Jewish philosophy...or the sick and the healthy

'The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and the uniqueness of his life."

How we are warped by a warped picture of reality and ourselves. We grow into the picture we have/make of ourselves (Iris M). Is that an argument for the anionic-something common to Jewish and Muslim sensibilities, approaches? Or is it a case, more lovingly, less harshly, for appropriate images? To see justly, lovingly... (Iris, again). The need for icons, bridges, rituals.

Religion is not an 'explanation', but a transformation.

"But for those living without questions..." there is no question of whether a transformation is 'religious' or not. The transformative moment entering and changing the 'It-world'. Reverberating in specific forms as you find your own, particular, unique form in life.

"Dry spells" ...learning, hard work. Is there grace without it? For Christ's sake, let there be. If not, winter.

If you are healthy do you think of sickness?

"The attempt to substitute words, especially words that have no religious content because they have no genuine internal relation to a religious life, for that kind of life."

Of course, yes. Cavell's brilliant, dazzling essay on Kierkegaard. But then again, what is a 'genuine' religious life? That's the crux of it. The need for forms, languages, observances, ways of approaching. Perhaps.

The whole earth is a mosque.
---a prophetic saying.

Who is to say? Should these things not be decided by God? What counts as a 'religious' act?

Rumi: a prostitute who places some milk for a thirsty cat finds her way to heaven. Who is to say?

"What is unchangeable? Unbiased reflection reveals once more that it is only a name." (neither essentialism, not nominalism. The hardest thing to grasp)

Common sense action: "we are responsible for what we have thought and done in the past, responsible now, intellectually and practically, and that is what makes us thinkers, rational agents in a world at all.

Ruffu

A regal face without crown or title, half-remembered. The absence of gold in your life; you make do with what's there. The golden light through eastern windows, the slanting light into the world, the human response a tilting of the head. Your brow, fresh, unlined, as when before the womb, when your simple soul was but a name with God...

Is the cross the way to you heart? The human heart, a cross, a path on which we fall. The splintered will.

Memory, reflection, require two points in time or, more precisely, one point that is not in time. The terrible fate of being oneself, directionless; the cramped existence of a black Romanian dog that shouts to God: "open up the universe a little bit more" (Bellow). For Christ's sake.

Ruffu:

A quick, rough and ready form of patchwork; a tying together of what is torn, even if only temporarily, even if with the cheapest of threads. In dark times, you take what is given...

The southern light that opens up something in you. Unties the knot, overlaps boundaries. Releases you into the familiar again. There you were, your face turned westward, extreme in your openness, your thoughts streaming out to sea. The silver of the old mirror still able to underwrite your image. Your face lacking clarity, but shining on nevertheless. After all these centuries things in the world still have the capaciousness of the first times, the old days. The silent star of your mind, the columns of deliberation, the calmness of your hand on my ruffled heart...

North by north-west. North, and I'm out of here. A metaphor is not of remembering. Life returns. An old trick. A gracious friend, a papaya. The jangling of nerves, the inertia of night, the jumbled up thoughts. Stitch them all up. Ah, it's a bleak skill.

The redwood in the heart. Your name, as dark as a forest. Your thin voice ]
]
]
]
]
]
falling away.

inclinations and intimations. findings. endings.

she turned my way. and i broke. north, south-east...

she then undid
the knot of mirror and of tapestry

and I undid the ruffu of her dress...

(Quotes: Ken Irby)

.

Feeling a bit down, so won't be writing for a while.

Take care,

b.

the other side...

Since you grew up in a small town and have always felt most at home in a big city -London...the Great Beast, Londonistan- country life and the rural 'areas' have never really appealed to you. To be honest, the countryside makes me feel slightly sick. Rolling hills, neatly parceled out picturesque fields, bovine docility, the parochialism and pettiness of peasants, the profound hierarchies of caste and gender sustained by the powerful. Rigidity, narrowness of outlook, 'irrationality' (dare one say it)...isn't that the reality? Perhaps. If Thibon is right-and he's probably as good a guide as anyone-then peasants and farmers are not your simple, conservative, traditional types but actually quite cunning. Are they also more in touch with nature, reality, the land and therefore more realistic, less prone to fantasies?

Of course, one of the most pervasive bits of fantasies that is dreamt up by city folks, the displaced, involves some sort of rural idyll, pastoral utopia. The deep desire for the unchanging, for fenced existence (to invert Larkin's phrase). The horror of living on the frontier, of lacking roots, a homeland.

