'black gnostic speculations'

There's never been much sympathy towards the arid, scholastic, or puritanical tendencies in Islam in the land of the pure. Until recently, that is. Tablighis and Deobandis, yes, of course; but also growing numbers of the middle and upper classes are buying into a very narrow version, it seems. These are the followers of t.v. evangelicals or that insidious woman and her 'cells' that are multiplying and flourishing everywhere. Like ancient Christians in the catacombs, small groups of pious people trying to make sense of their lives in a hostile and rapidly changing world. The end of times, conspiracies, moral degeneracy, a return to the simple, plain truth of the Qur'an-as if anyone could just pick it up and understand it without any Arabic, sense of historical context, or knowledge of the traditions of interpretation. God save us from the intrigues of women!

[that was said tongue-in-cheek, in case you're new here]

And such changes in religious expression are hardly ever, you think, fuelled by theological developments or an engagement with ideas. Rather, they are the product of socio-economic changes (internal migration and urbanization, for example) or reactions to political events (the Afghan war, Saudi funding, etc.). Gellner was surely right here: the 'Protestant' strain as the future, especially since it was, for him, the orthodox tradition in Islam. Which makes you wonder what's going to happen to the traditionally eclectic, looser traditions. Not that you care too much for them either-from a personal point of view- except insofar as they contribute to a diversity of opinions and act as a bulwark against the narrowing down of viewpoints and the mind-numbing simplicities of the semi-literate religious folk.

Of course, I've got nothing against religious people per se-as long as they mind their own business (which is not very often) but the atheists aren't much better, being so very tiresome and predictable. Paganism or polytheism, then? (will you ever get round to reading Hume?)

'Those who love life do not read'. Could it also be said that those who love life do not 'do' religion? Or maybe they're already religious in a different sense?

"Finding a sudden reserve of perfection or inspiration inside oneself went hand in hand with the need for a God with whom one could be alone: a God whose 'charge', as it were, had remained concentrated and personal, rather than diffused in benign but profoundly impersonal ministrations to the universe at large...

Paganism mobilised feelings for sacred things-for ancient rites, for statues, for oracles, for vast beloved temples."

[God, bet you didn't think a wahabi would ever write those lines and feel some sympathy for them!]

aside: Jim Ede on HGB (via Peter Fuller)..."a continuing way of life..in which stray objects , stones, glass, pictures, sculpture in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognize if we are not to be swamped by all that is rapidly opening up before us."

The world is not with us enough.

---Denise.

But, yes, stray objects: Van Gogh's shoes, his pipe. The end of symbolism ? (Guenon)

"..the glare of the crude monotheism of the Christians drained away the rainbow articulations of invisible and visible gods, by which it was necessary that the beauty of the One should pass to mortal eyes...

Black gnostic speculations, Christian monotheism, later Christian asceticism threatened to leave a man living in a world drained of meaning...

The pagan philosophers upheld the 'gestures charged with soul' of traditional sacrifice..[they] emphasised the 'chain' of beings, the 'interweaving', the 'intermingling', that linked man to his awesome source."

The Museum of childhood

Perhaps the highlight, for me, was this: leotard

Gus Wood's booth (1912-1962). Punch and Judy. Slapstick, a 16 th century Italian tradition? A doll's house from Nuremberg, 1673. The very word 'Nuremberg' has lost all its innocence, though.

Makes you think just how impoverished an education most children receive; without music, art, history, languages, what is there but the dulling of sensitivities with the an information overload, the darkening of minds with books? The disciplined mind, the imaginative mind, the ethical mind (Gardener). Well, yes, but one needs to ditch the emphasis on 'mind'...intelligence is better than none, but intelligence without innocence or a sense of humour is a frightful thing.

Poussin on at the Dulwich picture gallery but don't think I'll be able to make the trek. Must find/buy Anthony Blunt's book one of these days (or maybe T.J.Clark's, even though he's some sort of Marxist).

JCO on HPL. Next post, promise. Thoroughly depressing, though. Ubo, in his old, non-mystical, pragmatic sort of way said: why are you reading about that 'loser'...tell me a story about a winner, a fighter. He's got a point: someone who lives on 30 cents a day and eats "spoiled food" does sound rather desperate. As the days grow shorter, such gothic/gnostic musings appeal less and less. Or maybe it's because I'm growing older.

