I often think to myself how unremarkable my life is, how extraordinarily dull and plain it is, and yet I still don't have the energy or the desire to move beyond this crab-like existence. The neutral, unheroic rolling on of time. Indifference of the soul, Fenelon would no doubt say (not that I've read him; just have lots of black notebooks full of hastily scribbled down words, words that seem to indicate some sort of wisdom, easily available without the struggle..the wonderful facade that quotations afford oneself!).
And of course, some people are quite content in that surrounding warmth, the daily rituals, meagre ploddings-groceries, banks, bills-,trivial conversations, a life without metaphors, the easy after-dinner smiles maintaining the surface illusion, the quietness and stillness of mid-mornings flatly refusing any existential questions-what mattered in life was to be part of existence, not possessing it- nor dreaming of any greatness or any deeper meaning, not railing against the lack of it...this is it, this shallowness that came surprisingly easy to you... And all the time one senses the slow drifting away from oneself, the silver disintegrating behind mirrors, the darkening of one's hands, the narrowing of the light, the forgetting of names.
~~~
Today, you woke early as usual but it was so dark you couldn't see the hands of the clock, just the empty white face, bald and absent-minded. Outside, the storm still raging, a cool freshness blown in from God knows where, the wind whistling through eastern windows, down empty hallways; the oblong flowerbeds filled with greyish water and debris, like a shallow grave; a small tree uprooted, the moist earth still glowing, clinging to the roots. A maulvi with an unbelievably pure white beard races toward you on a motorbike, his arms locked into position, his head steadfast, his gaze resolute, and the determined look of a man who sees the end of days...
~~~
Listening to Rachmaninoff's Vespers (Shaw Festival Singers). The pre-reflective naivete that the Russians so love. A knock on the door. Rashid, the secretary (a man with the roundest face you've ever seen). As he speaks to you you rather cruelly divert your attention elsewhere, trying to remember what he says so that you can write this blog! How fucked up is that! I am not kind, but I am true. What use is that, when it was kindness above all that was needed in the age we were living in. You needed an image to keep you going, to reveal something to you, but it didn't come. It was simple, not that complicated after all, but you'd have to painstakingly put it together in your imagination on your own, in the darkness.
"Do you have a minute?" he asks, sheepishly.
"Yeah, sure, what's on your mind?"
"Have you read Dr. Faustus?"
"Goethe, you mean?"
"No, Christopher Marlowe, written in 17__"
"Why do you ask?"
"He proceeds to try and explain something to me, but I don't get it. What's he saying, for Christ's sake? Concentrate. There's probably something to it. That makes you seem a bit mad, like someone looking for signs in tea leaves or something.
"In it there's a line where the devil says 'all these treasures, these women, are for you. You're a Ph.D. (what, did they really have Ph.D's back whenever it was written?), if God's dominion is the whole universe then surely you, with your education are a "little god"'.
"No, haven't read it. But what else do you like?", I ask, hoping he'll clear off soon.
"Oh, mathematics and literature"
This, I think to myself, is going to be a very long conversation and I can't feign interest any more. Keep the Rachmaninoff on and he might leave.
"Anything in particular?"
"A Passage to India and the essays of Lawrence. 'What is sex?' for example."
I can't say that I've read them to be honest and I wonder to myself if Lawrence did in fact write such an essay. Sounds plausible enough, but best to steer away from such discussions. Don't want to end up in a discussion of erotica so early in the morning-at least not with him!
citation: James Salter.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
the lawless heart
Stealing words, reclaiming others, as if the word was the thing itself or that it could conjure it up. Years have passed by, or so he understood from her eyes. The more he spoke the less he became himself, less sure of what it all meant. He struggled to remember his first words to her, thinking that they might hold the key to some unsolved mystery, just as a cave painting is said to be the prototype of all art.
What was it, he thought to himself. She looked quite primitive herself, and that despite her fierce intellect, or maybe it was because of it. Her jaw slightly protruding, her eyes bright like an ancient fire, murder on her hands, the plain, shining brow...she had a face one could never forget, or settle for.
Of course she was arrogant to the hilt, her lips provincial, full, but slightly cruel, fashioned from years of self-protecting habits, adulation, and other-worldly disdain. There was no equal, and nothing suggested commensurability with anyone else. She took delight in acknowledging this, that each person mistakenly thought he was the centre of her world.
He tried to concentrate, become serious once again, but he couldn't hold his thoughts together. It was like his thoughts were circling in a whirlpool, picking all sorts of random objects, unable to relate one to another in any kind of system. And sometimes he failed to recognize himself in this courtly game, failed to see himself slipping away from the image he held of himself. His breathing betrayed him as he folded and unfolded his hands.
Distinctions! She had said something about distinctions. As if to say: 'you were you, and I was I, and don't you forget it'. Remembering would be a disastrous sign of giving in, so he drew up a list, like a keen child, or a fisherman who marvels when the nets are down and the counting must start...when did it begin, how will it end, this calculus of pain and pleasure?
But she only looked on in a detached manner, looked deeply and darkly into the dark rain, her lips sweetened, the measure of her mind something like the abstractness of the stars, brilliant and telling, her starred heart triumphant, her forehead radiant, her half-moon eyebrows raised in mock indignation, like someone who can afford an excess of emotion, and she whispered quietly and coldly to him,
the years radiating
toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,
inadequate boundaries
of the heart you hold to.