And yet it is worth remembering that as rural life is drawing to a close (a majority of the world's population now lives in cities)we have, as a species, lived for at least eight tenths of our history without agriculture. A startling fact. Still, for all purposes, part of our mentality and habits have surely been formed in an agrarian setting.

Well, I don't want to say the obvious: that our current desire for the limitless is leading us to disaster: infinite wants and limited resources, so says the opening of any economics textbook. We want it all, and we want it now. And damn those who follow us to hell! The history of capitalism is itself the history of crossing frontiers, of colonising other 'spaces'. The 'space of flows', said someone. The idea of the home sounds woefully inadequate to us: it must take form as capital, be brought into the nexus of exchange: all that is solid melts into air.

The desire for endless happiness, for unlimited access. Restlessness, heroic or desperate as the case may be. Move on,get over it, and don't get fixated with any one identity, job, place or love. To talk of a vocation is really so old fashioned; one might as well talk about 'essences' or 'human nature'. Everything's interchangeable, and all is flux: liquid modernity.The pursuit of happiness is what it's about. City dwellers as the modern nomads.

Where are you from?
Nowhere in particular. Or, worse: I'm a citizen of the world!

And yet, maybe this is getting it all wrong, mixed up. As Hugh Brody writes in 'The Other Side of Eden', maybe it is the agriculturalists who have been the restless (and destructive) ones? Maybe-and this is the really troubling bit-city life is just an extension of, a natural progression from, a rural life. The 'unnatural growth of the natural (Arendt). Wasn't that there all along, from the very beginning? Didn't the settlers introduce violence, require the partitioning out of lands, enforceable by the law and, ultimately, by the threat of violence?

Anyway, all that brought back memories of Essex. God,how I hate Constable and Constable country.

(The pictures above are from my friend's village. Very peaceful and a quite special place. Intimately connected to one of the founders of one of the main Sufi orders in Pakistan (3rd picture). You can read more about the saint here).

...to the music of time

Charles Rosen, on Elliott Carter:

"We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities."

"We live life forwards, but understand it backwards."

silent way

"The using and discarding at will of so much sound, so much artistic brilliance, the reliance on intuition, on risk-taking, on not knowing..."

Out of place and out of time. Less and less yourself. Twice removed. The words falling all about you. And if words, why not the heart? When I think of you, I'm not here...

The words not said, you kept in your heart. I held your small chaste heart in my hands, as if it was a flower, and they a paper boat. What you didn't say was true, after all. It was there amidst all the white lies of your heart, all that was false, like the dark words you wrote on the blank page. 'I give you my word' translates as 'I give you my tongue.'The small curve of the 'n's' of your eyebrows, unfashionably Persian; that silly comma for a nose: the grammar of your face I read, and was speechless. The last word between us, a key. When all has been said and done, a full stop. What the Americans call "closure". But, for me, or so I think, a mark of slavery. Yours or mine, I forget. The full stop, where all paths lead, paths tended or overgrown, a small world of mirrors, where you are me, and I am you. It was like the mole on your left breast, the dazzling beginning of your silent ways...

'No-one can teach us morals'

You've heard this phrase before: from Israeli fanatics or Muslim fundamentalists. As if our way is right, necessarily right, and always right. But there's more to it: it's a God-given fact-and there's no arguing with that!

Well, you don't believe for a second that a moral compass is 'given', or to the extent it is, then it is given to everyone and as a potentiality. No Syeds, no Brahmins, no Gurus; no pirs, no men in pointed hats, no swamis, no Shaikhs..no..as the Hindus say: "not this, not that"

Can a moral sense be taught, nurtured? If so, it's not through books or academia or music. You can study economics, philosophy, mathematics or whatever and still be a horrible person, just as you can be jewish, muslim, or an atheist and be horrible to other people. Not much use saying that in doing so you cease to be jewish/muslim etc. How to come to terms with violence within religion?

What is the 'first philosophy'?

You can talk all you want about pluralism (Isaiah Berlin) or 'infinite responsibility (Levinas). And yet, when it comes to real people, real events, what you say sounds fake, duplicitous. The Palestinians, for example. Or, you can harp on all you want about democracy but then at the very same moment say that the 'inferior races' aren't quite ready for it. Just as you can talk all you want about women's rights in Islam but, at some time or the other, you're going to have to face reality.

