Last words

Really must do it this time. And move onwards (if not upwards). Just to say: a big thanks and hugs to roxana, anton, C, nikki, sadia, and beth. Boy. Wolf. Cry. I know. Will probably resurface again. There, said it, to put the kiss of death on it. How can there be an end to something that hasn't begun? But khair, today seems the perfect day, for no other reason than it is the perfect day...

~~~

The quality of the light is the quality of our understanding.

I was walking past the familiar places, Denmark Street, Foyles, Centre Point, the Korean shops, the same old narrow circle. The smell of fresh coffee enticing, as always. Could have killed for one-if coffee wasn't prohibited. And the light, just then, seemed to have come full circle, reminding me of when I first came to London nearly a quarter of a century ago.

The pattern, scratched in time, ahead of time. And then things happen, are made manifest, in the dustbowl of the heart. No matter how many times we return we remain but small segments of an arc of a greater, unknown circle. The circumference of our understanding like old stones at the city's limits.

You don't stop to see your reflection but think of poor glass, like you the glass does not know what it sees. In other places, at other times, dark-tinted mirrors, kind to people's defects. As the academics say: yes and no. And yes & no were in your eyes.

And what colour is blue? Is there a word for it? Was it something borrowed? Blue is something you searched for, and blue is what you found. You should have chosen red. Red was everywhere, but never yours. A memory, perhaps, like the rust of your heart. Why does the soul sigh, within? A question to myself. Who can say, except there's a loyalty to your inheritance, a fidelity to your roots. Last words strikingly similar to your first.

You mistook The Landing Light for The Wrecking Light. Unsurprisingly.

an interlude:

'you could not be reached

...but had to leave, instead

to the sound of your voice spinning in the dark,

at the slightest touch, at the slightest touch.'

In-between can mean being nowhere or it can mean being connected to everything. The places in-between, where you were, where I am. There was a time when time was not the space between us, between the thing and the thing said, a time when time didn't spiral, curve, fall; when time was not time. The silence enacted, phrase by phrase.

'...and the drama of it all flourished there

in the gently shaken arcs of shadow-work

the roof's filigree cast over them and seemed to draw

a graph. Your mouth was striped and dazzling as you talked

and saw and heard nothing but your hands and voice

your hands and your voice, beneath all that space.'

~~~

Body and world were never the place
for you to live in. There was climbing, though,

climbing not out of the body but out of world –
in the fork of the tree, so high up it seemed

you’d already got to the sky and I was gravity
in your shoes. I kept you upright by somehow

contriving to be the counterweight far below
as long as you swayed up there. And as your arm went up

mine sort of pistoned down. As your arm reached down
mine was slowly raised, Dodya, and you started back

towards earth with caution, a kind of guardianship
exercised by every nerve tensed for falling

in your body, and placed the sky-egg carefully
between your teeth; you placed it there so tenderly

and eased yourself down backwards as if you were
responsible for bringing down to safety

the rarest and most susceptible outer shell
of life’s longing for itself — so pristine and so sky-blue,

perfect, but for the faintest freckles of blood:
don’t fall, I shouted up to you, don’t fall, don’t fall . . .

Now you fall through time, if not through time and space;
and the darkened freckles survive, are everywhere.

They are on your hands, on mine. They are on your shoes.
They were on our mother’s wedding dress before you were born.

(poems by Tim Liardet)

'Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.'

the dead serial moments of ordinary life

Prosaic. Ordinary. What is it to be modern except to be at ease with a simple, ordinary life? And yet, isn't that also a very ancient way of thinking?

K. Clark:

16th c. : work and humility. Northern Man: faith, sincerity, personal piety.

17th c. Holland: Divine authority replaced by experience and observation. 'Does it work,' not: 'Is it God's will?'

In painting: the solid, commonplace, worldly figures of bourgeois democracy. Realism and practicality, responsibility and the sheer absence of showiness. The first stirrings of a world of leisure, movement, independence.

The ordinary can also descend into the trivial and life in the flatlands can produce a wild intoxication with the exotic, risk; excess as a way of breaking out of boredom, all sorts of bourgeois escapes (Levinas) and mindless diversions. The unbearable lightness of being.

How to re-interpret religious truths, sacred history in the light of ordinary experience (Rembrandt?) Through an emotional truth, a story?

Vermeer: truth without convention, custom. Nature as it is. The natural light of the mind. Rooms full of light, shining enclosed space.