After a few chapters of Hans Jonas' book you become convinced that this is just the same old story repeating itself, detail after monotonous detail. The lack of confidence in reason, society, language; alienation from oneself, estrangement from one's family, disillusionment with the times one is living in...all smacks of the most terrible sort of narcissism: 'I am the centre of the world'. De Waal's worldly, easy-going humanism seems a million miles away.

the far right

This was a provocative piece by Goodhart from a few years back. Reviewed an awful piece by some Muslim conservative for him and then had a bit of an argument with him soon after. "Radio silence", as he called it, followed. Boiled down to this: he thought I should be supporting the English cricket team. What a tosser! The reason: the English team had a few Pakistani and Indian-origin players at the time and since I supposedly believed in diversity, then it followed...

Well, first things first: those players were terrible/mediocre. Secondly, The English team as a whole plays in such a boring and lacklustre way that to support such a team would go against my principle of favouring teams (in cricket or football) with flair and panache. Thirdly, cricket is not politics. But the point I made, and the one that really got him going was this: the Pakistani team was made up of a collection of individuals from a far more diverse background. Class, for instance. That was something he didn't want to talk about (partly, I suspect, because he either knew nothing about such distinctions or didn't care much for them even if he did). Also, at the time the team had a Christian and a Hindu playing for them, so even on his narrow terms they were about par (especially if one considers how small a minority they form).

Behind all of those rather unpleasant exchanges was, on his part, I fear, the puzzlement over having a rational discussion with someone who you disagree with. In the final analysis it's quite discomforting not having to deal with a lackey or a raving lunatic, a house-n__, or a field-n__. Far, far easier to put people you don't like-Jews, Muslims, etc. in a box.

~~~

Listening to the fag end of a discussion on the radio about the rise of the far-right. What on earth has happened to the Dutch, for example? Or the Danes? Halal food. That's what politics has come down to, I guess. The crisis of "European values" brought on by a few burkas and chicken tikkas! Populism and conservative reactions. Since when has identity been political!? Well, probably from quite an early on (as Goodhart's very interesting article indicates). The nation-state is precisely that: the bringing together of 'the people' and the state. Of course, that question has always been a contentious one: who, exactly are the people? Not the poor and not women (for a long time). Certainly not black people or the Red Man either. More radically: is it possible to exist (politically) without being inscribed into the history, projects, archives, 'subjectivizations' of the state: non-representable citizens, rebel-citizens? A community of saints (or 'bastards')

Augsburg: 1555.

Which is not to say that there aren't other trajectories within that political tradition or that the very notion of the nation might not alter as economic changes take place (globalisation, say) or as cultures become more intertwined, or as we realise the commonality of our problems (eg. the environment).

~~~

Well, wanted to jot down a few notes made on H.P. Lovecraft, that nasty piece of work, but I guess that will have to hold 'till morning.

And this on the day that I visited the wonderful museum of childhood. Ho hum.

The Feathered Sun

One of the four books I keep in a thick piece of cloth and take out now and again, just to look at the images: The Feathered Sun (Schuon); The Meaning of Icons (Lossky and Ouspensky); Calligraphy (Martin Lings); and Moorish Spain (Titus Burckhardt).

The lack of idle chatter. Concentration. Commitment. Community. Stoicism. The love of "old times", of the elders.

Of course the westerns loved to play up the so-called "rugged individualism" of the settlers. And who knows, maybe there's a grain of truth to that. But surely a lonely individualism based on destruction and hatred can't be compared to an individualism that flourishes in, is nurtured by, a settled pattern of life, a life that thinks of earth as "divine" because it was prior to the creation of Man. (This notion of animals being "communities like us" finds resonance in some Islamic traditions).

But no matter what, the westerns couldn't but help, even if subconsciously, bear witness to the courage of the Red Man and the often duplicitous nature of the settlers. This isn't a political point (politics doesn't really interest you). The sheer irony, though, of calling the attack on OBL operation Geronimo. As every kid growing up in my time would know -and probably from before as well-to shout Geronimo! whilst doing some daring act, or making a charge for it was, even when we were only dimly aware of it, a sign of being able to put our weaker selves to one side in order to become more than ourselves.

One Feather:

"What can never be taken from a man is his upbringing; it can neither be taken away nor sold. Everyone must discipline his character and shape his personality. If one lets oneself go, one falls and must bear the responsibility for it. "

a thousand things to take care of

"Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember certain afternoons of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

---Bowles.

A thousand books to read and not enough time. Dead Souls, for instance. A thousand places to see, waiting like so any blank postcards to be filled in. The infinity of people not yet met. This is how life in the city will break you, where every moment is a lost moment, and every glance slips away unrecognized, the image broken. There's too much light in this month by far. We float between the days, losing track. Free, weightless being; every place losing its specificity. Light years stretching out as far as the eye can see.