I dunno. On this one I tend to think that if it can be taught then it comes to us through our families: father, mother, sister and maybe through our friendships. Not as something that is inherited or inviolable. Anyone can fall (Augustine's pessimistic view in his later years, according to Peter Brown).

Iris M.
The background work required to be a good person. The need for second spaces, revision, for places of refuge, for generosity, for openness. Not the 'isolated will' making a choice. attention, concentration: seeing someone, something, oneself, in the right light. Clarity and charity.

think green

"Once students were attracted by seeing the urgency of economic problems and by a sense of their mission to solve them. Now the best come to economics for the opportunity it provides to exercise arcane mathematical skills."

J.K. Galbraith (1969)

Is the environmental "problem" really an economic problem? Is it, fundamentally, something that economics can tackle and provide a "solution" to?

Well, first things first: there's no doubt that it has been economic production and the lifestyle associated with it that has been (and is) at least a part of the problem. Secondly, economics as a discipline hasn't really helped in providing any way out (some might argue: how could it since it has, for years, been justifying more production and consumption: growth, precisely).

So, what could economists say: that the basic problem is that the externalities produced by economic activity are not 'internalized' (i.e that the costs are not taken into account). From this it follows that appropriate taxation on polluters will lead to an efficient level of pollution (or, alternatively, if property rights are well defined then the people who cause the pollution and those who are affected by it can trade so that one pays the other off for the privilege of polluting or having clean air/water etc.. Who pays who depends on how the property rights are assigned).

Of course, that's all crap.

1. It's not clear that when it comes to pollution everyone knows the exact extent to which particular activities affect which particular people and in what specific ways. Distinct from that, it is not clear that anyone can know how increased pollution will have an impact on human beings or the environment: there may simply be things we don't know we don't know: fat tails.

2. But let's say information or knowledge wasn't a problem. Also, assume away problems associated with property rights (do you have the right to clean air and what if an industrialist producing in country X has an impact on the quality of your health/life?). Even then:

3. How would all of those trades come about? Isn't there a free-rider problem here? I know that you're willing to pay to prevent pollution and since I would benefit from that as well I might be tempted to say: why should I even bother paying for it? But if I think like that, so will you, and we might end up where no-one pays for the reduction in pollution.

4. Or: if you're very poor (P), you might say, since money is more valuable to you than ill-health, I'll accept a payment in return for allowing the industrialist to pollute. P could be a poor country. Who is anyone else to say that this is a non-voluntary transaction or that P doesn't fully understand the full ramifications of the transaction? That smacks of paternalism, and seems to go against the dominant idea that tastes/preferences are given, indisputable. To talk about 'the good', in an objective sense, really means, or so it is argued, sometimes going against freedom-and that's paramount.

5. But why should the costs be 'internalized' in the first place? One example of this is as follows: our actions now will have an impact on future generations (on people who are not even alive now [can they be called 'people'?]). So, why should I cut back on my consumption just so Z can live a better life? What is the economic argument for that? Not sure if there is.

6. Economists will say: well, if you think of society as one infinitely lived individual then this problem disappears. But that's really a mathematical solution-and not based on any ethical foundations. And of course, if you assume that then distributional concerns become less pressing. What else would you expect! Less pressing, but not eliminated.

7. a) So, if society is one individual (a "representative agent") then, obviously, if he pollutes he's really affecting himself. Therefore: pollute less. [aside: you may have noticed that the only considerations here are of a particular type: consequentalist and human-centred. To say that we have obligations to non-human beings is really to take a step in another direction]

b) but there are still questions about how to weigh up costs and benefits over time (the inter-temporal distribution problem). Typically, economists will think: the benefits to "me" (remember, there is only infinitely lived me) in some future time period (t -125, say) are of less value (importance) than benefits to me now in the overall stream of benefits (as seen by "me at t-0...i.e "now")

But why is that? Is there an economic rationale for that? Think about what's actually been done here: effectively, what we're saying is that the welfare of someone in 125 years is not as important (it is "discounted") as the welfare of someone (which conveniently happens to be me) now. That itself is an ethical issue (as explicitly recognized by Stern in his influential report).

Verweile doch! du bist so schön

Won't you stay still, for once! Like the devil you are, always fading, always soaring. The truth of you now, and only now. The image undistorted by a question. Take off your glasses that you may see clearly, that I may see...Unloosen your hair and mourn the death of me-at your hands.

dog and nothing but a dog.

And at last he meets a black dog
running around in smaller and
smaller circles
like an ominous spider
spinning its vast web...

like a carrier raven,
like a cat, like a mouse,
like a black-burning bush.

like the still point of my heart.