To see things clearly, precisely, mathematically. The linear prose of the world, of time. An awareness of time's ending.This does not cease to be any less mystical than the 'enchanted' world it comes to replace. The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.

ethics and economics

Haven't actually read this but picked it up from another blog. Liked it since it chimed with some of my views on ethics and economics (quotes from Macintyre)

"What the economy needs is that people become responsible to its needs rather than their own, and so it presents as over-ridingly desirable those goals of consumption and ambition, the pursuit of which will serve the economy's purposes. The desires to achieve these goals, when they become central to our lives, prevent us from becoming self-critical about our desires, and so prevent the asking of Aristotelian questions about character and desire."

Thirdly, modern capitalist economies lead to "conditions of gross inequality: inequality of money, inequality of power, inequality of regard, and it is an undeniable fact that even the most successful examples of growth in the present globalised economy generate further inequalities. Aristotle pointed out long ago that a rational polity cannot tolerate too great inequalities, because where there are such, citizens cannot deliberate together rationally. They are too divided by sectional interests so that they lose sight of the common good."

The character of desire. There are objections to this on the grounds that it could lead to paternalism, i.e goes against the liberal ethos. But why should desire-satisfaction be equated with the good (individual or social) and why should it be any old desires, why can't the individual himself or herself reflect-as we often do- on the value of different things we want? Is there, then, no role for education or refinement? What such an approach conveniently ignores is how are preferences are often influenced or manufactured. At the root of it, can we say that we have or know what is some kind of first-order, primal desire, unfiltered, unmediated by others's expectations, desires, strategies?

'A day of thaw...the sun, the blue of the sky, the broken ice, the mud, and the moving water turning the water into a dazzling mirror.'

--- Proust (cited in The Hare with Amber Eyes)

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."

People on a bridge, 'it is like the start of the world: a litany of perfect movements and shadows'.

There's something like near perfection in walking on a bridge on a Sunday morning. A time when people stroll, are not concerned about going anywhere, and less like themselves, and therefore more like themselves.

'There is light in these rooms, trembling reflections and glints of silver and porcelain and polished fruitwood, and shadows from the linden trees.'

'The world had undergone an Umsturz, an overturning, and this led to a kind of heaviness in the things that made up their lives. Things now had to be preserved, sometimes even cherished.'

This really goes against a large part of my-well, not thinking, precisely; rather, my temperament, since apart from my books and cd's I don't think I really value any objects (or is it: have any objects of value?). Old Puritan roots, I guess. Something suspect about thinginess and the awkward relation between inner-worldliness and worldliness?Need or desire? No, that's not quite it either. Can there be a 'rational ordering' of our preferences, desires?

And yet, I'm strangely drawn to these sentiments. The world is either too much with us or not with us enough (Levertov). Never could decide! There's a kind of fanatical self-absorption in both hedonism and asceticism. What would it mean to have a 'proper' love of the world?

'...all these possessions, all these drawers full of things, these walls full of pictures-but they lost their sense of a future of manifold possibilities.'

...

----------------------

He is Null Achtzehn. He is not called anything except that, Zero Eighteen, the last three figures of his entry number; as if everyone was aware that only a man is worthy of a name, and that Null Achtzehn is no longer a man.

