the importance of lists

There are long stretches of the day in which I say nothing and meet no-one. I used to be quite at home like that, with a book, the radio, sitting on the landing stairs or in Borders (from 9.30 to 5) with my fish sarnies. It makes you think: there is a world of difference between imposed silence and actively sought silence. Yes, a world, precisely.

'Yes', a word you silently know, spoken in the mirror, you know.

A monk in the 10th century invented a mechanical clock, and since then there's been no looking back.

Rodin's wonderful Jean D'aire. Can't find it online (Ha! So much for the information revolution!). So earthy and downcast. On your list of things to see, this will be up there.

The images in Jennifer-Gough Cooper's book are sublime. It's not just the old light filtering through at 10 o'clock in the morning; it is also the fact that by seeing the figures through layers of glass-the camera's, the display glass- they somehow become more human, as if the relation to the confining outside space made their inner lives more real. There is no visible growth, just a moment, a fleeting moment caught in our gaze, and because it is only a moment it can only become timeless as it gnaws itself inward, towards a centre of perfection. The inward gaze...

~~~

Lists are what define us. You once read Jack Goody's book on this but can't remember a single word! With age you remember less and start to think about the things that are worth remembering. Drawing up a list might help.

What is the fascination with lists? If I were to say to you, list your favourite five books, or your all-time best five films, pieces of music ("all-time"..what is meant by that?), your greatest three regrets, etc., then there's an instant thrill involved in constructing such a terse revelation of your personality, a delight in locating and selecting the things that really matter to you, in comparing them to objects of lesser value and then discarding the latter. There's something puritanical about lists in their division of the world into black and white, the saved and the damned.

Lists and memory: lists and the organization of material (is the list an exterior manifestation of the mind's inner working or does it help develop the mind in its ability to categorize, organize, distinguish disparate objects, things, desires).

A list, like a preference ordering, often puts things in perspective, demarcates value, and is not a simple description. If it is then we have to add the proviso: in no particular order.  But usually we say: "in descending order" or "in ascending order". Lists always retain an element of 'verticality' along with the tremendous ability to sort out some of the messiness of a life.

Lists and numbers:

Go to the shop and buy me three red apples.

What is 'red', asks the philosopher.

You point to it and then to the list. Lists help you connect to the world.

A list tells you all the things you never are and maybe never will be. For this we are sometimes grateful. 'Things to do'. 'Books to read'.

Lists and religion:
1. Thou shalt not...
2. ...

~~~

I made up a quick list of all the things I thought I would need to get me through, help me survive: chia seeds (yeah, talk about bourgeois decadence, comrade!), a hair-dryer, a thermos, Dorset museli cereal, sunflower seeds, books, sardines, rye bread, dried cranberries...

Well, I got most of them but have now realized what I really need is none of these things. Perhaps what we truly need cannot, after all, be put or found on a list. A list only recreates in words a reminder of what is absent, missing. A list is only a cage of vertical bars in which a panther, striding around a ritual centre, notices, now and then, the plunging drama of his life.

Birds of America

...Chardin, the greatest painter of mid-18th c. France...perfect rightness....the basic nobility of design of something that has had to serve a human need unchanged for many centuries. Chardin's pictures show that the qualities immortalized in verse by La Fontaine and Moliere - good sense, a good heart, an approach to human relationships both simple and delicate - survived into the mind-18th c., and survive to this day in French country districts...

---Kenneth Clark. 

~~~

'Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of it not being soemthing else, but only itself.'

---Lorrie Moore, Birds of America.

 ~~~

Preparation: always wanting, you feel. The round of our lives settling in no matter what. The great forces of conservatism, time; the msytification of the era we live in, the drawing of equivalences, the exchange of like for like and bourgeois comfort...all of that etches on to our faces a kind of ordinariness with such a lack of distinction that we sometimes struggle to recognize ourselves. With time even our voices will falter, triggering off a memory of some golden patch in your life when there was clarity to your words and a lack of hesitation between them. We forgive our faces for letting us down, for carrying on with the show, but there's no betrayal like that of the human voice.

~~~

"I don't look at my instrument [the bass] as having one specific role; I was raised to go as far as you can...'You have to share the space with people'...Erykah Badu would always say, 'Get out your mind and come out here with everybody else.'"

I don't know if we can get out of our minds any more. There is no 'there' there, only here, here. "This is where it's at..and this is where it's always been at" ( a throwaway line from Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys). And what is the scope for a quiet interiority, the possibility of the 'radical calm' of  being alone and yet not anxious to find oneself in other people or exterior things? What kind of witness to our lives do we want?

~~~

Birds of America (so far) is a collection of sad little stories of small lives caught up in some kind of confusion. There are parts which are jokey, parts which don't quite chime (who thinks like that? who speaks like that?) but you can put that to one side. There are strange instances of a veering into the unreal or the semi-fantastical (I'm not sure why I have that impression. Probably couldn't give you a single line to back it up, but it does feel as if a rare medieval bird would hop into a story, even if its presence was in a single word, a single image).

