between past and future...

And now this is 'an inheritance'-
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long ago, yet willable forward
Again and again and again.
---Seamus Heaney.

Don't ask me what you know is true. What one gives, one gives freely, without the counting of silver on one's mind, without the silver passing between finger and thumb. A silver coin in the palm of my hand, open, free, unclenched, at ease with the world. Take it now, this first word from  me to you, to coin an expression; it wasn't mine in the first place, to borrow a phrase. Keep its reflection close to you, the shimmering outline of what could have been. A b and w photo of a child close to your heart, the child who never aged. This low blue flame of my heart. Yours.

By chance you were re-reading Hannah. Six lectures, three and two. The problem, from the first, of how to live within time and without. A circle, perhaps, is a small comfort, a radial intelligence. Kafka's un-homely parable of the parabola, before and after: to walk diagonally, bound and free.

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,
Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead
And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space
He experimented with infinity.
His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the prefect pitch
Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused
In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at its last circumference.

and these lines, even if rubbed out the tracings would do, the faint grey smudges, the remains of lead, like a snapshot of a life, the bullet that hits the mark, a spectral existence, the kind that continues when the lights have been turned off, the voices in the old house in the old country.

a line reminds me. the memory of what i was. my death under a southern tree was foretold one summer afternoon.

Death leans forward and
writes on the ocean surface
While the church breathes gold.
---Transtromer

I don't know why, but I find that very peaceful, a kind of achieved stillness worked through time. That breath seems to be as eternal as the ocean, something that continues below the surface. Death, which is abrupt, is nothing compared to the expansiveness and openness of gold. 

The English Major

There's a wonderful post about the importance of the English Major by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. But what immediately struck me was this photograph. Now, this may just be a reflection of my own state of mind, but it does seem to me that this image is deliberately provocative. England might not be sexy, but English is. I don't know if anyone has noticed this but there do seem to be a lot of adverts on the sidebars, (dating ads, from what I can gather) of skimpily dressed women or cartoons with the caption 'undress me' etc. All seems to be quite normal.

It may be that images affect men and women differently. A woman looking at the picture above might look at it quite innocently.

To be honest, I think we'd all be a bit better off with fewer images, less music, and less noise. What chance of judgement is there when we are bombarded with 'information', when the imagination is given free play? 'Taste' has now come to mean-except in a few rarefied circles-the same thing as raw, unrefined,wanton preferences or desires, an expression of pure subjectivity. The irony being, of course, that the desires themselves are in large part constructed by the big corporations. But to talk of standards, norms, or understanding when it comes to taste is to at once be accused of snobbery and elitism. To talk of the dangers of images, the abuse of language, is to open oneself up to the accusation of being an old fogey, a prude.

But isn't reading a pure escape, a flight of the imagination that mirrors, even if darkly, the writer's creative instincts? Yes, in some ways the hyperinflation of words, the exponential growth in the printed word (or the electronic word) also has similar effects, but you wonder if we aren't talking about different mechanisms here, and if the ancient contract between word and world doesn't set up all kinds of resistances.Perhaps ebooks will change that as they alter our physical experience of reading-the texture of the texts, the notion of a fixed place and reading (as opposed to reading on the go). Mobility, speed, flexibility, the quickening of the eye, lightness, the undesirability of 'boundaries'...all of these things, so essential to the domination of capitalism, will no doubt make the book, silence, the commons, the Jewish/Islamic aniconic attitude or temperament less palatable. Instead, the deluge. The major will become a minor. Preserved, no doubt, for nothing today can allowed to die in a natural way, its memory stored somewhere in the land of google or in a 'cloud'.

The ancient skills of looking carefully, of looking away, of letting things rest, of not reaching out to grasp everything..the ability to say "I do not know", or "I do not want to know", all of that seems lost in an age that prizes the tearing away of veils. Open access, 'the knowledge economy', the super highways of the net, instant access, free downloads, live streaming, the porn shop of the heart where you can get whatever you want. You are 'one click' away from nirvana. Yes, that's it, our lives streaming away. That blur in the photograph, that was me...I think.  The revolution will be televised. The revolution will be television. Dumb it down, check out.

Drink up, Khayyam. Our bones are old, our soul is out of style.

solitude

'Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.'
---Pessoa.

'If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature unto you would be a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.'
---Thomas a Kempis.


There is a sense in which this writing is too 'inward', irritatingly so. And, yes, there are typical elements to his writing which appeal, I guess, to a bourgeois intellectual or someone who is, more generally, estranged from the world, the times she is living in.

There can be something suffocating about this writing..it never curves out to the world and one really wants him to open the window, so to speak, so to speak. And yes, it's at times like this that one longs for a more substantial 'worldliness' (in Arendt's sense), a connection more tangible than these surface observations. Pessoa is like a man who wears gloves and has a good idea of the shape of the world but not its feel. But there is also, perhaps, a danger of something being too informed by history, the political. This need to escape history is also half our story, wouldn't you say?

Yes, the solipsism is definitely present. One feels like saying: yaar, give it a rest, Fernando, give us a break (all that wallowing. In England you imagine a reader saying, for fuck's sake, get a hold of yourself, man!). But I think there's something else going on here as well...this desire to be nothing, plain, neutral, small, as if that-somehow-could mean we are not tied down to the world, not overpowered by it. It is hard not to think of this in hindsight as an attempt to avoid or sidestep the large forces set into motion in the 20th century: the domination of the state, the party, ethnic determination..an attempt to not say 'Yes' or 'No' but, rather, take a step back from the whole question itself...Bartleby's 'I'd prefer not to' (no, haven't read, but seems relevant).

Primo Levi: "inert, noble, rare." Grey as a form of resistance, a resistance that doesn't even recognize the hold of power. Unable-or more to the point-unwilling to act, to interact.

As always, the key question: what is the way out of the world that is in the world? I think Pessoa's gnosticism doesn't appeal to our Muslim sensibilities. But there are moments, opening onto something else...

What redeems his writing for me, though, is the gentleness. Like Walser, he aims to escape bourgeois reality by being small, tender. He is a writer -in some ways- for the dropouts. Not the hard boiled, raw reality of the drunks, druggies, etc. but, still, along those lines. There is also a real connection here between the city and the soul, it's all very Platonic, very ancient. I can't but help read this book against a background of religious questioning: who am I, what is the self but a tissue of dreams? Such questions would be jarring if asked too insistently. And that, I think, is ultimately where Pessoa's charm lies. There's no strenuous searching, just a kind of daily reporting, the type of self-examination one imagines monks (a kind of Jesuit, he calls himself) might conduct. Yes, I think that's what makes reading this -at times-so awkward: writing that turns inwards around a centre that we're not even sure exists any more!

There's something contemporary about these small notes, the meaningless chatter, minute observations. A kind of blogging, maybe?

This, for example...when was this written?

'I write, or rather scribble, these lines not to say anything in particular but to give my distraction something to do. With the soft marks made by a blunt pencil I haven't the heart to sharpen, slowly fill the white paper the cafe uses to wrap up sandwiches (and which they provided me with because I required nothing better and anything would have done as long as it was white). And I feel content. I lean back. Evening falls....And I stop writing just because I stop writing.'

As always, this can slip into the banal but, for me, it's this kind of simple, clean recording of daily events that appeals. Maybe it isn't literature. But the blunt pencil! Is that all that is left? To carry on writing, into your own solitude, despite everything. This, again, reminds me of Walser and his microscripts...
 


What am I searching for?
Nothing.

But everyone is searching for something, whether they know it or not!
Then let it be Wales, my whore, my dark country, my black sun. 
 

dreamworld

The dream of the world is the world.

I have the amazing ability-say some-to fall asleep at will. At least during the day, that is. Butt hat is really just all the sleeplessness that is carried over in my body from the previous night. I put my head on the pillow but don't really sleep, just wander in and out of different rooms, speaking different languages, settling old scores. There is a thin shaft of light from another room that remains with me throughout the night; it is like a tall, elegant door. A few of the high cupboard doors are flung open and gaze down at me with their wild, dark eyes.

