I-We and some bitter coffee (for fff)

One of your favourite articles is by Jonathan Jones (Wild Ones) and there's a nice and small piece in today's Guardian which pointed you to this painting.

Last week you read a page on Steffi Graf. So wonderful to see a person so deeply in love and so at home in the world. The great balancing act: is it possible without love and friendship? Actually, the best thing in the whole paper is usually the one page quick-fire interview or the one page called 'experience'. The obituaries are very rarely well written. If it's death you want, then turn to the Telegraph.

A good kitchen table where everyone eats together is my version of the wonderful (must get Gopnik's book).  Deep fried courgette flowers stuffed with ricotta cheese. Yes, a book on a table. What was that line by Plato again...twice removed?

The great combinations in the world: chocolate and coffee; chocolate and orange; chocolate and cherries. Some things by nature like to combine with other things (a bit of mysticism there for you!).

Coffee, pluralism, distinctions, religion. Recent threads.

Coffee and tea are a great civilizing force in the history of humankind (yeah, doesn't say much for humankind, I guess). You don't quite trust people who drink neither (and are completely sceptical about funny Europeans and Turks who drink the latter without milk..God forgive them, for...)

~~~

You make your way out down Shaftesbury Avenue against an unusually boisterous Saturday crowd. It's only when you see people in S&M gear, gold wings, wigs, and school uniforms do you realize you're moving against a mass of humanity sauntering towards Soho for the Gay Pride ..what is it..a protest/march/celebration? It must be awful to be just a normal gay person and see all this theatricality.

In any case, you finally get to the National and find your Titian, Rembrandt, and the clear and calm interior spaces of  Da Hooch..and then 'the Allegory of Asia' which is stunningly beautiful. You look closely at Turner's Steam and Speed for the first time and see Venice again.

~~~

A distinction: large parts of modernity are about erasing distinctions. You can't but help feel that this is a wonderful thing, a significant achievement of the Enlightenment and socialism-to use two old and unfashionable words: the differences between men and women, between races, between religions or even the distinction between the feelings and thoughts of religious and non-religious people now count for less and less. Class inequalities remain a profound problem, of course. On the other hand, the erasing of the boundaries between the private and the public, between markets and ethics is all deeply problematic. At another level, the notion that there is an "up" and a "down" (Milosz) also seems to be on its way out. Is that true, is that really true, b?

~~~

Coffee, latest research shows, inhibits the mind from wandering and is, therefore, no friend of creativity. You find things when you're not looking for them.

Helen, the Greek girl with long flowing black hair, thick luscious lips and deep, timeless eyes asked me if I wanted some coffee. It was the muddy Turkish stuff which is cooked on an open flame in a long-handled copper pot. On drinking it my mind suddenly freed up, as if I'd opened the door of a very old house and found a bright empty room I'd never seen before. Everything I read became immediately understandable. My attention was concentrated, focused, and it soaked up whatever it was fed. More than that, my mind felt like a sparkling stream, pure, clear, able to race along free from any feelings.

Of course, the next day I went back for more, hooked to that fleeting experience, the kick of a few minutes of life being untangled. Perhaps that's what we all do in our lives anyway, try and recreate some magical moment, or look down the same street where we once saw something that piqued our interest. The glance, sideways, at something strangely familiar, some higher truth half-guessed at, a vague shamanistic belief that there was 'oneness', or at least a connection. The belief  that chance was just a word for the shortness of our horizons. There are reminders, intuitions, of other times; a time when distinctions simply don't enter the equation. 

Red-bridge

The writing is on the wall.

~~~

At Redbridge station your mind wanders hopelessly. Is that the nature of bridges, or of your mind?

External circumstances narrow the range and scope for the internal movement of grace; or they make it more urgent, necessary. The great advantage of religion proper is that it deflates the ego: I am not at the centre of the world any more.

