California and the End of Men

Was casually listening to a catchy tune by 2Pac (or Tupac). Reading up on him (Wiki..yeah, I know) there was the sad-and not wholly unexpected-story of the web of violence that he seemed to be implicated in, one way or the other. For some reason this made me think of prisons in America (Gary Wills?, NYRB, and in the current edition as well).

Many have commented on the misogyny of some parts of the 'genre' and whether one can or should relate it to people's behaviour and attitudes. Iris M: on the violent image (or pornography),  the lack of a restrained gaze (Illich), the forgetting of the ways of approaching. You really need to go back to Dudley Young, but is there something 'hard-wired' about men and violence, something ritualistic, almost?

'In the United States, for every two men who will receive a BA this year, for example, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the United States over the next decade, 12 are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the US economy is in some ways becoming a kind of travelling sisterhood: professional women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill. Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities between men and women are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, as women make all the decisions.'

---Hanna Rosin.


'And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.'

---Norman Mailer.

how to live

You don't give much thought -probably because you haven't got much to give in the first place-to how to live. Except the thought of first place does guide you, now and then. Don't want to see the world; silliness like the Taj Mahal doesn't interest you. Stay, stay inside.

Yesterday Irfan asked if didn't want to know the answer. Er..what was the question again? But no, I don't know what the answer is or what it even might look like. I suspect it would like something like the tree outside my house, suspect it would sound like the silence of the back room, the radio dial stuck, as it always is, on a particular frequency. Strain to find the answer. Waste so much time training your mind on it. None of that seems to matter. Little r said she wants to get married. "To who?" I asked. She smiled and said: Paddington Bear. Of course, but who else!

So many dream of being something, someone, or of finding our "true self". If this was California and the 1960's and I a Buddhist, then maybe. But this is here and now, the accumulation of all the here and nows of before (and maybe some of the future ones as well-God knows).  

'One lives with light and pleasure in spaces hitherto lost and really quite dark'
---Mercier, in Braudel's Wheel. 

A line from K. Irby...the sunshine on the sidewalk is all we had. Near Ray Lodge, you always walk on the side where the shade is deepest, out of the light. Catch your breath, hold your thought. Your skin and mind's northern aversion to too much light. Some other kind of clarity, surely? Icarus: the world turned away.

The gaze, perhaps through no effort of its own, turned inwards. Through the smoke you see a face. Memory and desire meet.

Only a dead person or a philosopher asks: how to live?

...

Picked up some Merton and last night randomly turned to a page; found the breathtaking line:

Nothing goes towards God unless it comes from God.

Of course, you've heard this before...alpha and omega, but it also resonates deeply with a Muslim perspective. I think any genuine religion-as a lived experience-tends to build bridges, see similarities, erase useless distinctions. Perhaps it is the other way around as well: those who try and connect, listen, are already in some sense 'religious'? If one does not have faith or an 'object of love' that is transcendental then what?  Is there some truth to the belief that if one desires something enough it becomes valuable, is valuable? Or must we say that only the inherently desirable is desired, truly desired?

On the one had, you're inclined to go against the 'taste model' since it would be odd to think that, for example, an irresistible desire for drugs was of any value. On the other, to ignore subjectivity or the personal point of view is a bit like saying an 'objectively' not so attractive woman cannot be desired. (Of course, using such analogies itself is indicative, you might say, of the problem at hand).

stray thoughts...

'The lack of system is a sign of generosity of mind.'
---from a review of Jonathan Meades's new book.

'Better naked than the Burqa'
---Femen.

A man in Hyderbad has, apparently, been accused of blasphemy for not closing his shop in protest or not participating in the riots.

The lack of system, you think to yourself, only makes sense against the background of a well-functioning system.  There's chaos, then there's chaos.

Just got a soft copy of Julia Kristeva's superb chapter on Holbein's 'Dead Christ' from her book, Black Sun. Anyone who wants a copy can e-mail me.