The clock, getting slower with every passing day, stands as if it is above my head, examining me. I can read it in the dark or know instinctively what the time is by simply raising my head. Before looking at its blank face I can read its thoughts.

I wake up feeling tired, wondering if I ever really slept. But I look forward to the morning, to the weak, grey light, because this means I can sleep, find an hour's worth of rest, like the last sip of a drink in a bottle. My left shoulder aches for some mysterious reason. I am too tired to run any more. You wonder what it would be like to sleep like a saint, or like that day labourer you saw the other day, the one who exhausted himself during the day as he clawed out a living, digging deep down into the dust and mud with heavy implements, digging down in a hole which was up to his hips. Or the sleep of a child. You intuitively feel that if everyone could sleep like a child then most of the problems would disappear. There is something holy about that sleep.

A day passes without really talking to anyone and so it too seems like a dream. 

Pessoa...it says "like nothing else" on the cover but he sounds like Walser, a hyper-sensitive Walser. Craftsmanship: tell it, tell it slant.

My course continues. The lights are always dimmed down and the four or five students sit there wondering to themselves who this ghost-like person is. I realize I'm not really in the classroom-or I've trained myself in this great disappearing act, this great art of taking leave, of speaking without meaning anything. Not that they'd notice the difference. I quietly enter the dark room with its fuzzy light, its silent walls and think I've stepped into a morgue, a twighlight zone.

Faqir tells me, in an all-knowing matter-of-fact kind of way: don't worry, when you're fifty it will all be clearer. There will be no indecision because you can't do anything to alter the course your life has taken anyway. Great! The mathematical necessity of it is devoid of any charm. The fake wisdom of old age.

Fernando, you are a dark one...

'To cease, to be unknown and external, the stirring of branches in remote avenues,..and the whole indistinct world of gardens at night...To cease, to end, once and for all, but yet to survive in another form, as the page of a book, a loose lock of hair, ..insignificant footsteps on the fine gravel on the curve of a path, the last twist of smoke high above a village as it falls asleep, the whip of the waggoner stopped by the road in the morning...'

a time of no reply

The sun leans into our lives, mysteriously jostling up to us, nestling as birds do in high treetops; it takes us by the throat, demands an answer. A century is a flick of its eye, a thousand years of Byzantium gold is a whisper of excitement in comparison to its eternal stillness. The sun, the fisherman, silently casts its vast net over us. The sun, idol of the days that I've never truly believed in. My soul points north, north to you, black sun.

'sun splinters
in water's skin
quivers hundreds
of lines to rim
one radiance
You within.'

---Menashe.

~~~

Too much sun in your eyes, too much on your back; it's like a sack of coal. Shade your eyes, seek out the few oases of shade. Already he's grown old: a black eyed dog who doesn't know his name, the war veteran shell shocked after fifty years, a man who by sheer coincidence crosses a woman he could have loved but didn't. Something remains hidden, true but unknowable.

I feel a tug at my coat. It is Insignificant.

What have we become? What we always were? The harshness of a doctrine dissolves over tea and chips. Is your inability to pray a reflection of you being stuck in 'la'?

Little r refuses to talk to Ubo unless he shaves his moustache, that great throwback to the 1970s, a reminder, I like to think, of a kind of warm secularism before this country was ruined by the shrill voices of the fundos. But deep down you don't even care about that. What remains is a memory of an image of the Turkish military man (not too senior, of course) who could never be religious because of his sense of humour: ah, my father, my Jew.

And if God wills it  I, too, will never be religious. A non-jew non-jew. Yes, I mean no.

~~~

You write to people and you get an automatic reply: 'I am not in my office right now' or some other fob off. If I knew anything about technology I'd try and sort out a similar arrangement-except it would be more personal. So, when people would stop to greet me in the corridor my eyes would flash and a tape would play: Sorry, I cannot respond to you right now, I am currently out of the country.'

In Wales, the dark country, we dreamt of escape. Nothing much has changed in all these years. Except, of course, that I can't recognize myself any more. Apart from that...

~~~

little r's favourite joke:

My dog has no nose!

"How does he smell?"

Terrible!

She laughs, not knowing why. Perhaps that is the best way to laugh.

~~~

And now I must clock on-or clock off, depending on how you look at time- and enter a different world. I think of anton with her deep and heavy nineteenth century German books. It is as if she has become those books. And Roxana, a short gem of a novel or a book of riddles, haikus. Dear C, a richly woven nineteenth century book of profound psychological insights and deep humanity. The Dougal, who is the first line of every book she has read; the swami, whose heart is written in Sanskrit, a book whose letters are dark and glistening;  Ubo, a book he's never heard of but he's read the preface and knows the end. Me? A question to myself, but I have no time to reply.

I

That is no country for old men.  The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

                    II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

                    III

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

                    IV

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

---Yeats. 

~~~

Gold, a constant element in our lives, the 

idea of perfection, indestructibility. You put 

the days of the sun behind you, the way you put 

your hat down on a sideboard when entering a house.

The day is done. 

You write these lines with half your mind thinking 

about the lecture in 17 minutes. You must become invisible 

again,find your way through it. Feigned intelligence, 

formality, the final glance in the mirror, tighten the 

knot around your throat, and pick up the hat again... 

~~~

The form of your writing is determined by technical glitches-

which is another way of saying: you don't know how it is 

determined!

'The truly wise man could enjoy the whole spectacle of the world from his armchair.'

---Pessoa. 

My armchair is nearly broken; it has seen better days. 

The springs are looser, have less resistance, and only 

tiredly and reluctantly return to their normal at-ease

shape. There's new upholstery, for sure, a dull 

chocolate brown that takes away any individuality

it once had, and a side of the arm rest needs to be

continuously nailed into place. 

From my window I do not see any people and nor do I

ever hear any noise from the other flats. Am I the only

human being living here, I wonder? Now and then I see a 

well-dressed administrator come out of a white door to a 

mysterious room, and there are the good-natured cleaners 

with their wet mops and shallow buckets of soapy water. 

There are hundreds of crows-or maybe just one-and they're 

very noisy. I wish I had a shotgun. I sometimes see a 

maulvi on a bike. Extra points? 

...of small things

Note to self: are you ready for a life of smallness?

'You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten.'
---Anthony Lane, The New Yorker. 

Walser certainly seems to be the writer for you: the supreme artist of the person in the process of erasing himself from the books. Sum the totals. What does it all amount to? Pessoa, too, seems to be a kindred spirit (25 pages in). Like a corkscrew, turning inwards around the same point, through dry-as-dust material, though his darkness can be oppressive.  And you wonder to yourself: when will the wine flow, when will there be forgetfulness?

I somehow look forward to sleeping more than to meeting people. Not a good sign, I know, but the tedium is draining and there is little to say. The trick is to be able to go through with the motions without a second thought, so that no-one really sees you and you can then glide through, invisibly, like the man from the moon who was held in prison. 

Small one-liners, incidents, like the shining five pence piece you keep next to the bathroom mirror for good luck, to remind you of home. As long as it carries on shining, there's an opening.

"And then nothing happened", Plenty Coups says in that great book by Lear, Radical Hope. Nothing happens but you go on, until you can't. Waiting.Patience. This is where you need your religious hat. Really do. If you are in the possession of sound instincts, good health, firm habits...is this really down to your own volition or is your constitution determined elsewhere, by other means?

You think: maybe we have a store of memories that we think we can retrieve when required, at will, like a bucket that fetches cool, fresh water from a dark well. Be careful not to spill it now! But more than likely it seems as if it is chance or fate or something, something beyond our will that can draw us back. 

