The way that is away is not a way

It took us a whole day driving up there but eventually, after a few stutters and false starts, we got to Kalam, Swat. Three days of quiet: these were the days before Blackberry, online books, wi-fi, facebook and other irritants. Simple living: basic food, a roof over our heads and bare furniture. This was it. The real deal. No relatives, no politics, no thoughts of the state of the world. Via negativa? 

After three days Ubo said: sod this! I don't think I can take any more of this quiet. We've seen nature. All very beautiful and all that but now what?!

There was this line from Glenn Gould's radio programme that I liked a lot: you cannot find holiness in the city.  Was that the line? Or was it: you cannot find holiness apart from the city, in isolation? To talk of 'holiness' already leads in the wrong direction...

there are these nice thoughts by Thomas Merton, someone who Bob on the overgrown path constantly points us to...

'There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve.'

Yes.

John Burnside continues, citing Emerson:

'we require such solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the streets and in palaces...it is not the circumstances of seeing more or fewer people but the readiness of sympathy that imports.'

Of course, blogland is a strange place to be writing about solitude, 'aloneness'. 

Is there a point at which you are at the right distance from the world, a place from which you can look at it from the right angle? Not too close to be drowned in it or drawn to it; but not too distant to lose oneself in one own's trivial and petty thoughts or anxieties? If there is a false inwardness then there is also a false worldliness. Degrees of freedom. 

I think, with time...who thinks with time? I think, with time, I am less sure of what I want to say about religion. Very little, actually, except to spite the atheists now and then. 

Truth...interrupted

In the quiet in the land you hear only your own voice.

It takes maybe twenty, thirty years to live out a life of meaning, to work it out. An apple-pie existence is okay, but if you look beyond to the specifics and further, you might ask yourself: is there anything else, or how does your life reflect something greater, wider than the narrow arc of time and space that has been allotted to you?

There is something both fascinating and daunting about the idea of a simple life, one consecrated to the memory of a way of life that is centuries old. As if the passage of time itself could confer a trace of the timeless onto some daily act, as if by repeating the same words and gestures over time one would suddenly alight on some kind of deeper truth. The mind not scattered by distractions, hand and heart in sync., a voice that finally speaks with clarity, without reference to writers...

In the desert hours you remember the colours, the centrality of green. What kind of life is a withdrawal from life?

Archaic green colours time. Passing centuries are evergreen...Green colours the earth in tranquility, ebbs and flows with the seasons. It is the hope of Resurrection. We feel that green has more shades than any other colour. 

---Derek Jarman.

the black, black sun

Janelle Monae Feat. Big Boi - Tightrope from Fred Romano on Vimeo

Growing up amongst white people you could never admit that white people could be cool (and for the most part, they weren't...this was the time, folks, when racism was still very much a "normal" part of the conversation). Of course, it takes a while for some to realize that coolness doesn't have anything to do with colour or religion or gender or sexual preference.

But to think with my left foot: I doubt whether in the strange netherland that is suburbia there is much appreciation of the possibility that strangers-blacks, muslims, women-can offer much in terms of "high" culture. Even if you listen to pop, you're probably conditioned to think classical represents the pinnacle.

I guess this is why I find David Goodhart infuriating (his new book has just been published). I had run in with him some years back.  Not worth recounting, really, but it did seem then (as it does now) that there is something slightly nasty lurking below the surface, and it's something that reminded me of views I heard in my childhood, views that originated in a fear of the stranger who lives amongst us. Old England, the trauma of it going (Larkinesque?): the language, the customs, the openness, all to be trampled on by people who don't really 'get it'.

But is that the real story? Somehow doubt it myself (which is not to deny the difficulty any host country would face with a sudden change in its population-especially if the newcomers come from rural/semi-urban backgrounds). But what is missed out on is the fact that the newcomers do adapt, do come to like the place they live in (by and large). At least after one generation things are radically different, even if the second generation harks back to a mythical land/time that no longer exists and never really did anyway.

Secondly, the immigration debate is really a red herring. The more fundamental changes happening in culture, work, the way we live stem from globalisation and the nature of the modern economy. If in late capitalism everything is in flux, from religious belief, to family structures, work and identity then it's pretty bad form to scapegoat immigrants for the loss of the sense of 'place'. And post-modernism has nothing to do with asylum seekers!