At Valentine's park a solitary person lying on his stomach reads a book, in a secluded corner, whilst the few remaining white people around sit in front of the live music with their beers, as if they were witness to the playing out the final days on their deck chairs. The days are numbered and yet how timeless it all seems! This summer, this heat, this light, eternally the same; only the players shift positions: yes, it's true, perhaps there are fewer dogs, but apart from that we repeat the same few lines to each other, skirt around the same fears with our cliches. Some things cannot be looked at directly. The only small redemptive rituals left open to us, as old as time itself. The gold of sun reminding us that Arcadia was never the thing.

It's like watching one's own life go by. Outside, the constant hum of the traffic is strangely reassuring, deeply familiar. People sit here half pissed, sun burnt, or unnoticed under leafy shade. A life informed by the memory of the sea; the quick of the mind gone, the slow flame of regret narrowing us down. Close by, an Iranian woman with big Sofia Loren glasses, all in brown, the works, sits down in this little oasis in the East End.

Here we all are, without any of our personal things, not even any books, quite naked to ourselves, with just this childish memory of some long forgotten innocence to cherish, when one was two. There's much work to be done, a thousand things in the soul to be taken care of, and yet we stand here paralysed, blinded and heavy-hearted, stunned by so much sun.

The Informed Heart

It is easy to look at Weimar, with its seductive decadence and alluring freedoms, and feed our guilty anxiety that these very freedoms must inevitably lead to reaction-one accompanied by a search for a mythical moral purity.

But the real lesson of Weimar and Cabaret..may be that the ultimately depraving seductions are those of the right. Money, power and those simple solutions that lend themselves so well to propaganda...To defend a liberal democracy and insist on civil society against the easy moral hatreds of ideologues may be difficult. But it is essential. Once the press is curbed, once satire and laughter are banned and censorship has set in, it's too late.

---Lisa Appignanesi.

A fascinating book which I realise, to my horror, I never actually read to the end. Even worse: discovered that I'd left huge chunks out of Bettelheim's The Informed Heart; poor reading habits means you tried to eke out the ideas from the text whilst ignoring the actual lives, the stories, the anecdotes that were at its heart. But how else can one read anything of those lives and of those times? If you ever had the time you'd pick up Willet's book. But there is no time.

Peter Fuller: Ruskin and Morris: conservative radical and radical conservative. That appeals to you, of course. And for all the dark seduction of uninhibited freedom there's the niggling concern that life is also about finding or imposing a structure on anarchy, chaos ('law-lines': Dudley Young). Can there be freedom without constraints, resistances, the pull to the north of the future, or the weight of the past? Can there be creativity without Tradition, the deeply familiar, the repeated themes and images (the potter, aware that he's participating in a practice that is as old as humanity itself); preferences ordered or arranged by reason or values. And is there not a danger that for an unmoored person, someone who lacks roots, his mind can veer off into all sorts of fantastical illusions and directions? The unbounded imagination of the addict, the gambler, becomes 'hooked', 'fixated' in another way, becomes mechanical, like pornography...

In late capitalism, liquid modernity, is there the distinct possibility that all this freedom is morphing into the banal? Does the limitless extension of choice (or the promise of it) end up in so many trivial choices, and therefore in the destruction of our experience of responsible choice itself?

Yes, I guess so. But there's no going back-or all steps back are false ones. What is left, then? Disenchantment, for sure, and what Augustine would call a "lonely freedom". But if one is to err, then better that it should be on the side of freedom. And despite all the dark forebodings from the prophets of gloom, people hold on to their core values, find them expressed in ever-new ways. And let us not forget that most of the horrors of the last century have come from those not on the side of freedom but, rather, from those who have been able to organize violence: the state, institutional religion...

anti-semitism

When he was a boy, Freud's father told him how a Viennese Gentile had knocked his hat off and ordered him off the pavement. "What did you do?" asked Freud. "I stepped into the gutter and picked it up" he replied.

Was reading de Waal's account of anti-semitism in Paris and Vienna in the 19th century. What struck me was how terribly ordinary it all was, as if it humiliation was if not quite routine, then at least something that could be expected to occur at any time, just simmering under the surface of the fake civility that was mistaken for the bonds of society, ready to boil up at the drop of a hat. Of course, there are levels of stupidity and thoughtlessness, there's years of ideology, myths, jokes, insidious undercurrents, and crucially there's the institutional support or the turning of a blind eye: Foucault: state racism.