Economists don't usually think in absolutes; goodness is really reducible to 'betterness'. X is better than Y and Y is better than Z and the ordering of them or, rather, the conditions we think that should structure the ordering, are what counts as rationality (or at least the minimal version of rationality).

My first trip to America. Quite chuffed that I found an old coin-about 100 years old-in the subway. As I walk up the dark steps into the light I see hundreds upon hundreds of topless women protesting. I rub my eyes in disbelief! America! What a whacky place (admittedly, this was only New York and you suspect the rest, Larkin's 'desert of bigots', to be slightly unhinged in a different way). Which reminds you: must look out for The Master.

green philosophy

'I saw there was nothing to learn in the deep north...you get enlightenment where you are.'
---E. Bond.

We're out of time, you and me, kid. There's no two ways about it. The arctic is heating up at twice the global average. Scale down, reduce your thoughts to a minimum, to the essential, the necessary. We're old already.  Read about polar bears in a book. A world of reduced possibilities and diversities, the angles to the universe folding. What will you remember? Not Socrates or any mathematical equations. There won't be so many questions, or answers. Books, libraries, abstract thought..all that will seem so quaint, mystifying. Why did we darken ourselves with words for so long?

Crow, no longer afraid to touch the earth lightly, settles down. Once again, time will move in large sweeping arcs, free from machines and human regularities. What shall I remember, precious one? My house, the tree, stars, grey clouds, morning snails and slugs? History in stones and wood and glass. Fires still burn, the red in the green...

We will search and search for our previous life, unable to reconcile ourselves with loss (much as we do now). Or that look on your face, the recognition of so much time passing deep in your eyes; London, still a dark memory in my heart, the bridge, gently arching over the Roding, where a black dog once licked little r's face. You will remember how once she was startled, asking: "Why did he do that? .."What language does a dog speak?"

Muslims don't like dogs (Celia once said). Muslims don't like anyone! But there will be no time for such considerations. Flags, as beautiful and meaningless as silver badges loosely pasted in a scrapbook; the dizzying awareness that what held us together was just a two-dime fiction, that Shylock had it right about the great equivalences: my flesh was your flesh after all.

'Whatever remains green is more deeply, richly green than it was before.' An intense stillness..the smallest sound is easily heard.'
---J.B. 

Green spark, Montale, the district line, Bellow's green Venetian bottles, Tarkovsky's sad green of Solaris/Roding, Bonnington's lady-in-green, a "luxuriant green"...

what do you need? a tree a house to
gauge how great how small our human life
how great how small when you look up to the top of the tree
and get lost in the lush luxuriant green
how great how small when you think how short
your life compared with the life of trees
you need a tree you need a house
not all for yourself just a corner a roof
to sit to think to sleep to dream
to write to be silent to see your friend
the stars grass flower sky
—Friederike Mayröcker

...the green after the black in AnneMarie's German sufism. Bulleh...

She injured me, then turned away.
Compelled by love I dance, I dance.
She clothed me in robes of green and red.






  

the eaters and the eaten

'The table is laid according to rules of symmetry, choosing the right cutlery...Everything is controlled by aesthetic norms, and these norms, freely obeyed and freely varied, convey some of the meaning of...life...it speaks of tranquility, gentleness and things that remain forever the same..serving the food is also ritualized and you witness in the family meal the continuity of manners and aesthetic values.'

---Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy.

When your German friend was here you remember how, when going out for a meal, you or other friends would invariably put some food in his plate first, before eating their own food. A common gesture, but obviously not a universal one. And you have to confess that at times this custom has slightly irritated you. But, for my German friend it was as if his very individuality was being affronted.