Thirdly, for those who do venture to listen to other types of music, extend their minds to pick up something from other people's culture, to those who are receptive to the wonder of art from distant lands (my moment came at the Met, NY and a statue from the Chola dynasty), or the sublime pleasures of different cuisines; for those who make friends across the borders and are open in a sense that is a lived experience and not dependent on a mythology of 'liberty', to those people such old-world posturing will seem ludicrous.

Goodhart, you think, could never really be a New Yorker or a Londoner. A bastard: yes. But not in the best sense of the word.

The Last Word

The last word sounded like the first word, except tinged with an unexpected sadness.

To have the last word.

...

On the highest point of Cavalry Bridge, you look down and out, to the cosmos of bright lights, constant gold and fine silver, sky blues and sweet purple, flickering uncertain orange. It is as if each is burning in its own time zone, distinct, singular, isolated, blazing against the darkness; at the same time, they seem to merge into a sea that is light and flowing, a sea whose forward movement catches the various lights on its surface like so much flotsam,  as it swells up and down, like a living monster. 

Inside your own car, your little zone, you hear nothing of the traffic, the world outside, but only see these mysterious lights, like unknown beings, merge and separate. And Gorecki, which you turn up to catch the perfect pitch of loneliness. Gosh, you could have been on acid!

No-one knows what the last word is or will be. You might think you do or think you'll say it later, but time doesn't stand still for any of us, doesn't give us that moment to compose our thoughts and words. 

Stokowski is a wise man. Originality is a response to the conditions of life...to appreciate originality one must have an original mind oneself.  The word that crops up again and again in the interview: life. Life, full of contradictions, open to revision.

~~~

The last word between us slipped away like a seal, without anyone ever seeing it.

Nothing he said was remembered; nothing he did
was fact or legend
in the village square

yet later they would memorize the word
he spoke that morning, just before he died;
the word for death, perhaps, or meadow grass,

or swimming to the surface of his mind,
that other word they used, when he was young,
for all they knew that nobody remembered.

---John Burnside.

~~~
....

We speak as others have spoken before us. And a sense of language is also a feeling for ways of living that have meant something.
---Rush Rhees.

110-A

'I look in the mirror and see someone who is not myself'

110-A, home and heartache, is no more. Sold it off today. Wearing my pragmatic hat: you know it had to be done. But when did the inevitability of something stop humans wishing it wasn't so, that some other kind of life could continue, behind the mirror's silver? But if truth be told, or at least some of the truth be told, then there's a tangible sense of relief about getting this out of the way, since it's been dragging on for ages...

Getting rid of the guard was a nightmare. I've never seen anyone so crestfallen; one would have thought it was his house. He did his best to fleece me but luckily the cavalry (in the form of the Colonel) was around to help. Some unsavoury talk about "these people" and how they only understand one language (the whip or the rod, I suspect..this isn't a point Wittgenstein quite got round to). Anyway, sod the socialism, the guard had been running a brothel in my absence (yes, I know what you're thinking: why didn't he tell me?!).

The last day, the last hour, try and muster some nostalgia for Christ's sake! One last inspection of the rooms, holding the brief memories of each room, as if one could take with you only one from each. The palm of your hand on the wall (is that what cave art was really about?). The sky greying over. Less than 12 hours before dear, dear Mr. P. dying a few streets away. Alzheimer's is a terrible, terrible way to go...Jesus!

...

Get the deal done and get the hell out of here. The place and the memories are crumbling at an alarming rate. There's no-one around. Not a soul who knew me here. You meet the President of the Society. He is unshaven and has oily hair, a double chin..about your age, give or take. Younger, definitely younger. Bags under his eyes. Just by looking at him you'd  think he was a drunk or a poet. Turns out that he was actually very religious, with a sparkling wit. A real, three-dimensional character who connected with everyone he talked to. My own voice sounded false in front of his. Maybe I was just tired, sleepless from the night before, or maybe I just got a glimpse of my own superficiality. I see someone else, but maybe that is me. There's a confidence one gets from living in the world and from living well. Not quite a deepening but a widening of the soul's capacities. And if wide enough, God knows who will stumble your way... Academia, on the other hand, encourages triviality and narrowness.

I could not sleep last night, suddenly I could write my name...

Sign here. And here. And here. Then blue thumbprints, as if I'd been stunned into ignorance...Mark your loss with smudges of blue. Head north, to the green ice. Or think of a green shade and a book. Still, after all this time I remember more than I forget...remember to say I, to say you.

You feel you've come to some great creaking inner turning point, a solstice of the heart...