Days and Nights in IG8

Jack Robinson, if that's his name, is good: quirky, funny, slightly mad...a nobody who is everybody in a big city. The guy next to you on the tube reading Life and Fate, not the unshaven one with a funky scarf-the multi-coloured narrow scarf that only a thirty-something would wear. You know the type, sky-blue jumper, a few highlights in the hair, white shirt hanging out, a fake European, essentially.

Reminds you of Mr Palomar in a way. Look at the world one step removed. Of course, we've been doing that since the day we landed. But there's a tangible difference because here the person isn't quite at home at home whereas here, as in, here, the person, which would be me, doesn't even have the concept of home. The lives you could have lived flow on by; you see them in the dark reflection opposite you as the train enters the tunnel.

On the district: the grotty, easy-going third-world feel of decay. Rubbish on the floor, laughter, African women in their towering head gear, children slurping down their food, babies bouncing on mothers' laps, Albanians, Bengalis, Somalis...all aboard the asylum express.

~~~

A meeting with the new Vice-C today. Wants to tear everything up, bring us all up to speed. Heads are going to roll....most likely: my fat one. I can see it rolling down the steps now, kicked along by a few colleagues as it passes them, with half a silly, grinning smile still stretched across it.

You have no students, no research, no "institutional contribution", you have raised no funds for the uni., you have mocked and derided everyone in power, you have told a former VC that he was worse than the Nazis, and the one after him that he should be ashamed of himself (that too in front of 300 students). The first VC (then Dean)..you wound him well and good. In the end he wrote to you, exasperated: "you are a juvenile delinquent..your parents haven't brought you up properly, you have lost the right to call me by my first name"...blah, blah, blah).  The last Dean is someone you ridiculed on a daily basis (The current one you like, however).

What do you actually do, then?

I read, I think, you know, the old things. I try and listen, learn. Compile. Yes, I'm quite good at that. I've got all the material for a survey book. Nothing original, just a collection of a thousand one-liners, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I'm all spent here. The rag-and-bone shop of the heart empty, the terrible charity shop of your mind, full of clutter and jumbled up hand-me-downs. The homelessness in your bones, the doubt in your voice, the low-key intelligence, the high octave of stupidity,  the oriental drowsiness of your eyes, the sagging, droopy lower lip of a clown, the jangling nerves, the peasant fingers (I slipped that in for you, Roxana), the shuffling feet of failure, the thickly arching  Persian eyebrows, the central European anxieties, the Punjabi sluttishness, the ears of a Buddha- without the spirituality,  the swami's pessimism that manages to start every sentence with a 'No' and end it with a 'maybe,'  jeans worn out in the inner thigh region (don't ask), a soul that is out of style, the wonderful aimlessness of the Dougal, the toothpaste stains on your t-shirts, Ubo's Jewish nose, unique in the world,  the grand idleness of your Kashmiri ancestors, those frightfully frail wrists, little r's amazing ability to wind everyone up, her beautiful, beautiful pig-headedness...what a junk shop this is!

~~~

'The Last Place on Earth...the pull of these shops is the ghost that barely adheres, the bygone associations and value-even if very little-attached to these objects by their previous owners: the heirloom kept on a shelf, the dress worn twice and never again, the substance of thought in the pauses when the writer rested the quill on its rest before inking another sentence.'
---W12.

postscript

The age of the book has come to an end. What appears as a sign of life and vigour is in fact the fantastical paroxysm of a condemned body aware of its own imminent demise.

Blogging will have contributed to it in its own way. Whether technology is a manifestation or the cause of the problem is a moot point. Certainly the pace of life coupled with the sheer availability of images, entertainments and information makes it less likely that it will survive- except in the rarefied circles of the useless and the futile.The classic, ...what has endured through the grime of industrialization, the bombs, the changing parade of fashion..if there is no sense of immortality or, more prosaically, of 'lastingness', if there is no north north of the future, no wholeness but only the serving up of what is palatable in suitably repackaged sizes, then what?

If books are the anchors of the world then do we lose the world?

I think there will be a sigh of relief in some places, the awful pressure of 'inwardness' and reflectiveness relieved, the move away from the infinite grave weight balanced against the world. Or, more accurately, against life. All that will come undone and the scales will wildly tip the other way before clattering  to the floor. We'll feel the stars again and breathe in the open, think while walking. The cloisters of the mind, its doors flung open. The crab-like monastic mind exposed to bright sunlight as life reclaims us. It will rain inside...

For some time now it seems as if we've attempting to grow in lightness, to cast off inherited metaphysical longings, the burden of "meaning", the drive to always having to mean what we say, the finding of  our place in the order of things. Speed and lightness, away from the pull of the earth and its rhythms, its seasons, its inertia and its slow and patient establishment of equilibrium.

MOOCS.

The way of the future, or so we're told. A colleague is teaching a whole course without any texts. They will, however, have to watch videos at home. Am I alone in thinking this is weird, unprecedented? Or is this just the beginning and we haven't adjusted yet? My objection: the text and the university: seven hundred years. The counter-argument: technology has moved on, things have changed, the students don't want all that old, staid dry-as-dust approach. 'Liven up yourself,' Marley used to sing. Why this conservatism, why this affinity-you, of all people!-with an institution? Freedom, freedom lies in a different direction. But since when has liberty been a free-for-all? More to the point, to invoke academic freedom is bizarre because behind the changes are lurking the twins: power and money.

Behind it all is, I think, the attempt to break up any sources of resistance. And in an age of late capitalism and frictionless flows of capital, information, that means the death of slowness (Rebecca Solnit). Which is why the book must go. Because it helps us find time.

lateness

The first day, and already I'm a wreck. Disaster looms just 35 minutes away. I don't think I can face them any more.

"Why are you here?"

Me to them. Or them to me.

Woefully under-prepared. I guess I shall try and float through it, imagine they're not really there. Somehow you can't accept that summer is over. The great creaking machine cranks into motion, first gear (whilst I'm still in reverse!). You hope for some sort of reprieve, for an Indian summer, a late flaring of the sun, a second chance. From a distance or a window someone will see me gesticulating, miming fine words and they might, for a second, be fooled into thinking: "ah, a  true academic". And perhaps a guileless student or two may be deceived for a while as well. From a distance or in  a mirror how do we appear, how will we be judged?

The inner workings of the man or woman unknown. Today. And since the first day. There are no inner workings. A sign, a rule. Follow it. What is red? An apple, a heart?

I come from a long and illustrious line of...

The tent is up, the white canvas flapping in the morning, keeping a bit of the night in its voluptuous bosom. There is dew on my shoes, bewilderment in my sagging heart. I'll stumble in, fumble for words, let my papers fly to the floor like so many dead soldiers, I'll hobble, scuff my lines, blinking into the light.

Drum roll, if you please...

Send in the clown.

~~~

No Nature, no cosmos...and God isn't feeling too well either! Instead: 'brokenness', the fragmentary, stilled moments, like Vermeer's, that persist, in memory at least.

We are one (I got that line from The Lion King! Tribal mentality!)
I am one
I am
I
Er...

What certainty there is buckles with time, springs open and falls to the floor. Don't make a story out of it, or romanticize it. There is no "pure description", for sure, no Zen: "it is". Too late in the day for that.

'Bewilderment' creates too much distance in the heart. It sounds too mystical by half. Muddled, befuddlemt, begunked, begecked.What kind of spell is this? I can't wait for the dry Autumn leaves to rustle in.

Describe for me, then, your inner thoughts and feelings.

But there are none. I died a long time ago-I think it was the 1970's, before Thatcher arrived-and this is being written by a ghost. I was never here. Not really. And as we speak, even he is slinking off stage. [Exit Ghost]. Don't ask me what you know is true.

The Keepers of the Image

With so much information flying about out there it's hard to know where the gaze might rest, or what memory might cling on to.There is an accumulation of books, none of which you can remember beyond the barest outline, the shelves of your heart and mind crowded, jostling for space with a real life.

The dark days, the ice-rain slanting down at an angle, and still they held on, with their texts and vellum, books whose first letter contained a whole story, a word and an image, a picture book. The determination to preserve this thinnest of reminders of other times: the past, civilisation, warmer climes, a life of concentration and stillness.

There were the lonely fortified monasteries , like little arks floating and keeping the adventure of consciousness afloat. The brave souls, the monks and bishops who carried the soul and spirit of man, unbroken, unabated, undiminished over the howling flood of the Dark Ages.

Images of stars, and Arabic commentaries on 'the divine Aristotle', the Sanskrit of the heart, words with their meaning all but snuffed out, a kind of low blue flame to be protected in glass. To name the world, imagine a reader a thousand years from now who will eke out another interpretation just by the sheer dazzling fact that she lived in another time, remote and alien from theirs. To carry the word with you is a religious act and is driven by the fear of loss, but also by hope and charity.