He feels he loves the dog with a love
whose essence is hopelessness just as
hopelessness has its essence in love.

But there is no essence,
only dog,
black dog,
staring fiercely back at me,
like my own fate.

the human voice

(with apologies to bob)

Desert Island discs remains one of your favourite programmes. Of course, to the purist the idea of a song horribly truncated like that, the interjection of the human voice, the mixture with personal memories, anecdotes, politics, and humour must come across as something quite barbaric. The Beeb pandering to the unsophisticated palettes of the untutored and lazy.And yet, for all that, the human voice remains the thing that fascinates you.

Micahel Foot, at seventy five, his mind bursting with intellectual excitement. Sue Lawley, oozing with so much delectable charm, that sparkle in her eyes (or so you imagine).

A life lived with deep commitment. The idea of home. No, not the idea: the reality of it shaping what and who you are, always fondly remembered, acknowledged. American politicians (and modern British ones) always sound comically fake. Not even stage actors in a second-rate play at a run-down theatre. There's something ridiculous, eminently laughable, about conservatives.

the death of the heart

If ever I was tempted to read a book for its title alone, then it would be this one. I love the first words, the first page of a novel, because they draw you in; they're like a film trailer or a band striking up before the actual performance, or the moment you adjust yourself and settle in back home, the door firmly closed, the lights blaring away, time kept at bay. Events in the world as distant as the stars-which sounds kind of heartless (Hume's little finger and all that)...

The crackle of the loudspeaker before it starts; the maulvi clearing his throat, preparing himself. That registers, but ever so faintly, like the slow return to zero of the galvanometer needle and its shadow. You lose track, eat when you can. People come and go.

The other day, you bought Moveable Feast, and since there wasn't much traffic, and because of its size, you started to read the blurbs on the back as you drove with one hand. Which is kind of crazy, especially as you're not that fond of books after all! The dougal, on the other hand, has read everything under the sun.

-Yesterday, lunch with your old friend, canny and wise, as worldly-wise as one can imagine. He has this incredible (and irritating) habit of being able to look someone up and down and then form an accurate judgement of their life, their unique problems, their soundness. A bit like Sherlock Holmes.

But he just wants to discuss his 'woman problem'...the problem being that he's addicted to them, even though he can't admit it. But because he can see so clearly, so uncompromisingly,he recognizes there's something wrong, that someone with half his strength would have become unmoored if they'd gone through what he's gone through. Addicted not to the love of women, I should add. Not much point asking 'where did it begin?' or trying to describe the boundaries of desire. Each man is an island. And so is each woman.

What can I say? I shrug my shoulders. "Go and see a psychiatrist...a female psychiatrist."-

The mystery of the opening up; a beautiful face glimpsed. You move, north by north-west. Uncharted territory; the only belongings you carry with you are the shoddy ones you wear. Your hands as dry as the pages. You forget all the reviewers and critics that you so despise. There's no telling only, at best, a showing, a pointing to. Commas and breathlessness.

The momentum of the inner world.

Shall we talk about the end, then? A good ending, the perfecting ending, when you close the book in your hands, and just sit still with the sad realization hanging around you that you have to return to life, ordinary life. You think to yourself: what the fuck was that?! Just the death of the heart, or something like it.

cross my heart

Couldn't find any of this online, but it's a lovely cd. If you live in Lahore I can make a copy for you.

In a discussion with a colleague yesterday: what counts as a cross-listed course? Is there a set of criteria -perhaps not rigorous or definitive, but something on which one might base one's judgement?

One idea is that you run courses together, simultaneously, hoping students themselves will make the leap across the divide, see and make connections themselves? This, the 'pillar model', seems to expect too much of students in my opinion. And you can really only make that leap when you're on a sure footing yourself. Since most of us are blind to our habitual ways of thinking, and are only reminded of them once we've left them-like an exile from his homeland-then, and only then do we really get a clearer picture of our assumptions, methodologies, aims, history, etc.

The other way of thinking about this is a real conversation, a dialogue within the course itself. The problems here are legion: who, today, has that type of inclination or, indeed, training, to cover such vast ground in anything but a superficial way?

What, exactly, is meant by the cross?