The survival of folklore, legends, Gothic horror, story-telling, love. The modern west is born with a sense of its own death, right there from the beginning: the dance of death. Nothing lasts, nothing can outshine fate; the sweetness is destined to cool and crack and decay. "Nothing persists..." say the Muslims and in that sense we moderns, to the extent that we are modern, are all half-muslims. But that isn't quite right either. Whereas the muslims continue: "...save for the Face of God"  the moderns would say, hang on, what about love? What about the memory of love? Is that, at least, not always with us?

~~~

Outside your house on a bright and warm summer morning. The great tree behind your back is like an anchor in the world. Trees are sacred because they last so long, see so much.

A fly, bright-backed, fizzing with energy and dash, glistening with intention, with those eyes from an alien universe and that thin coat of armour, appears like a miniature mythical beast with a film of oil over it. Next to it, at the distance of two hands, rests an old, ancient medieval fly, calm, peaceful, dispassionate, Oriental in its stillness. Black and furry and satisfied, it sits on the brick wall like a plump raisin. 

Did they once share the same ancestor, these two flies? How much genetic material do we share, after all? And what chance variations, what random choices lead one of us to go our own way and leave home whilst the other settles for a completely different life? By what chance is it that the old gods allow a thought to grow again, as each thinks of the other after all this time? 

The brief pausing for breath, to take it all in, the early morning light bright, outlining the word with great precision, the warmth of the sun on our backs. The life of a fly is short and carefree, with minor variations on its one theme, its necessary strangeness to the world. The essence of 'flyness' is to not stick around for too long. But since its mind never reaches that second degree of thought, that stepping away from its life into the shadows, it probably doesn't mind that too much. No fly has second thoughts. No beast cooked a meal (Samuel Johnson). No fly parts with such sweet, deep sorrow.

The swami finished cutting the lawn. It was time to pack the bags.

undated

The depth of reality, imagined on the surface.

'Individuality resides in the way links are made.'
---Anne Carson.

For the life of 'me', I can't string anything together.

Out of solidarity for the working classes (yeah, you just knew such pretentious shit would land you in trouble) I decided to carry all the bags myself (potatoes, onions...hobbling  down the street like an old stumpy Russian peasant). By the time I went to sleep my back was done for. I could feel the muscles twisting into a knot, deep down next to the bone, and imagined the pain the shape of a small Turkish glass. A small movement would bring instant but temporary relief, as if the body, suspended for the briefest of moments in the air, forgot itself but then through contact and breathing the pain returns.

Outside it is grey and drizzly by 4 o'clock. Only anther three hours and Ill try and haul myself up. My back, so uncommented upon! A silver knife sinks into golden butter.

Do we recognize the pain of others? It's so boring after a while and we take delight in returning to our own comfortable little room, so to speak, so not to speak. My little finger, and sod China! (Hume). In the common pain and suffering of the human body do we cease to be individuals? And the human heart? Can that be translated, authenticated?

'What is life, after all, but a caravan of lifelike forgeries'
---Robert Coover.

'The pain writhes spirally...The pain was a pyramid  made of diamond; it was an intense light; it was the hottest fire, the coldest chill, the highest peak...'
---Jean Safford.

To travel lightly, not remember too much, is to live with fewer mistakes since there is no turning off the main road..there is no main road, only side-roads, secondary roads and diversions. What accompanies you is a vague sense of episodes strung loosely together like beads on a thread, ready to fly off in all directions at the slightest tug. Then some child will pick up the beads and count them but it won't be the same thing. The danger of a shallow life is, of course, that you do not see it as a shallow life. Self-sufficiency. Every object around you is familiar and, you fool yourself into believing a reflection of your personality, a marker of where you've traveled. In truth, you've never really left your room. What is unknown is unthought.

Late night, you watch a foreign t.v. show where everyone seems to be laughing uncontrollably, the spasms of the body, the fake gestures of the hands like a throwback to the histrionics of the silent movies, the extended moment in a conversation that is unreal. Turn the volume down and drift into sleep, you think to yourself. This is, you pause to consider, how another person or God might see your own life playing out.

Centuries of faith, in stone and wood, prayer and imagination, given over to a bit of silly prancing around in bright red shorts.

In the given time answer the following questions. Answer all questions in the available space. Answers written on the back of these sheets will NOT be considered.

But who knows how much time is given? Day to day. Nothing becomes clearer without the well known horizons, the necessary frameworks, the knowledge of the seasons and the ability to label and categorize events under the right time.

There is this line. You can take it or leave it. Is it a way out? I don't know. But there won't be a 'radical calm'; not for us anyway, you suspect.

She would try and live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic-drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
---Lorrie Moore.

It won't work. You can be drunk for ten years and find yourself in a stupor but should sober up by thirty. What answers do you have, how much time remains, what space available? Like a fool, you ask: what was the question again?

More than I can say

"Misunderstanding? Misunderstanding!," she said. "What is there not to understand. Which parts of that sentence didn't you understand?"

"The beginning. I never understand beginnings," he replied.

"Well, that's a start. Anything else?," she asked, ironically.

"Yes, but they're more than I can say."

That was profound, he thought to himself, but it would only draw him deeper into trouble. Profound can only take you so far with some women.

~~~

Bits of conversation; vast stretches of silence. Words said randomly, drifting like tumbleweed. There used to be dust storms down here, great gusting winds blowing ferociously, howling through empty rooms, throwing up gulps of dust and depositing them on chairs, tables, books, evenhandedly. And there were even memories of dust storms...old people would tell you about '51 and the red sky and how everyone thought it was the end of the world. But now the old patterns have changed. Maybe it's always been like this though. Maybe we've just reverted to the natural way of things, and those storms were a temporary aberration, something that seemed normal because they stretched and covered the life-span of human memory.

We see the world through a narrow door, our own time horizon. From a distant and more impersonal perspective nothing would be the same. Would there, then, be any misunderstanding or mistakes?

~~~

The clock stood twenty five minutes behind the rest of the world's timekeeping. He woke up at the precise moment that the curtains fell down and the light that he had so assiduously tried to prevent from entering his room burst through like a giant white blot. He woke up with bitter thoughts still circling in his mind. This was his life and he wasn't happy with the way it had panned out. A grand failure might be tolerable, but here things were just petering out in the banal, regular as clockwork. These minor grievances seemed awfully inflated in the early morning light. Objectively speaking they were quite ridiculous: the cutting things said to him, his invisibility at the workplace, the inability to remember where he kept his books, the disappearance of his socks...

It was remarkable to think that this knot in his heart, carried over from the night, would take four or five hours to loosen and unravel before finally dissipating as a dying stream finds hard rock or the levels of the plains. but at least for a while there was a certain sharpness to his being, an angularity to is thoughts, and it would only be by mid-afternoon that the edge would be blunted by dull routines and unstylish talk.

~~~

The lizard darted down the white wall, out of the safety of the mirror's dark side, behind the silver. A straight line-a brief and fleeting achievement. Often, at a great dinner, amidst collective guffaws of laughter and general raucousness,  the solitary lizard would be startled by those wildly gesticulating hands. His dark mind would be frightened, panicked, losing what trust he had in the world.

An observant angel who knew nothing about the affairs of the world might mistakenly join up the dots, imagining an invisible link between the man's hands and the quickness of the lizard's mind, between the heavy and inadvertent gestures and the nimble free will of the lizard's response. If truth be told, the lizard looked forward to the intersection of his own life with that of the humans, the way the the time-scapes of their different worlds sometimes overlapped.

After the lizard's crazed motion he stilled himself, calmed his heart down like a contemplative. For millions of years it had the same patterned thoughts and some took comfort in that, as if regularity itself were a great house to live in forever. Three or four thoughts, maximum. There was nothing new under the sun to say, nothing struck him as particularly noteworthy, more or less startling than any previous experience. His agelessness had evened things out.

But there was a small space for reflection, about 1 mm deep in his mind. Nothing more. And here, as if in a  brilliant coloured glass or the first dream of Venice, there was a faint hint, a glinting shimmer of originality.

