the lost moments of our lives

Susan Bell on Epstein:

"Gesture gives many of these pictures their pulse. Tender hand, strained shoulder, swivelled hip. It isn't the fact of 13-year olds smoking that shocks, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes."

"Epstein's world is one of quiet individuality. It is about the pursuit of pleasure before pleasure was commodified, he says. now everything is so packaged. People drink, dance, hold hands and gaze out to sea, independent of the frantically consumerised world growing up around them like a jungle that gradually blocks out the light.

---Carol Roux, The Guardian.

I-level

It won't be long now brothers, before the decadent west is finished.

~~~

I find it so hard writing nowadays (Thank God! I hear you say). 'The snow is general' and all that kind of thing. Not that knowing why would make any difference; it rarely ever does. How can we find someone without knowing what they look like?

'We are only real in our moments of recognition'

---Carol Shields (with thanks to anton for pointing me here)

Don't know why I'm surprised, but Carol Shields is surprisingly good. Only 140 pages in but there's a great 'writerly' quality to it, the same unassuming intelligence that you thought you picked up in the first pages of JCO's memoir. The most interesting passages are on the house, how rooms, images, through their use and their structure, can offer a form of continuity against the ordinary loneliness of being human. And this idea of a shell, an encircling, a turning, as a way of survival seems to run through it. It would be interesting to re-read Roth's American Pastoral at the same time, given the similarity. You know, that's a terrible thing to do. But think back to Cheever's Bullet Park also and how comical parts of that were (comical not in a good sense, mind you; comical as in: unreal).

What or who do we recognize, acknowledge? This seems to be the heart of it. We go on blindly, as it accumulates particle by particle. The illusion that you'd find some meaning just by pottering about, never taking the plunge, hopelessly pinning your hopes to this fake, old-world detachment, and those bloodless abstractions. That you'd get by another day by half-inhabiting the routines whilst your mind drifted...that there'd be a second and a third chance. Make your lists, get serious. Does it matter? You inherited the temperament of a clown! (Not even a high-minded clown like Herzog!)

You woke up in the middle of the night remembering this perfect line. It all made sense. And now only a few words. guess you'll have to make do. "Keep", for example. "At the right distance". Yes, that was it. You were always getting too close or too far away from things, what really mattered. All that was brought on by Milosz's speech, no doubt. Or was it Shields: how one needs to inhabit a life and remember things, to see things in the right way?

To my left, at eye-level: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; Life is Elsewhere; The Gardens of Light; The Sheltering Sky; Patterns of Medieval Society. Well, okay, you didn't expect a perfect match, did you?

Today you saw some penguins on their little island, oblivious of all the noise around them, the sun heavy on their backs, the bars of light and shade across their eyes; people pause and sit down to gaze at them, or marvel at their undivided world, whilst no-one notices the drowning all around...

a sigh is but a sigh as time goes by

the shard of white . . .
trembling with white light
with white flat sea
distant in memory
between the deluge of life
our dearest, our white youth
our white, our snow white youth
that is infinity . . .

and yet, and yet

but a moment

---Seferis (more or less)

And all the seasons were rolled into this one; all moments that could be recalled were recalled, here before us, ready to slip away again; what was missed was like a mirage of white in a black-heart; a summer-soft dream with all its dreamlike qualities passed before our eyes. Gentleness, the space opening up, a life full of reflections., which is to say distances. A Chinese landscape, the mingling of inky paint, scribbled words and fragments of poems only half remembered (not by heart), the sadness of forest-green in our lives. A picture gallery. Up close you imagine the creativity, the link between one painting and all paintings. We are in a cave, looking to find some secret, some secret that will help us leave this cave...

the pre-eminence of pluralism

Don't think I've got the stomach to watch old Rageh's BBC documentary tonight. Well-intentioned, I'm sure, but an opportunity missed perhaps. The Beeb with its pseudo-intellectuality and fake 'objectivity' goes down very well, I suspect, in middle England, especially with a cup of Ovaltine, but come on, seriously...

Maybe it hasn't always been that way (Reith, for example, After Dark, Berlin and Iris Murdoch) and maybe it's unfair to be so harsh given they have to respond to the general 'dumbing down', the competition from other flashier sources of information for our attention, and also the desire to think of Islam in political terms more than anything else-which is wholly understandable given the way in which the religion has been used to stir up and justify all sorts of horrors.

And there's no point, really, harping on about the splendours of the Alhambra etc., etc. Face reality: some of the most regressive views and politics is coming out of the so-called Muslim world.

But Rageh really did miss out on the miraj (I think). The idea, for example, that 'finitude is not a misfortune' could be traced back to it (the Allama); that religion is not a negation of 'the world' , a seeking of 'annihilation' (fana) but, at its best, a return to earth, and the ties of the world, obligations, duties, commitments. On the whole he's been too apologetic. And the stuff on the relations with Jews is likely to reinforce misperceptions. Well, that's the way I see it anyway: the rather common notion that Muslims are anti-jewish (partly re-inforced, of course, by the unmistakable growth in anti-semitism post '67).

There's a tendency to see Sufism as the pluralistic, relatively more tolerant version of Islam, a foil for the severe insistence on transcendence, the regulation of so many aspects of one's life by so many laws. Doubt if that's really been the case, historically speaking. As if any spiritual practice could be without its own form of discipline. In any case, you've always thought that pluralism was the orthodox position-irrespective of its relation with Sufism. Tauhid, unity-in-diversity, is the fundamental approach.

Farid Essack has a very interesting piece here.

Now that I think of it though, this inclination towards pluralism was never really a philosophical idea but, rather, something more like a set of accumulated feelings and partial insights randomly suggested by loved ones. It did help, for example, being told by Ubo, with some pride, that his father was often called 'the jew' , something that, by a strange quirk of fate, has been repeated with me and my friends. And then there was the swami who really seemed to be more impressed by a sort of Buddhist fatalism than anything to do with Islam; the Dougal? Jesus! She's more Catholic than Muslim (but that may just be down to musical tastes).

bewitched

"The narcissist exploits our longing to be bewitched. They enchant us with the possibility that we are the one that will really share in their glow...

Beautiful women, great criminals, superb jesters...never seem to be defeated."

The heart's endless desire to break; the endless desire for perfection that is both an endless desire and the still point of the heart. That first moment, when one were two, and two were one, some vague memory of speechless bliss, before time, like a grey slate slanting down, divided us. The easy weightless time when our innermost thoughts were visible in our gestures, our minds unclouded, free with the rigour and clarity of some great truth. Hands childlike, undarkened, unimaginably smooth.

"He thought of falling...suddenly held up by nothing, free, drifting past windows in one long instant, the shadow glimpsed incredibly from within."

---James Salter.

how b got his groove back.

Of course, there was Junior and Central Line, I-level for a summer, and Funkin' for Jamaica, Toots and Marley, Al Green's take me to the river, Stevie, the Jackson 5, Aretha's beautiful You, Sam Cooke's wonderful world, Sam & Dave (don't knock it), the epitome of cool, the old soul, the new soul, B.B. King's better not look down, smokey's really got a hold on me, and still white folks and Qutb-lites and men in pointed hats wanted to talk about European culture. And this classic from the 80's, for the americans who may have missed it. If you've had enough of classical music tune off, and get with this:

When I Get It Right from Joan Armatrading on Vimeo.

Mars and Venus?