How can one enter another's territory, land, without knowing the required etiquette, the ways to approach the other? Not just the borders, or places where people and ideas overlap, but deep into the heart of the other? How do you open yourself up, make yourself available without losing yourself? The awe, the bewilderment, the utterly mysterious: like the face of the other, that you recognize but do not know. Somewhere, somewhere deep in you the stranger ceases to be a stranger...

the lost ones

(with thanks, as always, to jacky B.,"a dark glass", for pointing me here).

Heart.
Still.
Untrue.
For you.

"I want to know how you fell. Tell me all the details!"

My heart?

"Who cares about your heart!"

What would you know? The ghost songs of a life. I nearly became a white man, but didn't. (The Allama once wrote that he was saved from becoming an infidel by reading Wordsworth. A bit dramatic, but there you go!). Always the intrusion of the comical in what turned out to be, ultimately, a falsely serious life.

How I nearly scored a goal for the Colts. The rain pelting down, washing away the image of Danny on the sideline, screaming to me to go on my own. Beaten the (offside) trap. The slanting rain, the moment opening up before me...

Or how I nearly made the right decision: put my name down for philosophy, only to renege and take the cowardly get-out clause. The loss of nerve, the swerving at the last moment to safety.

What about the time you were nearly seduced by a married woman? Get out of here!

On the dark side of the moon, the other you lives, the one who chose 'right' instead of 'left'. But why the moon? In California, right now, there's a tramp or a millionaire , who has my name, and less of my fate. Closer to home, in the walled city, a slobbering drunk lies heaped up in a corner, wearing my stolen coat, dreaming my dreams. And in the mirror, I sometimes catch a glimpse of that other me: confident, bragging, years of success under his belt, his hands resolute, knowing, his eyes dazzling, his heart not in need of another...there he is,just as ready to fall, the old fool.

fine form

To find one's deepest instincts; to stick by them.
---D. H. L.

Something odd to our modern ideas about the notion of narrative, a sustained picture of ourselves over time. It's as if the edges of the mirror are clouding inwards, so that the face itself is invaded by doubt, mystery. How to look at yourself clearly? No wonder the world seems so opaque!

Of course, the years of fakeness accumulate around you, can be seen in your eyes, heard in your speech. Words and voice always the first things to look for when you're looking for betrayal-assuming you can still recognize it. The tell-tale signs.

How to find the form that is an expression of your innermost desires, aspirations? Mostly, life is a compromise, a slow erasure of vision. Family, society, work, or religion will beat it out of you.Your old Jewish roots warn you though:don't expect too much: to be human is to be anachronistic, to be a stranger to the world. And yet for all that, this can veer wildly into a sort of cheap gnosticism, a tardy kind of self-centredness. No man is an island, and we all need "bridges", Forms, stepping stones, places of refuge.

Time passes. Only the young and the old understand. F.R. has this line: five seconds! If we had five seconds of love, truth, and understanding, what would the rest of the day be like?! The moment you wake up...how to keep that moment of awareness with you during the day? That pure gift? First thoughts? You're sure there's an old Islamic text one should recite on waking. Etiquette. Probably sounds too formulaic, mechanical to us now. Still.

What use are the words, without the life? Religion isn't a matter of words or concepts.

under the glass

...In the morning the mirror is consulted again,'
said Doctor Johnson, but
not of this one dumped in the back of a Peugeot truck:

it is left, one corner broken off, among the riven architraves,
and won't be consulted again.
It is in with the ripped out sinks, the sofa springs' dying octaves,

it is with the builder's rubble that is valueless.
Now that its silver leaf is
peeling off, it is pond water with gleams beneath the surface.

There is a frogspawn of rust-spots. Black stipple on mercury.
There is a cloudiness
of depth and current, scratched by teeth beneath the glass

but bright enough for provincial eaves and firs to crane
over - for the first glimpse.
The mirror is put out. It will not be consulted again.

First, there is the misplacement - a veiled indoor convenience
must cope will all that light.
It reflects a worm's eye view of what will soon evaporate:

the passers-by with collars up for whom spring broke
too early, knock wet
turgid blossom onto it - equally misplaced where breeze-blocks sit,

as incongruous as the fractured seventy eight
of Beethoven's Fifth
dumped in the stingers - where nature and something else conflate.

Second, there's the passivity - the mirror tilted as it is
reflects every detail
of onrushing sky - the gulfs of blue and weightless cumulus

that drift like floes, that billow, fly, and break apart.
And so I think this bit
of junk's not just the still reflecting point of art

but may be likened to a certain juncture in
the history of clouds,
at which formations such as these might part to glimpse

maelstroms both human and equine, far below,
and which will yet
tear softly apart, to show the goings on of god knows what.