Every thirty years or so some migratory birds would fly north and their winter shadows would fall on the wall, traverse it like a beautiful cup sized eclipse, float like a diagonal over the map on the wall, get lost in the lake that was the mirror, and catch the lizard in its net. This movement of darkness was a kind of ecstasy to the lizard, a fantastic eclipse or the presence of a black sun. It broke up the normal structure of time, adding a richness and variety to it. Time suddenly seemed open, like a door ajar. the moments of the lizard's normal life which were full of fear and waiting and misunderstanding now seemed to find another perimeter, another circle touching that of his own life. The burning days, the long years dissolved in that one sweet indelible moment in the bird's elongated shadow. And for a thousandth of a second the lizard imagined he was free from earth. Even though the bird might now be high in the clouds, distant, remote, he had the first stirrings of the feeling  that there existed a life in which there was more than he could say.

~~~

(This was derived, in a very oblique way, from Lorrie Moore's story in Birds of America. The writing is a lot looser than Alice Munro's which is like a tightly wound lock that springs open with a particular word or turn of phrase. You think it doesn't always sound true, but you don't care either since it has its own inner momentum and real life probably mirrors that slipping into and out of truth and untruth.

I should be applying, writing, thinking, digging a way out. Instead, I'm digging my own grave here, and filling it with books. Yesterday Flaubert's Parrot, Bennett's Writing Home and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier arrived.)

wants

What do you want?

If one were able to get a handle on that question you suspect most of the problems would evaporate, disappear. Who amongst us knows what they really want? We may want something and wish we didn't; or we may want incompatible things. Is want a simple craving, a visceral feeling, a "blind," wanton desire rushing headlong to its 'object'? Something necessary, something freely chosen? A hierarchy of wants, then? On reflection or with time we realize that what we wanted wasn't really what we wanted or needed, but only a shadow of it, or maybe even a diversion, a false image. How are wants connected to our well-being, to goodness? Do we always want what is best for us?

A great democratic soul that accepts too much, has grown soft, and knows so little: scraps of poems, throwaway lines, half-understood sayings. Is there another kind of craving that has escaped me, another kind of 'food'?

A wife-beater once told me: you have great potential to become a deeply religious person.

If you wrote on a blank piece of paper all your wants would you have a map of who you are?

The river we cannot cross
flows forever.
---Menashe.

Was there a time when we had a sense of the unity of our lives, when were part of some order? Not adventure, but the happiness of ordinary humble men. Is freedom just another word for our 'unknowingness', our unhappiness?..A new consciousness of the depth and seriousness of life, realizing we must make a choice and cannot have everything, that the circle is broken. Lives constrained, constricted, a limited whole in which each aspect was reflected in the other. Mirrors, yes, nothing is the same any more...

I look at myself and, bizarrely, think my face has become blurred, on its way to becoming unrecognizable. Perhaps in middle age it is not easy to see oneself so clearly. You're in the thick of it, but still outside. Your face has become darker (was it ever radiant or is that, too, a trick of the mind?).

A face ageing
to less generosity than it had
---D.P.

You have become less reflective, looser. You want to read without pausing. An Arab at an airport-I forget which- once said to me, out of the blue, "You think too much". I put my book down. "Look at me, I am happy. Have many wives..We, we Arabs are one people."

It did cross my mind. Well, old blood, I guess. But then I asked: "And what about the Shias?" His face darkened. We, to the extent that we're modern, can't deal with happiness or unity very well. They've lost their glow. 

Twice in the last  week a person has walked up to me and I haven't been able to recognize him till he's right up close. He, too, seems to have a blurred face, or maybe its just a generic face in his case. I think of my own face as if it was in an old oil-painting, becoming less distinct with each passing day, as if a film of dust from God knows where were spreading over it, draining it of any colour and life, then smudged and then turning away like that woman in the Hammershoi...

Some of our wants are delusional, like those for eternal youth, or the age-old desire to turn back the clock, enter a different picture, wiser, less self-conscious. Is part of the human condition, then, to be half-mad? You want to sober up; you want to get drunk. 

(citations: R.G. Collingwood..not read, of course!)

 

A three line novel

JB is up there with G. Dyer. Of that there is little doubt. Of course, since he's a 'proper' writer you might expect his range of interests to be more tightly defined, such as France, French writers etc., and then narrowing down further, as if entering a country road, the backwaters, Provence, Flaubert...And Dyer remains, when all is said and done, a gloriously roaming spirit, an amateur who seems to find everything interesting. You wonder to yourself if that results, ultimately, in finding nothing interesting?

Lydia Davis has written short stories in three lines. Perhaps some will find that pretentious, too gimmicky. Let's see. The connection being, of course, Flaubert. The bare bones, a minimal structure, Latham's black sun, Malevich...strands left fluttering in the air, part of some long forgotten religious ritual?

You choose your writers by tone and temperament rather than according to depth, 'lyricism' and that horrid word, 'content'. You envy those who find appeal in the low key, unfashionable and obscure. You seem to be drawn to the flashy or the homely. You suspect Salter, DeLillo because they come across as being enamoured by style.

Anyway, do check out JB's wonderful essay here

~~~

The other day I was told of an old man who was attacked because he was eating in a public place during the fast. There are many horrendous things happening in this country-people being burned alive by their brothers, young girls gang raped. It's all quite medieval in its gruesomeness.  Now and then there are particular events which strike you as a departure from your run-of-the-mill evil, to use an old-fashioned word. Depravity here seems in these cases to be more specific. The burying of a woman alive, for example. It was passed off, amazingly, as being part of 'Balochi tradition'. Or then there is the forcing of women to dance naked in public as a form of punishment for alleged infidelity (in England, according to E.P., they used to feather and tar those who brought shame to the community..something that still persists, you think, over here-at least in the language if not in practice...to 'blacken someone's face). The cutting off of someone's nose to mark them out as unfaithful is another one of those brutalities that hardly gets a mention, and if it does then it's a few lines stuck towards the middle pages of the newspapers.

Tribal or feudal stupidities, as old as civilisation itself, all mixed up with economic and sexual anxieties, religious fanaticism, make for a very warped 'society'. The mystical east? Give me a break! In the end one loses interest in these 'stories' so frequent are they. People gawk at them on the television and it never crosses our minds that despite being able to drink cafe latte we're living in a different time zone from the rest of the world. Nothing is serious or serious enough. You sometimes wonder to yourself  if it wasn't the Turks and Uzbeks who came to Lahore all those years ago but a troupe of circus performers, leaving behind them a motley bunch of fraudsters, tricksters, clowns, prostitutes and pimps.

~~~

Anyway, my three-liner for the day:

The old gatekeeper eats to avoid starvation.
Says that his watch has stopped in the holy month.
And is promptly beaten to death.

~~~

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Edouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

The corpse of a sixtyish Dorlay hung from a tree in Arcueil, with a sign reading, "Too old to work."

Louis Lamarre had neither job nor home, but he did possess a few coins. At a grocery store in Saint-Denis he bought a liter of kerosene and drank it.

Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, "Forgive me, Dad. I like you."

The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Menard, snail collector.

In a hotel in Lille, M. H. Hallynch, of Ypres, hanged himself for reasons that, according to a letter he left, will soon be made known.

A ruling by the mayor of Angers concerning parades forbids union banners, songs not of a liturgical character, and canes.

Lightning in Dunkirk struck some men who were installing lightning rods. One of them fell into the soot from 135 feet up and survived.

Medical examination of a little boy found in a ditch on the outskirts of Niort showed that he had undergone more than just death.

Four hundred ecclesiastics welcomed, at Moulins station, Mgr. Lobbedey, their new bishop. Five of who were overcome with sacred frenzy were arrested.

Standing on her doorstep, modiste Rudlot, of Malakoff, was chatting with a neighbor. With an iron bar her wild husband made her shut up.

"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The firemen of Saint-Ouen stifled his ambition.

