Takes a step back from the fray...he sees the whole picture in his mind, chooses the right moment, and finds time, space. Is Pirlo a sufi? Not since Zidane side-stepped the whole Brazil team has there been such a masterclass.

(proper) desire

You looked away just once
as you leaned on the chip-shop counter,
and forty years were gone.

---Helen Dunmore 

Economists are wont to speak of wants as anything but 'given'. Can there, then, be any sense to thinking of desires as wrong or of them being too many, or too few? Forbidden desires, excessive and frivolous desires..what language do we have to reflect on them and think of sharper, 'higher' desires, ones more attune to who we really are?

ploughing the field...Adam Smith:
...


The moment of recognition, that leads to intimacy, a kind of understanding. To assume we always know what we desire, who we are, is a great conceit. We stumble through, imagining the lives we didn't live but might have. "If..."..."one day...". the clauses, north of the future, the winter soul, finding true north, as if passing downriver, sparkling, far from home but clear to us at last.


~~~

One day the Earth will be
just a blind space turning
night confused with day.
Under the vast Andes sky
It will no longer have mountains,
There'll be no more mountains,

not a rock or ravine.

 

Only a balcony will remain

Of all the world’s bulidings

and of all the human mappa mundi,
limitless sorrow.
In place of the late Atlantic Ocean,

a little saltiness in the air,
and a fish, flying and magical
with no knowledge of the sea.

Picture a car of the 1900s
(no raod for its wheels!)
and three young girls of that time

traveling through the fog

They'll peer through the door
thinking they're nearing Paris

when the odour of the sky

grips them by the throat

Instead of a forest

there'll be one bird singing,

which nobody will ever place

or prefer,or even hear
Except for God who listening out,
proclaims it a goldfinch.

---Jules Supervielle.

out of the blue

I dream of the silence
the day before Adam came
to name the animals,

The gold skins newly dropped
from God's bright fingers, still
implicit with the light.

A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,

as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms

we might have known
before the names,
beyond the gloss of things.

---John Burnside.

Culture vulture

Flipping aimlessley through last Saturday's papers, couldn't but help think to myself: there's an awful lot of things to see, books to read, music to listen to. You keep on adding to your lists, which is silly, really; it only adds to your (mid-life?) anxieties: things-to-do-before-you-die sort of thing. Of course there's no time for any of it. You end up (no, you've ended up) living a life without assimilating anything, and have no sense of any inner coherence; instead, fragments of lines of poetry, quotes here and there, a few jumbled thoughts which it would take you a lifetime to untangle. The number of half-read books, half-watched films, and music listened to distractedly is staggering. Everyhting is there to be consumed, nothing to be savoured...

'The range of culture is so diffuse, the "topics" of interest so proliferated, that it is almost impossible to find a centre of gravity that can truly define the "cultivated" man.'

--D. Bell.

'World-culture', fusion music, international best-sellers. You have to wonder: how convenient all that is for capitalism and the marketeers. The idea of boundaries, limits, of something being withdrawn from one's gaze or understanding, is simply not on. The past and "exotic" cultures must be plundered, made "available" (is it a coincidence that that word is related to sex?)

~~~

The case of someone who went missing 21 years ago has been re-opened. There's something utterly mysterious about that (assuming it's not sinister, which is more likely). Someone, back in 1991, just walking out and never returning, the bowl of cornflakes on the table a sharp reminder of his presence, the room exactly as it was when he left, his loved ones greyer, wiser, sadder; or maybe they've moved on and he returns to find strangers living in his home...

~~~

As we become more competitive over luxuries we 'lose the ability to share and sacrifice. There then follows, says Ibn Khaldun the loss of "asabiyah", that sense of solidarity..that group feeling which means mutual affection...'
--D. Bell. 

But what's the evidence for that? It seems, on the contrary, that market-based societies are fairer and have higher levels of trust etc. Also, the 'group feeling' was often based on tribal instincts, ethnicity- and depended, at least in part, on excluding those not in the group. Of course, to a conservative, this falling away from unity is to be deplored. It seems unquestionable (to him) that the modern world is full of alienated, estranged, disenchanted individuals. Markets, or so the argument goes, lead to a decline in "social capital" and to "atomization".

R and R

little r's favourite song at the moment. only problem is: she sings it to the words from bleedin' julie andrews
:-(

Gotta break her out of the white man's culture.

Regret
Slips its noose
around the neck
  ---Menashe.

Skidelsky's new book is out. Chimes with my own planned book.

'Deprived of their ethical language by the collapse of religion and the strongly individualist fashion in economics and political philosophy...'

news from a strange planet

an hour before sunset and little r helps me collect some flowers; we don't know the names of any of them and so have to go by their weirdness or size (in her case). she blows at a dandelion, not knowing yet the timeless human convention of making a wish as one does so. the natural life of flowers on earth intermingling with human history, desires, expectations. at other times people have held buttercups under your chin as a proof of love...

we walk across the wooden bridge, full of cobwebs but no spiders. the Roding in full flow, dark and brooding as usual, bending back the tall grasses. r thinks she sees a fish but it's only the glimmer of the late sun on a ripple. "strange that you should remember fish at this particular moment in time," I said.

"why? don't you know that i always think of fish no matter where i am, no matter the time of day."

there's no arguing with her when she's in that mood and so i let it pass.

we pass back and forth across the bridge several times. "this doesn't go anywhere," she muses. strange, because you'd always thought of bridges and how they facilitate movement. but when you think of it, there they are, fixed in time.the world, a static bridge, and i have no desire to be anywhere else, nor any need for names.