anton makes a fascinating point about reading here.

Think about Roth, Bellow. Not just how women are incidental or a vehicle for the man's story to be told, but how their work is about the brash, bright public world, how the city, the political, is always there, something that impinges on their lives. None of that stifling domesticity, claustrophobic insistence on feelings. This is where the action is. Even Salter, you think, is a man's writer.

Is this a parody, a piss take? Not so sure. Here's Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins:

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses.

Also, it seems that men are a lot less likely to finish a book than women (who are page turners).

Whilst women like a range of books it appears that most men largely read books by men. Here's the list:

The Outsider by Albert Camus
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
Ulysses by James Joyce
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1984 by George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I'm sure if you did a list of top films you'd get something similar (Godfather, Shawshank, etc., for men).

Okay, just a small anecdote that confirms this: today at the main Watersotnes. A table with books under the title: 'the Great american Novel' . 19/20 were male writers! (Updike, Roth, Yates, Pynchon, Salinger, DeLillo, Ellis, Fitzgerald, Franzen, Steinbeck (no Bellow, for some odd reason)...)

The Singular

That is to say that we make them with the ordinary, everyday things, whatever greets us when we wake up in the morning, whatever we're hoping for. I am just recording what I see on my daily round.
---Frank Auerbach.

And yet the way we miss our lives are life.

---Randall Jarrell.

But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed.
--Alain Badiou.

MS : to mix in the right portion (as a way of removing disproportion)mixis, miscere : promiscuous, miscellaneous. Mestizo (mixed breeding)mustang.

ML: medley, melange, meddle.

MSR or MSL (Hindi): mixed with divinity (misr)mishran: addition, a kind of mixing. Mushrik: one who adds.

Sebastian Smee on Freud:
....'not so much about "penetrating character" or illustrating personality traits; it is about the strongest possible representation of a specific human presence. And bound up in that is an understanding of other people's privacy, their essential solitude.'

" I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."

Love is never directed to this or that property of the loved one, but neither does it neglect the properties in favour of a generality: universal love; the lover wants the Loved One with all of its predicates, its being such as it is [whatever the person is is not a matter of casual indifference to their qualities, but neither is it a forgetting of those in favour of an 'essence' or 'spirit'..it is the person as a person...does one have to tear the words assunder to see that it is a question of an everlasting question: what....ever]

'The portraits do not presume to know their subjects definitively ...instead, they do something far more subversive and in the end, moving. [He] powerfully registers their unknowability. In doing so, he grants them great depth of human freedom...."when you find things very moving the desire to find out more lessens" (Freud)'

'It is as though he (Freud) has continued to paint beyond the point at which Freud (he) had achieved an adequately realistic image..a point that is somehow surplus to requirements; representation that goes beyond itself.'

Do we grow within our limits and not beyond? Is heaven a perfect, unchanging circle? ..or, is it: "verily towards thy limit, for thy limit is God"?

Absence makes the heart grow...

Agamben: Saint Thomas and Halos:

In the Kingdom of the Messiah everything will be exactly the same as it is now, except for a slight displacement....the tiny displacement does not refer to the state of things, but at their periphery, in the space of ease between every thing and itself. This means that even though perfection does not imply a real mutation it does not simply involve an external state of things, an incurable "so be it." On the contrary, the parable introduces a possibility there where everything is perfect, an "otherwise" where everything is finished forever.

The Beatitude of the chosen includes all the goods that are necessary for the perfect workings of human nature, and therefore nothing essential can be added. However, something can be added in surplus (superaddi), an "accidental reward that is not necessary for beatitude" (Aquinas) and does not alter it substantially but that simply makes it more brilliant (clarior).

The halo is this supplement added to perfection. Something like the vibration of that which is perfect, the glow at its edges.

The halo is thus the individuation of a beatitude, the becomingsingular of that which is perfect...the singularity here is not a final determination of being, but an unraveling or an indeterminationon its limits: a paradoxical individuation by indetermination.

The halo: a zone where possibility and reality becomeindistinguishable..the being that has reached its end, that has consumed all of its possibilities, thus receives as a gift a supplemental possibility.

Mixed in a new birth...this imperceptible trembling of the finite that makes its limits indeterminate and allows it to blend, to make itself 'whatever', is the tiny displacement that every thing must accomplish in the messianic world. Its beatitude is that of potentiality that comes only after the act, of matter that does not remain beneath the form, but surrounds it with a halo.'

Freud's portraits are soaked in particularity. They are full of human contradictoriness. They do not insist on one aspect of character, any one physical fact. They include as much as possible...forever feeling the contrast and inter-play between so much densely packed life and the threat, the promise, held out by the inanimate.

"I'd like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it...[I want my pictures] to look awkward, in the way that life is awkward"

'Freud's account of human flesh , insisting on its gravity and animality, speaks to widespread contemporary veins of pathos and abjection..it as though each sitter had suddenly learned of a disaster, and that disaster were himself.' (NYRB)

The Loved One encircled. Leaving nothing out. Touching upon all things that are brought.

---fl.

non-jewish jew

Always wish I'd read Freud. The uncanny was brilliant, civilisation and its discontents good, and Adam Phillips, a writer you like a lot, always points you there as well. And, of course, Said's great little book on Freud and the non-European is full of insightful thoughts. Something to be said for someone making the case for civility and rationality. Perhaps 'reason' is a better word, since rationality seems too narrow a concept.

Re-reading the collection on mass psychology and religion (unfinished first time round, of course. Yes, I know!). Good stuff. Makes me want to pick up Edmundson's book on Freud's death.

The prohibition against making an image of God — the compulsion to worship a

God whom one cannot see,” he says, meant that in Judaism “a sensory

perception was given second place to what may be called an abstract idea

— a triumph of intellectuality over sensuality.”

---from 'Defender of the Faith'.

Hmm. Didn't George Steiner make the same point? More interestingly, what does that say about aniconism in Islam? And then there's Hans Jonas's brilliant essay on cave paintings which is pretty similar: presence and absence, abstraction...Most intriguingly: the possibilities of thinking about being religious without being 'religious'. No, not 'thinking about', but being.

bookslut

The blurb on the back of The Hare with Amber Eyes had something about being ''Homeric"... "a masterpiece!". This is often a quite charming courtly game, when it's not just the usual base commercial interests rearing its ugly head. Academic books, for example, always have great plugs by other academics. Always worth looking to see how it's usually colleagues or people mentioned in the acknowledgements who write these things.

For the first time ever I went to sell some of my old books. Sluttish, I know. Buying second-hand books isn't, of course. It's just being cheap and/or sensible. Judd, Skoob, Waterstone's (Dillons). Nada. Interesting experience though. Felt a bit like selling porn. Pss, hey, you, are you interested in...

The woman at Skoob was a fucking joker (though quite attractive, with her dark Irish hair). Five pounds for Held's Globalisation book (awful); Muthoo's Bargaining theory (incomprehensible); and Scruton's Modern Philosophy (the print puts me off this one). Mint condition. Five pounds for the lot. Jesus! There's capitalism for you (or is it racism?)..."No, I decline your offer," I say pompously and then promptly get the hell out of there.