A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.

dunderhead

Dunderhead [ˈdʌndəˌhɛd]

n

a stupid or slow-witted person; dunce Also called dunderpate

[probably from Dutch donder thunder + head; compare blockhead]

Are there any words or phrases in the English language that borrow from the Dutch in a positive, non-sneering way, you wonder. To think: worldly events centuries ago would shape our use of words, the way we coin an expression. 

Starter for ten: The only word of Czech origin? 

Robots are such dunces because they always do what they're told. 'Dunce'..now, there's a word with a history! Dunces are such dunces because they can only think. Theoretical intelligence refined, boiled and distilled down to a tee ceases to be intelligence. The road taken ceases to be a road. As long as I am unsure of myself I am human.

~~~

One thinks of one's own clumsiness (gosh, that makes me sound like the Queen!). Is it because I've moved about so much, being neither here nor there, with only a vague sense of belonging? (There's nothing worse than a failed mullah, except for a failed nomad). A life in parenthesis. Trivial decisions made by successive generations of idiots means that like Paula Fox you don't really have words for the place you are. The worldly non-events that carve out your silences.

~~~

JB.

The 'sin of despair'. I suppose we've dispensed with biblical terms and so this won't do. But there is something ungrateful about the terse, puritanical soul of the  fundamentalists for whom any relation to the world-music, art, women-is suspect. Desperate characters who despair at their sensibilities being refracted, dispersed into the myriad forms of worldly attachments.

Is this so very different from the pornographic soul?  The soul laid bare: repetitive, mechanical in its operations, robotic in its processing of what only amounts to 'information' at the end of the day, two-dimensional in its outlook, world-weary, predictable in its nihilism, cliched, cheap and artificial.

The sin of not connecting, of not wanting to.

Provence and the southern light. Camus's First Man, of course. Camus kind of redeems himself here since he finally sees the Arabs as human beings. 

Michel H.: An old, drunken ranting sod. So very, very, boring.

The best essays are undoubtedly on Ford Madox Ford, though Kipling (and Lahore!) and Orwell do make an appearance. And there's also the wonderful Penelope Fitzgerald whose short stories are quite mysterious, nearly as good as Karen B. (note to self: you really must stop making so many notes to yourself and actually read The Blue Flower).

In 'levels' he leaves sentences and thoughts floating in the air, half completed. It's as if each broken line could be made into a story itself and sail. This is from one of the essays:

'It is sometimes to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness an frugality of life in the Midi which includes a simplicity of thought, and a kind of whittling to the bone...Sunlight reflected from red tile floors on to whitewashed walls..and an air so soft that you live equally in and out of doors, suggest an experience so sweetly simple that you wonder that life ever appeared the tangled , hustling and distracting piece of nonsense you once thought it....Your mind relaxes, your thoughts spread out and take their shape, phobias disappear...

And you are released from the necessity of owning things. There is no need to be cosy...Your comforts are the warmth and light provided by nature.'

Perhaps only a northern soul could write so lovingly of the light. To be truly a part of it would make you speechless. 

That was Stella Bowen by the way. A terrible fate to be remembered as only the spouse of someone great.What she says sounds right, rings true. And that is all one can want -or at least all I want-from any writing.

From the same essay:

'There are in this world only two earthly Paradises...Provence ...and the Reading Room of the British Library.'

Yes! The 'exalted silence' of the book. If you cannot bring yourself to be religious in the formal sense then academia or books may be the only other way, the only viable alternative. And yet, you don't really see them as alternatives, do you. Religion has always had a profound relation to the arts, to poetry and music and architecture. It is only the corruption of religion at the hands of the fundamentalists that make the world 'the world', a mere palace of dreams and fantasies. For the traditional Muslim the Prophet's words remain true: 'The whole world is a mosque'.

~~~

I dunna why, I canna say, but this word sounded Scottish to me (not just Dundee). Unknowingness and clumsiness, stunned by too much music until one is out of one's sense (or is it too much light?), music and ec-stasy...and as if by magic:

' But the most likely source is the Scots verb “dunner,” meaning “to resound with a loud and reverberating noise,” especially “to fall with a loud sound.” This “dunner,” in turn, has been traced to the Old Norse “duna,” meaning “to thunder,” which in turn goes back to the Germanic root “dun,” which also gave us our English “din” for a loud noise.'

books;china; a life

One of the oddities of British (cultural) life-not that there is such a thing, or if there is that you would know anything about it-is its ability to generate quirky, idiosyncratic things such as 'rear of the year,' the Royal Family, and a category of people who are known as NTs (National Treasures). Not quite institutions and  often a bit of a piss take, but there you go.

BBC, another classic piss take, with its wonderfully insightful coverage of 'the birth' had hours on end of, well, a door in a  terrible state of inaction. The commentary-are these people actually being paid?-was stunning: "It is said that the baby will make an appearance immediately, or at least in the next few hours." And the fake intimacy, like that of an EastEnder who pretends he knows a thing or two about bird watching: [in hushed tones of reverence] "And there we see Charles and Camilla..if you listen carefully you can hear him saying 'marvelous'".

Well, there's no point harping on about the class system and servitude because you'll end up sounding like a silly commie.

Other funny stories: Channel 4's coverage of Ramzan (or Ramadhan as the Arabs like to say). 'We want to inform you about Islam'. Er..have you ever thought that most people don't want to be "informed" about Islam or religion in general. Oh dear! In any case, it turned out to be a dash of light entertainment: "we iz fasting coz, right, it's like we get a hundred times reward for what we do now, inshAllah".

The options: a religion for accountants or a bit of sufism.

Well, the latter is equally fake and pretentious. Inner enlightenment and all that jazz. Please, give me a break, bro'. A bit of old fashioned utilitarianism wouldn't go amiss here: for good states of mind things have to work.

Everyone here wants to talk about their own fasting. Apart from that, there is a proposal (shot down) that women should have separate shopping areas lest they tempt the pure by showing off their charms (read: hair, bare arms, elbows, ankles, a nose, cleavage, the outline of a buttock etc., etc.'Rear of the year'? You've got to be joking!). Now, part of me wants to support this proposal since there's nothing worse than shopping with women (except, possibly, shopping for a woman). But, really, are they serious? We're being drawn to the Frontier with these fucking Afghanis and towel-heads on our backs.

What is the problem here: the Jew world order: usury, democracy, women not knowing their place, western licentiousness, decadence, irreverence; the lack of authority or any real freedom (or was it too much of the wrong type of freedom..I forget).

Pass me the bag, Bob, I think I'm going to vomit.

NT. As the Hindus say: not this, not that.

~~~

What makes for a national treasure? Someone who is a  bit of an oddball, who has stood against the times (but not too firmly), and spoken clearly-or at least freely. In England it also means someone who isn't overly clever, full of himself or herself. Definitely not an intellectual or anyone else who takes themselves too seriously (like Grayling, for example). Humour, wit and charm help. Too much success doesn't. A NT may be wise, but not too wise. A national treasure is, as JB says, a reflection of some of the deep values, characteristics you associate with your fellow countrymen.

