answers and questions

Just been watching that blubbering idiot Mark Lawson interview Roth; the same old cliched questions, stuck in his flabby throat; the whining voice hooked on to its own self-importance, unable to disentangle itself from the grooves of his mind. The appearance of intelligence, so appealing to the beeb's middle class viewers. The questions we ask reveal who we are.

Simpson's (simple) world:

Watching Simpson, the great liberator of Afghanistan, on t.v. Depressing that this should pass as a programme on politics. There he was, pottering around the old streets of Baghdad-stuttering past his old "haunts"-in his pink shirt, full of himself, as usual.

At one stage he becomes irritated, as if the real people were disturbing his reminiscing about the good ol' days. "This man (pointing to a police officer) is becoming a bit of a pest." And then:

"But the old ways are coming back again, family and tribe."

Oh yeah, very reassuring!

He has an interpreter tagging along with him. Simpson, in his charmless way, reassures viewers: "I go out with the army..er...I meet them and it seems to me they're much better, much better than the Afghan army, say."

Hardly a ringing endorsement for the occupation, Mr. Simpson, but still, what's the death of a few hundred thousand people in the bigger scheme of things?

The interpreter, to Simpson's dismay, says there's a kind of nostalgia for Saddam. "Surely not amongst the Shias, only the Sunnis?" The interpreter says that this isn't the case, that the people he's come across prefer to have things work-no matter what the leadership is. Simpson, visibly disturbed by this turns to him and asks, " Do you mind if I ask if you're Sunni?"

Then, all of a sudden, he breaks off the 'serious' discussion to recall how he bought some ol 78's from the street corner they've just passed. And this, you feel, is what it's really all about: Simpson's world.


I'm beginning to think that a classic is something that one reads only once and not, contrary to received opinion, something that one can return to again and again; by its very nature it is incomplete and it always leaves its impression without fully being articulated. Whether one reads it once or a hundred times makes no difference: its main virtue is only to point to its unfinished nature, its ability to resist definition...

Kadare's 'Broken April' is a dream...dark and brooding and utterly simple:

His eyes were fixed on the grey sky that spread, lonely, above the mountains; it was hard to tell whether he was making them dark or if the darkness within him came from them.

Or, perhaps Bellow says it better:

And what he saw with his eyes was not even the real heavens. No, only white marks, bright vibrations, clouds of sky roe, tokens of the real thing, only as much as could be taken in through the distortions of the atmosphere. Through these distortions you saw objects, forms, partial realities. The rest was to be felt. And it wasn't only that you felt, but that you were drawn to feel and penetrate further, as if you were being informed that what was spread over you had to do with your existence, down to the very blood and the crystal forms inside your bones. Rocks, trees, animals, men and women, these also drew you to penetrate further, under the distortions (comparable to the atmospheric ones, shadows within shadows), to find their real being with your own. This is the sense in which you were drawn.

After reading that purple prose I feel the gloom has lifted. Minor irritants seem like so much rock dust in the orbit of being. One only has to shrug one's shoulders for the universe to take shape again...

How spacious the heavenly halls are!
Approach them on aerial stairs.
Above white clouds, there are the hanging gardens of paradise.

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.

Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?

And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---C.Milosz).

~~~
A fire that purifies is a"friend" (57:15);
the earth is nothing but a co-mingling of fire and ice.