~~~

Well, bought a marathon (no, not going to give in to the Americans) from a man at M&S called Andreas! Can you beat that, Roxana? He was trying to chat up a-let's be polite here-very large woman, telling her in his slimy, bushy-eyebrowed way: "you don't look a day over thirty; some women do, but you don't, I swear it". Embarrassing.

Tramped around Foyles for a while, looking for a book on Gedney. I'm not sure if I'm talking to myself nowadays but given the looks I get from the sales assistants this must be a distinct possibility..."Yes, Sennett is spelt with two 't's', " I say. Why are they trying to test me? The guy looks on incredulously. Even that Asian chick at the LSE bookshop looked at me sheepishly, almost with contempt. (Well, there's desis for you, always putting down their own). It's as if everyone knew I was selling books.

Picked up Solo Faces though. Style over substance? Maybe.

purity and danger

The violence of Man (and it usually is men: why does that go unnoticed?). The bloody 20th century: the Camps, the Gulags, the Trenches, man-made famines; Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Saddam...The list is endless. Not just the mindless acts of terrorism-which in the scale of things are not that large, not compared to state-organized violence, that is-but the daily acts of violence and brutality...

But when did it begin?

Estimated that 4-5% of all deaths in the 20th c. were violent ones. Compared to 1.5-2 % we see now or in industrial times. And for the hunter-gatherers, in that pre-lapsarian world, what Sahlins called the original 'affluent economy'. Well, estimates are anything up to 13-14%. So much for the noble savage!

So, what about the theory that the greater the surplus the greater the specialization (in violence and religion..and perhaps the links between these two needs to be teased out) ? Well, despite, or perhaps because of, our sheer bloody-mindedness it seems as if some progress has been made. We do trust strangers-even if we don't care much for them. We have decided that city life and a politics not based on kinship, clan, and hierarchy, is the way to live. And even bearing in mind the cynicism towards human rights you've got to admit that this is an achievement. The peace of the bourgeois world may not be heroic or even very spiritual, but I don't think there's any denying that things are much better (think: the rights of minorities, women, the notion of citizenship...).

Don't knock it. You who live safe, in warm houses, who find on returning in the evening, hot food and friendly faces (Primo Levi)

And yet these fantasies of exclusion, of the expulsion of the vermin persists, as if it was hard-wired, had taken root.

What is it that binds one person to another, then? What obliges someone to not only not cheat or attack another person, but actually want to cooperate with him? If it's not religious or ethnic identity, and if self-interest can work just as much in favour of mutual dependence as trying to pull a fast one, then what? Can an altruistic disposition, a sense of mutual sympathy, be enough and what type of institutions reinforce them, make them sustainable?

Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view.

---Ernst Haas.