Boris Johnson will, you suspect, eventually be considered a NT-especially if he keeps on putting his foot in it and despite his heavy-handed attempts to appear an innocent and bumbling fool in a world full of wolves.

~~~

I sometimes wonder if I'm not suffering from depression. I'd drink, if I could.

A friend, who often thinks he's dying from the latest disease (and yes, it does have to be the latest) went to a doctor who told him in no uncertain terms, "There's nothing wrong with you Mr.S. I think you're  abit of a hypochondriac, to be honest".

That cheesed him off no end. " That simply can't be the case. I insist on a second opinion. There's  got to be something wrong, soemthign seriously wrong...what am I paying you for?"

I think he was half expecting an illness with a Latin name or something unpronounceable. Now, that would be real style.

~~~

Do Americans have anything like a NT? (anon, if you're still alive now would be a good time to break your silence. If you're not, it's okay, I'll let you off the hook). In the land of the pure we have neither a nation nor any treasures so that rules us out. We don't have a royal family either. And if the mullahs have their way rear of the year is going to be an all-boys affair.

The sense of an ending

Typeface: Bembo or Garamond:

It’s known for its graceful, flowing style and humanistic elegance. 

Hard to recapture the magic of JB's levels, and maybe because you know its destined to fail, you quickly purchase three of his other books: Nothing to be Frightened of, some essays, ...

Awfully cold and distant on Desert Island Discs. DiD doesn't always work-especially with intellectuals or academics (Pinker, for example, was a terrible flop). An idea sinks like a stone on that programme, which is probably why Rowan Williams came across as an egg-head, a boring stiff from another century. Ultimately, you wonder if the lack of revelation comes down to the inability to flirt with the interviewer (Sue Lawley in this case). Did Fallaci, for instance, entice ol' Ayatollah Khomeni by removing her niqab? Probably. Bhutto, on the the other hand, was comical and histrionic, mainly because he was too in love with himself, caught up in the whirlwind that was formally known as his own ego. 

The way we say things, or don't. I suppose in this day and age it'c come down to something like: the music we share or don't; the images we share with one another or do not. The human elegance of not saying too much and not revealing too much can quickly evaporate, leaving only a thin and dry crust of personality. We lose interest, move on from the insufferable bores. Perhaps we have nothing to say, after all; nothing to show for ourselves. 

Man, earth

We have been here for so long and still the nostalgia for other places resides in us, the shadow of Eden still crosses our gaze, and still this dream, of a beautiful, drifting cloud.

At ten o'clock you drink some thick, muddy, bitter coffee and a crumbly walnut and chocolate pie. By eleven, with the Ashes coverage discontinued and your mind still alert, looking for something to anchor it, you pick up JB's Levels...

~~~

To have a thought, just to fill the emptiness that seems so natural in the history of human beings; for the heart is full one moment and the next it is, amazingly, empty again. Who would have thought?

~~~

'When you are above, find me', she said/thought. And who hasn't imagined it so? His heart floating above hers; her heartbeat fluttering, straying into his, the pulse faint but in step. Think of a word. 'Does this word mean anything to you?', he asked.

The old words come to us eventually, sometimes spectacularly.

~~~

When you are in the air, look down and think of me. But he fell asleep and when he awoke he was over Constantinople. And down there were only harems.

'Perhaps I will catch you in a dream,' he thought to himself. Like a wave that rolls and washes back, like a second chance, a distant echo of some original fate, a flaw or quirk in the gods' parceling out of our lives. But he had lost all sense of orientation and time, the markers that make any life on earth comprehensible. 'I'm all at sea,' he said.

He looked down. How large were those clouds? Who could tell? From a distance nothing seems right. And below them, what were those? Waves, ships, a flock of birds, more clouds? At a certain height time stops and all you see is a frozen picture.

~~~

To write a line in the darkness and not know yourself. You think there is something more, but what if there isn't? He looks for that dark self, unremembered, slightly out of focus, the air in which he can breathe. She shields her face from too much light, the sun's brightness making her clumsy; she remembers the greyness of the light most of all, when the day is done and last things reappear.

That self-darkness, soft as ash, open and alive , not oppressive in the slightest, Rothko's refined black. The dark, changing fortune, like the first streaks of morning light, the emergence of something totally new,  the light on the edge of the darkness that has been with us all this time on earth. The life lived under a black sun. It was our life; it was his life, the colour of a true heart...

~~~

'When you are in the air remember me, won't you?'

What kind of distance is this, he wondered. Memory or a random dream? Perhaps the dream is just a memory of some kind of reality, deeply buried within us?

 'Do we know each other? Haven't I seen you some place before?...Think of a name, a place we met.'

~~~

In a dream he saw her face but it was plain and ordinary and not like her at all. There was no dressing up for the occasion, no silver or gold. But there was something dazzling about the moment. And even though she didn't look his way, not this time, he knew it was her and he remembered the blue and thought he was in the air again, all at sea.

The Romance of Violence

'Constitutional institutions might be equitable, but they were not (and it’s striking that Lincoln used exactly this word) “authenticity”—the dry, rational legal system that the revolution had insured could never satisfy Americans’ need for an emotional connection with the past and with each other.'
---Adam Gopnik.

This might just be my paranoia, but it does seem to me that there is an awful lot of violence in the land of the pure, much of it directed to non-muslims, women, particular ethnic groups (Hazaras) and people associated with some political group or the other. 

Of course, the presence of the Taleban is one of the factors in this incredibly complex equation. But apart from political and economic factors is this a cultural phenomenon?

It always amazes (and saddens) you that after all this time we're still the blood-crazed animals we always pretend we're not. Maybe the lust has been tempered by religion, culture, conversation, and economic interdependence. On the other hand, maybe some of those things have spurred us on to ever greater levels of depravity?

Yesterday, the leader of the Pakistan Taleban wrote an open letter to Malala saying, yes, we did indeed shoot you in the face (a 15 year-old schoolgirl) because you were maligning us. That's what it's come down to....

The dirt in the mind, the dark cut, the acuteness of the dark, forest-dwelling, the life of trees and spirit surrounding you. What makes you different-nothing but the ability to destroy, kill, sacrifice. The cave dweller's primeval instinct breaks forth in the total release of impulse.The long winter of the mind, the lizard's ageless silent gaze and waiting still with us, in cold blood...to sacrifice oneself for a faith...regardless of whether it embraces truth or error. The primal act, the fascism in our blood,..to look for oneself in extremes, excess. The mind stretching into Utopian Thought, the great purification, cleansing, clearing the waste..wastelands, superfluous humanity. Ashes, a solution, the final solution, the war to end all wars. The chaos in the heart, the dissonance that enters the music of the times. Thinking is only a dream of feeling. The "enemy", "us" against "them", so that the original community is restored, the 'oceanic feeling' of oneness, the pure bloodlines.. An impression of blood, roses and splendid tears.