One of the best meals I've eaten was in Seville...a lavish but inexpensive two hour affair with ripe watermelons, bitter coffee, dark chocolate,..sun and shade and a book. On the other hand, one of the quietest and simplest meals has been in Hunza: delicious goats cheese, apricots (of which Denise lovingly once wrote) and freshly baked bread. The etiquette there seemed very much to be: don't speak unless you have something to say. Not Wittgenstein, but a kind of natural grace and ease with oneself. None of the straining egos of 'the south', no excited and lively banter, no background music, just the mountains, clouds, and the bitingly cold air on one's face. This was, according to the locals, 'little Tibet' and it's not hard to see why...

It's tempting to look back, all misty-eyed, and reflect, Waltonesque, on the small ordering and regularity in out lives and how their dissipation is somehow a symbol of the fragmentation of modern times. Eat on the go, or in front of the television, eat on one's own or eat just because one has to, to keep the body going.

On the road to Bukhara, we stop at a roadside restaurant, a rickety wooden structure, something one imagines only existing in a medieval book; there the old man crouches on his haunches (eating or drinking standing up is usually frowned upon in many muslim countries); he pulls out a knife that he carries with him (this reminds you of Berger's fantastic essay) and starts to cut wide slices of succulent watermelon for all of us. Then, the oldest of our traveling companions is asked to break the large oval loaf of bread and divide it amongst us all. Again, there's something deeply reassuring about this ritual.

Of course, there are other norms, pernicious ones, that have profound implications. Those associated with gender biases. How do these translate into nutritional and educational inequalities? Work pioneered by Sen (I think). Other norms, rituals, strike one as very odd. For example, when in Boston, living with a Hindu family, an incredibly loving and gracious family it should be added, my entering the kitchen was frowned upon. Sharing of food or drink that has already been tasted is also considered to be quite disgusting.

Cleaning one's plate is also, you guess, a fairly widely practice. For Muslims it's considered part of the sunnah, for  northern friends it's plain old pragmatism (D. McClosky has a lovely reflection on the Dutch and their idea of "waste"). Drinking a glass of something in at least three 'goes' is also a custom, though I do confess to swigging down glasses of lassi in one go. Eating with the right hand now seems to be a fading remnant of an old tradition. Another part of that tradition: only eat so that your stomach is two-thirds full (there are other, more social ones which advocate that if one of your neighbours- up to seven houses from yours-is hungry then you have an obligation to share your food). You are told stories of how back in the per-partition days food was regularly shared by neighbours across the wall.

Cooking with someone is as enjoyable as eating with someone. But that's the subject of a whole new post. (R. Sennett: Craftsman). The politics of slow food.Food as a "political commodity" rather than a natural one (Ignatieff and Hont's fab. chapter on 'needs').

In a dark, dilapidated room in Karachi you remember how distant relatives, people you barely knew, laid out an elaborate meal for you. We sat, crossed leg on the floor, eating out of plates set out out on a brilliant white piece of thick cloth. Then they stopped and realized, in horror, that I didn't eat with my hands. There was a frantic search for a spoon and all was well in the world again. In Kashmir, you are told, there aren't always individual plates. That sounds too Arabian, barbaric, almost.Each to their own, I guess. Really must read Norbert Elias on manners.

Albert Hirschman: the common meal as a symbol...