--Primo Levi.

~~~

The Hare with Amber Eyes is surprisingly absorbing. I don't know what it is about it, though, that makes it so. I think it's De Waal's ability to stay tight to the main spring of his emotions; it could have meandered off anywhere and ended up being a book about everything and nothing. Instead there is, for me, this recurrent idea that things and our proper relation to them are vitally important; that the deep continuities in our individual lives and the continuation of shared meanings between people depend on, ultimately, very small things, names, places, superfluities, even.

The book starts with, and pretty well ends up with, these lines:

'Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp.'

At the heart of it is a story of survival, of things lovingly passed on down the generations. But no, it's not just that; it's that there's no telling who or what will survive unscathed; and the answer, of course, is nothing, and no-one. the sheer utter randomness, the terrifying absurdity of it all. You can't do anything to protect yourself. Neither innocence or beauty or cunning will do in this world. Plan all you want, there's no insurance in life. It all sounds terribly fatalistic but true. Just the other day old MM was telling me about how a mutual friend had died ten years ago. I'd always thought it was an accident but he said he drove himself over the cliff. What can you say? Shrug your shoulders. That's what it's come down to.

And this line from Simone Weil (roughly): the uprooted, on pain of suffering, always try to uproot other people. You often hear people talk about the lack of a sense of place, the idea of being an 'exile', as if it was jazzy, and as if the opposite was a limited, parochial, fenced-in existence at best; at worst a recipe for bigotry, conservatism, and fanaticism. Blood and soil or the desire to escape earth.

after the rain

the rain at 2:17 lights up the sky a bit. you love it when it darkens over like that, the house becomes silent and dark, the narrow window sills calm, the wooden doors closed and still. the rain falls evenly, with a constant but faint patter, until it's everywhere: tiny pin points, large grey blotches on the pavement first, then sweeping by on the horizon, through the tree tops, shifting angles, falling, it seems, in the best way possible. the ageless approach of the third thing, that makes it what it is, and no-one knows what it is.

outside, some of the cautious drivers switch on their lights; inside the lamps are lit, jumpers unfolded, mirrors become the colour of sky, like a dream that drains pinks into grey, or time reversed. inside, yes, there it was.

three black notebooks scattered on the floor. the work of little r, disruptive, darling little r. your notes on fairness kept in a plastic bag, irrelevant. you come to the close of the amber book and have to slow it down, lest something escapes you. the end often reveals something, like a gentle sadness. not some mystical utterance but probably something utterly ordinary, like a list of my favorite things. the small black buddha on the carved wooden stand. serene buddha, his thoughts never leaving the circle of his mind. behind him, a small medieval painting, woodcutters or village idiots. the kashmiri-rug, the warmth of the house, your old clothes that finally fit, this small world that will soon be empty, once the window panes start to shine with clarity. and then, after the rain, the catholicity will return to the orthodox way of things, and the mirrors will fail to show our true faces to one another again.

Erotic Capital

Well, just when you think you've heard it all Newsnight gives air-time to the ridiculous air-head author of Erotic Capital. There's physical, human, social, and ethnic capital, so why not erotic? There's an unrealized value to be exploited here. Scarcity value, she goes on.

Hard to know where this stems from. The dominance of market transactions, no doubt. But where does that come from? A particular conception of property, a negation of the meaning of what Margaret J. Radin calls 'personhood'? Can there be any moral limits to markets (M.J. Sandel) ?

First: the conceptualisation, market rhetoric: everything must be thought of as a potential commodity, something that can be exchanged, something that has value through exchange. There's no question of 'intrinsic worth' or inalienabilities here. Then: the actual practices and justifications of those practices. Setting up markets, 'legalising' transactions, defining the efficiency gains (well, if two parties want to transact aren't you being paternalistic by blocking them...the 'sovereign consumer'-even the language is instructive. Aren't both 'better off'?). But the argument stemming from well-being is supplemented by that of freedom: freedom, an act of choice, pure and simple. And for Christ's sake don't bring morality into it.

...

...

Pan-pan girls:

'What is behind the phenomenon is hard to say--something of the sort always existed in Japan--the pan pan or street girls are not new. But the magnitude and garishness of the present situation is unheard of. In Shinjuku alone there must be at least 3000 of these kids--this is no exaggeration'

---Bennett.

Good for a single journey

No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.

---Simone Weil.

Was reminded of this when reading the harrowing accounts of what happened in Vienna, 1938. Harrowing in the sense that what was taken to be the ordinary fabric of living was torn asunder. The daily rituals that sustain what can only be called the illusion of our civility to one another and our sense of continuity are destroyed. The Jew becomes, is made into, a stranger in his own home. De-politicisation, invalidations, cancellings. No, not just that. De-humanisation, as if it was simmering there, under the surface, all along...

'This process of stripping away your respectability, taking away your watch-chain, or your shoes, or your belt, so that you stumble to hold up your trousers with one hand, is a way of returning everyone to the shetel, stripping you back to your essential character- wandering, unshaven, bowed with your possessions on your back.'

Houses are ransacked, people are roughed up. This is how it begins. Again and again.

'This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.'

There's something awful and almost universal in this brutality: the bulldozing of homes, resettlements, the denial of property rights to slum-dwellers, the creation of 'reservations', expulsions (good for a single journey), the rootless vs those bound by blood and soil, the saved and the damned; it goes on, and on...

