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.
'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.
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