The sight at any moment
is as complete as the heart is

Negation and logic keep at bay, though. Find the still point in your hand, your thoughts, the years blowing through you. By what light are we known if not those of our loved ones. Here, at 110-A, I saw no image, no reflection. There is a silence when it comes to the things I know. Whose hand plucks us from the darkness, mirrors our unknowingness...

...

You place your fingers over the black 110-A sign outside for one last time. Actually, it was just 11 since the '0' had dropped away, just leaving a barely recognizable circle of dust on the white wall. Zero, a double absence, then.

There are no more mirrors in 110-A. Oh, I know, others will go up in time and it's wrong of me to not wish the new people all the happiness in the world. You drive by the house-from a distance- 40 minutes later and out of the corner of your eye spot them moving furniture already. Three, four people around the main gate, others inside. Already the business of life continues, things move on. This is the world. This is the bridge. Don't build a house on it the sufis used to say. People come and go. 

Nothing last for ever.
But I will always love you.

the name of Red

Oliver Bullough's book, The Last Man in Russia, looks very interesting. Does Eastern Europe even exist any more? And Russia?

Was in the uncomfortable position yesterday of defending capitalism. Thought the other panelist would be a hard-core religious right-winger who would attack capitalism and its corrosive effect on tradition, values, family life, etc., etc. Turns out he was just a hard-core right winger, the kind that peddles all that baloney about property rights, contracts, etc., etc.

What I managed to say was that market societies come in various shapes (from social democracies to stricter and sometimes authoritarian states). Also: varieties of capitalism. The flaws with the system are legion:  growing inequalities within countries, the decline in social capital, the diminishing of a public spirit ethos, and the inability to deal with the problem of climate change. But I wanted to steer away from the silly categorization of market societies full of roguish, selfish, and materialist individuals. What seems obvious to me is that market societies-at least the good ones-are pretty open places to live in and that they eventually work against the fixed identities of religion, race, gender and maybe even social class mattering that much. Of course, much of that is down to social democracy.

But Charles Taylor is perhaps right to suggest that the market is part of our social imaginary, part of the picture we have of ourselves and of our relations to other people-which we think of  as being well-ordered, peaceable,  and productive. Voluntary transactions between people does go some way-for good and ill-of undermining some overarching notion of 'the good' as defined by the state, family, religion, or tradition. Freedom to choose one's own lifestyle is-the obvious point- valuable in itself. The additional point, made by Sen, is that market economies can also extend people's opportunity freedoms and not just their process freedoms (op. freedoms being the things we have reason to value, the things we can do and be). And this, too, strikes me as important: in terms of the range of fiction, art, music, films, and education now available one can hardly be that critical (range in the sense of the number of good things as well as in terms of the number of people who have access to them). Again, it's not just that market economies make such things possible...Perhaps there's a deeper connection. Is there a proper love of the world, then? Why do you find it so difficult to say: Yes!

~~~

And yet, and yet, your heart sinks ever so slightly when it is so optimistic (this is the black sun, after all!), when it forgets red. And it does feel like something of a betrayal not to be more critical. Is this lack of alienation just a sign of middle age? Is age just a way of accommodating oneself to the world? Or is it some trace of a religious instinct that says: this isn't all there can be, that the Robinson Crusoe theory of how individuals interact does, indeed, represent, or filter through to, parts of society?

All this whizzing about, the 'instant communication' malarkey, facebook and having 2,000 'friends', 10,000 books on your kindle, even more thousand mp3s; all the marketing of classical music as 'cool', 'relaxing', the 'trinkets and baubles' (Smith) floating our way via the South Pacific, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and the nexus with the war machine...you can't look at this with a blind eye. Is there alienation, angst, then? No, I doubt there is. We've gone through that. What there is is the boredom of Sundays, the need for some kind of excess (what does the word 'excess' mean in late capitalism'?), exotica and erotica, and a kind of superficiality that comes about with being surrounded by material goods, the life of the Eloi.

Brando: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Or better still, Augustine (in Ignatieff's Needs of Strangers): does a commercial society lead to a lonely freedom?

Red is a connection. Something that is lost. Soemthing you can't name.

Nostalgia for the Light (Religion without God)

A lovely short film/documentary. Well, at least the imagery in Nostalgia was spectacularly beautiful. Trying to weave the political into it didn't always work...to make people speak about their grief and despair can coarsen it; it can only be shared, ultimately, by other grieving people and can, quite amazingly, tend to the farcical if not handled with care (which means, you think, large areas of silence).

A very interesting article by Dworkin, which you need to read more slowly: Religion without God (in the NYRB).  The lectures are also online. Now, how to tie this up with Putnam's Jewish Philosophy and Dewey's Common Faith-both of which are little gems?

What is meant by a 'religious experience' and what do we mean by the 'transcendent'? I think in modern times there's been a tendency to look for these things in ordinary experience and not some isolated, cordoned off, specific locality, or set of rituals.

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

That wouldn't work without the small e.

If all is holy then does that lead to a diffusion of the notion of holiness itself? Must value always be localised, focused in well-established forms, symbols, places or does the spirit bloweth where it listeth? If the latter, does that lead to a kind of subjectivism where people can even say watching Zidane is a religious experience? (Well, if you've watched the France vs Brazil World Cup quarter-final you might think again).

And then there's this wonderful story, which I think sounds real, since it appeals to our modern sensibilities.

Of course, the mullah will have none of this (partly because he has to sanction what counts and what doesn't).

...lecture. back later.

Black Spain

This is the only Goya I've seen in London. The others, in the Prado, were quite haunting, something that at the time I thought quite an experience but on reflection seem rather silly.

Watching Robert Hughes's awful Crazy like a Genius. His book on Barcelona is fascinating, as is his Shock of the New. Visions of Space is full of intelligent commentary but this programme really fell flat on its face. Dark Spain, Black Spain. Throughout Hughes kept on saying that he feared he wouldn't be able to really know Goya, the person. Well, why make the programme if you're not up to it, not up for it? And is it really the person we want to know anyway? A bit harsh, I know, and it's probably got more to do with my turning away from Goya than anything else. The sleep of reason, monsters, crazies, witches, the devouring of flesh, the satire, the disasters of war...all of that turns me cold nowadays. Give it a rest, bro'.