~~~

'I bear witness...'. A well-known Muslim line. But it is a witness to our own lives that we want, need. To bear: a burden, to suffer, the weight of responsibility that only man takes up...Or doesn't. Again, this striving for 'lightness', forgetfulness, for the disengaged moment, discontinuous from all that has happened. The gap, shored up by ruins and fragments, but the dizzying vertigo, the radically, shocking new, the desire for a clean break, the man of the forest, he too is with the monk on his journey.

~~~ 

'The tension between the everyday and the Sabbath-his awareness of himself as he is, and his longing for what what eh wants to become.'

'The world will be the world again.'

'The shabby origins of our love, can lead to this act and this death.'

'Those who are keepers of images are people selected to hold precious objects safe...They have taken a vow to do so because of the singular nature of the image itself. The image is a representation of a secret self, the being one longs to be, the Sabbath-self, the infant.

'More than ever, now: to believe there is something that is simply not the norm.'

---Fanny Howe (via anton, sort of)

~~~

'The inner walls were adorned with paintings executed by a Byzantine artist on the orders of the Kaʿba’s pagan masters; they portrayed scenes from the life of Abraham and certain idolatrous customs. There was also a representation of the Holy Virgin and Child. Protecting this icon of the Holy Virgin with both hands, the Prophet ordered that all the others be effaced.'

---Titus Burckhardt

In our times

In, but not of, our times.

There follows a mass of unorganized fragments.
---Simone Weil.

Time is not a straight line, it's more a labyrinth
---T. Transtromer.

What's there changes by the hour.
---T. Transtromer.

I can no longer speak of 'I'. I look into the mirror and see someone who is not myself; even worse, more abstractly: who is 'not-I'.  Your bewilderment doesn't find any form. That's the heart [of it]. Your face is far too large in reflection, almost South Korean in proportions. And the puritanism of the north isn't too far behind in your thoughts either.

What blank pages the side of your hand rest on! Like a thirsty man at sea you have too many books. Somewhere, in one of them, there is a line that will save you, a clearing in the forest. Terminus: the god of boundaries.

~~~

The crow's intelligence extends to tipping over trash cans, finding remnants of the night by day, its nostrils highly attuned to picking out a scrap of nourishment, the age-old instincts, learning, that ensure survival against the odds. The wide-eyed dice rolling in. Crow carries death within its breast, like an old hat, an ancient memory, lives alone amongst thousands. Maybe there is no distinction between its way of dying and its way of living.

The students, on the other hand, are not interested in being individuals. They are screaming in unison in the courtyard, like Americans at a sports event or crazed Iranians in their black tents denouncing Israel. 'Death to...' Nationalism, tribalism or communism are all variants of the dark time when crows and ravens were one.

~~~

There is no 'I' in islam; but there is a lower case 'i'.
islam is a way. Islam is a statue.

In Egypt the generals are  "restoring" democracy by killing women and children. The brothers are defending the faith by burning down the churches and terrorizing their fellow human beings. Who does your heart go out to? My heart does not go out much nowadays, and rarely to those it does not know.

the unreal

Against my better instincts I watched SpringBreakers. I can't imagine many worse films and yet, for all that, I watched it to the end. Not just because I wanted to kill time, but what, then?

Why do you think you have an inexhaustible reservoir of good instincts that can be drawn on at will? Goodness is a habit, a way of looking (which means, of course, not looking as well), being surrounded by reminders, refuges, good people. There are stories you don't want to hear, that will do you no good if told to you. One of the biggest cons of late capitalism is the notion that greater availability (of books, music, images, information, etc.,) necessarily leads to greater character, knowledge, depth.The 'globalized' soul that must be everywhere, see everything, taste everything.

One can be drawn to the darkness. That much is obvious. What is less obvious, perhaps, is the appeal of seeming harmless drivel, the background hum that drains meaning away or that produces boredom, a grey indifference. The soul wants to be lost in daydreams, diversions, fantasy; it wants to meander, escape, doodle, take delight in its 'unknowingness', the way in which we slow down, stop, and gawk at the site of an accident, the mangled bodies in a crash, a natural disaster. The paradox being, of course, that this can sometimes serve creativity. What would be without the magnetic draw to what lies beyond us?

But there are ways, then there are ways. It goes without saying that in the absence of organized religion and practices the training of the defences is left, by and large, to the individual and to families. But what they're up against, first of all, is the pervasive idea that to talk of 'defences' in the first place is a sign of repression, dismissed as a throwback to 19th century prudery. This is not, you suspect, a legacy of the 1960s (weren't the '20s similar?). There are probably at once more specific factors and more general factors at play: the dynamics of capitalism and its determination to transgress all boundaries, to erase the very notion of frontiers, barriers; the general human desire, from day one, to resist definition, to break the mould winter has cast).

Spring Break, a rite of passage, a way of "finding oneself" by losing oneself: disrupting the humdrum and predictable patterns of one's life and cracking them open. We're drawn to Utopias where personal responsibility floats away ("lighten up, dude"). Is Utopia always an island, a pleasure island? [In a post capitalism world, a communistic fiction, there is no more labour or toil, just fishing and reading books..at last, art for art's sake]. Is there always a juvenile element to them: to distance oneself from the all-seeing eye of one's parents, God and society. No-one will judge you because you will just be a gleaming body under the sun, a body whose desires know no conflict, restraint, or guilt. I want it and I want it now, glide over here...

The film itself is full of the most awful cliches. I can't believe it wasn't made by a ten-year old.. Much is made of the slow-mo of heaving bosoms-no doubt a cynical attempt to bolster sales-but the real core of it, the nihilism, is portrayed in so fake a manner that you wonder just how superficial and nauseating can Hollywood get.

I could have-and should have-been reading Transtromer in that time. Cool, dispassionate, eagle-eyed...more an image-maker than a wordsmith (at least in English translation). Which makes you think: we suffer not just from an excess of images but, also, from a lack of the right type. There is a kind of nihilism involved in the proliferation of images, in the attempt to erase our judgement by saturating our senses, inch by inch. It is, paradoxically, akin to the nihilism of the iconoclasts. There are deserts in California, there are deserts in Saudi: a false austerity and a false infinity, both unbalanced, signs of disequilibrium, the cave in the heart and the virtual world equally unreal.

Today, more so than at any other time, we need ikons, or what Simone Weil once called 'bridges'.

the suspension of time

There is no time for Schubert now. No time for the 'whole thing'. Give me a snatch of it, a quick fix, the gist, the essence, a shard, the express note, a few choice fragments, a thirty-second trailer, crystalline pure, without any ads, give me the last word, the shining truth free from the dross; cut me some slack, fasten the knot, sock it to me. What's the dope, Schube? Cut to the chase, lay it on me, and keep it real. No more diversions, just the one thing necessary. Cut it out, paste the relevant bits. Let me scroll down, fast-forward to the relevant part. My blood-shot eyes can't fix on anything, like a junkie's, and I haven't got enough silence in me to hear the music. Bring it to the surface, on the double, lay your cards there for all to see (more jokers?). Like a hooker, you've gotta catch our attention. There's a lot of people out there, putting it about.