And all this reminded you of your own childhood, of the sneaking suspicion that lurking behind the corner was someone ready to shout at you or chase you (of course, the fact that you had been chased by a gang of kids, a pack of wolves, didn't help). Later, you read that Europe hadn't been able to overcome its intense 'race consciousness' -and you still think that there's some truth to that, despite all the progress made. Which is why you baulk at the word 'Englishness'.

What did you do? Not, what did you do to deserve that, the victim's question But: what did you do, how did you cope?

And then I thought to myself: just how many people have faced such a ridiculous situation? Black people, the Red Man, the colonised, the poor, women. Is the history of the world nothing but a stepping into the gutter? Of course, at times it makes sense to run (which is what I did!). And yet there's something pragmatic but also profound, and deeply human about Freud's father's response. As if to say, this crooked timber of humanity will always be with us; one must sometimes stoop, bend, and retrieve what was yours.

It is said that the next world will be exactly the same as this one except that a few objects will be slightly displaced. Like a hat, that will then firmly rest on the head of its owner, only to be removed when one enters one's own home...

~~~

Of course, such gloomy thoughts are soon dissipated; you sit on a bench in a leafy park, reading, and eating a crusty roll (Gorgonzola and lettuce, if you must know), walk, stride for stride, with a beautiful girl until she suddenly turns down another street, visit three or four old bookshops searching out Jesus's Son...

"I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther."

as it were

"I think today of burning glass; these clear green trees standing in the deep grass, covered with white flowers, from some happier time...

I had, fleetingly, this morning, a sense of the world, one's life, one's friends and lovers as a given. Here it all is, comprehensible, lovely, a sort of paradise. That this will be taken as swiftly as it is given is difficult to remember."

---John Cheever.

Is there such thing as a muslim sensibility? Probably not, but if there was it would be a kind of mellow materialism, not a rigorous asceticism, one that is fully attentive to the beauty of the world without giving in to hedonism or a glitzy sensuality. To know how to give each thing its proper due, not in an overly formal way, but from the inside, as it were. Not a narrowing down of the ego (khudi) but a deepening of it, an enlargement of one's capacity to connect. Already 'ego', 'mind' are the wrong words: the person..now, that's the thing, this inescapable jumble of contradictions!

The Red Man would say: intelligence without character is not really intelligence. And what is character but the groundwork of our being, the formation of habits of right action, clear thinking, disciplined freedom, all nurtured by memory, desire, other people. There is no determinate self without other people: I-we. A life held in common; a common life, commonplace. Each person is a new perspective on a given world, is part and parcel of revelation itself. For is it not written: the creation of a single soul is like the creation of the universe?

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.

--Hannah A.

~~~

There are many journeys made in the fading light of mid-morning; the carriages half-empty, the world, like your mind, elsewhere. The rain pelting down at an angle, the red paint peeling away to reveal an indifferent grey. The painted number somewhat familiar, numbers announcing our arrivals and departures now. At a stand still at Stratford, the engines still growling like a crouching beast, the doors flung open, full of ambiguity. Yesterday's papers still littering the dirty seats. Names and loves forgotten. Here we are, on our predestined paths, indifferently floating above all haste, each person isolated in his own suspended dream. Down the sloping tunnel, the intermittent light flashing across our faces, jolting us into recognition. When we emerge, where shall we be? As we were, as it were?

Are you looking for me?

I am in the next seat.

My shoulder is against yours.

---Kabir (Robert Bly).

Light Years

(With thanks to Bob and Luke).

What is it about the juxtaposition of unearthly music and the scenes of ordinary life on earth? (Bach, in Solaris).

Sun destroys

The interest of what's happening in the shade...

and none

Thought of the others they would never meet

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.

I thought of London spread out in the sun,

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.

---Larkin.

There's a certain light in the south, that opens you up, softens the hands, makes them more accepting; relates each face to another, a word or a style of thought to a landscape; it aims to unify a life: the material a reflection of the spiritual; it reminds you of the first man, the earth-dweller, whose life was full of loss and appearances, home-comings, ritual breaking-ups, ceremonies of innocence.

And there is this uncertain northern light as well, straining, harsh, individuating, that suddenly bursts through the deep grey clouds, revealing rare earth, degrees of longing, telling us how estranged we've become from one another. This light of the abstract mind, precise but haphazard. This sea-light, the blue that escapes us, reminds of us other places and other times, of the light years separating us from the beloved.

"There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown."

---Flaubert.

Last week a dear uncle said: we're living in times when each bough, each branch, doesn't know what's happening on the other side of the tree. Is it so very different for human beings, for a single human being?