I don't know why, but I'm always looking for that 1970's polaroid look, the sort of picture that I've already got. This isn't quite it; too pure, not faded enough. You know what I mean, empty car lot, California, or wide sweeping highways. Quite literally: the end point, where the 'traveller's journeys are done'; from now on all the frontiers are inward ones (Hopper).

No more promises of Utopia; this is as good as it gets. It's a perfect summer's day outside, there's nothing on on the box, but your thoughts are all scattered and phoney, paralysed by endless amounts of trivia. Modern life (Simmell). When everything is possible, nothing is. Leonardo was fascinated by everything and maybe, therefore, by nothing.

An endless, dreary Sunday afternoon, an afternoon swallowing down whole years, its every hour a year. By turns walked despairingly down empty streets and lay quietly on the couch. Occasionally astonished by the leaden, meaningless clouds almost uninterruptedly drifting by. 'You are reserved for a great Monday!'. Fine, but Sunday will never end.

---Kafka.

Joel Sternfeld, of course...

letters from the black sea

There are words inside me, inside us, that no-one will ever know. I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm dying but it's really just living. There are words, foreign, obsolete, ancient, still dry on your tongue. The dead words of our future. Words erased by light; words forgotten in the dark. Yet you read my silence...

In the dark I look out to the night. I think of you. And see my reflection. When I speak I often forget what I was saying or why. When I read from a book my train of thought is broken, as if you just entered the room. In the morning I need to stop myself. Fragments of stories are recalled: the search for Z; Andree lost; the red queen.... then I think: maybe all stories were just one story.

Better to contemplate the blank page

And leave it blank

Than modify

Its substance

By so much as a pen-stroke

Woven of wood-nymphs

It speaks volumes

No-one will ever write.

---Derek Mahon.

You kept an image of me close by. We spoke to one another like children, so that no-one else could hear, my name dying on your lips. In the land of the black sun there are no words, except for one. Did you really exist? There's no place left where I can be dealt fresh wounds.

I was kept from harm by a word found in nobody's heart.

(photo courtesy of Roxana)

misc.

Rained on Friday. Not looking good.

(Saxon bishop and all that)

~~~

Tolpuddle Martyrs, 1834.