What was it, he thought to himself. She looked quite primitive herself, and that despite her fierce intellect, or maybe it was because of it. Her jaw slightly protruding, her eyes bright like an ancient fire, murder on her hands, the plain, shining brow...she had a face one could never forget, or settle for.
Of course she was arrogant to the hilt, her lips provincial, full, but slightly cruel, fashioned from years of self-protecting habits, adulation, and other-worldly disdain. There was no equal, and nothing suggested commensurability with anyone else. She took delight in acknowledging this, that each person mistakenly thought he was the centre of her world.
He tried to concentrate, become serious once again, but he couldn't hold his thoughts together. It was like his thoughts were circling in a whirlpool, picking all sorts of random objects, unable to relate one to another in any kind of system. And sometimes he failed to recognize himself in this courtly game, failed to see himself slipping away from the image he held of himself. His breathing betrayed him as he folded and unfolded his hands.
Distinctions! She had said something about distinctions. As if to say: 'you were you, and I was I, and don't you forget it'. Remembering would be a disastrous sign of giving in, so he drew up a list, like a keen child, or a fisherman who marvels when the nets are down and the counting must start...when did it begin, how will it end, this calculus of pain and pleasure?
But she only looked on in a detached manner, looked deeply and darkly into the dark rain, her lips sweetened, the measure of her mind something like the abstractness of the stars, brilliant and telling, her starred heart triumphant, her forehead radiant, her half-moon eyebrows raised in mock indignation, like someone who can afford an excess of emotion, and she whispered quietly and coldly to him,
the years radiating
toward the so-called first days,
toward the so-called last days,
inadequate boundaries
of the heart you hold to.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
light-hearted
"I love to see leaves blowing through the headlights. I don't know why. I mean they're just dead leaves , no good for anything, but I love to see them blowing through the light.""He crossed the dark hall to the living room where Tony was watching a show. The tube was the only light, shifting and submarine, and with the noise of the rain outside the room seemed like some cavern in the sea."
--John Cheever.
A moral quality to the light: free, independent, clear. Each particular object and person seen as they really are, as a revelation to themselves. The disbandment of hierarchies, the flatlands of the spirit welcomed. The light that holds the moments of a life together, like a memory, and seems true. Remembered off by heart: a face, a city, full of shadows, full of longing. In the clear light of the day we see the pure distances between us, those that were bridged during the darkness of the night and the mind's sleep.
We see eachother at last, with relentless precision, without colour, as a god might see us in fact, each breath, and each detail noted, yet still desirous of a fall...it is as if we had begun with a clean slate, a fresh start, not knowing what to do with the burden of the past. This light, what is it that grows so darkly within?
---------------
In Turner, there is a line, a line in which all opposites are reconciled.
..A sense of immersion in nature (Monet), a loss of identity, which heightens one's sense of being.
from K. Clark's Civilisation.
What is this loss, where one finds oneself, finds alone a sense of self to keep from the mirrors? Like colour, a pure sensation but also an order of the soul. Is the daily accumulation of it prefigured in our sleeping? Our absencing of ourselves, from ourselves? Taking leave. As if reality was too much for one, and not enough at the same time. In your dreams you can be anybody; and in your sleep you can be nobody.
This line, this line was once marked by shamans in caves; the porous border which allowed the spirit to escape, which allowed others to arrive. Art, as a way out, and not just a symbol of it to the mind.
And yet something in you recoils at this thought, anything approaching an ocenaic feeling; something pulls you back to the familiar world of dead routines, commitments, attachments: not Tillich's 'all truth is on the boundaries' or general Kashmiri laziness, but Ubo's simple and instinctive pragmatism: better to be late in this world than early in the next. And you don't have a mystical bone in you anyway! Reconciliation? Nah, too Jewish for that!
But the broken circles of our lives, like chains of light, glinting in the summer rain.
There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint.
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.
---Mir Dard.
-----
Does comedy in a novel take something away from it? A book that is genuinely funny: Spike, of course! Had you in splits. But Lorrie Moore, for instance. Jesus! Is this a woman thing? No, Cheever, for all his stylistic brilliance, is beginning to grate on your nerves with the slapstick.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
the extremist (II)
Of course, the extremist isn't one thing. You can't even imagine what goes through his mind, which is precisely why you have to draw up this caricature.
The fundamentalist, like the economist, is a reductionist, paring down the whole complex of multiple and often conflicting desires and values down to the simplest of motivations, the elemental springs of action. He is also like the economist in that he has infinite wants and limited resources or, to put it another way, one want that he imagines can be satisfied infinitely.
The fundamentalist is unable to love in the proper way. The object of his love becomes an object, separate from life, something to be preserved in its pristine state against the corroding effects of time. And because he cannot bear the thought of losing his attachment to the object of his love, or losing himself -and these amount to the same thing- he must, like a doomed lover, hold onto the object, not lose control. He -and it is always a he-must destroy all that threatens this relation, or destroy himself.
The fundamentalist, like the economist, is a reductionist, paring down the whole complex of multiple and often conflicting desires and values down to the simplest of motivations, the elemental springs of action. He is also like the economist in that he has infinite wants and limited resources or, to put it another way, one want that he imagines can be satisfied infinitely.