Lastly, there are the soft concealments - the mirror invokes
the droplets
of wet that steamed off with the last to smile in it:

the youthful nurse's theatre of unwitnessed face,
the couple who
moved in and out of it some twenty times a day.

Now all that consults it is sky. Soon, it will go
to the council dump,
but here finds cloud after cloud moving slow

though its skin of liver-spots is utterly still,
under the glass of which pours this
bright moving floor or conveyor belt, freckle-faced.

---Tim Liardet.

~~~

Under the glass, behind the mirror, the words not spoken, clearing, rising, breaking the still surface of our lives. Time reverses in the evening mirror. A dim round light above it, a fading yellow haze, helps bring back something of the past. The lines on your face, like those etched in blood by a tribal, to mark the passage of time, the forward rush to dying silver.

To walk in the morning light, the dark leaves still by your side. The rain has cleared things up, and you smell fresh earth after a long while. The icy northern wind: the grass trembles, and your teeth chatter like an old man's. The mud is compact, full of crystals.Reflected light held in a calm puddle of water. Walk on, like someone discovering a new world, or the straggler left behind, surveying what remains of a settlement.The wind howls in the empty corridors of the half-completed building.

In the dark intervals between, you found yourself.Lost, as always.I can read, I can write. Is that the sign of the humanness in the human, like the strawness of straw?

Things get misplaced. You worry about that for a while. What direction is this, you fail to understand. No step brings us closer.Winter has brought a kind of clarity; you see yourself without shadow, pared down to the essential, or at least the minimum. The fundamental questions still applying as time goes by.Life, thought, as opaque as ever. The seasons of discontent. The generality of it all.

The other day, buoyed up by the prospect of this blasted term finally coming to an end ("closure", as the Americans love to say), you suddenly see one of your better students in a corner, pensive, quiet. Is everything okay?, I ask. She starts to cry: it appears that one of her cousins has killed herself. Just ten days ago N had told me a similar story about one of her relatives. What can you say? That there's a distribution of pain and suffering and joy in the world and that it will reach each one of us in its turn? That we are here but to fill in the slots, the individual names not being important?

Of course, this thought struck you even during those sensuous dances. (What a bundle of fun you are b!, I hear you say). Why should beauty remind you of death? But no, it wasn't that, or just that. Rather...I bumped into one of my old friends at the re-union. At first I couldn't recognize him. Don't think I've actually seen him for 20-odd years. He was, and remains to this day, one of the most down to earth and soft spoken people I've met.

"How have you been and where have you been?"

He sort of shrugged off these questions and just said: I've been kind of anti-social". His hair used to be jet black, plastered to his head. But now, it was all wavy and grey. His eyes were sunken and he looked not unlike a figure out of a Durer picture. Forget which one. A strange sort of madness, or half-madness if that's the right phrase, in his eyes. I looked at his name-tag. Who was this, after all. Then it clicked: he was the one who'd been in jail for the last fifteen years on a murder charge.He was the one. It could have been anyone.

In the early hours of the morning, with most of your friends sloshed and the initial charm of the dances wearing thin, you walked around and talked to those of your friends who could still manage to speak clearly. One friend, extremely rich, told me of the terrible time he'd had over the last seven years: litigation and family disputes; another of how he was racked with guilt over his kids not being able to speak Urdu, about them not being able to communicate with his grandparents. Behind the surface, the cigars, the girls, the booze, there's the old familiar heartache.

You think to yourself: get the hell out of here, get out quick and don't look back.

the memory of the future

The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and the uniqueness of his life.
---M. Buber.

Without meaning, the world is just things.
---JCO.

There is no "proof" or set of "arguments" for or against God! It seems quite ridiculous that anyone would want to try and convince someone else-one way or the other. And isn't a good life already religious, in some sense? What is that sense though?

Maybe not an 'inner transformation' of one's life-that seems to be asking for too much. Nor is it-and this is only your two cents-a fully coherent life, one in which there's the acknowledgment, understanding, and acceptance of a narrative thread. Our lives are too jumbled up and fragmentary for that. Then what?

Moments of recognition-of others, of ourselves.All this is possible only against a certain background, a picture of the soul. And that background work is done by others: the compassion of loved ones that allow you to be: volo ut sis. No higher wisdom, don't look for it.

Memory binds. Forward-dreaming and the past are lovingly carried with you, and are not sources of illusion or fantasy. The distance between us, between all kinds of pluralities, is recognized, the way broken-ness is. It wants to, and doesn't want to be named. Memory is a bridge that spans time, all that was thought to be lost, lost to thought.

What is the future but the past? The point becomes a circle. Like a boat moored to the land, it gently rocks outwards and is brought back in by the same rope!

ravel

Southern California: I thought I'd lost you there for a moment!