~~~

Miro, on the other hand...

Interesting Times

Two books to look forward to this summer: George Packer's Unwinding and old Hobsbawm's last collection of essays and pieces. Haven't read Packer but G. Dyer has this quote from one of his books:

"The press redeemed in Baghdad what it had botched in Washington."

Dyer goes on to write, 'reportage, long-form reporting-call it what you will-has left the novel looking superfluous.'

That's a nice idea: zona: how to zone in to the detail but also zone out and see the bigger picture. Also, this desire to 'keep it real' strikes a chord. Experience, life, not art...it seems that large parts of modernity are about just that: the removal of the superfluous, artifice...a return to ordinary living. (By the way, I don't think I can take much more of Cheever's moping around in his journals..it's unhealthy.)

And these lines from a GP article:

'The fetish that surrounds Google Glass or the Dow average grows ever more hysterical as the economic status of the majority of Americans remains flat. When things don’t work in the realm of stuff, people turn to the realm of bits. If the physical world becomes intransigent, you can take refuge in the virtual world, where you can solve problems.'

Listening to Aleksandar Hemon on the radio. Radio, of course, being miles better than anything else. Just the voice and ideas and forget the frills. Hemon's happened to be gravelly, old-world Jewish, world-wise, the type that is devoid of any spiritual pretension. Multiplicity as a way of defying definition (Houdini and all that jazz). Only makes sense if you've actually lived all those lives, otherwise it's just fragments, shells. The desire, the need, to tie the loose threads together, to "intuit unity" is always there. Storytellers and their "&.."..a different kind of unity, perhaps?

Edward Said's last book, the one on Freud, was wonderfully subversive of the notion of a fixed identity, of "origins". You might say that such disruptions are very convenient for the culture of late capitalism, which has to tear up any 'rootedness' to keep things flowing (yeah, I know, a bit general). But that's not such a bad thing, you think, especially if the only alternative is a rigorously defined exclusivity based on ethnicity, gender, religion and class.  

What does it take to go to war with someone, to actually hate another person with a vengeance? Is that hatred really a form of self-loathing, a way of escaping from oneself? These are the wrong questions, of course. All that matters is that one does one's best to steer clear from it, and not contribute to the growth of these feelings. Another kind of escape, no doubt, but one that is infinitely preferable. 

~~~

An excerpt from Hobs's book

the dark ones

the dark ones, without inheritance, who slipped by unnoticed by history, exiles in their own country. we had to imagine ourselves back into a culture, a life that wasn't ours and never would be...

Wales, my whore.
---Dylan Thomas(?)

what could be more beautiful than seeing England trounced, trashed, thrashed? Defeat always leads to speechlessness or lyricism but sometimes victory is permitted a word or two. The Palestinians, for example, or the Red Man. If This is Man, then sometimes what you have can prevent you from understanding. The outcasts, the outsiders, the lost and forgotten..all will have their day in the sun when the world is turned upside down. Of that much you're sure, except the sun's light will be black...