The fundamentalist is unable to love in the proper way. The object of his love becomes an object, separate from life, something to be preserved in its pristine state against the corroding effects of time. And because he cannot bear the thought of losing his attachment to the object of his love, or losing himself -and these amount to the same thing- he must, like a doomed lover, hold onto the object, not lose control. He -and it is always a he-must destroy all that threatens this relation, or destroy himself.
the extremist
Conservatism, fundamentalism, extremism, fanaticism. Is there a continuity between them, an inevitable transition from one to the other? Obviously not: many people remain deeply conservative, drawn to some sort of tradition, finding solace in continuities, order, hierarchies, and resistances to the flux in their lives engendered by capitalism, immigration, social 'atomisation'. And yet they still remain fairly 'decent people' (Rawls?). More to the point: who doesn't become conservative as time passes?
Of course, these terms are loaded: other people's beliefs are often viewed as being extreme (Hey, you're a Muslim, aren't you? Aren't your lot against women/jews/the west?). Not everyone can be C of E, and why would a religious person think that following the fundamentals of his or her faith is anything but normal? It's a great put down to say that other people are full of hatred, bitterness-and one way of avoiding looking at one's own excesses.
But this isn't about just religion, is it? The Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps. What is that, but excessive violence (is there a normal amount of violence?). And can't you be excessively in love (with cinnamon rolls, say?). Is there a 'proper' love of the world, or endless lust? Madness, desire, and the need to contain it, circumscribe it: lawlines, cosmos, and civilisation, fighting the chaos in the human heart, the unmoored imagination. At the social level: bourgeois society must be protected from the marginal man, the steppenwolf, the lumpenproletariat.
But when did it begin?
Aren't we transgressive creatures by nature? Our nature to escape ourselves?The Fall, a mark of freedom, not sin? And who but a god decides what is excessive? (That seems too extreme: as if to say: the judgements of human societies and rationality count for nothing).
But on second thoughts, isn't it the deities themselves that are excessive and isn't the plural itself excessive? Excessive in their loving, in their need for devotion (the 'jealous God'), in their punitiveness? And does that inspire an excessive confidence in the believers or is it the other way round: is our excessive confidence in ourselves projected on to our ideal version of ourselves? In which case, maybe we're not really confident of ourselves...
Old Jewish proverb: if a man is right 70% of the time that's very good; 85%? That's excellent. 100% , then? Then shoot him!
'Religious' people invariably think they know it all. This isn't a particularly modern aversion to 'knowing'..after all, there are many traditions that focus on our unknowingness and a sense of humility, on seeing through a glass darkly.
Religious beliefs legitimate and contain our excesses.
1. Transference. It's wrong to say that we create gods in our own image, but who could deny that certain styles of religious thought-or 'imagery', in the broadest sense of the term-appeal to us in certain way because of our temperament? The idea of perfection haunts us.
2. Without the divine we feel uncontained. If God is dead, everything is permitted. We find ourselves too complex for ourselves and therefore need single-minded devotion to something:the Party, the family, tribe, or deity. The 'emperor of one idea' (Wallace Stevens). Compare this to the diabolic.
In the Garden there was the Law and there was knowledge. Or was it: there was knowledge and there was life, and you can't have both? What is the one thing necessary? Or is it that we imagine ourselves complex, and find it deeply satisfying to 'come home', as it were, to some simple reductionist view of ourselves when all along that's what we really were: simple, mundane creatures, lacking, for the most part, imagination or creativity?
If excess is the problem, how are the excesses of religion a solution?
1. Stifle excessive doubt. To ward off 'despair, confusion, emptiness'. Through repetitiveness and a relentless insistence on one's position, one can at least convince oneself that there's some meaning to it.
2. No man is an island. The extremist wants to become 'visible', be someone (even as he becomes another statistic in the catalogue of nihilistic violence); he wants to be noticed, for people to sit up and take notice of him-or at least his views/religion. Not to be messed with. Some sort of recognition (is this different in degree or kind from the person who suffers a loss of identity?). A man of influence: people will sit up and listen. And the 'event' has to be extreme to startle people from their lazy dreams of contentment.
[Of course, as others have commented: is there a sexual element in all this?Don't fuck with me. Purity and danger].
3. Life is full of too much injustice (personal and political). Extremism is an extreme way of coming to terms with the frustration that follows from the recognition that the world isn't the way you want it to be: the final solution. The extremist can't wait, or can't see a way out. Bring it on. This is his moment.
Excess as a sign of our poverty.
All this is highly speculative by Adam Phillips. Psychologically plausible, you'd like to think, but where's the sociological flesh and bones?
Of course, these terms are loaded: other people's beliefs are often viewed as being extreme (Hey, you're a Muslim, aren't you? Aren't your lot against women/jews/the west?). Not everyone can be C of E, and why would a religious person think that following the fundamentals of his or her faith is anything but normal? It's a great put down to say that other people are full of hatred, bitterness-and one way of avoiding looking at one's own excesses.
But this isn't about just religion, is it? The Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps. What is that, but excessive violence (is there a normal amount of violence?). And can't you be excessively in love (with cinnamon rolls, say?). Is there a 'proper' love of the world, or endless lust? Madness, desire, and the need to contain it, circumscribe it: lawlines, cosmos, and civilisation, fighting the chaos in the human heart, the unmoored imagination. At the social level: bourgeois society must be protected from the marginal man, the steppenwolf, the lumpenproletariat.