~~~

The weird and yet fascinating story of the Ovitz family. Mengele was in his thirties. The randomness of it all. The damned and the saved.

~~~

'a sheltered, privileged, mysteriously stalled life'

---JCO.

Fuchs found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"what is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it sings."

The incredible, the superhuman ability to accept the cards that have been dealt to you. With the blessings of the sun. Not to ask: what might have been but, instead, to inhabit the parcel of history that's yours.

~~~

The piling up of books, the sheer, dizzying fertility of the culture-churning industry. The rapid, burgeoning, growth of academic papers, newspaper reports, tweets, blogs, 24-hour news, cheap pop music, the derivative market: criticism, analyses, commentaries, biographies of biographers, films, clips, documentaries, all available at the click of a button; the mind not knowing what the hand does. This frantic, frenetic gathering and accumulation of details, information, its exponential growth; the hyper-inflation of words, the silence of the commons destroyed.

The libraries, the museums, vast cathedrals of the human mind, vast storehouses categorizing everything that's ever been done or thought. What a tangle we've got ourselves into. Another fine mess. Long ago it's outstripped the human capacity to name, let alone understand what it all means.

At a stroke this might seem oppressively burdensome, the great weight of the past, unplumbed, sunken, as dark as whale, so vast that it defies structure; on the other hand, the sheer accessibility to this bloated, overblown mass of details, profundity mixed up with trivia (the need for search engines to shuffle it all about) may, in fact, have the opposite effect: a delightful giddiness, light-headedness: pick out whatever you can for yourself, like a great jumble sale. You stumble across something, a story, a reference (good ol' wiki), a writer or a musician who was once considered great but that now everyone's forgotten or will forget in 30 years. All but a few amateur experts and dusty-haired academics, holed up in the tower have even heard of them. Everything is rediscovered. Like the Eloi, you start from scratch, not remembering what happened before. You find a few leaves away from the whirlwind.

Multiplication. Think about it: Prafit with his two volumes and thousands of pages. Do you really think anyone's going to read that, give you the privilege? Or Burton, six volumes on melancholy with the fashionable blurb: this books is about two things: melancholy and everything else.

The sustained brainwork, monkish devotion to the Cause, the blind, fanatical collecting, storing up for the winter of the mind, this colossal, mammoth effort comprising small, marginal advances added to one another. A few samples for you, from one page: The Last Imaginary Place: a human history of the Arctic; The Future of the Brain (dim, let me tell you); Choral Masterworks; Kansas city Jazz. The examined life...This morbid inability to forget. Major and minor works. Black studies, gender studies, development studies. Post-colonial, post-industrial, post-everything..the colossal leviathan ploughs on, devouring..heaving with a monstrous incomprehension, like a silent movie...Great Authors Series; Great Books. There's something neurotic, hurried, unnatural about it all, this tumble of imagery and dialogue. Bring back the Taleban. The 'world of celebrity, fast movement and shiny living'.

Art staves off death. Old hat. The art of storing up art. Now, that's a story!

Steiner: Errata.

the jewish question

Re-reading Putnam's nice little book, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life.

What struck me-and what probably drew me to this book in the first place-was the central question which could be stated simply as: "a life without questions". The tree of life, the tree...

To go back to the first place; the dark fruit of our origins gratefully accepted. "6.522: The problem of life..."

We're too quick looking for the answers, not paying enough attention to the questions; the questions we ask are often the wrong ones anyway. Academics specialize in this. To what extent are our questions related to life, an ordinary good life?

Rosenzweig, despite his anti-Islamic stance, is fascinating. At least what little I could make out from the Understanding the Sick and Healthy book (also something to be re-read).

Come on, come on, I hear you say. Spill the beans, cut to the chase. Give us the quotes you've culled and killed, taken out of the context,to bring back to the stream of life.

I dunno, seriously.Close the books, none of that matters today. Have a cinnamon roll, some black coffee...put on Grizzly Bear and be thankful for the care and attention of loved ones. To speak to, of, for...does this not mean to think for, of, with?