'All the disturbances of the city continued outside our window, but we felt isolated and safe, as if the street were a river, and our room a raft...these small shared pleasures were, and remain, no less moving, or beautiful, or real for being so precarious...

A life whose meaning lies not in a faith in the past, or in an after-life..to reconcile their own habits of pleasure with the violence of the world.'

--Adam Gopnik, preface to A London Child of the 1870's.

lost islands

Saint Jude's Infirmary-Happy Healthy Lucky Month from Richard Ferguson on Vimeo.

via anton

Not that I was keeping time, or that I could. Walked for five or six hours under grey skies, the familiar side roads that you know like the back of your hand. Supposed to be thinking of God. No, religion isn't about 'thinking'. Then what?

Saw Miro again; not the same wonderment of the first time, but still...and there was this line about how he loved Bach and Casals. There's something medieval about Miro. A book of signs. On the way there I passed someone selling a few books (maybe 20) on the floor. Odd. Laid out there on a thick piece of cloth. Middle-left, the book I was searching for! Carver's collected stories. And that line in the intro, that you know to be true: after the intelligence or the heart has been displaced a peg or two, there's a moment of reflection, like a closed book in your hands, and there's life, always the return to life...

Also saw the stunning book, Paul Strand in Mexico. Reminded you of Thesiger's wonderful Visions of a Nomad. Grace, necessity. The cross. For who, for Christ's sake?

We are captives, you and I, captives to a lost future. This island in which we occasionally talk to one another, the words we speak, already hold the reflection of drowned worlds. The last words. Concentrate. The innocuous first ones that opened up a space. The old mirror of our lives, lapping everything up, waiting for a particular image. There is no road to you, only detours, diversions when it comes to the unsayable. You don't know the what or why or who of it. The lies in my heart will be the death of me.

In my coat I sit

At the window sill

Wintering with snow

That did not melt

It fell long ago

At night, by stealth

I was where I am

When the snow began.

---Menashe.

The Interior Castle

I do not doubt the words spoken; or the silences. I do not doubt the world or the worldless, the world here and now, or that to come. I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight. I do not doubt that what seems full today will one day be empty, parched and brittle; and that what seems lacking right now will overflow. Without question. Capstones shift. The second space, the white room, the time when there is no 'interior' and 'exterior', me & you.

a day for the statisicians

What is cricket?

A game.

But no, what is cricket?

Life. A game.

Watching Cook all day long reminded me of the way cricket used to be, the way in which it used to be played, the old ways and the old style. There he was, in the zone, carving out a mental space for himself, like a monk who's forgotten the world; pure concentration on the 'one thing needful'. Awful and fascinating at the same time: the single-mindedness of a killer. The creation of an immense world in that small space, impenetrable like a diamond. The stolen singles, the dabs to on-side, the utter devotion to blocking out risk, to finding one's tempo and one's style and then sticking to it come what may. The calm stillness of someone who's playing within himself, who's become a master because he knows his limits.

Comparisons are unfair. Each player is unique, brings something to the game. A shot is played. The end result is the same but the way in which it is achieved can be vastly different. Only the result will be recorded, not the flair or panache of a player. Think back to Viv Richards, without a blemish, apart from his friendship with I.T. Botham and his arrogance; the expansiveness of his play; so much so that you felt as if everyone was involved in the game, brought within the circle of his mind, whereas with Cook you feel as if everyone is slowly being poisoned to death. Then think of that drowsy, lazy genius of Inzamam who played it late, as if he had all the time in the world. At the time of delivery he raises that dull eye, looks up with that grumpy, slightly tortured expression on his face, as if he's just been unceremoniously woken up and is seeing for the first time what's before him, realising that he's really here: a moment of awareness. In that huge, slow body of his there's a spark somewhere, like a distant star in a creaking universe that explodes at just the right moment, firing his imagination: is it instinct or learned? He sleepwalks through the innings, showing flashes of intermittent brilliance.

At the end of watching Cook's innings you return to life, grateful that there are mundane things to do in the world, like boil a cup of tea.

styles of thought

Listening to Zoe Williams again made me think. In the discussion Kruger comes a cross as all academic, his thought somewhat abstract and removed from realities. Well-meaning, I'm sure, but still, speaking as if there was this invincible ring around him. Zoe, on the other hand, is on the mark, tot he point. Maybe I'm just being swayed by the arguments since I lean towards her views anyway, but perhaps there's something else, something about a style of thought, a way of speaking that is self-assured, engaged, and still not dominating? Maybe after reading anton's blog I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't, after all, something about the gender of the speakers here that makes all the difference.

And then there was this marvellous bit of broadcasting: F.Shaw

Cricket: Aggers: 'Kumar is like a tireless labrador. He's spent. But if you threw him a stick he'd still go and fetch it.'

Good radio is so much better than the box...still, the banter between the former cricketers is a good approximation to it. But what is it? The voice, the to and fro of discussions, the deep familiarity of feelings housed in a place free from the relentless gaze of the eye, a different type of intelligence?

Fionna Shaw: 'My grief is not irrelevant to my imagination'

'You have to be alive to the scale of the possibility of other people'

And then she's got this line about the 'arc of thought'. And you think about how limited your own is; partly because of language, not really inhabiting any, but also, partly, because you don't have any skills or the ability to concentrate on one single thing. There's a lot to be said about the multiplicity of intelligence-from photography, to music, to art, to sport. Academia is a very shallow or pale form of it.

The wider the arc, the more it intersects, the more it bridges over differences. "There's a point, " Milosz wrote, "at which all lines intersect".