Flicking through some Merton you came across this line, which you love:

'The law is consistent; grace is inconsistent'

When all has been said and done, there are still some things unsaid. There is always something (but not everything) in religion that will resist the ways of the world, or be a vehicle for that resistance ("be ye not conformed"). The negative way: this is not me, this is not about me, not everything can be said or analysed. Religion, at its best, is about de-centering, or being ec-centric. Or, to put it another way: about finding another centre, a centre that is everywhere ("All that is, is holy").

The Arabesque:  There is no centre, no 'fixation' on one point, and everything is connected.

~~~

This seems like a naive idea today but...if you see beauty, you will see it everywhere. Which is why religious exclusivity has always struck you as slightly bizarre. If you think red, you'll see other colours. "Red is an infinite task" (Iris M). 'Seeing' is not about a static image but an 'object' and movement to it.

For the mind to wander do we need bridges? Or are we all at sea?

Pluralism

There are many windows in London, some new, some ancient. There are many ways of looking at the world: acutely, with finesse, discrimination, or attentiveness; one may look through a glass darkly or one may sit by the window and dream away with the clouds or remember all that is lost...There are many windows in London; sometimes I think I need only one. The best are the high windows around Mile End. There are posh windows around London House (even here class rears it's ugly head). There are windows for Muslims (mostly shattered) and windows for the infidels (boarded up).

Someone once said windows are feminine. Is that because it is easier to imagine an interior life? A house without windows is an asylum or a lecture theatre.

A window is like a bridge, always leading somewhere else. Piercing the solidity of the world. Well, okay, can't you write anything but these inane generalizations?

I don't really like taking photos because it stops the wandering process (as does coffee, according to new research). But it is nice in one sense: you're half aware of things that are out of the ordinary, open to things that might catch your attention.

The first three pictures are of Charlotte Street and some others nearby. The first reminds me Europe and on a sunny day one can trick oneself into believing that London has grown warmer, softer..has lost it's northern roots. The food on this street was always too expensive for you and you always thought: if I ever have any money I'll eat at such fancy restaurants.

The second, with it's old window was just the thing. This window always reminds me of 1966. I imagine, a la DeLillo, the World Cup and not a soul on the streets. The pubs are full, and with their dense smoke, plush seats, and deep shade are a kind of refuge from the sun and time. And behind this 1966 window a very old man sits down on his bed, wipes his forehead and admits to himself that he cannot make anything of his life. Near Whitfield Street, I believe.

I don't know why, but the third reminded me of a Lutheran church (there's actually one two minutes away). The austerity of windows! (So speaketh the wahabi)

The 4th, which was off Gower Street (probably near Malet Street) reminds me of school and exams and the life of the mind. At the corner of this street I passed my MSc. exam (by the skin of my teeth). As always, the aim was: just do enough to get through.

The last one is a magical little street that always catches my attention. It's just next to a theatre as you walk down from Denmark Street to turn into Drury Lane (a walk I've made a thousand times). On a dark winter evening the lights go on and in the high windows you imagine some second-rate American actress pouring over her lines.

That's it.

I don't think I'll take photos, however, of places closer to home. Some things remain true only if not spoken.

When we were young...

When I was young I used to live a stone's throw away from Charlotte Street. I knew I was young because I could still look myself in the mirror...

Derek Raymond and Mumbai...

Strange coincidence. Started Raymond's book, which is a breath of fresh air after Updike. No elaborate descriptions and objects are just objects. Realism or anti-literature? No idea, but it's a great antidote to the grandiose claims of 'the novel'. What carries it is not the precision of language nor any deep insights but, rather, the background mood it evokes and a particular moment in time. Perhaps in another twenty years it will come across as completely dated. What is the lifespan of an ordinary book?

What caught my eye was a reference to Charlotte Street since I lived on Fitzroy Street, one street down from there, for two years. By bizarre coincidence anton then posts something about Charlotte Street. And to my utter amazement, two nights ago, I started watching the tail end of an Indian film in which the main story line is, as far as I could make out...

A painter moves into a flat in Mumbai. The last tenant has left some stuff (jewelry. clothes, etc). In any major city there will always be, at any point in time, thousands of people moving in and thousands out. It's similar to an airport where as you work your way to an exit you can see across the glass barrier other travelers moving in the other direction, just beginning their journey. In the city and in airports we rub shoulders with people moving in all sorts of directions. There is death and bereavement and birth and joy, love and memory and desire and it's all mixed up. It's all here.

On the street, an old and disheveled man with unkempt hair, totters along, quiet and lonely, the few words he has muttered to himself, heavily bracketed. He walks past-like a ghostly survivor, a man from another era whose slang no-one would understand-two young mothers in jeans and cardigans. The infants in the strollers, with less than one hundred words between them. The bright-eyed world barely notices the dead who live with their eyes open.

Old buildings and tradition, hemmed in by the ever-advancing shiny glossy world of technology, entertainment...culture industries. The shape-shifter's world, eternal flux that Heraclitus would have died for. What remains? The ever-greens, the faces (whether black or white, shaped by the same anxieties and hopes) that are universal, timeless. In London you see a recurrence of types. The roles remain the same; only the individual players change.

Sometimes there's a transition and objects from one domain slip into another. And that move across the border means anything can happen.

Imagine coming across someone's blog for the very first time. The beginning: the life before, shrouded in darkness. What do you make of it? Is this person still alive, even? What books did the person read, who did they love, was there any underlying theme to their questions and writing? You want to piece it together. It's a detective story like no other. You dare not try any such reconstruction of your own life. Days and years have fallen irrevocably into the past, out of sight. You want it to slide, disappear at an angle.

So, back to the painter. He comes across some tapes which the previous tenant, a young woman from a village, sends back to her brother and sister to let them know what she's experiencing in the big city. Nothing lasts in Mumbai, the squalor and the bright lights jostling for space. The painter (Amer Khan) is hooked to the tapes, the daily recording of the everyday.

She's unhappy; that much he knows. She sighs, looking into the camcorder: "I used to be so happy before I was married..." He lights a cigarette. It's as if he knows her personally. But he doesn't. Who knows anyone any more? But he listens on. Is there some great truth hidden here?

Well, all this is eerily very similar to the Raymond story. The detective finds some tapes of a man, now dead, who narrates some key moments of his life, boiling them down to get at the pure essence. Is there time for anything else? He's divorced (as is the painter), and the detective, too, lives alone. Failure. The ones who couldn't hack it, but can't go back.

You revisit the places you once knew. Time has changed the tempo of your walk. The sandwich shop is no longer there but the French restaurant where you first had snails is. A lot of it looks the same. A bit run down, to tell the truth. The old coffee shop at the far end (towards Oxford Street)  is no longer there. By contrast, at the opposite end old Fitzroy Square, elegant and refined, seems timeless.

You're not here any more. To accept one's fate is a virtue-or so I'm told. Room 128. I think someone died in that room a year after me. 

&

Classical music 0, Soul 1

One and half points. Away victory.

Think I'm going to trawl through Desert Islands and see who picked the incomparable S&D. To paraphrase Otis: feet, do your thing...

But if there was one song by them you'd choose over any other it would be, I guess, 'Don't knock it'.