But when did it begin?
Aren't we transgressive creatures by nature? Our nature to escape ourselves?The Fall, a mark of freedom, not sin? And who but a god decides what is excessive? (That seems too extreme: as if to say: the judgements of human societies and rationality count for nothing).
But on second thoughts, isn't it the deities themselves that are excessive and isn't the plural itself excessive? Excessive in their loving, in their need for devotion (the 'jealous God'), in their punitiveness? And does that inspire an excessive confidence in the believers or is it the other way round: is our excessive confidence in ourselves projected on to our ideal version of ourselves? In which case, maybe we're not really confident of ourselves...
Old Jewish proverb: if a man is right 70% of the time that's very good; 85%? That's excellent. 100% , then? Then shoot him!
'Religious' people invariably think they know it all. This isn't a particularly modern aversion to 'knowing'..after all, there are many traditions that focus on our unknowingness and a sense of humility, on seeing through a glass darkly.
Religious beliefs legitimate and contain our excesses.
1. Transference. It's wrong to say that we create gods in our own image, but who could deny that certain styles of religious thought-or 'imagery', in the broadest sense of the term-appeal to us in certain way because of our temperament? The idea of perfection haunts us.
2. Without the divine we feel uncontained. If God is dead, everything is permitted. We find ourselves too complex for ourselves and therefore need single-minded devotion to something:the Party, the family, tribe, or deity. The 'emperor of one idea' (Wallace Stevens). Compare this to the diabolic.
In the Garden there was the Law and there was knowledge. Or was it: there was knowledge and there was life, and you can't have both? What is the one thing necessary? Or is it that we imagine ourselves complex, and find it deeply satisfying to 'come home', as it were, to some simple reductionist view of ourselves when all along that's what we really were: simple, mundane creatures, lacking, for the most part, imagination or creativity?
If excess is the problem, how are the excesses of religion a solution?
1. Stifle excessive doubt. To ward off 'despair, confusion, emptiness'. Through repetitiveness and a relentless insistence on one's position, one can at least convince oneself that there's some meaning to it.
2. No man is an island. The extremist wants to become 'visible', be someone (even as he becomes another statistic in the catalogue of nihilistic violence); he wants to be noticed, for people to sit up and take notice of him-or at least his views/religion. Not to be messed with. Some sort of recognition (is this different in degree or kind from the person who suffers a loss of identity?). A man of influence: people will sit up and listen. And the 'event' has to be extreme to startle people from their lazy dreams of contentment.
[Of course, as others have commented: is there a sexual element in all this?Don't fuck with me. Purity and danger].
3. Life is full of too much injustice (personal and political). Extremism is an extreme way of coming to terms with the frustration that follows from the recognition that the world isn't the way you want it to be: the final solution. The extremist can't wait, or can't see a way out. Bring it on. This is his moment.
Excess as a sign of our poverty.
All this is highly speculative by Adam Phillips. Psychologically plausible, you'd like to think, but where's the sociological flesh and bones?
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
a winter mind
Nick Cave Nobody's Baby Now by Saklas
He never shows himself by light.
His form is blurred.
---William Bronk.
The wintered mind, the withered gaze; hands, shaped by regret- or something else, you can't tell any more-remain unclenched; the heart that withholds much...a name, without title, belonging to nobody. A darkened face, the lights dimmed, the low-blue flame sheltered; rooms kept bare like an empty lean grave, the bed unmade, books cold as stone, stillness held, shadowed soul, the locked mirrors of your eyes, the stopped clocks spilling time into silence, unanswered questions, bleak skills, these: silver inheriting the black, words unspoken, windows left open to the night...all this so that when raven alights, she will feel at home, feed on my flesh, and die without knowing it.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
the field
Life is not a walk across an open field.
---Russian proverb.
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
---John Berger.
A strange co-incidence. I wrote some words in my 'Leonardo' notebook, and then opened Roxana's blog to see that she had written something on the same topic (roughly) as well! Bizarre! The great difference being, of course, that I just wrote whatever nonsense came to my mind whilst I was silently walking across the lawn early this morning, as if the words were part of an unfinished dream.
Crow, shining darkly. Black glistens as much as white, if you let it. The earth had heated up so that by 7 o'clock in the morning the heat and light was everywhere; it surrounded you, piled up like stacks of unread books, bounced off chipped floor tiles, streamed past opaque windows, gleamed off polished cars like a film, and all the time your mind slowed down, narrowed to a single thought. The warmth had opened up everything, unexpectedly, like the sudden expansive swerve of a road. Opened up and exposed to a harshness-a kind of penitence-that revealed each thing for what it was, as if it existed in that moment only, without weight or shadow. He thought he'd fall; he couldn't take much more of himself.
If you could walk through a field without any thoughts time would be abolished; if you could walk through a field noticing every disturbance, every event and season, if you could register every rare green, startled knotted brown, know its proportions, even then you would know nothing of your life, or of hers.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
a fish, a small bear, a fox and a wild dog
In Lahore one used to see animals all the time: horse-draw carts, stray dogs, donkeys pulling impossibly large loads of wood or hay behind them if they weren't tethered to a wooden pole, as if waiting for something or someone, with an infinite patience and the saddest eyes imaginable, and on the odd occasion there'd even be the dancing bear. Most of the time, this was all very cruel and needless. Goes without saying (as with much else). But now...