~~~

I showed this to the swami who said, half way through: You know, when I was in class nine (about 13 or 14 yrs old) I wrote these words in my scrapbook and showed them to my best friend: 'something is better than nothing'. But she turned around and said, no, you're wrong, 'nothing is better than something... with nothing that's the end of it, there's no moving forward or back, there are no more stories.

when the world was young

You always wonder: what if? What happened to that time we had under the golden sun...was it only destined to last a moment? An elegy for lost futures. Strange that the article that led you here was followed by one by JCO on the very same topic: Jean Stafford's Mountain Lion. There are only variations on a theme.

Eddie and the Drifters. Or was it Cruisers. Never did finish watching it. Whatever happened to old A who introduced me to the film? Fell through the cracks like so many others, I guess...a few were always fated to fall by the wayside. That's just how the cards were dealt, no matter what you say. And God knows best, as the Muslims say.

':-)'

There's no going back to what is lost, there's no recreating or recapturing what has left your hands, only a creation of new possibilities, a moving on. Only forgetting makes the past really the past, makes it ever more beautiful and real, something that is lived. What is there? What's there, is there. And in each person there is a prison, which we seek. One room amongst many. A joker or an ace of spades in the pack.

...

Civility

With London burning and some of your friends gloating over it, I couldn't but help return to the wonderful online series of articles titled 'Citizen Ethics'. From that collection there's Vernon's very interesting piece on friendship:

Ethics is a form of practical intelligence. Like friendship, we nurture virtues best by our engagement with others and the world. Such skills must be learnt afresh in every generation – another reason why a fixed, codified system never inspires: it contains little conception that life is to be lived. But that also means there's hope, because ethics can be remade. That will come about by recognising the nature of our dependency and independence. We'll sense it's right because it'll speak to our humanity, thereby enlarging it. Who would want to live without friends? Who could? It'll be good because it offers us the resources to flourish.

Huizinga, John of Salisbury:

'Every soil is a fatherland for the strong'

'It makes no difference whether a soldier serves one of the faithful or an infidel, so long as he serves without impairing or violating his own faith.'

Huizinga: '...an optimism based entirely on faith, nevertheless permits a full acceptance of earthly life..he had all the virtues of a humanist, and none of his vices..[a] sense of the real and the detail, the catholicity of knowledge and interest.'

'The opening of his Life of Saint Thomas is like a stained-glass window of his cathedral, bathed in sanguine red.'

Miro

Was just thinking to myself the other day about how lucky I've been over the last few years. I've seen El Greco in New York (when I should have seen Jackson P); Goya in Madrid, the fantastic 'black paintings'; Constable's small sketches at the V&A; Bonnington at the Wallace Collection; icons from a monastery at the Courtauld, Frank Auerbach at the RA; and can't even remember what in Venice. Titian, yes! All very good (not to forget Poussin at the National). But if anything stands out, something that will stay with me for a long time, it's:

1. Rembrandt's Jewish Bride in Amsterdam.

2. Miro at the Tate (today)

3. The sublime Rothko, also at the Tate, a few years ago.

4. Lucio Fontana's Harlequin at the Hayward

5. Treasures of the Ark (Armenian music) at the British Library.

Looking at these pictures, actually experiencing them, is so different from seeing prints of them in a book. There simply is no comparison. Which is why I was reluctant to put up one by Miro for this post. Perhaps purists will say the same about listening to live music. Not sure.

Miro was such an utter and complete surprise. Nothing can prepare you for that Catalan blue, for the landscapes suffused with light. Lyrical and poetical. Some of the faint lines in one made you think: the last thoughts of a dying man: clear, reduced to the essential, a dream-vision already. You'd always thought of Miro as if he was looking down, taking a snapshot of disjointed, fragmentary beings in the sand. Squirls and flat, horizontal, lifeless backgrounds. What struck you was, though, the verticality of them, in the sense of heaven being linked to earth, to the everyday things in one's life. Secondly, the Catalan blue, surreal, unimaginable, or just about. Dream-visions that bind. There's something of the mythical desert here, the shaman, the first cave painters: immersion, connections. Everything is connected to everything else-at least in memory or a dream.