~~~

Is it permitted for Muslims to listen to music? The thing that really got on my wick when I wrote a few articles for the Guardian (CiF) or commented was always something that went like this: 'you represent the voice of liberal Islam'. Of course, you weren't interested in 'representing' anyone (not even yourself) and the whole notion of  a 'muslim voice' or a liberal voice seemed quite odd. More to the point, why should you be associated with any group whatsoever?

The whole idea of belonging...I'm too Jewish for that.

Not 'the individual' or 'the community but..& or sometimes neither and therefore simply ignore.

And where were you from?

"Originally?"
--Carol A. Duffy.

~~~

The need for roots? Not so sure any more. Perhaps it's more like the need for a nostalgic view of place or rootedness? In any case, what matters is a particular house/home/people and not anything as abstract as 'place'.


Places where you feel at home: The British Library (Mecca), a bookshop at ten o'clock in the morning and no human beings in sight, a Church with no human beings in sight (er...a bit of a pattern developing here), train stations, the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, Postman's Park, the Wright's Bar outside the LSE (with lots of young and trendy people about!), the South Bank early on Sunday morning...


This wahabi reductionism that rejects all associations. Of course, that leads to fanaticism in many cases. And who knows how you'll turn out. God, please don't make me religious. But belonging? Who or what do we really belong to (gosh, creeping Gnosticism there. Must resist!).

Let us not talk of winning or losing. The Kashmiri solution: don't play the game. Jesus, I wish I was Buddhist.