~~~

The phrase, mad as a hatter comes from...mercury poisoning! (which was used in the production of felt).

~~~

Great books (still unread).

1. The Machiavellian Moment

2. Crowds and Power

3. The King's Two Bodies

4. Homo Ludens

5. The Theory of Moral Sentiments

6. Rembrandt's Eyes

7. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

"Somewhat grandly, I called this the Mir syndrome, after the cosmonaut who said that he didn't read a page of the book he'd taken to the space station because his spare moments were better spent gazing out of the window."

---Geoff Dyer.

The full essay is here

the clearing

Fossicking through your old notebooks for something worthwhile but nothing catches your eye. There's suddenly a break in the rain and the endless grey gives way to a brilliant, late sunshine and clarity of mind. Squares and oblongs of cool shadows compete with the light on the green belt outside. By the time you get to the park the golden light is rolling down the hill, bouncing off car wind shields, collecting, intensifying in pools of water. Who would have thought! It ambles through the knee length grass which is now half in darkness.

The park is empty except for the pigeons and crows. The pigeons fat, double-chested, succulent, medieval in their ways. Long corridors of light stretch across the field and alight on some trees at the other end. The trees thus illuminated are lime green, living in another time almost, whilst the rest, the ones that remain in the dark are cold, somber, you might even say tinged with a forest-green sadness. The faint light pours in from the east; the slow drift of the clouds. Perhaps there'll be another day like this 20, 60, or maybe 1,000 years down the road. If you wait long enough everything comes around again, new but strangely familiar as well.

It's something of a relief not to have one's thoughts crowded with quotes and meaningless details.

Haven't we darkened ourselves with books for long enough?

And yet, do we not see everything through the lens of memory? The burden and blessings of mortality, Hans Jonas once wrote....

The clouds and the world roll on by, and here you are, mysteriously, at the centre of it all, with time on your hands, unable to forget. Ubo, little r, and me, a link. Outside the park you see a bus ascend the hill like a ghost; the lights are on in the upper deck, and there's a kind of warmth there, you're sure. The windows frame a few vacant faces. Some see you, perhaps even recognize you; most don't.

guilty pleasure, small confession

At the risk of showing my cards I have to make a small confession: I simply love Desert Island Discs (much better than Private Passions). I guess it might be considered a bit naff listening to 'bits' of classical music, cropped, intertwined with conversation and reminisces. Shouldn't music exist and be listened to in some pure exalted realm, a desert island, precisely? (You remember Hasan telling you how noisy the Chinese were when listening to opera, how it was a whole family outing that lasted for hours and hours). In a box, people blocked out, thoughts and memories temporarily put to one side, the will receptive, music that takes you away from yourself, not back? If music is timeless what has it got to do with a specific place, a moment in time, one's individual, unreliable memories?

Do you remember the first time you heard this? Why is that important?

How to choose words that chime with the lives we lead, how to conceal words so that their meaning is half-hidden?

---John Graham.

Ronald Searle: Once you're a prisoner, you never cease from being a prisoner.

Small confessions made in the small hours of the night hardly ever amount to much. At night much of the façade we build around ourselves falls away and we tell truths to ourselves, but in the cold light of the day we regain our senses, our confidence in the solid and reassuring world returns. Then, once again, we discern the clear outlines that distinguish one thing from another. All sorts of distinctions are set up, established, maintained. The hands fold, like a book shut close, and you remember that the '&' in me and you was only a dream.

Happy is he who has travelled much, experienced much, and returned home. Slate, slanting, wet, grey. Blotches of moss sprouting in the grooves of the corrugated garage roof. Images of the sea. Fifty one beans (French) , nearly ready to eat-or so Ubo promises. What, that's nearly one a week! A cool summer breeze and the rustling of leaves, the dizzying flight of a fly, the humming traffic; all this seems eternal today. A day, an hour? How long does anything last?

Now, for some Rowan Williams...quite boring, actually. An ideas man; as a person: less interesting, methinks.

ten thousand things

He wanted to say ten thousand things, but ended up saying nothing, or something like that. There were no transactions, no equivalences, no I for an I after all. He wanted to reach the still centre of mystery, but only reached the outer hem, and held on to it. Even then he was amazed, bewildered, as if he'd been here before, known her from some place else:

I sensed everything before it happened.

Was this real? Degrees of separation: glass, mirror, selfhood.

I mean that he couldn't tell me what he was dreaming and I couldn't tell him what was real, she said.

East and west it flows, taking up the ten thousand things; indifferent or in love, he couldn't tell. Once a fox had danced in, silver footed, red-tailed, and stolen the fruit, not that he'd ever actually seen her. It dragged the fruit all over the place so that it lay scattered, like an ominous warning in the early morning light of how the world would be turned upside down; he'd tricked it to a dark cupboard beneath the stairs and then boarded it up, making sure no light got in; made sure there'd be no mingling in his affairs. But when she'd gone, he was saddened for some strange reason, a reason he half-guessed. It was like he'd boarded something up in his heart.

It doesn't matter what his problem is, until he's fully understood it himself.

And then, out of the blue, when the trail had turned cold and he'd least expected,

the interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book.

He didn't read a book, but stumbled across a line by a Romanian poet: I am me when I am you.

He imagined those fine Roman features, haughty, proud, generation after generation of untamed impulses caroming through her wise blood. Here they were again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God. Two hours passed, three maybe. He lost track of time. He'd wasted so much it already. Years had slipped by terrifyingly and he couldn't remember much: an act of kindness here, a joke or two there. But now all the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before he woke up, when he could see with all the clarity and truthfulness of the day, when figures first took shape, assumed a destiny. He felt the beauty of the morning, could understand how a drowning man might suddenly feel a deep thirst being quenched. Or how the slave might become a friend to his master.

Perhaps it was too late, cynicism and arrogance shining through his eyes, his tone often harsh, his words falling short of their potential. Will you believe me when I tell you there was kindness in his heart...It was only that certain important connections had been burned through.

---from Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son.

Gravity and Grace

You've written on these pages, foolishly and flippantly, about monasticism, asceticism and religion in general when, truth be told, you haven't got a clue. There's even a childish sense of pride in saying you haven't got a religious bone in your body (except, maybe, your funny bone). You can read about these things, know something of the history, but still know next to nothing of the experience of it. It's somewhat delusional to think one can be religious-or even comment on religion- from the outside, as it were, without any set of sustaining practices.

Do you see a pattern here? Same with all that jumbled up reading and the half-hearted attempt at being an academic. Not a double life; rather: half a life.

Not that you want to be religious, or an academic, or anything like that (though these do seem to be good professions: plenty of food and lazing around). Old loyalties do mean, however, that you want to defend religion against those who hate it. Well, not most of the time since it's a terrible arrogance to think one can convince another person of anything (more to the point: it requires too much energy).

Came across this line which I think Bob would like a lot:

"In the end we are saved by things that ignore us".

Sounds incredibly harsh and what could it possibly mean? Time ignores us. Are we saved by it? Saved? This plays such a small role in your thinking and your life. There's that wonderful story in Imam Jafar-al-Sadiq's Lantern of the Path where Jesus says to a disciple: my people are not those who pray to go to heaven, or to avoid hell but, rather, those who pray out of the love of God.

Time. The body. As it is. Unredeemed, frail, broken. To know this, to understand it, would mean, surely, that we have some sense of what is beyond these things, what outlasts us and is most of the time indifferent to us (Rumi's: he who knows himself knows his Lord as 'he who knows the finite knows the infinite'). What prevents such an awareness? The idea that we can readily attain grace or understanding on our own, without any effort, without any suffering; that we are whole, complete already, or have no need of wholeness, or that the fragmentary is all there is; to believe that the bridge is the thing, or that we can get on without bridges.

There's a kind of peace to be had sipping a cup of piping hot tea, listening to Berlioz's Les nuit, and yet...I ask Ubo: can I have five minutes of peace. "You can have ten," he replies. Hard to distinguish his joking from his natural and sublime characteristic of always giving. Yesterday we were watching Only Fools. He was greatly impressed by what appeared to be a throwaway line by a mad man: "I like losing; no-one wants to compete with a loser". And just the day before you recall reading a line-and you only managed a line before being attacked by little r- by Rebecca West, saying how she'd attempted something in "her own demented way". Sounds very modern to our ears, but was demented really just another word for eccentric? And this definition of idiot which in Greek means, literally, a 'private person'.

the end of the world

The end of the world, the end of an era. When a sportsman or woman who you've grown up watching retires and you remember when they first appeared on the scene like a shooting star. Things will never be the same, but they always are. The end of space exploration, perhaps. Something profound, the desire of humankind to break free, ask questions beyond a narrow utilitarian framework, will been lost if that's true. Life itself is a series of losses, departures, and there's no getting over that, no tying of the threads together, no rhyme or reason, no Buddhist mantra, no fana. The end of the news of the world that the pseudo-left's moral brigade is gloating over right now. Yet few ask the more interesting (apolitical) question: what is this fascination with the sensational, with exposure, the digging up of the sordid details of other people's messy and often ludicrous lives? But watching the powerful squirm is itself worth watching, worth being made into a story.

Music is one of the few remaining bridges linking people.

---Ry Cooder.

And when bridges fall, then what? (No, can't go back to Kadare's book on bridges..er..I bet some of you are wondering if I've ever actually completed reading a single book!). But bridges. What would Venice or London be without them? A city is, by definition, a number of bridges that span out, connecting. A monastery too, but in a different way.

"We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: solitude, hardship, exhaustion, death. We're proud of ourselves, in a way. But our enthusiasm is a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos-we want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the cosmos. We are only seeking Man. We don't want Other Worlds. We want mirrors."

---Solaris.

Is this not the greatest of paradoxes, ironies? No sooner had we convinced ourselves that this is all we have, that this green and blue planet of ours is and had always been our true home and would always be inextricably tied up with our fate, than we had set into motion the mechanisms that would eventually lead to the fulfilment of the most ardent-and who knows, perhaps even the most ancient desire, the desire to escape from home.

Goodbye to Berlin

The light, pours in eastwards, year after year, has drained the colour from the books closest to the window. When I'm here the heaps of books might get re-arranged but somehow, by some quirk of fate, it's Light of the Ancient Worlds that has suffered the most, it's yellow cover now only a few degrees perceptibly different from the yellowing pages within the covers.

But what to do with the others, a book, for instance, that is 1,100 pages long, and packed with over half a million words?The answer, inevitably, is nothing. Nothing is to be done, Mr. Lenin. Perhaps I'll wrap it in a large piece of white cloth and keep it from the sun. Ridiculously superstitious, of course. What, after all, can tenderness protect when time's got it by the throat, so to speak?

You look around the room, just rotating your neck, your body rigid, lest any movement wake little r. She's flung most of the books to the floor with a kind of abandon that I can only envy. The cover of Muthoo's incomprehensible book on bargaining theory has been bent. Which is a good thing, I think. This is kind of delusional, you realise, talking about books all the time and not actually reading them. At Henry's, on Charing Cross, you thought you might find Jahnn. Whatever anton recommends turns out to be gold. Now and then the crazy thought comes to you: maybe you'll find Strehlow (though only 500 copies were ever printed..or maybe Chatwin just made that up). Perhaps you'll find Fukase for a fiver...

In the room are three clocks, all of them halted. Cheever and Dyer lie quietly on the fake-1920's wooden radio set, next to some very old toys: Charlie George, Bobbie Moore, Martin Cheevers/Cheeves..that can't be right, can it? and someone else, his name now faded beyond recognition. Outside, a ginger-haired woman walks a lazy black dog with a red collar. She's plumpish and not very attractive. Like Jimmy Stewart, you're half expecting a murder to take place. Maybe later.

You decide to leave the piles of books as they are. On the top is the unfinished Goodbye to Berlin. Despite its alluring cover and promise of decadence it was dull beyond imagination. Still, I can see its reflection on the slanting window and every now and then, when a large vehicle hurtles past on the road outside the image trembles.

Already the leaves on the great tree are browning. This is how it invades its prey; first a few speckles, splotches and then it becomes more general. A few days ago, though, there was a stiff breeze. The sky darkened im...