More than anything there's exuberance, sheer joy. I caught myself smiling as I looked at some of them, as if the flow of lines re-enacted some primeval symbol of our humanity: the curve. The fantastic 'head' right at the end, as if to say: we must look in the heart of darkness for signs of life or that despite everything something will survive if, that is, one concentrates hard enough, if we learn to look in the right way. And more, even away from the eye there's the faintest smudge of red in the black, totally unscripted. Humanity can be found everywhere. Red, as an infinite task.

.

~~~

.

Took little r to her first gallery. Doubt she'll ever remember it and it makes me sad to think that kids don't have that exposure to beautiful and surprising things back in the land of the pure. The first artistic works she saw, the first room we walked into, by chance: Diane Arbus's stunningly weird photographs (yes, even the Jewish Giant). Which reminds me: must get Thesiger's Visions of a Nomad before I go.

the 27 club

The wing-tip touched a mountain. So begins the intriguing documentary by Alistair Cooke on his friend, William Kapell, who died in a plane crash at the age of 31. Maybe there's one for poets as well (Keats, Shelley). [Where's that Huxley chapter on this?]. Wasn't Bonnington 27 as well? You have to wonder, just how many people, how much potential, wars snuffed out. How many in the Trenches, how many in the Camps?

'I think greatness in art is something you come upon, after only yearning and pain, and a deep sense of being in a dark tunnel. Greatness in art is not something you tell yourself you have. It is the oasis, the greatness, the vision, or whatever you want to call it, after travelling the vast desert of lonely and parched feelings. After this, the oasis. And the older a musician gets who has once seen this oasis, the more he wants to live there all the time, so the more frequent are his attainments of greatness and vision...Any true artist at bottom must be an escapist. Because look to where or she escapes!

...Was life ever like that? Of course, children give an emotion similar...but life itself is a hideous mess, and aside from a few loved ones and dear friends one loves it is best to steer clear of the hatred and evil of most present-day occupations.'

---W.K.

There's something intriguing about people utterly devoted to a vision. Not just the energy and the commitment, but the idea of perfection itself, of the pursuit of something that is noble, independent of utilitarian considerations. The notion that someone can be so immersed in their own familiar world and that this can then flower into something beautiful, wondrous.

Well, guess we've become inured to the idea of the Romantic genius, the suffering artist, pushing against the norms of society, the constraints of religion or the simple platitudes of the bourgeoisie; burning like a flame, even if for too brief a moment. Lust for life, and all that. What else could creativity be without that tension? You wonder about the life of Rublev...

Doesn't this fly in the face of all our received wisdom:

'A culture based upon the printed book, which has prevailed from the Renaissance until lately, has bequeathed to us-along withimmeasurable riches-snobberies which ought to be cast aside. We ought to take a fresh look at tradition, considered not as the inert acceptance of a fossilized corpus of themes and conventions but as an organic habit of recreating what has been received and is handed on. It may be that we ought to re-examine the concept of originality...

There may be other and better ways of being original than our concern for the writer's own individuality..our self-conscious fictions

We may come to believe that, great as some authors have been , their greatness is finally surpassed by that of the craft they have served; hence whenever we reckon their contributions we shouldalso remember their obligations; no credit need be lost if some of it is shared anonymously with others trained in the same techniques and imparting the same mythology.'

---From Albert Lord's Singer of Tales

Notes from the Underground

Increasingly you think to yourself just how wonderful this phrase 'increasingly think' is. And the unfolding out of just. This capacity to escape one's memories, to get lost. Where are you when you think? Nowhere. And when you don't? Ditto!

Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air.

On the underground, the wonderful central line with its fabulous horizontality, the double metaphor for death-as if two were needed-you glance at each face and imagine the personalities behind them, as if you were a caricaturist or some great detective. The one feature-the tight lips, heavy shoulders, tinted hair, or folded hands that would somehow reveal all. Hands that would grasp, and know so little. How do people look at you? Today, with some affection, for some odd reason.

You overhear two male nurses bitching about the place they work at; the in-jokes, the petty politics, the affairs; who said what...one of the young men, chubby, very fair and with tawny, short hair and narrow sideboards, speaks, amazingly, like a black man (Ali G, to be more precise). If you close your eyes you'd never be able to tell. In his brown and cream striped jumper he looks a bit like Augustus Gloop when he chuckles.

Deep down we're all shallow.