This accumulation of glances, turns of phrase, gestures, inflections, the thick and warm darkness of the past intuitively known that holds us together, like a single thread that shows up now and then in patches; the "patchwork heart" with its own territories, distinct laws. Our minds: a kind of play between shadow and light. Your hands a witness to what you are or have become, the self-revealing gestures of the soul, of a life lived underground. These timeless forms taking shape, linking us across generations...a hundred, a thousand years have passed and yet for all man's progress we remain strangers to ourselves. These solid, unknown selves. Is it me? Is it you? The rain in our lives; clay gapes; clay agape.

Take any man

Walking on a road

Alone in his coat

He is a world

No one knows

And to himself

Unknown

Yet, when he wanders most

It is his own way, certain

As spheres astronomers note

In their familiar motion.

---Menashe.

Champignon

Notes from Geoff Dyer:

'People living out their lives in obscurity'

'The site and generator of universal gestures'

'Short distances and definite places' (Auden)

'Those who lack things are defined most conspicuously by what they own'

..'hands are the medium of thought, figuring. The knowledge-and ignorance-of generations is in the hands of the Cornett [family]'

In India: 'The physical everywhere bore the imprint of the spiritual'

'He photographed all sleepers as if they were the beloved'

'He saw his life refracted through the prism of other people's words. It was another way of not being noticed, of revealing himself in terms of what he saw and read'

Auden: 'The man or woman who in any walk of life...who manages to acquire and preserve a face of his own'

根付

Roots, attachments. The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.The things passed on from one generation to another, lovingly, with care; human chains, the rituals and gestures that bind, more than words can say, a common inheritance, even for those without title. The loops of time seemingly endless, but the shape of hands remarkably the same, revealing hidden affinities of the soul.

The door was open and the house was dark.

~~~

You're reading stuff you never thought you'd even pick up: JCO's memoirs; De Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes; Cheever's Journals. There you sit, quite clinical with your blunted lead pencil, trying to dissect someone's life, distill the parts you like into a choice phrase here or there. De Waal works, somehow. Leads you to Primo Levi and the Wrench. If the Periodic Table is anything to go by then I must head down to Judd or Skoob tomorrow.

~~~

What is art? Bizarre to think that the National had a whole stack of icons lying in its basement, as if to say: not quite art, or not quite western enough. Lacks the drama and the psychological dimension that one usually associates with art. But calligraphy too has suffered the same fate: respectable, one dare says, but a minor art nevertheless. And what of miniatures-which bore you to death? Too small in scale to be significant, to suggest the vagaries of human emotion, or the intellect struggling with the will? Or Kenneth Clark on the Polynesians: a beautiful idyll, but there's no Rembrandt. Art should suggest the universal but not, perhaps, something that is so unchanging. And the other half has to be steeped in contingency...

'This idea of the miniature was often held as the reason that Japanese art seemed to lack ambition. They were brilliant at the laborious fashioning of rapid feeling, but fell down when it came to the grander feelings of tragedy and awe.'

citations: Iris M., Seamus Heaney, Edmund De Waal.

p.s. Hmm...makes me wonder about the stylized forms of erotica as well (Shunga) versus the rather naff ones in the west.

the right angle (or geometries of the soul)

What is the right angle to see you-or see oneself, if you like distinctions? Into them. A certain approach, a certain distancing. You must remember or do you forget yourself? Not obtuse but the clear radiant lines that last forever. Acute. If you say so. He stood at a slight angle to the universe...and became invisible. She, quite plane; he, looking down on her, like a "vertical man". At first she seemed quite yielding, the full spectrum of humanity, her undefinable mystery brought to an abrupt focus by his shadow. The narrowness of his outlook redeemed by the unfolding of the horizontal line, which is to say time. Locked together they were, joined at the hip, twins refracted. Everything hinges on a simple point. The circle becomes square, the point a line.

But are the lines a coming together or a falling apart, the slow drift of the world? From the neutral's perspective they are infinitely different, existing in their own world without each other, something of the mirror-like quality of parallel lines remaining with them, like a memory. From the outside the right angle is perfection. But from the inside, that blank inside space, there is a kind of freedom from such conceptualisations. The right angle is not an intellectual construct, and even less is it about orthodoxy and heresy. An emotion, a fundamental gesture, that creates a living, breathing space. And though all other angles are a variation of, a falling away from the right angle, they are contained within it's loving embrace.