The outlaw. One must stand outside oneself, society, to restore order...the state of exception. The necessary darkness, unthinking energy, the rites of spring. The subterranean human impulse to violent collective action for a Utopian goal..Dionysus and Apollo. This hatred of the past, continuity, too much light and scorn for women. The destruction of spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols, traditions that have become rigid. The puritanical mind, the violence of orthodoxy, as opposed to the pluralism of paganism.

Shining India ?

Economic growth (increases in GDP per capita) remains the holy grail for most countries. Even if it means vast inequalities, human suffering, and catastrophic consequences for the environment. Yet another example of the "detour principle": short-run well-being can be sacrificed for some radiant, resplendent future. Of course, this is a feature of what remains the dominant philosophy of our times, namely: Utilitarianism.

In the long-run, it is argued, such misery is worth it since the lives of future generations will be so much better and the 'betterness' of such large numbers of people outweighs the current unhappiness, suffering, etc. But here's the rub:  given the looming prospect of environmental catastrophe (or, at the very least, uncertainty about how things will pan out) it is not at all clear that such an emphasis on growth is warranted-even if one concedes that the cost-benefit approach is the only valid framework we have (which, of course, it isn't).

Sen's latest book, one might argue his most urgent, is on this very issue.

I don't much care for gurus but if I did, Amartya would be right up there. I think my course which  is based on, or inspired by, his work needs to be updated!

The 'spiritual east'? Man shall not live by bread alone. Granted. But the bread does come first.

A palace of dreams

'The sexualisation of a teenaged Charlotte Church in the tabloids, the shots of young girls reproduced from their social networking sites, the pubescent fashion models, the Page 3 girls still in their teens – all these assist in blurring what should be very definite and bright red lines.'---D. Orr.

'[s]aturated by a culture in which one gender is a trussed-up, passive sex toy for the other. But this is exactly what we're doing with the rest of our public space. It's not the existence of porn that bothers me, but its colonisation of the mainstream, ...'
---Zoe Williams.

I know some will pass this off as simply being middle-age prudery or even muslim conservatism on my part but I think that's really a cop out. The incredible allure of the image. I don't think anyone can deny the appeal of some of the more provocative ones, whether one wants to call it instinctive or natural or culturally learned) Of course, other images are just cheap or comical and even staged as a 'bit of a laugh for the lads'. But there's also something insidious going on here. Related to this general acceptance into the mainstream is a deep scepticism towards anyone who even suggests there should be limits (as usual, this is seen as an infringement on one's freedom, etc....but what about the idea of self-imposed limits?)

Ivan Illich and the reticence of the eye. So much of this is really a religious training: to speak considerately, to lower one's eyes, listen carefully. In late capitalism does the idea of a boundary even make any sense? Everything must flow, nothing is sacred or permanent.

Saturation is the key word here. This is not about the initial high associated with transgression. 'Saturation' implies that the shock of the new (in art or in advertising or in books and films..all amounts to the same thing, really) doesn't shock any more. It's shocking that anyone is actually shocked in this day and age.Think of the exponential growth in the availability of music and films, the sheer volume of babble and conversation in blogland, the infinite growth in the number of research papers, books, reviews, derivatives of derivatives. The very word 'excess' seems almost antiquated, as does the word restraint. 'I want it, therefore I must have it.'

Availability. That's what it's really about, isn't it? A fantasy island in which nothing is denied you. A kind of free-floating Utopia, an endless summer's day of perfect light, Matisse's swimmers, the body stripped of its guilt. Abandonment. A sort of blindness because it entails not looking at the world as it really is, but escaping into a realm of unreality and fabrication, a palace of dreams.

J.B. on pleasures and palaces:

(really should relate this to E. Bloch, daydreaming...)

'If there is one word which can safely be applied to almost all the constructions for entertainment it is the adjective impermanent....The architecture of  entertainment, of fairs, exhibitions, concert halls, and theatres may  be considered alongside church buildings. Like churches places of entertainment are where people go for short spells only...But the difference is this. Churches are built to last...Nothing is more empty than a deserted fairground...but an empty church is full. ...

Fairs and entertainments are the cast-offs of the church. Their ancestors were hurled out of the church...And I wish that this people's art would come back to churches-a little more vulgarity of painted wood,..a little more of the fairground.

In Italy and Spain fair and church, entertainment and worship, are undivided...The Puritan sense of sin about pleasure means that we drive it out into the open fields of the world.'

This last point indicates a double meaning of the word 'contain'. As long as religious institutions encompassed the whole of reality, even making space for the less praiseworthy aspects of human nature, they were able to restrict/contain them to some extent. One wonders whether Guenon and Eliade were right: carnivals themselves were either sanctioned or tacitly allowed by religion. And didn't Dario Fo once make a similar point?

Hikikomori

'I'm fascinated by failure, a far more difficult experience to ride out with grace than victory, which tends to bring out the best in all but gloating arseholes: magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness, pessimism and low self‑esteem...there's a point at which it's pretty clear that whatever it is we're so determined to achieve is not going to happen'
---Lionel Shriver.

Then there was this which only gets to the half of it. There's also-you suspect- a strange phenomenon of 30 somethings dropping out, floating, cruising, staying at home after their marriages break up or when they become unemployed. The comfort of home cooking and familiar streets, shops, faces... Didn't Nick Drake go back?

The Nostalgia industry taps into this. To think you can return and everything will be the same is a form of delusion. But you've seen it yourself. Grown men playing play station. The endless re-runs on television. It was the summer of '69 and society wasn't broken and kids still played on the street. And it was the summer of '76, sweltering heat, hose-pipe bans, raspberry flavoured icicles, sweets for two pence, the light in Victoria park calm and magical even after the sun has set...you grab your cricket bat and run as fast as you can, past the drunks, past the chippy, past Pam's sad little shop...the Queen, who didn't seem quite human in those days; that was, I guess, a sign of royalty. B.B. King and Otis R., the ultimate in cool. And you used to tape songs from the radio in those days. A tape recorder? "What the fuck is dat?" you hear the younger ones say.

~~~

The Protestant work ethic...success as a sign that one has been chosen, blessed. The curse of idleness. Sloth and not madness becomes the new  form of sin (Foucault). The Romantic individual who must strive for glory, even if she knows she's destined to fail. Capitalism and the competitive instinct, the Darwinian struggle that weeds out failures, the people who can't adapt quickly enough..what the Yanks call "losers".

But also something else, perhaps. What is there to strive for? Iris M: the Left has run out of energy because it has achieved, by and large, what it set out to do. At the individual level, once you've reached some level of material comfort there isn't that much charm in trinkets and baubles. The world itself appears as something superfluous, lacking in reality, like a dream.The great manufacturers of desires need restless souls. Dossiers, like everything else, are 'sexed up'.

Don't let go. Hoard everything you can. You might as well be a Pharaoh with your fear of death.  Don't worry, technology will save us, connect us again, usher in a new age of knowledge and understanding (or at least spur on growth for a while). Austerity, the zero-economy, the steady-state in which nothing happens, the looming environmental catastrophe..do they all contribute to the sense that there's no point in trying?

I'd rather not. I'd rather not buy this, I'd rather not be seen.

Indecision: How can anyone make a decision when they don't have an idea of 'the good'? Pushpin is as good as poetry, said the man. How to live a life? Don't look to religion and work doesn't give you the necessary framework any more either. Why 'invest' time in anything if nothing's destined to last anyway.

northland

The Embankment, under the bridge, on a blustery Sunday morning, the wooden tables being unfolded before your very eyes, the books hastily carried from the big forest green boxes, Thames-side, to the tables, as if they were hot cakes; your sandwich and own reading material, pencils, etc. in your bag. The cold breeze on your face, the open northern light, the strange voices over your shoulder, your index finger rattling over the spines of the deeply creased books. All that is, on reflection, a slice of heaven.