As the doors close you look back and think of the lives of others going on, mysteriously. Timelines. I feel a surge of love for the arbitrariness of our arrangements, that we should assemble here together in this particular compartment of time, sharing public space, at one with each other in our need for retreat and the printed word...this is a familiar yet unique scene. The precise pattern will occur only once-us, here, this moment engraved in a layer of memory-a thought that stirs me to wonderment.

Outside, put on your 'fishing' hat and open your navy blue umbrealla, the layers of invisibility quietly comforting Walking in the slanting mid-morning rain. From a height we all probably look like a picture by Miro. A young Atztec woman in blazing red hurries by you.

Meet old M at the pub. Except the smoky old pub is now really a bar, and everything's transparent, open to the road. Nothing stays the same. A game or two of pool to relive old memories. Still crap. The past is gone and there's something grotesque and comical about the striving to hold on to it. Let the dead...The conversation turns, predictably, to religion: "The only thing that can save us from religion is a sense of humour," he says. Yes, that and drink, I chip in. Drink, tea, conversation, civility, all the things that make us more sociable. Religion far too often isolates, makes us men and women of the underground.

"What's the point," he continues. I remember something Stokowski said on the radio (but attributed it incorrectly to Barenboim). It was this: music is about the interaction of the human hand and the score, the text. Just having a text on it's own, what's the point of that? Which is not to deny the great civilizing force of religion, its inclusiveness, its spur to art and poetry and music (not forgetting its divisiveness and how it also leads to barbarity)...just to say: one has to be human first or that without the human touch what's the point of religion.

On the way back the rain has cleared and the light is stylish, warm, almost revelatory. You couldn't find The conscience of the eye. Never mind. Your step is just at the perfect pace. To walk in the open, with plenty of time on your hands, a kind of ordinary freedom that is exhilarating. You stop in your tracks to marvel at the scene, just beyond the glitzy Freddy Mercury on Tottenham Court Road, of old brick buildings with gentle light and shadows falling on them: Vermeer, not Miro.

words by Carol Shields.

unless

Tried reading the last pages of Unless but a splitting headache hasn't helped. Little darling r is up so I have to put the book down now and then. She looks up at the patch of light on the ceiling, fascinated by its quivering stillness. Outside the sky is full of brilliantly lit clouds, a full array of different types, you think to yourself. Is that possible? A greyish, two-dimensional helicopter flies in and out of view; there are people in that miniature world. The top leaves of a tall tree rustle and sway, with their own peculiar movement, as if they were living their own life, in their own time, independent of the events that come and pass below... r holds on to meeoow ever so tightly, dreamily...

You remember a spat you had with M and wonder why it came to that. At cross-purposes, I guess. Then again, this seems to be a recurrent theme: your remarkable ability to piss people off.

Maybe not gender-specific since old K. K. got a real blasting as well. In both instances you suspect there's an underlying presumption that a Muslim has to, simply has to, have regressive views. But something said was quite revealing, beyond that: why did I use the word "he", never "she"; or mankind instead of humankind or womankind. Why was that? Is there some deep-rooted prejudice that men harbour against women? Given the levels of violence, the types of violence-Congo, Bosnia, Gujarat etc.- you'd have to say there's something to that-unless you want to ignore the record. That it's more than that: there's a savage misogyny as well.

The main theme. Of course. But something else as well; about how things are destined to break, about how fragile and tenuous the bonds that link one life to another, stranger to stranger, really are. The small, comforting curvatures in life that we seek and find; curvature as the primal symbol of our humanity, our generosity, our refuge...Goodness doesn't last. That most enigmatic of words in the English language: good. Good for nothing; good grief.

'Our habits are so familiar ; they're like the interiors of uncurtained houses at night, a reassuring wedge of known lamplight, a corner of a familiar ceiling cornice, a wall of books, the top of a wing chair, always there, the same arrangements.'

Ramzan in summer once again. You can't but help think of the last time. Ten days back each year so that makes 30-odd years. And you instinctively think of the next time it will come around. Where everyone will be. The stars quietly ticking on, too vast and too small to be of interest. We mimic their indifference.

the first terrorist?

stone diaries

You know, just for a moment (well, nearly two hours) I forgot everything. Sitting in a comfy leather chair, sampling books in Foyles, the familiar 'exalted silence' of the book. Stealing time like this makes you feel a bit guilty later...but only later. The secret contract between world and word? I think not.

Wise Blood, Stone Diaries, Wildwood. Glanced through Primo Levi's Periodic Table (which I'd love to re-read; noted his Quiet Star, which I hadn't heard of; searched for Penelope Fitzgerald's Human Voices, checked out Edgelands, Robert McFarlane's Wild Places and Iain Sinclair's London Orbital, one of those slightly eccentric, rambling books that you think of saving for the desert island (along with Rebecca West, of course). Too tired to concentrate now though and the words wash over you.