I'll name that tune in one. The first note that folds all the hidden ones into it. As if all of human history were contained in our origins, in the Fall, waiting to be played out. The poetry, the prose, the poetry of everyday life. Don't talk about eternity or the cosmos. Just a few bright steps under grey skies is all we ask for.

~~~

You walk across the field, like a sleepwalker, past the library with its upper windows dark, austere and sombre, keeping the books cool and relaxed in the shade. You walk in the grass which hasn't been cut because of the austerity drive. It's thickness is uneven; up to your toes and sometimes your ankle, lush and soft and heavy. On the cement outer perimeter new students filter by aimlessly, being initiated in to the useless and pointless. I try to see myself through their eyes. Books held in peasant hands, lost in thought, dreamy eyes, time on his hands, a cheap grey and black bag slung over his shoulder, a receding hairline, drying skin, no greatness in his features or gestures , the walk of a condemned man or, less dramatically, of someone who isn't free, who doesn't carry any music with him. Very few graces or inner refinement, a dull understanding of life-despite, or because of the books. He laughs too much to be clever and eats too much to be wise. In his stride he doesn't exhibit the confidence of a believer. Riddled with light and shadow.

~~~

I stop in my tracks to note a very large, giant mushroom growing in the middle of the field. What is the inner life of a mushroom? A mushroom is all exterior: light brown, smooth and woody, breathing quietly in the grass, ticking with the pulse of  watch's second hand. There are no others around. But why here? Totally unscripted, unalysable, a form of resistance to our understanding. Calvino's Marcovaldo springs to mind.

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where
             one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million
             people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen
            from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop
           windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind  police -
locked doors  a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played
in some room over there and that for someone the notes are
more real than anything else.

II

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this
             very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two
continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land-
             mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
            chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The
Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

III

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the
             ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly
            feel that the plants have thoughts.

IV

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without
           Sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that
           the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow
           from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three
           hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us  com-
           pany part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers –
          trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the
          darkness.

V

the end of the mir

I've always wondered about Communism. Of course you don't understand anything about it, but you've always suspected it's really at heart a version of some rabid, fanatical, puritanical sect of iconoclasts. "Bolshevism is Islam without God" (Iqbal). There is no room for human beings, in all their variety, complexity, ambivalent, provisional commitments and loves. There is, it follows, no role for literature. And none for art either, unless it serves the Cause, the Party. Thinking by slogans; painting by numbers.

The deep, almost mystical, tribal or primitive need for belonging, for a 'we'.  To let oneself go, to passionately dive in, merge with, the other. "Oceanic feelings". Being with. Is that another name for love?

Nihilism: those who lack 'being' hanker for it in another entity. 

Well, call me old fashioned but I still believe in the individual, even if it's the bourgeois individual, that wonderful bulwark against the fanaticism of theorists and fundamentalists of all stripes and persuasion. You know Dougal, maybe I will read Fountainhead after all.

Nationalists, communists, and the religious will all tell you: this is it, the final truth, now be a good chap and follow the line. The party line, devotion to king and country, or unswerving allegiance to the band of brothers. England, my England. America, right or wrong. All boils down to the same thing: unquestioning loyalty, unwavering commitment, the legitimation of violence, torture, a bureaucratic mindset that delights in its own pettiness and easy formulas, a simplifying gaze that drains the world of colour, reducing everything to fundamental categories: black and white, us and them, the saved and the damned (Primo Levi), the pious and the infidels.

The crude utilitarianism involved here. Anyone can be sacrificed for the "greater good". The ends justify the means. If you want to make an omelette...

But what was it actually like living under a Communist regime? Roxana, you're probably too young to remember.


'Chernyshevsky's (a leading Populist) harsh, flat, dull, humourless, grating sentences...his self-discipline, his dedication to the material and moral good of his fellow men, the grey, self-effacing personality, the tireless, passionate, devoted, minute industry, the hatred of style, of any concession to the graces, the unquestionable sincerity, utter self-forgetfulness, brutal directness, indifference to the claims of private life, innocence,...created the image that later became the prototype of the revolutionary hero and martyr. ...

His personality and outlook set their seal upon two generations of Russian revolutionaries; not least upon Lenin who admired him devotedly.'  
---Berlin, Russian Thinkers.

The shallow reader

Well, the Arab Spring is over. Roll on winter. Didn't see it happening to be honest. What caught my attention was the story of a ten-year old Coptic girl, the only child of two Egyptian parents, killed by fundamentalists. So, you will say: what about democracy? You can't support a military coup! This reveals, really, the shallowness of your commitment to liberal values. Why is it that the death of scores of people in a bomb attack, a drone attack or at the hands of a military/police offensive don't move you but the death of a single individual does?

The thing is, putting on my practical hat for a mo., if these buggers ever come to power here I'll be the kind of person that they string up without a second thought!

Reading Berlin's electrifying prose, his essays on Herzen and Turgenev, one cannot but help think of the parallels between Russia and Pakistan. Something deeply conservative about both; in both a vast hinterland of ignorance, superstition and peasant old-fashioned backwardness, crudity, and cruelty. A thin crust of western-educated elites, drunk on themselves, full of half-baked and incompletely assimilated ideas, passionately engaged in drawing-room discussions over the 'state of the country'. An elite that is weak, childish, paper thin, ready to fold, crumple, both fascinated and horrified by the strength of conviction of the radicals.  An old feudal class surviving, barely, on old-world inequalities and repression, a growing religious fanaticism, a swarm of conspiracy theories in the cities, the growing realization that one has missed the boat, that the world has moved on; misogyny, antisemitism, rituals no-one understands any more, garbled words, duplicity, a village mentality that persists in all strata of society; a deep confusion over identity,  religious hypocrisy, inner boredom masquerading as 'fine feelings' and detachment.

No, this country is heading for trouble; either civil war or a fundo. take over. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon...

~~~

Formally creative~Islamic Republic~Independence Day~Reluctant Fundamentalist~internal logic.

Brusque~Burlesque~Berlin~Berlinesque~Belinsky~Berlinsky~Banksy~Bellini~Bella~Kova~

Bell~Timing~Toll~Taxes~Death.

FMF~Mutilation~Minister~Administer~Body Politic~ Politeness.

~~~

You're in a Russian State of Mind. 

The anchors of the world have blown away. A house without mirrors is a form of madness. The world is variably endlessly boring and endlessly fascinating.

~~~

We sat in the room with high ceilings, like an old country English house. The indoor swimming pool visible from one side of the room. The old men, worldly-wise, sunk deep in their armchairs and melancholy. The ship is sunk. That's the consensus. An old servant with henna in her hair brings in cool drinks on a tray. Some wave her off. Matters of the state. A young man, wearing a striped sports t-shirt gives the impression that he knows things the others don't. But his haircut and pencil-thin moustache make him look ridiculous. The exchange-rate is discussed, the shambolic political set-up is gone over with a fine comb; the old military hands in their stiffly pressed shalwar kameezes  nod approval in a drunken stupor: "What we need is a Khomeni to wipe the slate clean". There is silence. There is a whiff of sympathy for Shiaism in his comment so he adjusts: "What we need is an Attarturk to teach these barbarians once and for all. Only when blood flows can we have peace."  Where's the whiskey, for heaven's sake. I'm immediately recognized as an outsider, doubly so because I'm an "intellectual".

"The Taleban have got us by the balls."There is general agreement. The thing is, I don't read the newspapers or watch the news-haven't done so for three years now. I have absolutely no clue or interest in what's going on in this country. But these old fools do not seem to know a great deal more than me. All they know is gleaned from gossip and whisperings in the corridors of power.

On mention of the Taleban little r, who has been hopping about and jumping on the plush sofas-much to my amusement-turns around and says: "I voted for the Taleban". No-one hears her. Like me she is invisible. Doubly so: a child and a girl. Leave the politics to the big boys, hon.