~~~

Walking in the sun, in mid-afternoon, your skin burning, your eyes slightly dazed, unfocused. The southern sun reduces the number of words we have for different types of light, it eliminates "glimmer," for example. It has none of the deep clarity of coastal cities, none of the calm intensity of evening blue; none of the desert's monotheistic light that can isolate an object or person. The high afternoon, the sunken hour, the coarseness of our insights, my old voice returns when it thinks of home. Shadows had stained the afternoon, or held it together. There must have been a thousand days like this before. The perfect stillness of a man walking without reason, light glinting off long windows, flowers wilting, children dreaming in the verandas, marriages continuing somehow...

1981, summer cricket in Victoria Park, tennis in the dying days of the season; the grass worn down to a scrub light as hay. T-shirts off, Robinson's, deck chairs in the shade, the end of an era. My star is fading, yours just emerging. An Irish woman looks at me with kind eyes, drunkenly, wondering what I'll be when I'm older. We were beautiful once, said the poet. Of that I'm not so sure.

The wisdom of the East: there is no wisdom and no East.

Zero Dark

'In a few days, we will have a new anniversary to celebrate or mourn. The bombing of Baghdad ten years ago this week marked the beginnings of another senseless American war fought for reasons that turned out not to exist, driven by wrongheaded, cockeyed, and manipulated intelligence.'
---Seymour H., The New Yorker.

'There is a sort of elation about the sunlight on the upper part of the house.'
---Edward Hopper.

The university has closed for the Spring break and it's as if it had returned to its original and natural state: silence, books, birds chirping on the trees outside the library, concentration, conversations full of mirth and easy-goingness; recognition, familiarity, family, the striving ego quelled, between the acts, melancholy put to one side. How to wear this superficiality naturally and not resent it, that is the trick. Those Greeks were profound out of superficiality.

From a distance you see a row of white houses, the morning light casting deep angular shadows on their facades, huge squares and rectangles competing with one another for space. The light makes them appear more distant than they really are. Under a certain light, and from a certain distance, I guess everything seems timeless, or finds some kind of redemption. In time, I think we will recognize war for what it is: just another blotch on the already stained record of humanity's dubious  claim to be civilized. No, better to focus our attention on the upper part of the house, for God knows what darkness lurks in the basement...

~~~ 

The light in darkness

Andrea, Andreas, Anthea And...

what is the correct way of saying this word?

(from Kingsley Amis and memory)

~~~

The light, when it is fading, is often most brilliant then, most real; it is not trying to illuminate the world, serves no purpose. The light attains a freedom that only clouds experience, or the feeling a child has on her first day of the summer holidays. The falling light of yesterday evening. By the tone of light are we known (Celan?). The crows, faithful witnesses, huddled safe but noisy in the tress, with their dark whispering, recounting old tales to one another.  The purple rain clouds darkening and thickening by the minute. Time is of the essence. And yet the light survives, more unearthly, like the face of a stranger who has packed his bags and is on the road again. The light within the darkness is the grey edge of the storm of our lives, is like a Rothko painting, is a bridge, a portal, is like nothing in the heart of a believer...

The wound is to be found on bridges
Where the grave lengthens
and patience goes on to no end
between the shores of our love and death
The wound is a sign,
and the wound is a crossing too.

---Adonis. 

Dara

There were not many differences, except verbal, in the ways we..comprehended the truth.

---Dara S. Possente spirto

Violence in the name of Religion

I hope you'll excuse me, but this is playing on mind nowadays (for understandable reasons, I hope you agree).

The thorny question: why is it always 'in the name of', as if one could automatically dismiss the possibility that there's a closer association of the two than one would feel comfortable with?

Got caught up in a silly, silly discussion with someone on this. He wanted to talk about 'moral will' and moral skill' -a very odd way of partitioning how we 'think' about morality. What does it mean to say, for example, that you 'understand' what is right or wrong but you lack the will to follow up on those beliefs? In this reading you survey the world, determine what is wrong or right and then act. That seems to be the picture. The model is the isolated individual whose acts/choices are what determines value. What of consciousness and internal acts?