Tangent:

I will touch you once

And it will only be in passing

No use calling me back

No use reminding

You will have plenty of time

To rehearse and remember

This moment,

To convince yourself

We'll never part.

on a small scale

In the small room the books have been re-arranged, thrown next together randomly by the swami. Not as if the previous order was any more satisfying. Chance determinations. They've been lugged here, heaped unceremoniously on top of one another, the rituals of orthodoxy quite foreign to you as a matter of right. Books ready to be carted off. You imagine this room at night, words in the dark. The white shelves tired, sagging and sighing under the weight. There's less and less space to move about in here-especially when little R drifts by, poking her nose around. (Most of the day she's pretty content chasing dogs and walking in and out of small ditches and holes. This repetitiveness in human nature, for what purpose?)

By day the little one often repeats the words that she's learned to herself, fearful that she'll forget them. Store them up, re-arrange the words. But she, like a mystic, doesn't tie them too closely to things. Lots of things can be "clocks", even though they don't tell the time.

A random list of books, at eye-level: Stendhal, The Tempest, The Tao of Physics, Murakami, Schuon's To Have a Centre, Piper, Genet's Funeral Rites. What is remembered? Probably very little. Books ain't the thing. This painful storing up of alibis against reality.

Looking for the lost Badiou or even the fabled copy of Peter Brown's wonderful Making of Late Antiquity you come across your lost copy of Menashe's Collected Poems. The strangest of things: small-scale wordings, constructions, the simplest of words, that fold outwards. A stone. A pond. Small ripples that never leave but turn back, time and again, to discover a pattern that was always there. A common word whose literalness breaks established meanings with a second-take. There's a path, that only becomes a path once one has walked it. And then it seems as if it was always there, like a hole in our lives, that we step around but can't avoid.

Zen

"The vortex was the expression of Turner's deep pessimism for he thought of humanity as doomed to a senseless round, which ultimately sucked man to his fate..."

When you think of Poussin or Bach you think of a pure, architectural order, or the intellect and proportionality, of a passive kind of beauty.

"Colour appeals to the senses and not to reason or the sense of duty." Colour was the new 'god' (Van Gogh?)

"The marvellous transitions of colour-all the way from blue to gold-which had become Turner's private language...

A hatred of intellectual pretension so strong that he spoke only in simple and often ungrammatical language..."

Tree: an immediate experience. Zen. A moment if illumination after a period of patience, discipline, reticence; like Rothko: the experience of the pre-world, a flash, an afterglow. The painter of white and the painter of black are not too dissimilar. The irruption of the strange into the deeply familiar. Before words or thought come to fuse with the "I", for these stand on the other side of 'oneness'. Pure emotion, that of the desert-soul, clarified, heightened to such an intensity that it opens up even whilst remaining a flat plane, a horizon (Spengler on Russia, the "cavern"). Dimensions are not important (2X2, for Turner). Not abstraction, nor a negation of humanity; rather, a perspective that places human beings at the centre...

Ruskin on Turner: " There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead leaf..the lake is not blue but grey in mist, passing into deep shadow...a few dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower, scarcely seen-all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in turner's entire drawings."

On the borders of dreaming and waking consciousness, the merging of order with sensuousness.

A red poppy, she said. For remembering. For forgetting. Without immediate experience what else was there but time to kill? It seemed to last only a moment but was actually a lifetime. The spontaneous, immediate experience was in reality the accumulation and condensation of so many desires and memories. All that was human was here. The sudden splash of paint was a self-revealing gesture of the soul.

What is red?

She pointed, instinctively. Red is the ideal, an idea of perfection that one only approaches, never reaches; red is a set of tasks undertaken without too much questioning. From then on he saw red everywhere...

---citations: Kenneth Clark.

the dream within the dream

In late paintings like Te Rerioa there is no telling where the dream begins and ends, each level of signification-the dream and the woman dreaming-is contained in the space of the picture. There is no time-or sound-in this or any of the Tahitian paintings. The horseman in the background is so still he might as well be a figure in a canvas hanging on the walls as a scene glimpsed beyond them."
---Geoff Dyer.

Northern light: sharp, piercing, changing, always full of longing and absences. Lawrence: the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed...

Is there something too essentializing in this: the eternal east, the eternal feminine? The lack of distinctions: between humanity and nature, dream and reality, inside and outside; between the first days of mankind and the last days. A profound oneness of mind and body, or a dreamy childishness?

the ancient sway of the world

First thing you think of: how ancient England is. Those pragmatic heads, devoid of any spiritual concerns; the language plain and square; those faces, repeated every two or three generations, as if nature only had a limited repertoire of possibilities. The names: solid, matter-of-fact; the places, dark and unredeemed, just as they've always been. Eternal summer, comes around again, unimaginably so. Warmth on the back, profound and reassuring, beer sloshing in thick glasses, hands that would know...