~~~

It hasn't escaped your attention that your reading habits are those of a shallow reader. Books have become like your clients. Your lack of seriousness might make good material for a novel, but not for a life. At 11 last night, unable to sleep, you watched a bit of the Warhol film. More superficiality. The Night and the City which, despite its wonderful late-night scenes of a run-down 1950s London, was a mediocre film. Style over substance. The petty man who dreams big but is undone by a quirk of fate. Everyone's a crook out there, everyone's tainted. 

Then you picked up the Capote book which, so far, is slightly nauseating in its 'lightness' and  shallowness. Maybe that's the effect that is being sought. The lack of gravity makes my head spin. More superfluous people. Another book started, only to be abandoned. This is crazy. It is 1.40 now and still I'm restless. You know the next day is going to be ruined because of this wasting of time right now, but still you resist. You switch the computer on. Maybe in another dark part of the world there's an image that will bring some light or, rather, take the light away. There must be a way to live without light?

a world without foundations

No, haven't read this but the cover is fantastic. Enough to draw you in. Reminds me, for some odd reason, of The Leopard. Now, all I need to do is find some poor sucker on their way back from the States to the land of the pure.

~~~

"There is no question here," she said, her back turned away from him.

"I didn't think so," he replied.

"Then why did you come," she said teasingly.

"For that I have no answer," he replied, defeatedly.

~~~

Keep oneself in a dream state, so as to think clearer. Straight out of the world. This is Tuesday, where am I? Other people's mid-life crises involve affairs with pretty young things; mine is expressed in a longing for vinyl. Ho hum.

The internet connection is slow. The net is slowing us down, dragging us down to our first impulsive desires so that we can never escape them. There are no second chances, no real choices, once you've moved. Endgame, really. All there rolled in the first.

We've moved deep inland. The sunshine is centuries old. Speak, if you speak, in starts and stutters, like the First Man. You have no answers, no questions. A notepad with plain white pages and some black coffee might help. Hands and face become darker with time. Kashmir a distant forgotten song now. Your voice falters, untrue, a betrayal of sorts. If I had the mind of a monk I could focus on a button an find some meaning there.

Ina  dream, you think your whole life has been a dream [Oh, for pete's sake, cut out the pretentious crap! I hear Herr Dougal say. But then what would be left?].

Then why don't I simply say with Moore "I know that I am in England?" Saying this is meaningful in particular circumstances, which I can imagine.
---Wittgenstein.

My room has become my reality, a sort of warm prison cell (with WiFi). Capote writes like a dream (yes, another book started!). Ford M Ford, on the other hand, is determined to throw spanners and knives into the mechanism. So far: sparks but little comprehension. You wonder if there's a state of mind where the veils lift.

Go in. Go in further.

The tug is freckled with rust. What's it doing here so far inland?
It's a heavy extinguished lamp in the cold.

Find the words in the silence of your life. A gold ring lost in the house, under the sideboards, collecting dust? Stolen? Stuffed in a pocket by a quick hand in front of an unsuspecting eye?

As time passes everything becomes more inexpressible, less familiar. Dry, flat stones to mark the hours, days, the years. Each turning takes you further into bewilderment. Where is this? Is this what November looks like? The strangeness of the country. The traditions and rituals, the habits and dramas, words and gaits, and the trudging slowness of the heart: all of that makes your mind quicker, hungry for north, another North, unheard, unspoken. Each man and woman is another direction, each carries within them a faint recollection of it. The Dark Eden whose memory is love.Whose land is this, we ask (ed)? The shadows are deep, the slum within you. Every place is a frontier, no field has its centre. There is no centre to hold. Hopper was right after all: the frontier is drawn inwards now. They were once just words to you, now they're clearly outlined, worked on by gravity.

'It gets dark, difficult to see.
In there on the moss lie stones.
One of the stones is precious.
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.'

~~~

An old Protestant dreams of a time when there is no need for bridges. There is a pure act, a moment that transcends everything else, a stark revelation through the skies that unifies, shocks. The day without bridges is the day he dies, drowning.

(lines from Transtromer)

Let England Shake

I asked little r if she had spilled the ice-cream by mistake or if she did it deliberately.

"Deliberately," she said, with amazing confidence.

"Then you are more foolish than I thought." This at once made me sound pompous, like some upright character from a Hardy novel. I wasn't even wearing black.

She just looked at me with venom in her narrowing eyes and a pointing, accusing finger:

"From this day onwards you are my number one enemy."

...

By morning she had reconsidered after I made it a point of telling everyone about what was either world-class acting or a ridiculous bit of high drama. She turned her head, laughed, and said,  "my ten thousandth enemy."

~~~

Derek Raymond writes as if there is barely any hope left for the human race. His trick is-and what a trick it is- to take one simple and brilliant notion and let it ride. There isn't "precision" or "accuracy" but instead an emotional truth, a feeling or tone that hangs about. Everything else seems tangential, or drawn to that centre, touching it obliquely, like secondary waves, undercurrents.

What bleak skill! 

Here, in How the Dead Live, there is the all-pervading sense that something in the world is lost, that England is well and truly gone. The dull ordinary roughness at the edges of a life comes to the fore. Yes, but it's also that what was gold, or might have been gold, sinks to oblivion.

There was a time when I thought it was important to be religious, that all else was really hanging onto its coat tails. Now? Now I think one has to look carefully, eke out some narrow width of meaning for oneself. One may or may not find a sinew of truth.

There is something old, perhaps as inconsequential as manners, a turn of phrase, a certain demeanour, that just survives the deluge. Old hands, mostly useless, have seen their time. The dark winds of winter giving us our final form. A time remembered, a summer evening, when hand and heart were one, the inner wrist glowing with certainty.

England will shake, the heart will fall. Nothing new seems to happen. But this, too, is something you only dimly understand, otherwise it might offer you a compensating low wisdom. There is no peace here and no acceptance of the facts, only a grey haze swirling around the tree tops and a dark light growing in my mind.

The History Boys

Perhaps only a historian could tell us about  death and futility, and the small fissures in a personality that would, in time, open up and unfold into an irreversible disaster. A historian, as drawn up by a novelist, that is.

You continue to be underwhelmed by Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. This should have been finished in one session but, I don't know, it just comes across as lightweight. Does the name 'Julian' have anything to do with that? [he asks, putting on his east European hat]. I suppose all teenagers pretend to be intelligent (that itself is a legacy, I guess, of parents telling them when they were kids how special they were). But when it continues deep in to middle age, which is what happens in academia, then you're fucked. If you're still reading Nietzsche when you're forty...

Loved Levels of Life and his essays: dazzling and quick..a different kind of 'lightness'. I think I rapidly reached the limit when I glanced-yeah, how superficial is that?!-at his book on death and God. There can sometimes seem something slightly childish about not taking religion seriously. Not necessarily, of course, but by those who haven't truly got over it and who want, in the back of their minds, to convince others about what, to them, is the glaringly obvious truth: there is no problem regarding the divine because nothing is sacred. Or, the sacred-to the extent that it exists-is to be found elsewhere.

Still, let's see. Flaubert's Parrot to go. Perhaps you should finally take a stab at Donna Tartt's Secret History?

The History Boys, the film: highly enjoyable. And the lovely Hardy poem. Displacement, again. Forgotten under a foreign sun, a death that doesn't become a legend but is just another number to be noted in the scrapbook of history; the life that could have been, the treasure trove of words not said, the quirks of character passed down in a child he didn't see.