~~~

"The Puritans have stern faces; but their eyes have looked on life."

"I came to recognize a certain humour, flippancy even, as a sign of the higest seriousness."

'And if there was asingle day when we did not meet

I would sit listless, my mind in a tangle of gloom

To think we are now thousands of miles apart

Lost like clouds on high where many high winds blow,

What chance is there of ever meeting again.'

spent

'I began to realize how much audacity, patience, and solitude are required to express one's experiences.'

'the world, my life, binds the dark and light

together, reconciles and separates

in lucid day the chaos of my darkness.'

---S. Spender.

The great language animal has run out of things to say. Which is not true, of course. More like: I've run out of things to say and of copied lines.

Have western institutions run out of steam? The ability to go on requires energy and a blind will, hope -against the odds. [Aside: no point talking about the 'Arab Spring' or other places such as China since you don't believe they have much to offer]. Well, all instituions decline. That's just par for the course. But what, if anything, can stem the rot, lead to a fresh sense of renewal and purpose? As at the personal level, one can only dig deep if one has available resources stored up. Does an increasingly exlusive focus on our predicament, the sataisfaction of our desires and goals,indicate the weakness of instituions? Surely one of the aims of any instituion is to provide background set of norms and values that spans the generations? If our relations are viewed as being fundamentally of a contractual nature then what relation do we stand in with regard future generations when they do not even exist now! 

~~~

G. Steiner: the great importance of 'if', to think north of the future.    

first words

Descent. Stars, clouds, mist, dew. I fall.

Walk into the familiar. The tree in the leaf, the flourishing of green under the seasons. Menakshe. Me.She. The narrowing down, to find the first stammering word...sparse, pared down, the singular. The sound of your re-entry into the world. the grey skies over, cast their spell. the mystery of a name, re-emerging. you find yourself. the days of deep light and dark shade. too much history floating in the clouds. you look down, small steps. for a stone no-one has tread on...

a sudden breeze picks up, an hospitable gust from a great distance. spent forces, ghostlike. it brushes through a cloud, and delivers a few splotches of rain before my feet, displacing the dust. your heart dry, remembers, imagines a word. the river/we cannot cross/ flows forever. time herself would not flow, reverse. the swami hugged me. my brow unfurrowed. little r cried.

descent/dissent. down, to your self. surround your soul with words, and stolen glimmerings.the Lord of boundaries opens His doors again. a golden chain of light links us. outside & inside my house: i live in the day, with no time to know another.

The silence is vast
I am still and wander
Keeping you in mind
There is never enough
Time to know another.
---Menashe.

On the origin of 6 pm

At 6 pm tomorrow I will be somewhere else, or here. Don't ask where my heart will be! For I haven't found it myself. Use a magnifying glass, steady your hand, and see it burn.

Human fates are simplified by names. But your multiple names are so confusing. The unnecessary complexity of mixed origins, like the ancient anarchy of the heart. We walk, dragging our love behind us. Because we can't see what's ahead, north of the future: 6:01. "There you go again," she said, "putting words into my mouth." A keepsake for my namesake. There are no words. There never were when it came to the crunch. There you go again, she said, bringing silence to my heart...

Your eyes, of course. But I shall remember your mouth. What if the image before death is death itself? 'Five minutes to six,' at St. Paul's. Time is on our hands...

London, sweet London, translate my words for her. Fortunately, I hardly ever understand you. Take my coat, and slow my pulse. Help me find my true pace, the image I keep in my top pocket. Tree and star, and dark crow; muse whose mind is a series of inter-linkages, the face of sun's dark'nd world. Raven of the heart, looks down and spies that the magnitude of things is measured by the depth of the cut. 

Your mouth, (), deeply familiar. But when I kiss you, your tongue tastes of a tenth planet...your gait is indeed royal:...infallibility of breasts. You walk without motion. Your absence noted. And so it is 6 o'clock. The same as yesterday. The same as tomorrow. 

 

Colour me once

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

Bent in emptiness

over emptiness

But flying.

---Ted Hughes.