Well, not quite the first. At the airport you see a beautiful woman, dark haired, an intelligent and compassionate face (Mr. Heinz was right in this respect, after all). And they're the strangest of places, airports: people crossing each other's paths, barely noticing one another...just the most furtive of glances, a tentative finger to the lips ("what if"..) and then everyone moves on, back.

On the way home, the clouds radiant, the light full and peaceful, so that everything seemed to be swimming in its brilliance; past St. Mary's and the leafy park, the gravestones old and weather-worn, slumbering in the green shade. People walking in this high light seem somewhat unreal, as if this day and this day alone defined them, or as if a dense fog had suddenly lifted and one could now, for the first time, clearly see where one was going. The late flaring of the sun, the golden light relating and revealing each face to another. Past another church in the east, with the words 'Alive and Kicking' written in huge letters on the front. What next, 'Rapping with MC God'?

Down Euston road, a beautiful woman striding past you, her hips swaying like an Egyptian. And your first thought (well, not quite your first one!)...you only see individuals here. Yes, that much abused word. But better to burn with one's own 'lights', than with those of another's vision. The coming community will need a deeper sense of the individual, one that underpins a far more profound sense of the 'we' than hitherto produced by the state or religion with their army of clones and clowns.

"Being able to read means being able to change yourself more effectively, ..it means being being able to see yourself differently and to empathise with others more fully. That is why literacy and democracy go together."
---Rowan Williams.

You persist with JCO, despite your instincts and reservations. Quite simply because it's written with such directness and honesty (and craft, of course...candidness without dexterity is boring). The odd line here and there strikes you:

"Without meaning, the world is things, and these things multiplied to an infinity."

or, Pascal: "The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever. "

You don't believe that, not for a second. The ancient sway of the world; things and people return; we take delight in beholding familiar faces, seen in a new light, one that is as deep as the images produced by memory, that are remembered by heart.


‎"Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids' games, superstitions, habitats. They're witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical....Here are wild organisms' hues, habits, habitats, histories, and humans' histories and curiosity, too. It's not stretching meanings to say that the vernacular lexicon is part of the ecosystem, a living and growing web which links us with all other species."
---R. Mabey.

the devil

The devil was a word forgotten between humans, was someone who had been out of sorts with himself, on the wrong path from the start. He stammered when he spoke your name, was stunned into an awareness of distinctions, duality, of all that he wasn't and all that he couldn't be. He tramped on the streets, never knowing why; looked at the display of books in the windows but saw only the pale glimmer of faces, the frailty of the human mind. A line, a faint grey line of beauty.

He tried to recall...what? Nothing in particular. A time when he'd been happy, perhaps. Or something that had been said. He achieved a kind of pure inwardness, and the world became a desert, the high sun burning his face, making his eyes narrow, his face sting. An hour, an age seemed to pass. He'd lost all sense of time. He let it go, and felt himself fall even further.

The First Man

"...I realized that there is a fatality in human natures..."

"I've learned less about people, since their destiny interests me more than their reactions, and destinies tend to repeat each other."

"Clumsiness and disorder reveal too much of the secrets closest to our hearts; we also betray them through too careful a disguise."

"For being consists of being able to do everything at the same time...the great and simple images in whose presence his heart was first opened."

The first man, in the last light; remembering the first light, he became the last man. The light everywhere around you, and yet your love of bare interiors, no sign of your presence.

At the time of Judgement it is said that the unbelievers will ask for another day, another hour, to make amends, to change what has come to pass, as if we could live in all times. "If I had another day I'd be true to myself, and then return". But this will be denied them. Is it so very different for the believers? If you had another hour in the presence of loved ones, would you leave? What is destiny but a return to our origins? Everything will be the same, and everything will be different. Like a broken circle.

no more words

People who are very talkative are so full of themselves, so in love with themselves; the same is true for people who are very quiet. What is it that allows the self to be broken, to not think in terms of of, but in ways for?

you gave me a mirror,
so that when I looked at myself
I would think of you.
(after Rumi).

I don't have much else to say, and what difference would it make anyway. Words are not the thing. There were words spoken at the right time, in the right manner, and there were words that were lost, misplaced. In our haste we see everything in its contingent nature, not letting anything rest, take root, come to fruition.

At the right angle to each other there is no more room for words. But this second silence is a kinder space, one in which we see our thinner faces, as if we were looking back, with time on our hands, our names still a mystery to one another, the hours, the days, still wide and pale.

.

There was truth in the first moment; and truth in the last. In both, I found your silence.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart.

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
---Robert Frost.