~~~

Gopnik's book on Winter, Rachel Kushner's Flamethrowers, Z. Herbert's Still Life in a lovely Notting Hill edition, Walser's Microscripts, some Derek Raymond, De Lillo's Names, T. Judt's Memory Chalet...

Back in the land of the pure you pick up:

Speak, Memory.
James and the Giant Peach
Collected Stories, Lydia Davis
Selected Poems, R. Bly
Levels of life?, Julian Barnes.

I have no idea how, for example, L. Davis can be bought for 5 pounds here and 11 pounds in England. I suspect that the business is subsidized by the hair transplant business which the owner runs along with the book shop. An entrepreneur with a passion for books? when I make inquiries I am told that he isn't the brightest of sparks and probably doesn't understand the losses he's making. Hmm. A crap entrepreneur with a passion for books?

~~~

The Idea of North...just downloaded. Something to go with K. Jamie's Findings, the Gopnik, and Camus's Lyrical Essays.

Love-object or loveobject. A word in S. Johnson's dictionary. Now obsolete. A gift one makes to one's beloved. In the old b&w films you seem to recall that 'to make love' did not mean what it does today. Jeez, there isn't even any permanence to words any more. I suspect you have to go down the line and find something primitive, like water, or mother, for the word to be the same over the ages.
~~~

You'd forgotten how hot and horrid summeris  in the land of the pure could be. Like a poor Russian aristocrat in a novel, you sit in isolation, the streets half empty, wondering what others are doing in their vacations (except it isn't Paris, but London).

For the first time in 20 years you're not fasting and it feels a bit strange. There are lots of people around to make me feel guilty (a non-Catholic Catholic's guilt?). Don't find not fasting to be liberating, but nor did I find fasting liberating either. I'm sure there's a spiritual element to it for some (most, even) but not for me. And, of course, it's ridiculous to "want" such an experience. Is there any getting away from the self's own perspective?

It's so humid that your clothes stick to your body and the only time you can genuinely feel at ease during the day is when you stand under the shower. Just standing there, not thinking of anything, breathing. Every year it seems as if your mind is slowing down. It's not that you really ever had any technical competence or intelligence from the outset. But you did imagine, even if only vaguely, that by now you would have understood something of life and that that middle age would have made you if not wise then at least not so clumsy. But why should the mere passing of time confer anything on you? There's no fool like an old fool.

~~~

Was reading something about failure (yeah, what greater sign of failure could there be than reading about it?!). What if you're simply not good enough? It wasn't the stars or other people conspiring against you; it wasn't some lack of effort on your part or that you didn't understand there were only a few windows of opportunity. That kind of realization can be devastating-if, that is, you set any great store to the word 'success'.

But what of those whose soul has grown indifferent, lukewarm and placid? Those for whom neither success nor failure matter that much? The drop-outs, the floaters.

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived liked the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds.
--Simic, NYRB.

The city in summer floated in a daze that moved otherwise sensible people to repeat endlessly the brainless greeting “Hot enough for ya? Ha-ha!” It was like the final joke before the meltdown of the world in a pool of sweat
---Arthur Miller

Thinking of the books I've brought back and the ones left high on the wardrobe, the music I've 'bought' but will never listen to, the ever growing lists of things still to be bought, watched, given attention, the reminders to live one's life, the scraps of profound words hastily jotted down in a notebook...it is all endless.

Summer has passed by in a flash. It seemed it was only starting when I left-bright, cloudless days, the Ashes just beginning, Wimbledon over and the discovery of closure, the waist-high grass and nettles and weeds outside St. Barnabas's church, silently catching the long shadows and last light as a porcelain-white Christ looks sadly down, well-worn paths in the park, as the green dries out to straw yellow and then inch-high stubble and dust.

And now I must mend my shoes, prepare for the long haul, the long hours of silence, buckle down and become serious. Fold your clothes, adjust your pace, find the right place for things, reassemble what order there is. Another summer over, in which you witness the miracle of the transformation of time, perfection and timelessness, bodies loosened, hands unclenched, the soft morning light on people's faces making them more beautiful than they really are, the sugars in plums, cherries, strawberries, thickening and expanding under the moonlight, words more measured, the laughter of children, the pink clouds of evening stretching above us, the last soft glow of understanding.

And when the sky has darkened you hear the last notes of a distant bird. The notes are clear and precise and then they slow down, as if going from song to plain words, the plainest words imaginable. How old this ritual, how ancient the tune? Does this bird know any other?

In the morning a pigeon darts from one roof to another. Jumps, rather than flies. As he lands on the garage's corrugated roof which is now turquoise from moss and debris and too much light, he opens his wings and they flutter like so many pages caught in a stiff breeze. An awkward and clumsy landing. Don't read too much into it and don't dwell on it.

All you need is time and you'll find yourself again, find yourself again in deep winter, north or north by north-west, without any lists or books or music and just enough food and thought, enough truth and enough heart  for a day.

dead man walking

The long road back, away from the heart; the long road back to the heart. A wound like this has befallen me before. Nothing's really changed. Don't show me no mirror or silver. A woman in black, her face turned from me, is the way it is. The idol of the days. I walk in afternoon sunlight, the suicide hour, when no-one's about. As JB says, the old sunlight on my back...

The mystery of permanence

 We're here, strangers on this isle, exiles, if that's what you want to say, to dress it up. There's nothing much to hold on to now, maybe there never was. Some re-runs, fading photos, music and old haunts.There is only love at the end of the day. But it finds its objects, and the ordinary things around us can be sharp reflections, if we're attentive.

What is this dream of the Garden, of  green shade and rest, tranquility and peace? When we know each person by the light that falls on their faces, their soft words? Our hands, the self-revealing gestures of the soul. Even if all that is a myth, then it is a beautiful, eternal one. There is no journey to speak of without the magnetic pull of beauty, truth, love, friendship....

The Qur'anic verse (from memory): "We tasted a fruit like this before"

And why shouldn't that be the case? If something attracts us now is it because it once existed..and if it once existed, then it will again. Memory is what binds us. The remembrance of things past..this is one of the most frequent questions asked of us: "Do you not remember..."

The world is a bridge, a ladder. You doubt whether Islam has ever been about denying desires-only purifying them (incidentally, you were told by an expert that in the Russian iconic tradition it is also about subduing (not necessarily "killing") the snake). There's always been something Greek about Islam: balance, equilibrium, proportionality. The city and the desert...

Time is not redeemable. I've never believed that and hope I never will.