~~~

Turner, yes. Roxana was right after all. Must go again. And then to Willaim Morris's house. I get this terrible feeling that time is running out but then feel much better with simple things like a grilled cheese on toast sarnie or Jacob's cream crackers with Cheshire cheese. Stock up on books and chocolates (Herbert's Still Life being the best bargain so far...only a fiver). What else? Mascarpone and sun dried tomatoes are my luxury items. Having moved about so many times in your life it really does feel like you're always mentally prepared to move on. To divert your attention from such thoughts you think of which books (if any) to take back from your permanent collection. Perhaps some Peter Brown. Or Rebecca West.

~~~

Bacon: the problem with western man is that he can't sit still in an empty room. Me: the problem with eastern man is that he has an empty room (obviously not something eastern woman would tolerate for long). Not the perennial philosophers, sufism or immortality but,

Let me run, run
and never find.
---Shah Latif.

&...

Nine easy pieces

You look for red and find it everywhere, bright, distinct, independent, almost; it's even there on the hat of a gondolier, as two dogs gaze out in contemplation.

Venice, city of dreams, always disappearing in the mists, is the perfect city for Turner. The blue paintings in the sketchbooks, the 'unfinished' paintings, the wonderful 'two strangers in a storm', silver and blue (which is really Whistler), the balance of structure and the void, Parliament burning, the interior of a great room in which light and nature invade and objects lie upturned or unused, abandoned, difficult to pick out (a clock within a clock, half a mirror)...why do you think these are all variations on a theme?

~~~

This painting is something I couldn't stop looking at. Reminded me of my childhood. Those inner lights and hidden worlds amid the darkening skies, the coldness of November, the lack of time...

~~~

Samuel Palmer: the gleaming field, the enclosed world at dusk, each leaf distinct...there's something dark and medieval here, a folk story perhaps. The curvature of the land..does that rely on circular time, you wonder?

~~~

Bonnington died at the age of 26. Frank Ramsey at twenty eight. The latter was, I think, Wittgenstein's supervisor. Not bad for an economist!

~~~

A young girl on the bus talks with a softened American accent..you imagine her getting into the real swing if she were talking to an American friend; instead, talking to some clod on the phone she's mellowed down:

"Well, it ain't easy to say..it could just be lust...y'know, we're still only four months into it and so I can't say it's love, like, it's too early."

She looks Asian and maybe only 16 or so. It transpires she's 19! She doesn't want to have a baby-not just yet. The other passengers are thrilled to learn this.

~~~

Down on Charing Cross you notice a book in the basement of the second-hand book shop by Defoe called 'Roxana'. Apparently it's about a fallen woman. I couldn't stop laughing!

~~~

Near the charity shop, near Mark Anthony's, a middle aged man, balding and twitchy, wearing faded jeans and trainers turns to me and says: "Oohh, I only want to eat when I'm really hungry." He looks across the road to Mr. chippy and is undecided. He starts to talk to himself. London has a disproportionate number of mad and/or lonely people. Or, perhaps it is just that a disproportionate number of crazy people want to talk to me. Yes, that's probably it: I have one of those faces, I guess.

Further up the road, at 'Resul's Food and Wine' (Rasool being the Arabic word for Prophet!) the Turkish man-who usually gives us things for free (hurrah for the brotherhood!) starts yapping away about the current riots: "It's no good. He has double face. Not speak honestly, I tell you. Why he not go?" These few 'sentences' are repeated for the next twenty minutes.

~~~

The great dilemma of western civilisation: to put butter on a hot cross bun before or after it's been in the oven?

~~~

Patches of light. Saskia's sleeve. The brief moments of our lives.