*I should add that this has nothing to do with politics. It really is something that is, if anything, pre-political (if not opposed to the law or the political, then at least prior to it).

But since we're here, there is no escaping the terrible reality that it was perhaps the very questioning, the reluctance to "conform" (in St. Paul's sense of the word) that, in part, led to the barbaric 'final solution' (a point made by George Steiner, I think).

Also, it meant to allude to the fact that there is no question, that the setting up of questions-political and otherwise-is often already a kind of betrayal. 'What is a black man? And what colour is he?'Who is a 'real' Muslim? Once one has posed that question, the door is open to all sorts of categorizations of fake or not pure Muslims: Ahmadis, Shias, Sufis, etc.

the impure heart

the winter sun's halo above the library, dispelling the finer particles; on ledges, pigeons alighting, and suddenly taking flight, fearful. the dark-slit windows of the fortress library; my mind on a precipice.a speckled pigeon scaling the incline of the lamppost. a student turning on his heels...

from where i am, i get to see so much; but little of the outside filters through my darkened windows. I spy, with my little eye, something beginning, and something ending.these worlds in miniature, fragile and precious, the brightest hour in the heart's mirror when I speak your name.

the darkness in our hearts: anything goes: nothing comes. the open field, a diagonal dry pathway, that cuts back to home, that i know even in the dark. i can find my way when light begins or when shadows fall about me. but when you look my way, I'm lost and falter. the purity of our hearts remains unseen, unknowable-God only knows; what is impure shines with its own name, is recognizable, is broken.

Everywhere around you there is the inheritance of silver, the splendour of green, but only in the heart the glitter.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled...

~~~

He said "no" and really meant "yes"
she said "i hate you" but she spoke so softly...
each denial is a denial of something.

The executioner laughed, and though he didn't see it, word of it brought a smile to the prisoner's heart.

'the night is so dark

the way so short

yet you do not wake

against my heart'

---G. Hill.

The winter heart, that struggles with its own blindness, full of impure thoughts. Dreams of spring. The blossoming of flower from stone and ice.

~~~

okay, okay, I know: this is supposed to be about politics...

the arab spring

What we lost, by following the fucking Saudis, was a beautifully coloured strand of our being. What we found, instead, was the coarseness and crudity of the bedouin in our souls, the desert in our hearts, the wrecking light of the southern sun. No Persian ever called me niggah. Arab spring? Nah, it's always winter there.

~~~
I found a word.
you came to me.
The hunt was on,
but i lost you
Because I saw you everywhere.

the fabric of our being,
richly woven,
undone by what fair hands!
A green celtic bracelet around your thin wrists,
the snakecharms of your eyes,
leave me tongue-twisted.
"Faith is under the left nipple"
And infidelity under the right.
Lost to the world,
I found you elsewhere.

the heart's desire

****] heart
****] absolutely
****] I can
****]
] would be for me
] to shine in an answer
****] face
****]
****] having been stained
****]

The starred heart, hardly recognizable, not even yours.The heart's endless desire to break.The coal fires are nearly exhausted, and it's not really bitterly cold anyway. There's still enough warmth in your body, even at 12 at night, out in the open.The rooftop restaurant buzzes with hushed expectation. The fires, the flaky ash-grey embers, are moved to one side and the well-worn carpets are rolled out. Some sort of second-hand Persian stuff.

The red and blue notes are tossed into the air; cheap Bollywood numbers blare out into the dark night sky. Alcohol starts to flow, the empty bottles kept neatly on the floor. Old a_ slouches in his chair, his arms folded, resting on his knees. He still has his silly brown wool hat on. He looks on at the scene unfolding before him, memorizing it, or so it seems to me; he's like the last man on Brighton pier, looking out to the sea for a kind of lost freedom.

Someone else, who you don't even know, reaches out with one arm, like an old grizzly bear trying to claw at what he can't have. He mumbles some tune to himself as he does so. You can see he's intoxicated by it all. By now the academics and the sufis have left. J says to me: "If I'd wanted to see so many fat people, I would have stayed at home!"

Sherry blushes like a 12 year-old girl, with all the attention he's getting.

The dances: mostly boring. But one woman in particular is spectacularly beautiful. Large brown eyes, sometimes softly burning, at other times sparkling. Her hair down to the small of her back, a silvery blue and green 'choli', with a strapped back. Thin, tall-ish. Smooth, bronzed legs.

All sounds very decadent, I know. But it wasn't. Cross my heart, and hope to die.