To eat, outdoors, watching the world go by. One of the great pleasures of life. Paris. The click of high heels, the swoosh of a dress...Or a sarnie and some coffee, sitting on a bench or under a tree, a book placed down next to you, never face down, and never completely closed (a protruding pencil or bookmark makes sure of that). London. A liberating sense of freedom, equality and anonymity.

~~~

"To cook for someone is an intimate act. To prepare food that another will place in their mouth, that will be tasted and swallowed and then pass through that person's body, is a primal exchange. We care about food in literature not when it is deployed as a symbol but when it becomes a language. One cooks. Another eats. "

---from the Guardian.

Babette's Feast, of course. Courtesy of Beth.

Someone recommends a passage from Beckett...

tea for two and me for you...

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

---D.

I asked four people Scheffler's question; three were economists and all are my good friends so I was a bit surprised that their answers seemed to give greater weight to the former fact than the latter (or at least that's what I'd somehow tricked myself into believing...that friends somehow reflect and enliven our own deepest understanding of life). The fourth friend, a philosopher, didn't see how this dented consequentalism. I guess one should be thankful for such a response, but a part of me couldn't but help want a human response, one not so abstract.

I don't really believe-as some have suggested-that a training in economics makes one more prone to believe that "self-interest is the first principle" (Edgeworth).

Scheffler's question raises the question of how or why we value something. Firstly, it is unlikely that someone is going to be indifferent to the question; secondly, they are unlikely to think on the lines of an elaborate cost-benefit analysis, carefully weighing up all the bad and good consequences (no more suffering in the world, no more people able to listen to Bach, discover and create new and beautiful music, art, friendships). What is more likely is a sense of sorrow or even dismay. These feelings may be overwhelming when one thinks that loved ones will not get the chance to live wonderful lives (we commonly refer to the "premature" death of someone and are quite comfortable with commenting on how tragic that is). So, it makes sense to believe that we could think the end of a way of life, and of particular individual lives, will distress us.

This points us to the idea that we can value things without experiencing them and that consequentalism (and therefore utilitarianism) has its flaws. If it is argued that we do experience fear, sorrow, etc. that misses the point: that feeling is only derivative of an event in the future that we care about, that is important to us. Also, that we may not take into account all the consequences, may not view life from the viewpoint of the universe, suggests that a different type of thinking is going on here, one that is inextricably linked to our relationships. Value, or valuing something, then, can be for a different type of reason (if one wants to use that word). 'Valuing' is the meeting of subjective desire with "things"with objective qualities.

I desire tea. I desire tea not just for the taste of it but for, at least in part, the social dimension it has; I desire tea for two; I desire that you drink tea and desire it too and, even more, that maybe you do not like it but drink with me (not necessarily for me)... volo ut sis...or is it, perhaps, my desire for tea is really a reflection of a higher-order desire. I do not even like tea: I desire you. A new cogito: I think of tea, and I am. I sip tea with her, and am not.

What would it mean to lose the sense of continuity, of things carrying on? Radical Hope, as Plenty Coups might say. What if there is no north, north of the future? Not in the overtly religious sense but more in terms of an afterlife..a life after ours?

Scheffler's question is, for me, a question of what it means to be an individual, a question of our relation to time, of our appreciation of the fact that we find ourselves in a web of relations and dependencies and obligations that cannot be reduced to calculation or rationality. A love of place, of people, of life itself...perhaps our sense of the prospect of it perishing would enhance, in a not ambivalent way, the things we have come to love?

~~~

Train Dreams

Books are, to me, the last link with the beautiful in England...the margins of the page are browned and there's room to read. The sober blank verse is widely spaced and...easy to the eye because it's so spaciously arranged on the page.The whole book is as delicately proportioned as a Greek temple.

----J.B.

God needs the hermit in the forest as much as he does the preacher in the pulpit.
---Denis Johnson, Train Dreams.

Peak-effect. The last few pages certainly gave it a kick but on the whole: didn't do it for me. And the main reason is that the content demanded a different form: more detail, more pottering about, more everything; instead, what we got was a short story, a few moments of someone's life plucked out of the stream. You wanted to see a life, vast and quiet as the surroundings, an epic unfolding itself down through many various paths. touching on wider events in the world...the history of America itself, maybe.  

Lesley Chamberlain's got a new book out; was chuffed to be invited to the book launch but I fear I'll be like Rita fretting over what to say at Michael Cain's dinner party, so maybe not. Can't wait for her book on Van Gogh, though.

The posthumous Keats, or whatever it's called, is an incredible bore-so far. But I guess I'll persevere since it might link up with John Gray's fascinating Immortality book and Scheffler's question:

Say you live for a normal lifespan but that you now know that thirty days after your death the whole of human life will come to an end. What difference-if any-will that make to you in terms of your attitudes, feelings, actions?