But, again, boys. Rites of passage, the relation with high culture, books, literature, tradition, the greats...is all of that only reserved for young men? To be fed up with books, see through academia and its charlatans, be disgruntled about how knowledge saps the vitality of life. This sounds all too familiar. Someone once asked: is all this 'existential angst' a particularly male phenomenon? (As if to say, in other words, that domesticity is the irreversible destiny of one half of the population?)

The inability to grow up. This is bigger than Japan. But in what little you've read it appears to be a largely, if not exclusively, a man-thing. A man-cub thing.

~~~

'But underlying attitudes revealed in this case lift the lid, yet again, on the depth of misogyny in this society – all the women-hating, woman-blaming, woman-fearing instincts that can reach right to the top.'
---Polly Toynbee, The Guardian.

But if that is true in good ol' Blighty, then what of the land of the pure where acid is till thrown on the faces of  'dishonourable' women? And what of India, with its centuries of backwardness? This is something, you feel, is beyond the reaches of history or cultural specifics. There is some deep-seated misogyny that rears up no matter what. What will some future archaeologist of the human heart dig up, what madness will they find?

~~~

'Every day hordes of London commuters have passed unknowingly over the bodies of thousands of their predecessors, buried a few metres under the roaring traffic and rumbling trains at Liverpool Street'
---The Guardian.

On open day you actually saw this site, just round the side of Liverpool Street station. And the fantastic Masonic lodge. 

~~~

Everything was thought or said by the Greeks. In a brief interlude from the darkness, a few sprightly minds thought that questioning was a good thing and we've never looked back since. But at times it can also seem as if what one person in the distant past has started is inescapable. Is there any escaping from our history of violence, from our identity? And an escape into what, precisely?

Home is where...

A great aunt, twice removed, as calm as a summer evening after the sun has set. She sits next to me, unruffled by what most people would call the tribulations of life; impassive, unperturbed, as if from another era, her back to the world, a rounded, bovine acceptance of her fate. She has an old way of talking...

She asks me: " How is your work?"

"Theek hai"

"And your father, how is he now?"

"Theek hai"

"And your mother, is she well?"

"Doing well-thank God." I add the last bit taking a leaf out of her own book and with such self-confidence that it doesn't appear that I'm taking the mickey; it's just a natural flourish.

"And after all these long years, your heart must be settled now, it must find things familiar now?"

"No, my heart is not settled," I say in all earnestness. There is no time for gaiety or flourishes now. This is the core. The day it is settled, it is not mine, I think to myself [slightly adjusting my Jewish hat].

She seems to be thrown off by this and even for a fraction of a second the barriers are down and she thinks I might be a human being after all. But the window is quickly closed, the two bridges are drawn and we are alone again. We must make do with what light we have.

"And your sister, I'm sure she is doing well?"

"Yes, she is fine."

~~~

My sister speaks like a cloud or a dream; she is profound when she doesn't know what she's saying and silly when she does; my daughter speaks like she's reading the Constitution. She has, to my great delight, learned the word 'scallywag'. "This will stand you in good stead, my son," I say to her, pretending to be the Lion King. Yes, there is a streak of madness in our family (hadn't you guessed by now?). Some generously mistake it for clownishness (but that's just my father's side!). My mother's..ah, the infinite sadness...

"Little r, you must go to America. They love people who speak quickly and incessantly." She's not impressed but says the word 'hand' like haarnd, a bit like the woman in Singing in the Rain, if you know what I mean.

~~~

We are strangers to ourselves, kid. I look in the mirror and I see someone who is not me. You too? I have left all of my hats in Woodford and the sun bears down on me like a god I don't believe in.

Not being a spiritual person, I run in the evenings. My clothes are unwashed and so I stink to high hell. As I run I have to make my way through tens of low-flying wasps or dragonflies, a few bats, and the crows. Crows will wait to the last minute before they fly off...

~~~

At four o-clock in the morning there is a great gust of wind, as if it was blown in from the sea; a gulp of grey rain smashes against the centre of the window (it feels as if it is only the centre). Dreams interrupted. Not much can be recalled at this late stage. One is faced with the dawning reality that you have to let things slip by...I walk up some wooden steps to a cabin in which some lights are on, 'basement yellow' light. My flight leaves in 30 minutes but I've come back, 'd forgotten something. The swami says she's kept two black and white pictures of me up on the wall. I hug her. I don't know when I'll be back...

~~~

I am walking up the incline, past the dodgy Chinese restaurant and mock Tudor houses on Chigwell Road. It is evening and I wonder if I'm really here or just walking in another one of my dreams. It certainly feels that way but how can we be sure of our sensations? I think of 'S'. I remember 'S'. This is 'S'? It corresponds to another dream I had Ludwig.

It is evening and as I turn the corner onto Snakes Lane I'm up at the highest point. The sky opens up into a wide expanse, the clouds are purple, charcoal grey. There are patches of blue and a few white clouds surviving, like puffs of memory, as if they'd lost track of time and strayed in from the afternoon. Crimson and lush pink clouds. The moment is so beautiful that your eyes instinctively narrow, squint. This ancient gesture, carried over from when we were nomads.

Who or what is real any more? I cannot look at what is real.

~~~

Why do only prostitutes wear yellow?

It is a curious fact but you very rarely see women in 'the east' where yellow.

The yellow star. Venice. 1530. First it was the Jews, then the prostitutes. Contagion, impurity. Strangers, exiles, the rootless, those without a home in the world must be marked out, separated. Qadosh.

~~~


The Courtauld, the glorious Courtauld. Less grand than the RA. You enter it through a side door. That in itself should tell you. There are no direct approaches any more. We see everything from the wrong angle, slightly displaced.  There are a few small domestic rooms in which the paintings are huddled together. Outside: a vast empty space...

~~~

The first ghetto but not the last. You cannot build outwards, only upwards, only by separating what lies inside. You are there, face to face with the beloved, but also with strangers, people who speak a different language, whose customs are different from yours. Huddled together in this makeshift city, this inner city. There are sixteen Chinese Jews, strangers amongst the strangers, the Mussalmaners of the Camps, unseen, already dead.

Why yellow? Is it because it is so sad?

The startling irony. The model for segregation was that of the German resident immigrants in Venice. Would some German remember this five hundred years later?

The women must wear plain clothes, look sad, so as not to be mistaken for the nobility. The whores must wear plain clothes, look sad...

The model. Yes, let's get to this even though we can't face it. The Red Man, kept in a reservation or was it the Boer War? Dig up the books. Who will speak of our captivity? Speak, memory.

~~~  

Forgiveness and belonging

Forgiveness...this seems like the one impossible thing. Is there forgiveness in this world? Can there be?

This is something that I've struggled with, something that I've found utterly alien. (You remember your Indian friend who asked you, exasperated: but how can you bury your dead...don't you know their souls must be brought to rest by fire?). Your bewilderment is probably at that level. I guess there will always be certain things in life that one finds odd, peculiar, not quite kosher and I suppose individuals vary in innate temperament and/or education as to the scope of their tolerance for the weird, sickening or disgusting (Montaigne comes to mind here). But no matter what, everyone's got their blind spots.

To set the record straight: there are lots of areas in which one can and should just let go. And one must always try and summon up the courage to forgive oneself as well. Even more difficult: one must sometimes put oneself in the position of asking for forgiveness. That is not the question, though.

Some will say that for forgiveness to be really meaningful we must look at extremes, human depravity itself-at both the individual and collective level. Only then, it is maintained, does forgiveness really make sense. But I simply can't stomach this idea. Why should rapists or paedophiles or war criminals be forgiven and by who? Certainly God can forgive whosoever He pleases, but why should the victims or their families forgive the barbarians at Auschwitz? Why should the Bangladeshi people forgive the Pakistani army or why should the Kashmiris forgive the Indian army fort heir atrocities? Is there something "high" or "noble" in doing so?

Because forgiveness ends the cycle of violence, because it brings "closure" to all concerned? Does it, does it really? Truth and reconciliation? We can forgive but we can never forget. This, to me, is like a statement in another language and I find it utterly incomprehensible.

Why should you ask forgiveness from others if you cannot forgive yourself?  But this seems to miss the point because we can and do all sorts of things. But are there certain types of things (crimes, sins) which are beyond the human capacity to forgive? Is that kind of forgiveness really an other-worldly concept? The idea that we can or should have unlimited kindness, an endless capacity to forgive and unbounded hospitality strikes me as being somewhat unreasonable.