~~~

"London, your London, was really beautiful. Beautiful, not in the the sense of a measured beauty in all its dimensions, the way one sees in Paris time and time again but beautiful in the manner of a reference to areas which remain hidden and which one is able, time and again, to find when one's inner landscape opens up."

---Paul Celan (via nomadics)

Time and again,

or time and time again

in the sense of

a circle

that is broken

I find you

lost,

among the ruins

of my heart

the path back

From time to time you stumble across a few blogs-usually American- dedicated to books and book reading. The curious thing is that you've usually not even heard of, let alone read the books mentioned. The seriousness of book readers. Lists, 'challenges', reviews, analysis, criticism, spinning out not just a secondary literature but fragments, quotations, wild juxtapositions, churning out future anxieties.

Book clubs and the sharing of books. There's something deeply unsettling about that, incestuous even. Like some sort of underground occult order with its own horrifying rituals of domesticity and chuminess. Reeks of communism and the invasion of the private world, or of the mid-afternoon dullness of mid-America, middle England, middle everywhere. Or the sickly-sweet human warmth found in the catacombs. Probably says more about you than anything else, on second thoughts.

Images: mostly of women drinking coffee. Do men form book clubs? (Actually, two friends did, and all they did was get drunk and read chunks of the Baburnama). The pretentiousness of men reading "difficult" books. Angst, existential despair, edgy or profound. None of that girly stuff for them! But the wives! Now, there's a different kettle of fish for you. Oh, Jesus! Get the husbands involved as well...couldn't you summarize it for me or:

"What do you think of it?"

"But I haven't read it"

"Still, you must have something to say"

The husbands, scampering for safety. 'Is she going to use this silence against me for later, hold it against me. I can see her storing up this reference for the future'. Z, the poor sod, is forced to read reams and reams of Cohelo and pretend it's deep. He's a great fan of Jane Austen too, but with a wife who inspires fear with a click of her heels, I don't blame him. Later, he works it all off with an hour of squash and an hour pumping iron. Grit your teeth and bear it, man!

An interview with Roth. Same old, same old. He keeps on writing about mortality and they keep on asking him about it. But before he's even opened his mouth to answer she's smiling away, nodding, won over. That's what success does for you. Still, better than that blubbering idiot, Mark Lawson.

John Cheever is not easy to find in London. Three basements on Charing Cross. Nada. Jesus's son. You've got to be joking. At Foyles-or was it Blackwell's, you tried to read some Celan but your heart wasn't in it. Instead, you listened to the conversation of some woman sitting directly behind you. Trying to hook up an "English-Italian" woman with five kids with "Anthony".

"Isn't that too many?", the man on the other end of the line asked.

"Well, he's got his own baggage with all those Thai girls".