A rather morbid and abstract thought experiment but one that leads to some interesting reflections.

Another Day

Slightly less boring than yesterday. The usual routines of exercise, the track in the evening now filling with darkness, swooping birds, flitting bats, and flying insects. Man, 'Nam couldn't have been this bad!

Dinner. superb food but everybody seemed out of sorts. Or maybe it was just me. Much more likely. I probably died and didn't realize it. I was only half there, like some ghostly visitor from another world, mystified by the whole scene of domestic plainness and the rigid artificiality. Of course, you somehow think to yourself that all this fakeness will one day give way, crumble, to reveal some sort of resplendent truth, just the way you peeled away 12 layers of wallpaper in the old house, in the old country, Wales....

It's not just the falseness in one's voice; it's the nonsense one spews forth. Desert Fathers and stones in their mouth. Out there to escape the incessant chatter, babble, idle speculation and pettiness. Not the Syrian eccentrics, of course. Bake a cake. Eat and share it. Read a book. Spend some time praying or in the garden quietly going about your way...the sudden light near the library, this wild mixture of sunshine and shadow, reminds me a pure Sunday: late lunch, roast beef and mint sauce, then the Big Match...

A looked bored out of her mind, that vacant look, the flashiness gone from her eyes...as if she'd already been married for twenty years, or lost something of great value. The discussion wheeled unpredictably from jihadi violence to "experience", then back to DFW (who no no-one has read), then back to deadlines, how the department of politics was full of shits and losers (general agreement there), the mediocrity overflowing from their department like so much refuse that hasn't been collected in the winter months. H, probably a bit drunk, his voice full of condescension and a mild resentment, urging us to fight the good fight like a parliamentarian whip, despondent (or maybe just bewildered) that we weren't all true intellectuals, didn't see what was at stake here: "the university", "academia", I guess. My heart isn't in it. Opposite me: a very attractive and stylish foreign woman. I put on my liberal hat...

The kids, dazed by it all, unable or unwilling to share anything with one another, or play together (I don't know why that's always expected of children). They're supposed to learn how to be sociable, how to listen, mix, express themselves. But from who?

Another Day

Reverence, tolerance...