In the last moment there is a revelation of what we are. Already, to say 'we' is to move beyond the circle and to be at one with it. To look out for you. I saw a face, and all of humanity was there; you saw a crow...But the existence of the image at the end implies it was always there. Wouldn't you agree, Roxana? The last moment is also a beginning...

The circle of our lives: to some appears full, to others empty. Some see this as life, others as death.The whole of truth contained in a full stop. There are no distinctions, and there is no knowing how things will turn out. In love, what is 'inner' and what is 'outer'?

Friend, we are meant
For each other...
Let's cohabit,
Mindful of all we share
---Guillevic.

(link to Guillevic courtesy of P. Joris, at nomadics)

In praise of folly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grotesque realism:

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

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

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

Folly: St. Paul? The world's seriousness...asceticism, like worldliness, is far too serious a matter. Is there, then, a 'proper' love of the world?

What sense is there in a 'sense of humour'?

Shikast

Our heart has its home in journeying,
but one does not know where its wish will lead it in the end.
---Mir Dard.


a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy..and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! ...Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
---Shakespeare (forgive me, dougal!)

The drawn out look, the withered flesh, the face, finally, fully formed, as if God were judging it for signs, or some revelation of inner trust. The defeated look, where once there was a sparkle and glimmer. How we live is what we are. There's no escaping it. This is life, and this is love.

Not the restless energy (Durer, say) or the quiet, sober, personal piety and devotion of an earlier age. What we see here is similar to his 'Dead Christ', a world without salvation, time unredeemed. From now on western man-which is to say modern men and women-must live on without consolation, must overcome his core tiredness, come to terms with finitude, his own brokenness.

Resignation, fatigue, weariness etched on his face. The world is too much with us. Asceticism is not a solution. But at the end, as at the beginning, there is an opening.

I am not the sound of the blossom's melody,
I am the sound of my own breaking.
---Ghalib.

the falling of the old wall means the wall will be renewed.

moon-whale

(With thanks to Debbie for sharing this. More of her photos can be seen here)

Their music is immense
Each note hundreds of years long
Each complete tune a moon-age

So they sing to each other unending songs
As unmoving they move their immovable masses

Their closed eyes ecstatic.

---Ted Hughes.

The sea, like our lives, dark and light; it will rain and it will not rain. You carried with you keys, for different rooms and different houses. Moving from one room to another silently, reimagining some sort of habitation, warmth, loss, lies, the stories that will be fabricated, binding generations. I will leave a coin under the cupboard, in the dark and the dust, so that something of mine grows old. What moves the heart, except this unending song that falls, like rain, and not like rain?

Walk out into the sun's dying shadows, cast on blank walls and blank faces with perfect, symmetric equality-the sign of our forgetfulness; shield your eyes from the low-angled flickering light, bright like a knife. These, the last days, were like the first in their mystery, and this house of mine, vast and incomprehensible as the sea, this house like a creaking raft in the sea, an empty shell. The vanity of our lives. To think of belonging, and possessing, of the even flow of time, when in reality only a tent of scattered stars. We drift, we drift, without anchor, points of light, full of heavy songs, songs of longing for the moon.

taiko-bashi

Why is it that when young children first learn to walk, they also want to walk in circles, to topple the adults! My head is spinning from little R, who simply won' t sit down in one place...

At the Chinese restaurant, appropriately named Yum!, She insisted that I walk her over the small half-drum wooden bridge again and again. What is it, R, it's only a bridge!

"But no, it helps us get from Here to There! How can we live without them?!"

"Oh, most of us get on by quite satisfactorily, I'll have you know."

"Oh, please, not another one of your lectures! Come, give me your hand..."

And so we crossed the bridge together, again and again until R looked tired, and I thought that that was a kind of victory over her, and that we could at last return to the world of polite conversation, rituals, staring out of windows, noticing our own pale, half-formed reflections on the cold windowpanes. But she just stood there, perplexed, not quite ready to talk to other children, and strangely quiet, startled into awareness, thoughtful, the way she becomes just before she starts to sleep and dream.

"What is it now, little one? Are you bored with the bridge now?"

"Ha! What a silly thing to say," she said, laughing back at me."No, it's just that for a second I forgot which place was 'here', and which was 'there'. "

And so it is, that children are always looking for open ways, paths that never narrow but sweep you into new vistas; this remarkable ability to bridge distances, to forget distinctions, to think that as long as you are holding someone's hand you can find a place that grown-ups only see in their dreams.

~~~

"The taiko-bashi, symbolizing one's departure from the world of reality. In the Edo period, a bridge was usually situated ...to mark the dividing point between this world and higan (the other world). People crossing the bridge became conscious of entering an extraordinary fictional place."
---Tadao Ando.