Anyway, did manage to pick up Wolf Solent and make my way back to the Wright's Bar for the 20-year re-uinon. Near St. Giles you saw two Chinese men, vociferously arguing with one another. One of them held the other by his forearm and gave him a good shake. The Church itself is usually closed. You've never actually seen anyone go in come to think of it and there are lots of imposing signs outside, warning people to clear off. Lots of drunks and drop-outs, the half-mad and homeless; there they are, dishevelled, slumped on wooden benches in the adjoining fields, burnt-out, stinking to high heaven, speaking in tongues, waving off imaginary visitations, as if they were so many flies. The hierarchy of souls persists, even without religion. The Church isn't in the business of saving souls any more, but these quiet places in the heart of the city still offer a kind of refuge from the fierceness of the sun and raging storms.

St. Dunstan's was closed.

Everyone has visibly aged, you think to yourself. You have to blink twice to recognize one friend. No-one says anything, but everyone is quietly thinking, with suppressed horror: Jesus, what happened to you! Here we are, a banker, an accountant, a government minister, a wealthy businessman, and a bureaucrat. All have done quite well on the surface of things, but below the surface, if you dare to look at it, there's that same tired and world-weary look that you saw on the faces of the drunks. There's something awful about reunions, about paths that always lead back.

black-hearted

Not to have...

Not to have but to be

The black heart of the poppy

O to lie there as a seed.

To become the beloved

As the world ends, to enter

the last note of its music.

---Denise.

Like poppy and memory, said the poet. As if forgetfulness was a kind of death. A day of remembrance. Of the missing. Of our own lives that have fallen away, that never were. White, silent, or black, mournful. Red. Then everything was red.

Do you forgive me these November days?

--Anna.

Big-bellied gods

The more character you have, the more influences you can take in.

--Cy Twombly.

This is true, you intuitively feel, as much for individuals as it is for societies, civilisations. With a certain degree of confidence one can afford to allow room for stray reflections, meaningless diversions, easy-going generalizations. And, more positively, you can look in other directions, as well as look back. You sometimes even believe: if you see beauty, you'll see it everywhere.

Let's go the field.

Which field?

The same that has rabbits.

Don't kill the dogs nor the rabbits,

for the dream of the rabbit reminds me of the dream of my lover.

And don't kill the deer,

for the grace of the deer reminds me of the grace of my lover

And don't kill the pigeons,

for the flight of the pigeons reminds me of the flight of my lover.

I'm not sure why, but lately you seemed to be more and more attracted to paganism-or at least to what you imagine a type of sensibility that goes hand in hand with it. The rigorous, abstract, semi-puritanical ways, the fake asceticism, grey wisdom, and 'inner-worldliness' that sometimes gets translated into a preference for a form of socialism, a chaste heart, bookishness, or aloofness seems ever more remote.

Even to use the word 'gods'! May God forgive me! But not the northern gods; something more Mediterranean. Light, the chain of being, that connects all to one. There is no soul searching for a soul; there is only a finding, a seeing clearly, the setting of a trap for the white hare. And all this is peace, a form of play, all of this happens now and has happened before.

This focused concentration on 'the one' seems misplaced. What is it that Suger, Abbot of Denis, said again? Something like: jalal and jamal.

what is held, and what is not.

There's something about John Cheever's writing. Don't know what it is. The first entry on the first page of his journals goes:

"In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes, even love. I feel that there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning but I do not know when it took place, and I have no hope of finding it."

Why should anyone want to? Even though the clock can't be turned back there is some satisfaction, I guess, in working out how you fucked up. How to accept how, not necessarily know why, things turned out the way they did? And is acceptance about recognizing the unwavering reality of the presence of chaos, irrationality, randomness, and regret in a life? What do you hold on to, what do you let go?

You open The hare with amber eyes at random and come across these lines, faintly marked with a lead pencil:

'Its accomplishment requires a suppleness of the hand,..a preserving dexterity, a sacrifice of time'

"The deeper the experience of a moment the greater the accumulation of experience...the lived duree is not a question of length but of depth or density."

---John Berger.

What is held in common now? Not an image, a few scattered words, the oft-repeated stories or laughter...the tone of voice, the loving gaze with a tilted head, the silence between us, that covers what we know to be true. The days, the hours under the sun. How these intimate acts of memory tell of our humanity! The clouds float onwards, the contrast of dark grey and pure white unreal, they roll on past brilliant green tree tops, over empty, sleepy suburban streets, creating sudden shadows in mid-morning kitchens as kettles come to the boil unattended and the news of the world crumbles all around you. The rag and bone shop of the heart remembers. And forgets. The accumulation of small things, the misplacing. That, too, is only human. Some things can be given away for free, others have a price. Much has been lost. You point to a clock. Little r extends her finger, mimics surprise, and repeats the word. Clock. But she won't tell the time.

as it were

Sebastian Mercier: "One lives with light and pleasure in spaces hitherto lost and really quite dark."

The natural light of the mind is the same as that which fills the quiet rooms, until one does not know what is 'inner' and what is 'outer'. Do I have a 'clear and distinct idea' of what it is, or is it only a faint image in the mirror or my mind's eye that I see, one that carries the burden of memory and desire? The past lives on in other rooms, as it were. Is it, then, the light within that fails?

Start the week: A poem starts of as a small, momentary reflection in a mirror around which we build something more significant. The open work. What holds, and what gives? Partial, fragmentary truths, subject to revision, doubt...that seems to be the quintessentially modern, western approach. As opposed to? Cliches, standard formulas, tired generalizations, sayings of the elders, inherited wisdom, the well-worn and slightly tattered religious insights, and the 'timeless' truths of the 'east'.

An emptiness at 8 pm in the Cedar Bar.

---Ginsberg.

The dark, sad opaqueness of an 'interior' life. Confinement. How late the light is. The way in which we're unaware of ourselves is sometimes mystical; mostly comical.

I go inside the tree.

Indoors for this ash

is through the bark:

notice its colour-asphalt

or slate in the rain

then go inside, tasting

weather in the tree rings,

scoffing years of drought and storm,

moving as fast as woodworm

who finds a kick of speed

for burrowing into the core

for mouthing pith and sap

until the o my god at the heart.