There's a lovely chapter in Roger Scruton's Green Philosophy. I want to put to one side his (minor) comments on Islam but it never ceases to amaze me that people can comment on some topic about which it is abundantly clear they have little knowledge of. I mean, it would sound slightly ridiculous if a non-scientist made remarks about the scientific method. Of course, in an era which supports ever more fantastically rigid lines of demarcation between branches of knowledge it may be that no-one can say much now about anything except their own tiny area of specialization. So, yes, tradeoffs.

~~~

There's been some comment about the youtube clips which, no doubt, many Muslims will find offensive. And the recent decision by Channel 4 to pull the plug on a programme on the origins of Islam (Tom Holland?) has also brought widespread criticism (rightly so, in my opinion).

Some will say that freedom of speech isn't the real issue here; what we should be concerned about is the terrible violence and stupidity associated with some religious groups in the modern world (some may wish to go further and say that violence is inextricably linked to religion-or at least one religion-both at the historical level and at the textual/doctrinal one). I think that that's a reasonable and fair discussion, even though I don't really have much time for that point of view. Violence and the Sacred: Dudley Young, of course.

There's the minor point that it does appear that one group of people (Muslims) in the world is highly sensitive to criticism or ridicule and quite childlike in their reactions. Again, broadly speaking, that sounds about right- putting to one side Jewish complaints of anti-semitism.

My question is off tangent to those discussions: can people who have lost the sense of reverence for anything holy truly be said to be irreverent? When it was said of Eckhart: the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God, this was against a background of faith; in a similar vein, the idea of liberty, or one idea of liberty-that of freedom from constraint-was really a pressing concern when the state, custom, tradition, and religion bore down heavily on the individual. But I don't think complaints against authority were tantamount to the desire to abolish the idea of limits, restraints altogether (even the Reformation was about a reform of the Church, surely?).

This reminds of a brilliant essay by Cavell on Kierkegaard. Up there with Kristeva on Holbein and his own superb reading of Endgame. Words and concepts like "holy", "revelation" ..what can they mean in the times we live in?

What must strike the modern world as profoundly strange is that so many Muslims do in fact have a reverence for holy persons (of different faiths..as a matter of dogma, actually). Not talking about the barbaric views towards images (Buddhist and Hindu) of some, but of the day-today religious views of the majority. And then there's one of my favourite stories-which sounds authentic-about how the Prophet protected the image of Christ from being destroyed in the Kaba (see Titus Burckhardt's Art of Islam for details).

To go back to Scruton: is there something about the modern way of living, capitalist society, that destroys the sense of reverence, attachment to a place or the past or to nature? Is there something about it-its emphasis on use value, for example-that erases the boundaries between public and private, sacred and profane, the different "spheres of justice" (Walzer) so that the very notion of transgression becomes redundant? What happens when the shock of the new doesn't shock any more? Is nothing sacred, Rushdie asked, and the answer was: No!

Illich has this phrase: the 'revolt against necessity' and Hannah says: the 'unnatural growth of the natural'. To speak of "necessity" or "needs" and not wants and desires is to go against the grain. Are we in need of a different view of austerity, one that means living in one's limits with a sense of joy and responsibility?

It might be said-and with some justification-that religious people have rarely tolerated other people (minorities, unbelievers, etc) and so why should they now be afforded such space. Such a view really only mimics the hatred expressed by religious people. What would the world be like if the so-called religious people and the so-called non-religious people actually sat down and listened to one another as human beings, instead of ridiculing the other, instead of trying to determine the limits of free speech? Surely free speech is one that is easy-going, full of light-heartedness, but respectful of other people's sensibilities. Although the art of conversation still survives (despite the internet!) one does sometimes wonder if it will continue to do so when the voices of hatred and bigotry are so resoundingly loud.

snakes lane east

Once, just past Saint Barnabas's Church, on a bright day, an old man walking in front of me stopped in his tracks as a hearse passed us by on Snakes Lane East. I still remember his gesture to this day: a simple and elegant doffing of his hat (or was it a cap?). But the essential gesture...

Now, what motivated this person to do such a thing? This already sounds like an odd way to put it and smacks of bad faith or as if one was trying to explain something to someone who was from a  foreign land and who didn't understand the norms of the society he or she was in.. What reason did this person have to act in that way, in what we all recognize as a moral way? You're inclined to say out of some sense of duty but then you might think that such considerations appear to be 'mechanical', as if imposed from the outside, as it were (aside: criticisms of Judaism or Islam as being too ritualistic, too bound by the law, also seem to stem from the view that there's a radical disjunction between the "inner" self and the body, the act, the world).

If not that, then might we temper our view a bit and say: as a mark of respect? But how, it might be asked, can there be respect for someone who isn't really a 'person' any more and not someone you may even know? An impartial notion of respect does sound a bit weak.

We can dismiss at once the notion that he did this because it made him feel better or happier. Can pleasure ever be a reason? Yes, of course! But it seems mighty odd to conclude from that that it is always the only reason or that it always trumps other reasons? In fact, pursuing this line of thought, there's something not quite right about thinking that the reason the old man doffed his cap outweighed other considerations, other reasons to act (for example, he may have been in a hurry to buy some food for his granddaughter). Doesn't the reason we're after rule out the possibility of weighing up reasons? Is it not the case that that the man did not even think that the other things were reasons at all! Which is not to say that he was just forgetful or thoughtless, or lazy in his reasoning. But by excluding other reasons to act from consideration, things that wouldn't even have crossed his mind, was he merely acting out of instinct? Are we wrong to attribute reason to his actions in the first place or is that being unreasonable?

Was the old man really just repeating an action he'd seen his father, grandfather doing, all those years ago, when it was more likely that the dead body would be pulled by a horse rather than a car? How important is memory here? To learn something off by heart. Was he, by doing this act, placing himself in the web of connections that have defined him, his community, his traditions? Why should we think of this as an individual act independent of the world he lives in, distinct from the relations to other people, dead, alive and unborn? What, after all, is the normative force to his action? Why do we approve of his action if we're not at the same time convinced that this is how he (and we) ought to act? What is the pull of morality and why does it come across as a requirement, a demand, as a lack of choice?

you cannot be serious

'Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline, is not simply mounting a conventional attack of agape against eros, faith against culture: he is rather saying that the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God is poised on the divine word...

5 September 1966

What I see is this: that while I imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been absurdity. There is 'I' – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence! There is no longer anything to pride my self in, least of all 'being a monk' or being anything – a writer or anything...

The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously, that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful, successful and in a word 'not absurd'.

---Rowan Williams on Thomas Merton/ Barth.