~~~

Prompted by a recent comment I feel compelled to ask myself why I haven't read more Paki literature (especially now that one of your friend's books is being published by Harper Collins this Fall).

If truth be told, that kind of writing makes me throw up. Pretentious, self-conscious, money-grabbing crap. The type of rubbish that I might pick up at the airport if there was a choice between it and, say, a biography of the Spice Girls.  Kamila Shamsie, for example, writing about the air-heads in Karachi. Or Moshin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist (okay, okay, he did interview you once and he was a charming young man). This is just the pseudo-liberal bandwagon rolling in, of course. Gosh, it's at times like this I wish I was a half-jewish lesbian extremist-Salafi dwarf struggling in a "post-colonial" world, suffocated by the tedium of bourgeois capitalism. Try and fit in every box possible so that some frustrated middle-aged woman in Hertfordshire or Ohio can have orgasms about how good her life is instead, so that she can be at "one with the universe" and still have her latte at the same time. You know how I despise that term, 'post-colonialism', don't you?

~~~

You met two Bulgarians and it struck you just how much they hated their own country, their own past (was that the real legacy of Communism?). You thought to yourself at the time: how very sad. And it seemed to be matched by a kind of reverential affection for all things western. Well, no, that in itself would have been understandable, I guess. Instead, what you noticed-and maybe this was just your overly critical eye coming in to play- was that their love only extended as far as the superficial things, like the possibility of a glitzy lifestyle, big money  and fancy cars. The NHS and the National Gallery didn't stand a chance in comparison.

And what about your eagle-eye when it comes to your own distancing of yourself from Pakistan, Pakistanis, Muslims , Pakistani literature? Are you just a "brown sahib" or what one rather nasty commenter once called a member of the "comprador elite"?

It's not that you're constantly trying to escape being labeled or put in a box; it is, rather, that you don't care about such things (and probably never really have). It's probably the hardest thing to explain but if you're from London or New York you can't really have "pride" in your city. Being a New Yorker or a Londoner means, to me at least,  that you don't really belong and, more to the point, that you don't care about belonging or not belonging. All you can do is sit in a bus and look out at the grey skies, the people outside, and then return to your book.

Ur

The Guardian has an interesting feature: 'Books that changed me'. It's the kind of thing that is bound to draw a response because everyone nowadays wants to reveal something about themselves-in a blog, a tweet, a letter-Good God! Do those things still exist?-a comment, etc., etc. The Spanish Inquisition has been internalized.

A book that has had a radical influence on your life, or completely changed your view about some issue or the other. I suppose the ideal candidate here would be someone who hated Muslims or gay people or 'westerners' and then came to see them as, well, just as human beings, warts and all. What was the Pope reading, you wonder, when he made his recent statement about "not judging" the spirituality of gay people?

For me I don't think there has been any Ur-text, some fundamental book or experience or prism  through which I might see other books. Instead, it's been, er..books (plural), each with some sort of incremental effect (you suppose) in some unspecified direction. Arendt's The Human Condition helped you make some sense of the world; Peter Brown's Augustine was an entry into a different world. Apart from that the best books you've read have only been stumbled upon in recent years. but when you were eighteen, say, didn't you think the world of Siddhrtha and Knulp? When you were twenty five didn't you think a lot of the perennials (Schuon, Burckhardt, Lings?). And then later, Marquez's 100 Years, or Kadare's Broken April? Who knows, in five years time you may go off Salter's Light Years as well.

There's something terribly suspect about your infidelities, your lack of constancy. A deep character flaw that makes you think 'the first' is a radiant apparition of some kind of truth, some doorway into understanding,  only to be followed by a slow and dark realization that it is probably only a heavy shadow of it. Why does the first always give way to second spaces, perceived or imagined or hoped for?

It's all a gimmick, of course, all a diversion-a beautiful and sometimes incessant, necessary diversion-but, still,...

After reading a short story you sometimes feel short changed.

Didn't Carver say: once it's over, close the book and return to life? And there was this line from Gombrowicz's dairy (not read), something like: " Yes, Borges was immersed in literature. I, on the other hand, was immersed in life." The word, the act. Your old Jewish hat.

About a prehistoric painting
on a rock in the Sahara:
a dark swimming figure
in an old river which is young
---Transtromer.

Is there a first line, then, ask the Guardians. A first line that hooked you, drew you in, sunk you, opened you up, turned you around, displaced your gaze to a hitherto unregarded detail. A word that blossomed in the desert?

You half-remember, recall vaguely some plain words, a name perhaps. Your first words were always botched, faltering, said with no greatness of soul, but only a stutter...er..

And where are you from?

Originally?
 

Venice

Venice is the dream of winter; Venice is the perfume of the east drifting deep into the forest. Turner, sitting at home, dreams of a white landscape drained of all the faint and weak colours just a moment before he paints it. Turner's anti-intellectual love of white. The blank spaces in our hearts. He speaks kindly by pluralizing...

Venice, 1819. The web of colour, refracted, reflected, filling out the space. From now on in the western mind the sensation of colour, the last, collapsing note of music, is the door to perception. Fine colour must reflect our sense of values...The state of ecstasy...of a fine colourist is something on the borderline between dream and reality.

A man in his last year of life works to find the perfect blue. This man from Murano, who is forbidden to leave the island, dreams of Venice for a second and finds a bridge. The steps I walk in are the only time I've got; left my heart a long time ago.

~~~

Where am I when I think of you? He walks diagonally, bounded by trees and the library, old parchment a text between past and future. By the time he looks up he has arrived. In the time that has passed it is as if he has not walked at all, as if life itself were only two moments, a beginning and an end, a Yes and a No.

Rainwater has filled the flower beds and creates the perfect balance, like an equation. Sunken leaves lie darkly on its floor. Birds sense it is safe to return to the drying trees. He walks in a drowned world, a world glowing with bright reflections.

~~~

There is a sense of liberty, old England's old word for the forest, which is a 'freedom from'. To be free from the definitions laid out by church, mullah, a govt. official. To pin no colours to your flag, to be without title:

"Where are we, little r?"

"Nowhere" 

"And who lives here?"

"Nobody".

There is a lonely type of freedom of gazing under the stars, unsure of the directions, a soul that has worn itself thin by resisting much, by uttering 'No' whenever it could, like a teenager or an ascetic.

Is there another kind, that follows from 'being with'? A freedom that does not set up a "mine" and "thine", that is not foundational for rights and the law and property...a liberty that derives from, or co-exists with, a mutual gaze of recognition, a sense of obligation? And this is the realm of courtesy and custom, city and court. Who, today, will teach the heart to say "Yes"?

~~~

One can know a person by the way they approach a door
---a Buddhist? saying..via Bob.

The intellectual stops to examine the doorknob.

The mullah imagines houris on the other side.

The atheist looks at the wall.

The Christian imagines only he can walk through it.

The clown trips and stumbles through it.

The beggar sits on the floor by it.

The lover opens the letterbox.

The accountant weighs up the costs and benefits.

The poet puts his hand on the doorknob and takes the pulse of the house.

The Hindu discovers another god to revere.

The sensualist objects to its colour.

The ascetic regrets there is a door.

The old man remembers a door from his youth.

God says: Thank God for the door!

The addict craves other doors.

The racist paints the door a different colour

My father, ever the pragmatist, musters what strength he has, and opens it for me. 

(lines from K. Clark on Turner...and a line from Transtromer)