At Dillons, the slightly disconcerting feeling that there are too many books in the world. Like some sort of nineteenth century nervous temperament or condition. You catch yourself (who said that? Ginsberg?). You sit on the chair trying to read some Raban; a very attractive woman with tight blue denim shorts stands next to you. Not good. It is Ramadan after all. By now my head is full of words and fragments of lines and names and my stomach quite empty; must get some Carver. You read his introduction: always return to life. Yes!

Through the usual parks-which are a different world in summer, the little squares just off Bloomsbury like oases of bourgeois peace and gentle excess. They lived in squares and loved in triangles. A man in a freshly starched pink shirt sits cross-legged, meditating, as two women take their sandals off and tip-toe towards the lazy, gurgling fountain. Past Sicilian Avenue, a little slice of Europe in the heart of the city. Simon, outside Wright's Bar, not happy about Strauss and the cricket. But India lost so we're both okay. Suspect he's like me, happier when we lose...then there's something to look forward to.

Fascinating piece by Raban on 9/11. Link up with Mailer (NYRB) and Hell-fire Nation (LRB).

Then this. Reads like a Kashmiri manifesto!

Raban on P. Fitzgerald:

'the stuff of ordinary civilized conversation'

'She works every inch of her canvas. Her minor characters are as fully realized as her major ones. She is a novelist who watches over the fall of each sparrow...always reminding the reader of the ability of her characters to pursue independent lives behind the scenes, and their offstage activities are as important as those that are performed in public view.'

'The point of view of an amused, highly intelligent, and supremely charitable god.'

out of place, out of time

"But where are you from?", she asked.

You realized it was a mistake to talk in the interval but she did have sparkling green eyes...

"Err..who can say? From here or hereabouts, I guess". When 'When are you from?' might have been a better question, you think to yourself. What do you have but fragments. Fifteen minutes. And you want to construct a whole world out of that? I haven't got the time to explain. The background ordinariness of the world, the sheer, utter necessity of it, of worldliness, of "bridges" (Simone W).

"But there is real pathos in this dying people. These are my people-my own father, brother, mother, aunt and uncle...Yet I have no illusions: the death of these archaic, unprofitable, businesses is inevitable..But it is also the case that something rich and timeless that bids us to our roots and past, something central to our cultural imagination..is being lost"
---G.Bowley, on the decline of farming in England (Prospect magazine)

Perhaps the most valuable, the most useful, skill we can impart to our children now is precisely that of being able to ‘slow things down’, of being able to identify, in the fast-moving kaleidoscope of images and impressions which surround us and press on us from every side, those things which are significant. Significant, I mean, in that they enrich our life experience, are not ephemeral, have more than entertainment value. It seems to me that those of us who are old enough to have been reared and educated in what was in some respects a much simpler world, a book-based world, before the Internet, before Big Brother, when the only take-away food was fish and chips and people mended socks rather than throwing them away, when the shops remained shut on a Sunday-those of us who are that old are privileged. Because we had fewer distractions, and society in general had different values, we have resources and motivations which are harder to acquire these days. And yet, and yet-thank goodness there are some young’uns among us who are somehow managing to navigate a way through all the dross and emerge as thoughtful, intelligent people capable of discrimination and independent thought. Some of them are even here in cyberspace!

Celia Eddy.

I was reminded of this whilst walking with some friends through Chess Valley. Ideal companions in that they don't talk too much. Too much of a city-dweller to have any real nostalgia for a sense of rootedness to the land. But there's something to be said for continuity, shared traditions, living in a common world. (Steady now, b, you're showing your age). But here's the dope: walking through this quaint little part of England we couldn't name a tree or a shrub or a flower for the life of us. Not a particularly 'Asian' thing, you think. Must get Roger Deakin's Wildwood. Then again, that's just a book, not a lived relationship to a specific habitat.

There is a very real sense in which England's gone-just as every other place is 'gone' for you.

Andrew Sullivan: 'A society without some relation to the transcendent can become simply boorish and myopic. But, again, I see the merits of secularism more clearly now. It takes constant exposure to American fundamentalism to feel relieved by the prosaic dismissal of the spiritual by the English...

Anglicanism was always about the blurring of doctrinal difference, the aversion to looking into others' souls, the modesty of a limited spiritual imagination...the C of E as a bulwark against religion.'

The old ways, the old ways. Jesus, there's only a thin lifeline, a rickety old raft that's your family and a few things scattered here and there.