~~~

There is something absurd about those who want to "prove" or "disprove" religion by arguments, logic, science or anything else; something slightly preposterous about the desire, or is it need?, to think that you, and only you, have hit on the truth, been delivered, found a clear view, made sense of it all.

notes

There's a false note to Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams that makes me deeply sad, profoundly regretful that I actually spent money on this book when i could have given it to charity (these are the types of consideration I often mull over in these bleak days away from home). The first bit is okay: terse, condensed, worked over like a flat piece of metal, but then it loses the plot because it tries to breeze through time. How can a novella or short story do that without appearing untrue? So, his romance with Gladys is, given their courtship and her death is covered in a few pages, almost comical and replete with cliches, like a series of notes or points that have to be made, before they can be crossed off. Shoddy.

~~~

Yesterday, at a wedding out in the back of beyond. Got lost, as usual. Strange how when the sky is really dark a place that is  utterly familiar almost becomes another city. The quality of light is the quality of our understanding. I wonder if this disorientation isn't but a sign of something else, some deeper malaise in my life? At the wedding, which we made just as they were signing the documents, there was-and yeah, this is going to surprise the secular/atheist fundamentalists who have stumbled across this blog-a lovely recitation of some Qur'anic verses by the mullah. As always, no-one has much of an idea of what is being said, but there's something satisfying about hearing solemn words repeated in a slow, ancient way, a kind of remembering and binding to previous generations. Set words, and probably the same intonation, over all these years. Couldn't help but be moved by it all as I thought how many couples over the years had sat listening to the same words, their hearts full of the same hopes..and no-one knows how anything is going to turn out, what fate will bring them. Not the smiling uncles, the proud fathers, the aunties showing off their jewelry, the bored photographers, the younger girls who wonder when their turn will come...not a single one of them.

And since most of the family is broken by fighting and pettiness, I find myself the sole male representative of this side of the family. Haven't got a clue what to say and I've forgotten the envelope for the money. Where's Ubo when you need him! 

~~~

Earlier in the day, not thinking ahead of the wedding and the great food that would be available I stuffed myself with two almond croissants-which I ate in the dark of the two-storied car park, munched down along with some piping hot milky tea. Peaceful, absent minded bliss among the vacant spaces and muffled sounds. Pure grey insulation. Was going to buy some cinnamon rolls, but for some odd reason resisted. Old age, I guess. Wiser and older?

books, etc.

When it comes to reviews of books there are only two people I trust: anton and Nick Lezard. Don't think I've actually read anything that the latter has recommended but he always writes with such gentleness and with a small-scale, unpretentious love of books that you feel that he just has to be right. So, maybe I should try and get a copy of 'The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls'.

What is it about the short story that appeals to you? The precision, the puritanical idea that no word is superfluous, no image is allowed to grow (he says, putting on his Jewish hat)? The loose bagginess of the novel, in which one can lose oneself, can find some comfort as words wash over you.