~~~

Metaphysical brevity. Fragments, quotes, texts ripped out of context, epigrams, notes, underlined words whose meaning remains half buried, broken words, a falling bird outside the south window.

At Victoria you think to yourself: Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien. If you were stabbed you probably wouldn't notice. A wound, a wound like this: nothing new. Perhaps I've been wandering in these dark tunnels all my life.

~~~

Safe Love:

'Between him and her: the child on the examining table, the office itself, the staff, his wife, her husband, his stethoscope, his beard, her breasts, his glasses, her glasses, etc."'

~~~

A life in numbers: an old woman tumbles out of the W14 at South Woodford. She's not sure where she is or which year we're in. She shakes her head to get rid of the terrible confusion. Sparks and dust fly from her head, stars from her mind. Other old people crawl out, lending her a hand. She stands next to me, wheezing, on the verge of saying something to me. She collects her thoughts, gathers her strength, picks up her plastic bags and hobbles tentatively down the road in her black trousers, black socks, and black slippers. If you can walk, you can forget.

~~~

Outside Tate Modern, a patch of grass. We sit down, broke. A fetching blonde woman lies down nearby. Tight black trousers and a silky black sleeveless top, the straps barely clinging to her shoulders. Her skin is tight, smooth and well toned. She looks up toward me. Don't kid yourself!

The art inside doesn't seem very appealing all of a sudden.

Nine love songs for red.

The Great Fire. Turner dashes off with some students(?). Works frantically, mind and hand reliving some ancient harmony, the quick of his mind, the flash of silver senses alert, tuned in, a window of opportunity. A few lines, that's all he has to get to the heart of things, to say what is essential, what he's always known. Nine sketches, with such speed that impulse and memory fuse into one another. Indistinction: the line when land and sea can barely be distinguished, one falling into the other. There are no more distances, no 'East' or 'West', only North. Familiar landscapes and people dissolve under the lightness of his stroke. The fragmentary is all we've got. Let it pass. Water is like existence. Everywhere and always flowing away.

There is no constant self, no sense of immortality, only the shifting shapes aglow, the flames on the edges of the conflagration fluttering like butterflies into the night, like a swarm of stars in her eyes. Later, Whistler would try to repeat the attempt to capture the experience but each man or woman who sees, sees it for themselves, and no-one can explain it to anyone else.

Observe: observe it all breaking apart, crackling furiously under the weight of heat and acrid smoke, the verticals warping, bending, becoming softer, he thinks. See it from every angle, register every particular disclosure.

The memory palace: in an age when everyone forgets everything what is there, the one thing, he should remember? He strains his mind, trying to imagine what's there in the cold shadows, and how long before it, too, is made visible and engulfed and made invisible again. Fana, the Saracens say...

The flames, lapping up the solid beams, licking them like a whip, kicking, spitting, reducing the solid world of compromise, ideals, considered opinion, and back-handers to rubble and ashes. He is speechless, has no name for the way he's feeling. The thick sooty dust, swirling in the air, the chance conglomeration of atoms unloosened.

Red, red is at the centre of everything. For how much longer? He doesn't ask himself this question. There is only now, only this moment when a bright red glass burns in all this darkness. 

"One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in turner's entire drawings."
---Ruskin on Turner 

(other quotations: Derek Raymond, Updike)

A case for an immortal, unchanging self that neither I nor you can contain

 I have asked friends to write guest posts here on the black sun. These can consist of stand-alone passages from books, or favourite poems accompanied (if the so wish) by comments on why the chosen text is important to them. The first one (below) is by my friend, Sheheryar Sheikh (thanks!)

When the swami was a child she collected autographs (she had Fatima Jinnah's) and favourite poems written by her friends, so this is somewhat similar in spirit. Anyways...