Now, with the expansion of the city, the relentless extension of roads, and the creation of a uniquely ugly urban sprawl, the animals have receded to the background-both physically and in the mind's eye. What remains? Only the caged animals, and memories of power, freedom, danger (Pets, after all, grow to be human...and how you detest the next logical step: the digitalisation or virtualisation of animals with those silly Japanese electronic pets).
Animals, not even beasts any more; the irrational, formerly contrasted with our supposed rationality; not even the dark side of our humanity, but utterly tamed and humanzied...nature as a socialized product, made a raw material for consumption-our food, leisure or entertainment. The natural and the mythical have been destroyed, canceled. And one can't but help wonder if something of our own origin is lost in the process...
What remains? Crow, dark crow, looking down ominously, feeding off what we've killed, surviving amongst the debris (and he is in this sense,therefore, our closest cousin).But even when all is exhausted, seemingly lost, when all has been said and done, maybe a spark remains, since now and then the human being calls to another human being in the dark, and gives her the names of the animals.
(the ideas were borrowed from john berger's wonderful, elegiac essay, Why Look at Animals).
Now, with the expansion of the city, the relentless extension of roads, and the creation of a uniquely ugly urban sprawl, the animals have receded to the background-both physically and in the mind's eye. What remains? Only the caged animals, and memories of power, freedom, danger (Pets, after all, grow to be human...and how you detest the next logical step: the digitalisation or virtualisation of animals with those silly Japanese electronic pets).
Animals, not even beasts any more; the irrational, formerly contrasted with our supposed rationality; not even the dark side of our humanity, but utterly tamed and humanzied...nature as a socialized product, made a raw material for consumption-our food, leisure or entertainment. The natural and the mythical have been destroyed, canceled. And one can't but help wonder if something of our own origin is lost in the process...
What remains? Crow, dark crow, looking down ominously, feeding off what we've killed, surviving amongst the debris (and he is in this sense,therefore, our closest cousin).But even when all is exhausted, seemingly lost, when all has been said and done, maybe a spark remains, since now and then the human being calls to another human being in the dark, and gives her the names of the animals.
(the ideas were borrowed from john berger's wonderful, elegiac essay, Why Look at Animals).
Friday, May 20, 2011
Waqt
Set the clock, so that you can go on time. The small departures, the small hours. Fastidious, when it comes down to it, to the details of how not to live.
We see everything by memory.
---David Hockney
To think, to see, is to forget. Borges, perhaps. You think. You forget. You.
What time there was, was given, clunking into place like a lock. The key?
The only things in life that are important are those you remember. That was the key...pure recall.
---James Salter.
Fragments accumulate, turn, are noted, marked down. The variable key, held loosely. Your hands growing dark with time. Lord, forgive me.
The dusk sunlight, bright on white walls, its brilliance late, but finely attuned to its task of making things fade from sight. We stand there stunned, our distance from one another perfectly measured, as if in Hell, and I've forgotten what I wanted to say. But the mind is still, in the quiet reverie of lost time and things. Find the shade, for now. In time, I'm told, everything can be fixed, brought back to its former shape.
We see everything by memory.
---David Hockney
To think, to see, is to forget. Borges, perhaps. You think. You forget. You.
What time there was, was given, clunking into place like a lock. The key?
The only things in life that are important are those you remember. That was the key...pure recall.
---James Salter.
Fragments accumulate, turn, are noted, marked down. The variable key, held loosely. Your hands growing dark with time. Lord, forgive me.
The dusk sunlight, bright on white walls, its brilliance late, but finely attuned to its task of making things fade from sight. We stand there stunned, our distance from one another perfectly measured, as if in Hell, and I've forgotten what I wanted to say. But the mind is still, in the quiet reverie of lost time and things. Find the shade, for now. In time, I'm told, everything can be fixed, brought back to its former shape.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
110-A
For the long-time sufferers on this blog, something different, a bit more personal ("oh no", I hear you say, "we couldn't take the impersonal crap and now he offloads us with this!").
Phone call in mid-afternoon, just after the suicide hour. The Colonel's got his army of men ready, can I make it through the searing heat back to my old home, 110-A.
The house itself is falling to pieces; the walls are crumbling in many places and the paint rubs off in your hand like chalk powder. Most of the lights are broken or missing, loose wires dangling down like the spilled guts of a rabbit. The grass is scorched brown, rustles like the hairs of a brush. Only the thistle-like flowers show any sense of life in their sparkiness. Oranges, reds, crimsons. How to survive in the wilderness. Other, smaller flowers seemed to have 'frozen' in the heat, petrified, and are now an eerie cobalt-blue fist of stone. A few sparrows hop and dance, as if this was a graveyard.
Up, high above, eleven crows look down ominously, the very picture of death. The window frames have mostly rusted away and some of the windows have been smashed. Ants, with an inner sense of the final days, move in in their thousands. In the driveway petals, pink and white, have fallen to the ground and lie around in neat heaps, mixing with the fresh green leaves that have also fallen. Looks like that type of crap potpourri stuff that women are very fond of. Two leaflets for 'Supreme Pizza, Home Delivery' have made their way inside as well. By the main gate a crippled dog walks past us gingerly (Don't know why, but nearly all the dogs in Canal View are cripples).