The Dougal, of course. Still half in love with Capote's Cold Blood. Not so sure of her reading of Light Years, though Salter's other work does seem horridly false, contrived. Denis Johnson's Train Dreams isn't living up to Jesus's Son. So far, that is. Not sure why I was expecting some visionary prose.

Books to read, on my shelf:

M.D. Foot: Debts of Honour
R. Hass: Collected Poems
J. Burnside: Black Cat & Selected Poems
P. Linebraugh: Magna Carta
A. Carson: Nox.
L. Moore: Collected Short Stories (dougal's choice).
Transtromer: Poems
Hutton's book on Keynes
K. Jamie: Sightlines (N. Lezard's choice)
Infinity: the story of a moment (anton's choice)

~~~

There's something funny about religious people making fun of religion; not so funny when it's by non-religious people with their own axe to grind. If there are religious people out there to convince you that there's beauty, meaning, sense in the chaotic world, then there are non-religious people out there to convince you that all we are is raw flesh, and then, eventually, dust. What both share, and what I dislike in both, is this desire to convince or bring you over to 'their side'.

~~~

Scuton's Green Philosophy is a huge disappointment. Why is it so hard to find a right-winger who writes beautifully? There's one chapter on 'home', settlement, that has some nice thoughts, but apart from that he's a one trick pony, harping on about 'big' government.

Eagerly awaiting John Broome's book on the climate. At least he's a proper philosopher, a very clear thinker, even if one doesn't always agree with his views.

~~~

Some dickhead recommended two novels written by desis. I don't think I can read any of that artificial shit. And one on 'Islamic civilisation'. I think I want to throw up.

winter breath

These first steps, footmarks, were they mine or yours?

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 book said, watch your breath, count your breath...this song of emptiness and fulness. You said, in your funny voice, "do I bring you up?" and my breath trailed away to some frozen, distant land...

 

I shall imagine that each poem I read is really about you, cast off rememberings. This was the place that was the place. Strange how strange the heart becomes, how much our faces darken with time. You, on the edge of the picture, nearly gone, my hand resting a second on a random page, against the system of loss.

The snow, the white object of our past, the splintered frames, the shards of glass on the wall to keep trespassers out, preparing us for the sharpness of the outside world....this "there" that holds us rapt. The frozen ground, gnarled roots and knotted weeds. Here, where no love is.

You said, in your sad, melancholic voice, "Do I bring you down?"

The ancient sadness falling, like forest green. The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.

Within the dream you said,

Let us kiss then,

I put my mouth close to,

Flow North, flow South..

It is not love you will find.

The narrowing sun

lights her eyeleashes

 

 

Yellow Birds

La pluie nous a débués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis.
Pies, corbeaux nous ont les yeux cavés

---Villon.

There is something terribly morbid running throughout this book, the chance happenings, turnings, that lead to the horror, the way in which things might not have ended up as they did, the way in which low-level failing lives might have not spiraled downwards, out of control, intercepting the trajectory of other people's ordinary lives, bringing them within the orbit of that dark story. At first, since you'd only seen the film version-the latest one, not the old one-you thought that this would be about a single theme: the lack of hatred for the killers...

You start the day knowing it's rained the night before..can sense it like an animal: the stillness of the early hours, a hint of the smell of fresh earth, the delicate sound of leaves. 5.30, for an hour, you read, when you should be preparing for the 8 o'clock class. Scoff down a croissant, buttery and not crumbly at all. 

The coincidences...you'd read a review of Yellow Birds by J.B. and thought to yourself, yes, perhaps reportage is the thing, stay clear of all the bullshit fiction, the elaborate conceits, the constructions around reality; hadn't Dyer said as much? You haven't got the stomach for Johnson's Tree/Smoke. And then, some way into the book, out of the blue, as if it's staring you in the face, as if when you can't remember if you'd dreamed something or actually experienced it, there's the dream of the yellow bird...