---Jo Shapcott.

Frivolity?

I was tempted to put up an image of Monica Belucci or Salma Hayek-decollete, not to be confused with decollate, says the online dictionary!- but you get the picture. Last Sunday an 'entertaining' discussion about whether women should dress modestly but, as usual, you have to be sceptical of why in the first place this issue should interest men at all; if it isn't about seeing more cleavage and/or controlling women, preserving 'modesty' for their wives and daughters, then what is it? Is it a genuine political debate? Incredible naivete on both sides, though.

Not the least interested in the niqab bans, or what that says about integration, European values, or whatever else you want to wheel in. A ban sounds ridiculous, but on the other hand, I haven't got much sympathy for people who are always drawing attention to themselves.

Far more interesting, I think, was this:

From Braudel:

Mouraj d'Ohsson, 1741: Fashions which tyrannize European women hardly disturb the fair sex in the east; hair styles, cut of clothing, and type of fabric there are almost always the same.

'Fashion is not merely a matter of abundance, quantity, profusion. It is also consists of making a quick change at the right moment...to keep up with the times...an indication of the energies, possibilities, and joie de vivre of a given society, economy, and civilization'.

Around 1350 tunics become shorter and men never went back to wearing long robes. (Equally scandalous were the plunging necklines for women).

'The taste for frivolity dictates the judgements of fashion. All the men are turned into effeminate slaves, all subordinated to the whims of women'.

Is it a coincidence, Braudel asks, that those societies that were most ready to break with their traditions- in fashion, say (and here the word which is employed in the widest possible sense) -were the most progressive, the ones that pushed out 'obsolete languages'?

Fashion, for the French, is a 'thousand ways of dressing, writing, behaving' such that they 'make themselves more gracious, more charming, and often more ridiculous'.

The coquette easily took five to six hours to dress.

[Hmm. Yes, the less said here the better!]

'Show me what rouge you wear and I'll tell you who you are.'

Ludicrous, of course, but it just goes to show how old the advertiser's lines are, how you are what you buy or look like.

Much more on furniture, alcohol, chocolate, tea etc., etc. The material foundations of our life stretching into culture and how we picture our lives (the 'social imaginary'), to our social relations, our sense of space, and what we think of other people (Muslims, like most other people, didn't eat on tables and were thought by some to be, therefore, closer to animals).

1. Think of your own perceptions. How many of you thought on seeing the first picture above: for Christ's sake!And what did you think of the second? Fashion, luxury are not, then, just frivolous things, and to think of them independently of production and values is probably a mistake. After all, the first round of capitalism, if Hobsbawm is to be trusted-and he usually is-was intimately connected to the trade of luxury goods.

2. And what about capitalism now and the images of 'desirability' that it fosters? What does that say about autonomy?

3. Why do women's clothes and bodies elicit such reactionary feelings, feelings that often feed into all sorts of agendas: the nationalist rabble-rousers on the right and the conservative moral-brigade (men and women) who fret over western 'decadence'?

4. Is this the real issue? I mean, in a world of incredible violence and injustice, inequalities and brutalities, aren't discussions of clothing just a middle-class obsession? The BBC is a perfect vehicle for transmitting such a partial view, for skirting around the bigger problems, given its mastery over the skills of creating the pretence of an open, informative, and intelligent discussion: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Just another day on earth

What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain on me.

---R. Varnhagen.

I am where I was.

---Menashe.

Yesterday you saw two very tall blonde women in cat suits and high heels, offering membership to some sort of so-called 'gentleman's club' (Platinum and Lace, I think). Very fetching.

On the way home: a woman tries to chat up the man next to you: "I love this time of the night on the trains." Both have been to Thailand (to do God knows what). "You're sort of Morrocan or something, ain't you. I can tell."

A plump old black man with a tuft of grey hair below his lower lip, large blotches of freckles collected below his eyes; he wears a gangster hat (in this heat?!) , a blue shirt, a black glove on his left hand, and a black coat. Slouched into the seat, the only sign of an inner life is the rolling movement of his sad weary eyes; quiet, like a man in his own book. Apart from the eyes, though, he's unfathomable. He sits next to another black man, clean shaven, immaculately turned out, very muscular (dressed all in black as well: jacket and t-shirt), who holds on tightly to black sports bag which, you think to yourself, must be full of cash. The old man looks like a card-dealer or one of those old-time Baptist preachers, a man who has barely remembers his childhood; he's seen too much of life and now only sees so much sin in the ways of the world. He gets up and walks with a slight limp, a straight leg. You notice his slightly worn-out shoes with strange patterns on them, and you catch a glimpse of a silver chain dangling out from his trouser pocket. Outside, the young black man is met by a group of spiky-haired white kids, trying to be cool. They greet him with the word "Skaggg!".

~~~

No time to re-read Huizinga or the whole of Braudel now. Put them to one side. Far too many details of the ordinary, though they do provide fascinating diversions from your ordinary life.

In the mirror, we look for what we instantly recognize; not our first selves, or our original face but, rather, what has always been the same over the years. For some, it's a smile; for others, a quizzical look. To see in that image before us beyond the lines that tell us what we've become-the loves, the hatreds, the joys and confusions etched on our faces- to perceive, once again, what we always were, as if that was all of these things and yet at the same time none of them.

Everyone who looks at a mirror thinks of time passing, of the years that have floated away like clouds. The appearance of grey stubble remind you of an old black dog, quite lost, you once saw on Glastonbury Avenue.

Grey mirror of mine. Sky. Desert. Glass. Stone. No mirror can hold what will be, or the 'heaven of lost futures'; so many images jostle for space, find your name, only one remains icily aloof, like the cold silver that was the image before the image, time before time. The tree stump summarizes being; absence roots us to ourselves.