~~~

Early on, the marine routine and military mood of the novel is established. Then the revelations begin. Here’s a passage, a black soldier opening up to his white buddy:

“Well, let me tell you what I think the story be about. It be about this little duck can’t grow up. Can’t grow up to be a big duck ’cause he ain’t a duck. But he don’t know what he’s ’sposed to grow up to.” Cortell looked carefully to be sure he wasn’t losing Williams. “I mean, you don’t know what you supposed to grow up to, that makes it pretty hard to grow up.” He waited a moment. “So we ain’t congregating, we just hangin’ out with people best we can to figure out where to is. You with me here? To ain’t with white folk ’cause we be black folk and tryin’ to find to hangin’ out with you chucks just a dead end for us. When I hang out with you chucks, I’m a black man first and who I really am come next. When I hang out with the splibs, I’m me first and there ain’t no black man at all. It got nothin’ to do with white folk. It’s just the way it is. Ain’t no voodoo conspiracy. We just hangin’ out and movin’ on best we can.”

---Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

~~~~~

Hanging with crowds, there is the possibility of loss of self, especially hanging with a crowd too different or too similar. When alone, there is confrontation of—and facing up to—one’s self. Oneself. Is it you, though, that self? Or is it a cultivation of the different you’s you have been? That is what bothers me when I look to the past and find a foolish boy troubling his mother over having to sort his own laundry (pitiful little arse), or the one lying in bed on a sweaty summer day in loadshed Lahore, dreaming about making it to the Booker Prize podium and giving his “This is for my Mom” speech. Those were both me, but they aren’t my self, are they? I’m afraid of them being part of my self.

Thank God for the endless literary and religious texts to reference on the matter, not to mention psychology books. Intuitively, these strike me as true:

Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The Biblical and Quranic “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire; whoever ends one life ends the whole world.”

the outline

Are books the toys of consciousness?
---D.H.L.

Books are a load of crap.
---Larkin.

'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.

The perfect post, you will find, is where I am quite lost.

~~~

Ubo asked for a book in the hospital. 

Which one?

"It doesn't matter, i'm not going to read it anyway!"

He would often ask us for summaries of the books we were reading so that he could dish it out on the unsuspecting east enders at Stratford. And the plebs were mightily impressed:

"How is it that you know so much about economics, medieval poetry, contemporary American fiction and  late antiquity, Mr Mir?"

"One does not speak of such things. For those who know, know. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

~~~

The difference between a GP and a consultant is that the latter knows a lot about one or two things whereas the former knows very little about lots of things. But, yes, the division of labour and specialization is a wonder to behold. We watch spellbound as the two black cleaners do a fantastic job. Ubo carefully watches what they do, no doubt memorizing their techniques for when he gets home. He has to talk to everyone.  The West Indian tea lady (is that their technical name?) is praised for having the golden touch and she laughs to herself, almost blushing.

Me: "How was the tea?"

Ubo: "Crap, but at least I get good service by being pleasant".

Even the gay Portuguese nurse has given up. Ubo tells him: "the way you were talking to the doctor, I thought you were a politician or a statesman".

"Oh, reaaally?" he says, fluttering his eyelashes. 

Jesus, even Arnold who is getting a pacemaker fixed today can't resist the friendly banter. I think to myself on the way back: this is a madhouse!

~~~

sad cafe

the grey of your absences, the grey of the mind that recollects. the primordial pulse of red flowering open for you a dream, a mirror broken but not yet fallen. Lincoln green, and I shall wear scarlet red, you said.

the lead strikes up, sparks. lead from deep quarry, the words stilled in the vertical of the pencil, crouched, tentative like an animal, like the names for you i have in my heart.

i wake from some profound sleep, my mouth dry, your face against my face. every inch of the glass is filled with sunlight so that there are no more distinctions between outside and inside. all of the cupboard doors are flung open, have been like that throughout the night, like those wide, accusing eyes of yours. everything points to a complete and naked revelation of your soul. when it was the openness of your body that reminded me of the red and the green.

an ordinary day on earth

You must remember not to write anything that makes people sad; it is not permitted to mope about like this and drag others with you. So, so, in an attempt to do just that there will be no poetry or mention of other writers in this post; there will be no use of the word 'dark' and any dark thoughts will be banished. Instead, all there will be is a simple retelling of the facts, with the odd description here and there. The key is not to keep memory off stage, avoid any metaphors, and to look at the world from a distance and yet somehow retain some sort of human angle-like that of an eight foot giant, perhaps. The key is that you do not look for any keys.