The main gate creaks like a ship and the windowpanes in the doors inside seem to have misted up at the edges. In the lounge a cockroach lies on its back, its legs already eaten away..the husk of a being. Oh well, if you're going to get screwed, lie back and think of England.
The electrician is keen and pleasant. But the carpenter,..now there's a different breed for you. One quick look and he walks out, perspiring profusely. Dark skinned, thick-skinned.He sits on the lawn, as if he's overwhelmed by the scale of the task in front of him. He looks tired, beaten down by a hard life, what life's had in store for him...like a fisherman who's seen too many people die...either that, or he's just got a case of righteous contempt-and who could blame him-for someone with a house this size. Talal phones in-between: K.Clark's Civilisation has been downloaded. Well, that's a relief.
I visit each room, now hollow, dilapidated-but once full of life and chatter- and try to recall something noteworthy. My last memory in my own room: good friends gathered before I left for my Ph.D. How many years ago was that now? A house without mirrors isn't really a house. The Dougal, her room overflowing with books, now bare, as if the Taleban had raided. The back lawn, still in decent shape, but the lemon tree sadly missing.
This house barely survives, but survive it does. Like so much else here on the black sun, it has silently forgotten about redemption, and itself has been forgotten in the passing of many moons and suns.
Phone call in mid-afternoon, just after the suicide hour. The Colonel's got his army of men ready, can I make it through the searing heat back to my old home, 110-A.
The house itself is falling to pieces; the walls are crumbling in many places and the paint rubs off in your hand like chalk powder. Most of the lights are broken or missing, loose wires dangling down like the spilled guts of a rabbit. The grass is scorched brown, rustles like the hairs of a brush. Only the thistle-like flowers show any sense of life in their sparkiness. Oranges, reds, crimsons. How to survive in the wilderness. Other, smaller flowers seemed to have 'frozen' in the heat, petrified, and are now an eerie cobalt-blue fist of stone. A few sparrows hop and dance, as if this was a graveyard.
Up, high above, eleven crows look down ominously, the very picture of death. The window frames have mostly rusted away and some of the windows have been smashed. Ants, with an inner sense of the final days, move in in their thousands. In the driveway petals, pink and white, have fallen to the ground and lie around in neat heaps, mixing with the fresh green leaves that have also fallen. Looks like that type of crap potpourri stuff that women are very fond of. Two leaflets for 'Supreme Pizza, Home Delivery' have made their way inside as well. By the main gate a crippled dog walks past us gingerly (Don't know why, but nearly all the dogs in Canal View are cripples).
The main gate creaks like a ship and the windowpanes in the doors inside seem to have misted up at the edges. In the lounge a cockroach lies on its back, its legs already eaten away..the husk of a being. Oh well, if you're going to get screwed, lie back and think of England.
The electrician is keen and pleasant. But the carpenter,..now there's a different breed for you. One quick look and he walks out, perspiring profusely. Dark skinned, thick-skinned.He sits on the lawn, as if he's overwhelmed by the scale of the task in front of him. He looks tired, beaten down by a hard life, what life's had in store for him...like a fisherman who's seen too many people die...either that, or he's just got a case of righteous contempt-and who could blame him-for someone with a house this size. Talal phones in-between: K.Clark's Civilisation has been downloaded. Well, that's a relief.
I visit each room, now hollow, dilapidated-but once full of life and chatter- and try to recall something noteworthy. My last memory in my own room: good friends gathered before I left for my Ph.D. How many years ago was that now? A house without mirrors isn't really a house. The Dougal, her room overflowing with books, now bare, as if the Taleban had raided. The back lawn, still in decent shape, but the lemon tree sadly missing.
This house barely survives, but survive it does. Like so much else here on the black sun, it has silently forgotten about redemption, and itself has been forgotten in the passing of many moons and suns.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
1001
The swami would say: if one door is closed then a thousand are opened for you. It's a terrible thing, that. Believing in something that's been handed down in your family for God knows how long, with charming innocence, and then finding, all of a sudden, you don't really believe in it. Not a question of faith; just that experience, life, gets in the way, alters the path.
For some, you guess, it's true. Maybe one in a thousand. If the moon doesn't shine on you, is it still the moon?
'Light from without would slowly reveal the light within...the white as a denser substance-some ghostly reminder of another place in which Rothko once said he could breathe and stretch his arms.'
Was thinking to myself (who else is there?), why does the word 'dark' crop up so much in your writing? I guess you need Camus's southern light, Nietzsche in Turin and all that. What is it, for Christ's sake, the moral quality of light, the traveling acres of sunlight. The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.I imagine a certain girl, who's probably a vampire in all truth, who craves my darkness in her, who couldn't give a fuck about the light.
"The morning light is gold, and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined."
~~~
Yesterday, out of the blue (F)ariel popped up-after seven or eight years...I forget. How fitting, since she got me started on this blasted thing in the first place, and now a special guest appearance on the 1,000th. Last time I saw her she was a bright-eyed girl, looking to write short stories, or something like that.
Your mind drifts: short stories and fragments: is that all that is open to us in these late days?
For some, you guess, it's true. Maybe one in a thousand. If the moon doesn't shine on you, is it still the moon?
'Light from without would slowly reveal the light within...the white as a denser substance-some ghostly reminder of another place in which Rothko once said he could breathe and stretch his arms.'