You doubt that in reality that is how it really works. Can one (should one) talk about violence in the name of religion without looking at the content of religion, the historical understanding of 'difference' within a particular religion and the actual social and political context that makes violence more likely?

Even if one were to agree to the simplistic framework, it rests on too static a picture and too stark a dichotomy between moral will and moral skill. As if to say-as an economist might say-we can rationally see the good and then we just have to choose it. I suspect that value and desire are linked in much more complicated ways: the will is 'moved' or attracted to the good and the notion of the good may help us reflectively 'order' or purify our desires. Moral skill or understanding would not, then, be just a matter of 'seeing' what is right.

~~~

Right-seeing. Seeing as something more than a metaphor (and here I abandon my Jewish/Wahabi roots for a second). The icon. Art. Yes, where's my Russian hat...

The cross:

...

the shape of things to come

Of course, it's already here, as if you didn't know.

Religion and violence. Please, spare me the spiel ...religion is about peace, spirituality, etc., etc. It's already here, a kind of low-level disintegration ('low,' that is, as opposed to a major one-off massacre).

Now, of course, it goes without saying that there is something wretched and sick about human nature that makes violence possible and quite common. And I'm perfectly willing to accept that religion has had a dampening effect on some of those impulses some of the time. But when religious people set themselves up as the 'chosen people' or the 'best nation' then what you get is the classic distinction of us and them, the pure and the dangerous. 'Them,' the vermin, always bring with them diseases and (moral) corruption...deviation from the one true path.

So, it's not just the violent few we need to look at. (And, after all, the mob was 3,000 strong this time). We need to look at the cultural attitudes of the silent partners that either turn a blind eye or reinforce these hatreds.

Putting on my pragmatic hat for a mo. There's not much use in trying to understand pathological behaviour. Much better to drain the swamp. Economic progress, education, opportunities for all etc. has to be one plank in the strategy. Along with: cutting off Saudi funding and better policing. But when you think about it, the military have been cultivating the extremists for ages for their own ridiculous ideas of "strategic depth". What's changed, you think, is that the political parties now want to cash in: street power makes the mob 'useful'. The more you feed the beast, the more you try to bring them into the mainstream the greater the risk that they become an independent force in their own right. So, as Cohen sings, things are going to slide...

Northern Light

True North is only a longing for North.

Landmarks. Waiting under the  leafy shade outside Wimbledon station, district line, with time to kill. The darkness in the green. Is how you imagine Lincoln Green, which is solidly named, not experienced. The small bookshop, village-like in its seclusion. Pick up Larkin's poems for the green cover and the low price. Low-level poems, the low flame. The Marvell Press. A green thought in a green shade...

The faint Sunday afternoons and early closing. Sunday still holds within it the remembrance of an older way of life, threadbare reflections, the trickle from a drying stream. Today, years later, your face more sleepless, you sit on a green bench and the Spring light is the same as that day's. Some ancient affinity, words & light & time. The shadows cast by trees as precise and exact as they've always been, whether we notice them or not. From time out of mind, the same questions...

I help little r climb a tree. "What is bark?". It is the tree's skin.  "Then why does a dog bark?" I don't know. "What is front and what is back?" Well, you usually sit in the back of the car. "No, don't show me, tell me".

[I don't have an abstract definition for all things, only examples, particulars]. "Why does God love me?" (Thank God, she is Jewish after all!). "What is love?" Has anyone ever told you, little one, that you ask too many questions?!

~~~

The following lines and words, from Larkin:

Or watch the sad increase
Across the mind...

When the street
Darkens. Among the rain and stone places
I find only an ancient sadness falling...

And in their blazing solitude...

Having one simple fall
As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned...
the shape of loss
shape word to word...

Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
for always is always now.

Further North, latitude of soul, North by north-west, you find some old browning photographs in a stuck drawer. The rituals, the ceremony of remembering...your thinner face, brighter eyes, you hold the fading image up and squint. Yes, it's true, smaller and clearer as the years go by.

My face becomes less recognizable each week. When you stumble across a blog you find a person in mid-stream. Is that all you see?

You imagine moving, calling it a day, as if freedom was just a matter of sidestepping reality, some purifying, elemental move. What happens when you run out of lines to quote, or time for lost time? The light is thickening, drawing us inwards. Hopper: the frontier is drawn within...Seek shade from the fierceness of the day, small comfort in the dullness of the hours. And light, unanswerable and tall and wide...