~~~

The first comment after this video:

'Beautiful. It's the school holidays again late 60's- early 70's. Everything is fine, life is great. I'll go out and play when this is done. Be back at night time. Christ please take me back'

I'm reminded of Exupery and the freed slave (Bark): 

'He was free but in an infinite way, so that he felt weightless above the earth. He lacked that weight of human relationships that inhibits free movements, those tears and farewells, those reproaches and those joys, everything that a man strokes or tears apart every time he forms a gesture, those thousand chains that bind him to others and make him heavy.'

There is a kind of Gnostic/Puritan/fundamentalist tendency to think of the world as somehow a distraction, something to be denied, in case we fix our gaze on it too intently. Well, of course, 'worldliness' and a crass materialism is always a possibility. But, as Denise writes: the world is not with us enough!' There is a different kind of sufism, one that gratefully acknowledges and gives thanks for the good things in this world (as the traditional muslim prayer recognizes).

~~~

This great tree outside my house glows darkly in the late flaring of summer light. Here we are, caught in this eternal chain, of light and shade, between past and future, the song of joy and sorrow (as another Mir said) always with us. Here we are, holding out for some kind of permanence, as life flashes by and distances are eclipsed. I sometimes think all we will be known for, ultimately, is the quality of our attachments. 

The Allama: Yes! to life, to dear life.

By chance, or whatever you want to call it, you stumble across this in today's Guardian:

'What I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every pothole, delusion..held still and held together-radiant, everlasting."

Every last thing. I like that immensely.

~~~

I'm nearly out of time here. Probably always have been...

The Clash of Civilisations

The real battle of the twentieth century was not that between Communism and Liberalism. The real conflict was not between freedom and security, nor was it a remnant of the forces of religion pitted against a rampant secularism. Instead-as the Daily Telegraph wisely points out-the essential, the fundamental opposition was and is between Desert Island Discs and Private Passions, R3 and R4. (Bob and anton, forgive me).

'Then there’s the question of interviewing style: Kirsty Young is confidential – you can imagine that lulling Scottish voice beguiling intimate memories from her guests as though they were sharing a coffee and a Rich Tea biscuit in complete privacy.'

PP is, of course, high-brow and something all serious music lovers take a shining to. The uninterrupted music is undoubtedly one of its great charms. No adverts, no silliness, just a deep commitment to the higher aspirations and ideals of music itself. Here are people who know their stuff, who can say intelligent things about the music itself and the emotions, the passions it often evokes.

But, I have to say: it leaves me all a bit cold: the intellectuality, the rarefied air of specialization, the knowing silences.  DiD does it for me, though. Almond (of Skellig fame)or old George Foreman on second chances, on how he emerged from his defining moment and finally stepped out of Ali's shadow. Classics. Just sounds more real somehow, as if the music, a song or a tune, could only make sense in the context of a particular life, a background picture (Iris M). A song can come as the summation of a string of thoughts or summarize the way you felt at that time, or capture the moment, the spirit of the times one finds oneself living in. It's all mixed in the fray of memories, conversations, desires, and half-forgotten bits of wisdom your mam told you. 

There isn't always clarity and it's sometimes a bit rose-tinted. There is passion and drama here, but it is very rarely for the music in itself. What is meant by 'in itself' anyway?

You have cause me for to love you...

Saying what you mean, 

The Wonder Years

There are fewer and fewer places that I recognize or where I can feel comfortable. Am I talking to myself? That's how people look at me, as if I'm not from around here. Gosh, I've finally become Jewish...

You copy out a few passages of JB for anton. Something simple and reassured in the writing. The feeling of being at home, right there where you ought to be. That always had more appeal than the edgy existential stuff. The book I ordered (some poems recommended by someone) won't come through now because it has been "damaged in the process of shipping" (if this was a face-to-face exchange I would have said: "knock two ponds off and I'll still take it". Computers are still way behind human beings!).

At last you get away from the masses circling around in the shopping mall. A bit early for the Hajj, you think! You eventually make your way to a small Foyles and here, finally, you feel you can talk to someone (at least nominally) as an equal or without having to worry about eye contact.

I buy some C.S. Lewis for little r (even though she's too young..actually, I'd like to re-read it) and a purple kaleidoscope. Fruit scones and sunflower seeds. For lunch I make kedegree (which is, I think, an anglicized version of 'kichri') and Baba Ghanoush. At home you watch all the re-runs. Morse, for example. I've seen this particular episode at least four times. This inability to let go and move on is worrying, but not too worrying (a friend once watched Top Gun 21 times and he wasn't even gay!). Then there was a perfect moment where you caught a re-run of a 1983 game (Brighton vs Norwich) on 'The Big Match'. Television is brilliant at insulating you from the real world. Being There. "Winter is a time to conserve. But Spring will eventually arrive."

Bronk: The Winter Mind. One for later. Skellig.

The Wonder Years...an iconic show if ever there was one. One of the best episodes is when a girl in braces falls for K...there's chemistry, there's this feeling and image that floats beyond your gaze, and it's the world of togetherness and it all makes sense, a growing in lightness, another level of life, an understanding that comes from a life lived, the questions blunted. But it isn't to be. And no-one knows why or can say why. No-one knows how it turns out or how it would have (which reminds you of a great short story by Alice Munro). That's the wonder, isn't it? You haven't got a clue, Watson.

Time pulls you in two directions, drags you down in the dust. Every day has felt like a preparation for departure; every day has also, miraculously, felt like a coming home. One process shortens your days, the other draws them out. You've lost track.

A friend recites a poem:

We were beautiful once.
We were, weren't we?

The catalogue of aches and pains, uncharted. Grammar and any sense of structure but a dim memory now. You'll get down to something raw eventually. The anchor of the world...Your hands thick and clumsy. Your hair: the black inherits the grey (a bit of Akhmatova, and why not?). You'll be in luck if God has a sense of humour. Just you and Knulp.

The Wonder Years: you sometimes wonder if you didn't become a ghost in 1983. The moles become more predominant. And Jesus-don't flinch now-you have hair growing from your ears. My ears are long, says a Tiawanese friend-which is a sign of spirituality. Are you sure it isn't just old age [he asks, tentatively]? The knees... I could write pages on them. And my nose! There is no truth to my nose.  

A poem from the poetry that will never reach us, that got damaged on the way, or lost or something.

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

It's fantastic that you can type in a word, a word like 'shelter', say, and see what comes up, what is retrieved from the store. Yes, I know, a villager at heart to be amazed by such things. What does it point to? Not some great arch-angel who has recorded all we've said, nor a Stasi agent with his bony fingers in our books but, rather, the possibility that some words will not be lost. All time is irredeemable-except for the time that isn't. What time is left?