Leave out anything that looks to me forced, deliberate or fake.
---K. Ridgway

I wanted to write a book where nobody underlies anything on any of the pages.
---J.Salter.

(via asylumwordpress)

Your mind, a river, flowing, neither pausing to reflect nor running fast to forget, neither accepting joy nor rejecting sadness. The mind, a river, flow...

There will be no doors, no bridges, there will be no mirrors or missed chances and silver will just be a colour. There will be no specific names and no universal meaning; words will have no roots, imagination no destination and your voice will be clear and sound just right You will not be able to hook any feelings to the rapidly passing clouds up high above. The last faded splendour of the evening sunlight will say nothing about the quality of your life. No beauty or truth, just an equation, like 2 +

"What does 'and' mean?" she asked

~~~

London: the greyest, saddest, dirtiest great city in the whole world.

At Woodford you hear from around a corner the loud voice of a shortish woman. You imagine her to be dark skinned with unwashed dark, frizzy hair:

"I tell you to get-er the whole thing". Then, more excitedly: "getta er the whole whole fucking thing".

~~~

At Gate Street, which leads on to the wonderful (and smelly) Remnant Street, a small man walks with a bent back but with his French beret firmly set. His back and neck are bent. His head is barely at the level of his shoulders and he stares at his feet as he walks. Two hundred years ago he would have been a sniveling French peasant. He wears a checked coat and has remarkable broad shoulders, like those of an ox or a boxer. Earlier, on Southampton row a man-probably an American-walks towards you with huge thick and flat thighs. They're almost like extensions of his hips.

You find every third girl to be attractive-in a kind of inaccessible way. Or, more accurately, you should say: a flick of the hair catches your attention here, a calf muscle there...now and then you see a noteworthy neck. Very few noses worth commenting on, though.

~~~

At LSE we sit in a wood paneled room at the back. A committee room that has retained the feel of the 1950s, the tables arranged in a great rectangle. We sit there discussing the economy, unsure what else to say to each other. "Does printing money increase national income?" I offer: "Not according to the Quantity theory of Money". Howls of derision follow. No-one, in this day and age, wants to talk of theory. It's so, like, you know, 20th century. Books, let me tell you, are a dying species...

~~~

Sebald on Walser on ash.

~~~

On the central line back, around Leytonstone, you note a serene old man sitting with a finely combed head of silver hair. He sits quietly reading his hardbound book; it must be, you think, a library book since he's not the type to waste money on books-unless it's on the military. Another checked jacket, but this time the squares unfashionably small. No hint of swagger or dandyism in the solid black and grey lines. A strong thick jaw and a slightly protruding chin. At Snaresbrook you note his black rounded glasses, surprisingly out of place on such a face. Fifteen years too late. Dark grey flannel trousers, meticulous concentration. A real reader (either that or a racist who can't abide the fact that he's sharing a train with so many foreigners). A temperate man of few words, you suspect. Perhaps a retired schoolmaster. Nothing extraordinary about his nature and perish the thought of any mystical possibilities. From a bygone age when rules were rules and the only exciting thing about France were the women.

~~~

You pick up Memory Chalet...

the return

Officially the heart is oblong, muscular, filled with longing.
---Holub.

At the airport you scoff down a buttery and flaky croissant; the tea is piping hot. After a while you realise an old class fellow is sitting next to you. Twenty years ago M was quite attractive: sparkling eyes, fair and bright complexion, golden curly hair that made her look European-or maybe Lebanese- and high cheekbones on a roundish face that gave her an overall appearance of a sly cat.

It was hard to get a word in edgeways. She's now a minister at the national level, one of those turncoats from the Musharraf era. I pretended not to know. She told me how she'd set up her ex-'s business, how she'd led the twitter 'revolution' and how I must, simply must, read her memoir. By now my thoughts were turning to the possibility of a second croissant. Of course she was older and therefore more tired looking than I remember her. For Christ's sake, I look like a complete mess myself. But there was something unmistakably sad about her steely face, despite the well-disguised fake optimism and spontaneity.