The memory of Summer is like Spring. And the pubs, wide open all day. 1976 was a summer to remember. Your thick dark hair makes you look like an Injun'. Berry-flavoured crushed ice, cloudless skies, the idle train station behind the pub swathed in shadows like a mythical bridge that leads into an open, bright square. Floppy hats, cleavage. Never such innocence again.

The world gone wrong

youtube still down, so bear with me folks..

I can't even hear this song (or remember what it was), but still...


Ain't nothing right, everything is wrong. The world, with its small-town mentality and blood feuds, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Reading about the sickening cases of child trafficking and abuse is bad enough. In your own little part of the world people are killed because they're from the wrong ethnic group or religion. I don't think that's going to change much.  Saudi money, General Z, and the Afghan war has resulted in everyone being  pulled to the tribal belt, the frontier.

Old Bertie was right: the world has always been full of suffering and foolishness.Talking to Francis over dinner. Think he was right: one has to take a step back (but not too far back!) to get some perspective. One can, if one is lucky enough, also take a step back and-like a matador-let the raging world rush by.

If all is wrong in the world then what scope is there for the question: how to live one's life? Perhaps only in cultivating the small spaces you have, the "north" within?

the invention of abstraction

The idea of invention, as in originators, doesn't seem very fruitful. At the end of the day it's really an attempt to prove one group is more original and creative-and therefore more human-than another group. Old hat, really. The lack of perspective or realistic representation in an artistic tradition is seen, in this light,as a failing or a sign of immaturity by the particular culture. Russia and Islam must stand suitably condemned if that is so.
There's a great few lines from Chatwin here 

All well and good, you say, but what about Polynesia or some "primitive" tribe that has little art and no written documents. Do they still count as fully human? Of course, one does not to labour the point that 90% of all languages have not taken the written form and that right from the very beginning, if that's when the beginning was, cave paintings indicate that at least at some level abstraction has always existed. Isn't the very concept of a person that of someone who distances himself from his present (his or her present desires and interests), who can take a step outside of himself (to link it to cave art again: ec-stasy).?

Shamanism is a stray descendant of Sufism.

Hans Jonas makes a similar point in his brilliant essay. From the start our thinking, the way we see, was tinged with memories, desires and expectations ("I see everything through the lens of memory" said Hockney). There is no "pure" seeing, no raw data (the pervasive modern notion of how the brain works). What 'looking' can there be if we do not look out for others, with others?

On the other hand, the whole 'colonization' debate in the Huffington makes me slightly queasy. What is original, if that's where you want to go, is the emphasis on finitude, on contingency, a kind of psychological depth and shading...on the weight given to the moral outlook that holds that each and  every particular ordinary individual life is of some worth-and the representation of these facts in films and novels.

(hat tip to Roxana)

i

Chekov said: Let’s put God—and all these grand progressive ideas—to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man—whether he’s a bishop, a peasant, an industrial magnate, a convict in the Sakhalin Islands or a waiter in a restaurant. Let’s begin with respect, compassion and love for the individual—or we’ll never get anywhere.
---V.G.

