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.
---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.
2 comments:
your posts from London always make me melancholy (though there is so much to laugh here about as well, the plane stories and your irritation :-) - they are so rich, the way you tend to think about journeys, about coming and going, origins, being lost - but also finding again, being at home...
"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.
i will take that with me, puzzled about how it reflects (refracts) into my own life.
thank you for your kind words, roxana. yes, i don't know whether I'm coming or going! ;-)
Hmm. maybe i should stop writing these london posts then! will try and fix it in the next post (see above)
b.
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