Was thinking to myself (who else is there?), why does the word 'dark' crop up so much in your writing? I guess you need Camus's southern light, Nietzsche in Turin and all that. What is it, for Christ's sake, the moral quality of light, the traveling acres of sunlight. The constants that I look for are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being.I imagine a certain girl, who's probably a vampire in all truth, who craves my darkness in her, who couldn't give a fuck about the light.
"The morning light is gold, and pours in the eastern windows. But it is the shadow that is exciting, the light that cannot be defined."
~~~
Yesterday, out of the blue (F)ariel popped up-after seven or eight years...I forget. How fitting, since she got me started on this blasted thing in the first place, and now a special guest appearance on the 1,000th. Last time I saw her she was a bright-eyed girl, looking to write short stories, or something like that.
Your mind drifts: short stories and fragments: is that all that is open to us in these late days?
stories from the city, stories from the sea
Horses
"Here's another story.It tells how the Sun falls in love.
But before that, we hear how his light sees everything first:
in this case, brightening the bed where A__ lies.
She makes him fall in love...
He turns up in disguise, then discloses himself to her-you know?And so
overwhelmed by his radiance, ..she gives in. As you would.
But there's another girl, who also loves the Sun.
The other girl-the jealous one-
is changed into a tiny flower,..
turns her face forever, following the Sun."
The queen, not happy with that, demands another story...
At the pool, she's eaten up by desire and tries
to kiss him, but he's still too young to understand.
She retreats, watching him slip off his clothes and dive in.
Besides herself, she plunges after him, pulling
him under, taking him by force, and praying
to the gods that their bodies will never be parted
And so it was, like two trees grafted,
they were made one."
But the mythological is too superficial, has too much lightness. The Queen wanted to hear something real-just for once, even if they weren't his own words.
'The green leaf opens
and the leaf falls,
each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire
and grief is the price
we pay for love,
and the death of love
the fee of all desire.'
The light, whether we know it or not, never unifies in these late days; instead, it breaks and mourns, and wrecks whatever has a chance. The summer light rides the high tree tops like a horse, a dream that won't settle, but knows nothing of the dark time of the roots. And this southern light, which wasn't meant for me, became my fate. I think I'll die under it.
This place would be nowhere if you were here. Hard, hard though it is for you, you know gently: there's no return of lost time. If there was, we would be dark for one another.
Clear of myself, at last, I saw you, but you, like me, were riddled with light. We, who were made one by the gods, were parted, like two trees, or like the fish and the sea.
I am the Tigris without the fish
I am a fish without the Tigris.
"Here's another story.It tells how the Sun falls in love.
But before that, we hear how his light sees everything first:
in this case, brightening the bed where A__ lies.
She makes him fall in love...
He turns up in disguise, then discloses himself to her-you know?And so
overwhelmed by his radiance, ..she gives in. As you would.
But there's another girl, who also loves the Sun.
The other girl-the jealous one-
is changed into a tiny flower,..
turns her face forever, following the Sun."
The queen, not happy with that, demands another story...
At the pool, she's eaten up by desire and tries
to kiss him, but he's still too young to understand.
She retreats, watching him slip off his clothes and dive in.
Besides herself, she plunges after him, pulling
him under, taking him by force, and praying
to the gods that their bodies will never be parted
And so it was, like two trees grafted,
they were made one."
But the mythological is too superficial, has too much lightness. The Queen wanted to hear something real-just for once, even if they weren't his own words.
'The green leaf opens
and the leaf falls,
each breath is a flame
that gives in to fire
and grief is the price
we pay for love,
and the death of love
the fee of all desire.'
The light, whether we know it or not, never unifies in these late days; instead, it breaks and mourns, and wrecks whatever has a chance. The summer light rides the high tree tops like a horse, a dream that won't settle, but knows nothing of the dark time of the roots. And this southern light, which wasn't meant for me, became my fate. I think I'll die under it.
This place would be nowhere if you were here. Hard, hard though it is for you, you know gently: there's no return of lost time. If there was, we would be dark for one another.
Clear of myself, at last, I saw you, but you, like me, were riddled with light. We, who were made one by the gods, were parted, like two trees, or like the fish and the sea.
I am the Tigris without the fish
I am a fish without the Tigris.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Let england shake
PJ
If england were to die, what of it? Neither the walls of Lahore, nor the deserts of Arabia; neither Greek nor Jew. There is no place for the way I feel. But I thought I saw you, raven of my heart, feeding off my dead thoughts, so that I wouldn't remember anything, except for you.
This stored pattern of connections that never included you, though your presence haunted them all, and was maybe even prefigured in the slip of tongue, the faltering voice. There's no betrayal like the human voice. The shadowy underside of the mirror, the darkening hour in the glass. If this was england, then let england break.
My heart, on the move again, to a place I know or once knew. You can tell it's going to move before it moves.What gives? It waited, it waited blackly, it waited all this time for her, not a second longer than her arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia.
---quotes from Paula Fox, Richard Ford, and Denis Johnson.
(Apologies to those who left a comment on the previous post. For some odd reason they've disappeared. Quite fitting, I guess. Nothing lasts here.)
If england were to die, what of it? Neither the walls of Lahore, nor the deserts of Arabia; neither Greek nor Jew. There is no place for the way I feel. But I thought I saw you, raven of my heart, feeding off my dead thoughts, so that I wouldn't remember anything, except for you.