Going back to something fff said: the individual. Call me an old romantic, but I still believe in the individual.

~~~

The story of the missing. Probably less interesting than it first appears, but still...mia..

"In the words of Khakimov, he would very much like to meet his relatives, if they want to and if it isn't damaging for them."

Nearly as good as the story are some of the comments, some of which are as follows:

@inmufti -

I lived in a tent for seven good years all over everywhere..He not a nomadic fool i promise you!

Yeah, yeah... we are not talking about two weeks in Yarmouth.

Had the "poor, stupid, nomadic fool" been in London last night, he could could have waited a couple of hours for Bieber to come on stage late to lip-synch a few songs. But he didn't. Idiot. Life has passed him by.

I bet Khakimov doesn't even have a Twitter account. He surely doesn't know that Marathons are now called Snickers. And he may have missed out on his chance to enjoy a horsemeat lasagne, unlike everyone else.

What was he thinking?...

I just thought, someone is going to have to tell him about Princess Diana.

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Friedrich:

My grandfather went MIA in WWII somewhere around Leningrad. My grandma always used to say (consoling herself) that he was taken POW and that he took the offer to stay. Sounds hard to believe but that was a practice used by the Russians even towards POWs in the Napoleonic Wars.

@jfriedrich - Sorry but more likely he died of cold/hunger/being worked to death in the Gulag. Like a significant proportion of captured Axis soldiers.

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We didn't know it but we had a Japanese Soldier living under our compost heap up until the mid 1960s he refused to surrender until he got a letter from the emperor.

Seriously that is an inspiring story.

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Nothing new.......... Laurel and Hardy did this in 1938 !

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If I was drafted into a superpower military and shipped off to a far away land and shot at, becoming herbal shaman and wandering at the feet of the Himalayas smoking opium would be a welcome respite.

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Wish I had some Spike to read right now!

...

...at Readings you pick up some essays by Capote for the Dougal. "A great stylist," reads the blurb-and that's enough. Surface is all I want-or can take-today.

At a crossroads you ask the traffic warden: "And if I go under the underpass?"

He says, "then you're fucked" and you'll end up in Model Town. Such an expressive language, is Punjabi.

A security guard at a checkpoint reads your number plate to his assistant in a matter-of-fact way. He's let himself go: beer belly, unshaven, the disheveled look of someone who's had enough of the the vain attempt to get at any order in his life. Over the hill and only sad eyes to show for it. As I pass him I do notice, though, that he has pink nail polish on a number of his fingernails. Some sort of closet transvestite? Who cares, bud. Give me the security ticket and let's move on...

Here's how it happens. I'm told three times but still don't get it. Something like: the money or an electronic version of it goes through and then we sign. Clear the field. Get the blank slate, pay your dues, and sink it. Don't look back, especially at the mirrors which are clouding over out of sympathy. The natural history of a mirror: the decay of silver at the edges, the flakiness peeling away; the brown dots of rust joining like split ink to form a map. Bit by bit, that's how it goes. The decaying images in your mind. the memory behind the mirror will collapse as well, like a pack of cards. There is no music in the silence. The silver will inherit the black (Akhmatova? You can't even remember now). But still,

in the centre of the mirror is the brightest hour of all.

I'll be damned if I spell in Americana.

Sound is the last thing to leave a house. We pass through. The earth a bridge, said the sufi. This house wasn't good for us, said the swami. What doesn't start well can never end well. Wandering tribes like us have nothing to inherit. I'm sick of shadows, she said.

she then undid the knot of mirror and of tapestry.

Take all the lines you can, cut them out from a book. The line of greatest need.

How to answer the heart? What was the question again? What will you write about when 110-A is gone? This is the point of wholly turning inward. The 'object' that does not exist, or something like that?

Looking for home,
from the memory.

There isn't much left. These islands of the heart.

(fragments by Kenneth Irby)

Of the Southern Wild

How to set oneself free from the 'idol of the days'...

The abrupt end of spring: the breeze dying down to a whisper, the last, dying cold flame of chill glancing off your face; the moon visible at 9 o'clock in the morning against a pure blue sky, its existence more fragile than porcelain, thinning out to the last line of moon-essence, as insubstantial as a dream, already sinking back into a  fathomless night...Calvino's moon, threadbare, elemental, "almost just a few atoms", a wisp of being, a  cloud, no more than a smudge of powder, its ancient affinity with transience shining through. Light filtering through the branches of an old tree, almost like a shower, adding depth and poignancy to the green shade.

A late birthday party. Time for linens and handkerchiefs to wipe clean sweaty brows. Ice tinkling in a glass, shades to hide our eyes, the sun's light deep in the leaf, slowing our sensibilities, crinkling our skin, growing in our cells. There is silver in our hair, gold-dust on our faces, pollen and dust rise from the earth and children laughing as the old ones sit on the benches under the trees, confused by it all, quieter if not yet speechless. The dark patches on people's skin has risen to the surface and makes their faces look kinder, gentler. The scene is timeless, re-enacted by every generation. How many days ago now was it that you were the one playing in the grass?

'Barney' sits on the curb, half out of costume, drinking a steaming cup of tea, exhausted by the whole show. He looks my way: "Give me ten minutes and I'll be Barney again".
I say to him: "It's okay, I understand."

We're all half-hearted in our roles nowadays...

Here it is again, the lull of the south, the slumber of eternal gestures. It is in no book. My heart, pulled elsewhere...points North, remembers winter grey. This isn't home, or even what the heart is given to make a home from (K. Irby). If we could walk one hour north-someone said-one hour north, so the sun was not in our faces. I fall, I fall in sunlight, under the sun. Christ.