etc.

I want to be left alone. Of course there's a kind of freedom in that. But the interesting thing in the Lilla article is how it appears that we want to be alone with our own tribe: The Big Sort. (..also: Putnam, Baqir/Alessina)...to live in a gated community, a virtual world that isn't as messy and complicated as the real one...to find the perfect life.

"As laissez-faire market forces sweep the globe and the earth's future seems endangered, the dream of living in concert with nature and with one another is increasingly essential"
--from Joel Sternfeld's 'Sweet Earth'

miles

for bob:



distance is not a matter of miles. and each moment can take you there, is an opening. Minute by minute, time within time. slow slippage, or the opening of a flower. Fading, soaring. Waqt. Haqq!

Reminds you of miles, contemplative miles, around a still centre. Neither beginning, nor ending.

~~~

affable affers, said he'd take me to hear Sain Zahoor. Can't wait. At the same time, in his religious turn, he complains about the shrine culture. J, on the other hand, tells me how when sain Z went to London with his group they kept on getting locked out of the hotel because they didn't know how to use those swipe cards. So, they just wedged it open with their slippers! Love it!



If you see beauty, you'll see it
everywhere. And if you know what love is,
you'll forget your name.

the sufi of suburbia

The word 'sufi' is nowhere to be found in the Qur'an. And the word 'love' or for love?

Why do you look for the word and not the thing?! Why do you spend so much time on the outskirts of the city?

But Islam is simple and clear. In the desert there is only the word and the Law. Why don't you stick to the root meanings: wool!

Wool, yes! Wool, which at the end of time flies off like clouds to an invisible centre. And in the desert is also Man, and in his heart are wild flowers, stars, abandoned camp fires, ruins, forgotten mirrors in which the beloved once looked...his wandering makes the desert the desert...the desert in man.

you found a ring in your home, whilst not even looking. you knew it was there, somewhere. you remember her speaking to your heart silently that first time. and what is time, but the attempt to find that moment again?

the red and the black

he said,

The tulip has got one scar on its heart, and the whole world knows it.
I have a hundred scars, and no-one is aware of them.

to which she replied, admonishing him:

you are the heedless tulip, o slave
with a black heart, a short life, and yet laughing...

thoughts, like silver images, like silver words, flickered between them. the soul's images glassily exposed, fading to silverpoint.

this silverwhite space where you say nothing; you place a silver coin in my palm to buy my silence.

wszedzie bylo nigdzie i nigdzie, wszedzie/ Litery ksiag srebrnialy, chwialy sie i nikly.

and so the tulip, to this day, lives in the open expanses, in the wilderness, his heart red and black for the memory of her.

Music is the flute of the devil

...and the colours entered the world, like the first rays of the spring sunshine melting the ice. and there was no east or west, though your heart was north, north by north-west. the red mingled with the blue, the grey inherited the black. yet still the beloved's colours remained unseen. this blue beneath the black you wear...is it out of sorrow, or something else? what is it that makes you flow from my heart? the mirror turns to iron again, keeps your image locked away from me.

~~~

interesting post by bob (on the overgrownpath) on the relation between music and politics. you'd like to think there's a connection between, on the one hand, a sensitivity to beauty, greatness, the tragic, and on the other, a recognition of particularity and/or an aversion to generalizations that is consonant with, fundamental to, political liberalism. you'd like to.

the title of this post comes from something obin laden said. Guardian article here

Truly, madly...

With the pain of her love, my heart is as the light of the serpent's eye in the presence of emerald.
---?

In tiefer Nacht
wenn auf dem schmalen Stege
Der Wandrer bebt

The white work
of the black heart
that makes the sky look green
has given me the blues
while lumps of snow
are melting in tulip-cups
--after Khaqani, Denise

In my dream, you dreamt of me. As if I had grasped you in a few silent moments of the universe. And then, your heart hardening, you flashed your looks somewhere else, releasing me into darkness. You said, what might be seen if mind and heart gave themselves..deeper, and deeper into the forest. Stone is a ladder. You, too, even though you wait in the dark. When you enter, you cannot know, you know.