This stored pattern of connections that never included you, though your presence haunted them all, and was maybe even prefigured in the slip of tongue, the faltering voice. There's no betrayal like the human voice. The shadowy underside of the mirror, the darkening hour in the glass. If this was england, then let england break.
My heart, on the move again, to a place I know or once knew. You can tell it's going to move before it moves.What gives? It waited, it waited blackly, it waited all this time for her, not a second longer than her arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia.
---quotes from Paula Fox, Richard Ford, and Denis Johnson.
(Apologies to those who left a comment on the previous post. For some odd reason they've disappeared. Quite fitting, I guess. Nothing lasts here.)
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
How I write
Like everything else I do, haphazardly, between the acts, half-heartedly.
Repetitively. A certain chef speaking at a dinner table would always talk about a colleague as Chef so-and-so, thereby drawing attention to himself.
Your hand reaches out languidly for something to write with. Your arm dangling like a dead man's. The crows are awake and seemingly goading me in the half-dark. No pen or pencil to be found, only the jumbled up wires of an i-pod. Try to remember the colours: a red pen seen somewhere, a blue one...Sleep-walk through various rooms, deeper and deeper. Come back, write in the dark so as to not wake anyone.
In a dream, the last one, though repeated because by a superhuman effort I thwart it so that it ends before the subconscious mechanism has played out its part, I hear music blaring away from the radio downstairs. On the stairs I try to call out your name. May God protect us. But my words are stifled, my dry rasping voice of no use. I wake. My mouth is parched, and lips chapped. Too many walnuts the day before or some more general failure? In and out of sleep until I wake, startled, bemused.
My eyes are blurred as they try to focus, pick out some familiar object. The mind struggling to give shape to anything. You remember some basic dimension: 1X1X1.2. Is it morning yet? The call to prayer must have washed over me.
Put the pen down. Crow is silent. Crow is dead. Your hand reaches down and disappears, as if into some dense fog, misplacing the pen again. You look up at the window, the light appreciably better now, less thick, bettering. There's a kind of solace to be had in the fact that the stars are burnt out, have passed through you.
The first thing you see clearly is the wall clock, hanging lifelessly, slightly askew. Of fist importance, you think to yourself: determine the time. Is it four or five? Please God, let it be five. And if God wills it, then it will be so. Oriental hat, and all that.
Put your head down again like a schoolkid in the late afternoon, moments before the day is done ("heads on desk"). The warmth of one's own body, something quite simple. You were young. There R lies, in her red shalwar kameez, gloriously care-free, out like a drunk. During the day she struggles to say "how are you?" Is there anything else?
You walk across the lawn, past the empty library, stunned, dazed by too much sun. You're conscious of the small steps your feet are taking, as if on their own, shuffling steps like those of a Chinaman. The piece of paper you hold, like a mouse's tail, with forefinger and thumb, falls to the ground. Clutch at it, as if it mattered, as if the writing of the day's beginning would steer how the rest of time would unfold. Random words thrown against the chaos. What else could there be from the one with the falsely designated title, 'black sun'?
Repetitively. A certain chef speaking at a dinner table would always talk about a colleague as Chef so-and-so, thereby drawing attention to himself.
Your hand reaches out languidly for something to write with. Your arm dangling like a dead man's. The crows are awake and seemingly goading me in the half-dark. No pen or pencil to be found, only the jumbled up wires of an i-pod. Try to remember the colours: a red pen seen somewhere, a blue one...Sleep-walk through various rooms, deeper and deeper. Come back, write in the dark so as to not wake anyone.
In a dream, the last one, though repeated because by a superhuman effort I thwart it so that it ends before the subconscious mechanism has played out its part, I hear music blaring away from the radio downstairs. On the stairs I try to call out your name. May God protect us. But my words are stifled, my dry rasping voice of no use. I wake. My mouth is parched, and lips chapped. Too many walnuts the day before or some more general failure? In and out of sleep until I wake, startled, bemused.
My eyes are blurred as they try to focus, pick out some familiar object. The mind struggling to give shape to anything. You remember some basic dimension: 1X1X1.2. Is it morning yet? The call to prayer must have washed over me.
Put the pen down. Crow is silent. Crow is dead. Your hand reaches down and disappears, as if into some dense fog, misplacing the pen again. You look up at the window, the light appreciably better now, less thick, bettering. There's a kind of solace to be had in the fact that the stars are burnt out, have passed through you.
The first thing you see clearly is the wall clock, hanging lifelessly, slightly askew. Of fist importance, you think to yourself: determine the time. Is it four or five? Please God, let it be five. And if God wills it, then it will be so. Oriental hat, and all that.
Put your head down again like a schoolkid in the late afternoon, moments before the day is done ("heads on desk"). The warmth of one's own body, something quite simple. You were young. There R lies, in her red shalwar kameez, gloriously care-free, out like a drunk. During the day she struggles to say "how are you?" Is there anything else?
You walk across the lawn, past the empty library, stunned, dazed by too much sun. You're conscious of the small steps your feet are taking, as if on their own, shuffling steps like those of a Chinaman. The piece of paper you hold, like a mouse's tail, with forefinger and thumb, falls to the ground. Clutch at it, as if it mattered, as if the writing of the day's beginning would steer how the rest of time would unfold. Random words thrown against the chaos. What else could there be from the one with the falsely designated title, 'black sun'?
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