"I'm bored here, " she eventually admitted. "Shall we phone MMP (a mutual friend)?". It then struck me that there had always been something immature about M. Why she would want to become a politician is beyond me. The admiration, the allure of the limelight, no doubt, has to play a large if not central part in that decision. Are politicians, you wonder, any more loveless creatures than the rest of us?

"Isn't it time to go in yet?" she asked.

"No, only numbers 50-80 have been called. What's your seat number, M?" (I say her name, trying to avoid any deference).

She waves her ticket at me and smiles. "It's number one!"

That figures.

~~~

On the plane a man sitting on your seat.

"Excuse me, but I think you're in my seat"

"No," he replies. "C is the window, A is the aisle"

I look up and check, then check my ticket again. I bite my tongue. He's so cocksure that I decide to just let him wait and stew in his own arrogance for a few minutes-yes, a bit of a vicious thing to do- and then he is eventually moved. The woman next to me then says "ladies" and looks up at me. I'm supposed to decipher this half wit's mumbling; it's a kind of lame protest at having another species sit next to her. The 'woman' is at least 100 pounds heavier than I am, middle aged and, to put not too fine a point on it, a real horror show.

I give her the eye, the old cynical look that has been perfected in my family over the last 250 years or so. I wanted to say to her: "Do you really think I'd have any interest in..." but I resist and for the second time, with a great effort of will, I hold my words back and just let my heart sink.Eventually she moves as well as I don't budge. One in the eye of the Islamic Republic! I open a book-more as an attempt to make sure no-one talks to me than anything else- but have become so irritable by now that I can't read Walser's The Walk. Instead, I turn to Updike's Rabbit...

~~~

On the district line and I already feel like a stranger, horribly out of joint. At Chiswick I look down on all the sunbathers in the leafy park, without a care in the world, lapping up the warmth. Glass and silence, forest green benches, blonde hair casually thrown back, the way people talk to one another without really saying anything...a way of passing the time, avoiding any real stuff.

In the plane it is quiet as well. I remember preparing myself for eight hours of silence before the journey. I could have been a monk-if the food wasn't so awful. All these faint hours, lost, trapped behind the metal, and yet, outside, all that timelessness.

Under the trees in Lahore, so many petals have fallen to the ground that they've perfumed the cement, made it softer: a dimension of tenderness is added to the world. The green-yellow haze of light, the green and yellow, speak of abundance, lush exuberance, superfluous capacity. Summer always surprises in its openness, always makes you think of "always" the way the night stays in the early morning hours of the day, blurring the sense of the passage of time, making memory redundant.

~~~

Updike, it says, writes of loss. Well, who doesn't nowadays! But yes, you want to believe that there's some essential truth revealed in the confined lives of 1950s Americans. Screw all that post-colonial nonsense. It takes 20 pages or so to get started, to work its way past all that stuttering; the writing is precise, narrow, small-scale, tightly domestic-bound; the roads are gravel, the alleyways all boxed-in. Then the writing shifts gears into an open, ever widening arc of looseness and freedom, like the summer light itself which draws everything in to itself. The light, breaking open the broad, dark country.

~~~

You get out of the taxi, catch your breath, look upward at the great tree whose reassurance is something you  can't imagine going without. Look up, take it in, the deep-veined pattern of shade it casts. It's dark silhouette against the brilliant clear light; the tree has become an ikon of itself, pivotal in this little corner of my world, protecting us-you somehow imagine-from chance, time, change. There are a thousand names written on its bark, in Arabic script. One of them, I have come to recognize, as my own. I have traveled for too long, and know much of distances by heart. But the return, this re-entry into the centre of the world, always leaves me, unknown to myself, speechless.

~~~

And farther inside, so ghostly it comes to him last, hangs a jagged cloud, the star of an explosion, whose center is uncertain in refraction but whose arms fly from the core of pallor as straight as long eraser-marks diagonally into all planes of the cube.

---J. Updike.