Umbrellas

Jim Ede on HGB (via Peter Fuller)..."a continuing way of life..in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability which more and more we need to recognize if we are not to be swamped by all that is rapidly opening up before us."

Is there something between a pure 'functionality' and a pure aesthetic appreciation? Is this just another version of the ongoing tension-one that is, perhaps, more acute in the west-between materialism and spirituality, pragmatism and idealism or is it something more localized, something like the divorce between craftsmanship and art? 

'It's great to love by the spirit, to testify by day for eternity, only what's spiritual in people's minds. But sometimes I'm fed up with my spiritual existence. Instead of forever hovering above I'd like to feel a weight grow in me to end the infinity and to tie me to earth.'

'A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained and let herself get drenched.'

~~~

The portrait of this situation is Van Gogh. The sunflower, the chair and the boots that are the chance receptacle of all that homeless energy of the spirit which once had its lawful house with Giotto's angels-once a king of kingdoms, now a squatter in boots. Look at this bough of almond blossom, look at this chair-indeed, they get much more than their due of the spirit, almost bursting with its superfluity.

---Heller.

~~~

Roxana raises the fascinating question: is there anything necessary to such a disjunction? Isn't it true, after all, that the turn to the ordinary, the re-focusing of our attention on the world, has led to an appreciation of the simple, plain, ordinary life along with the everyday objects that make up a part of it? 

Or is there in reality a "second turning inwards" (Arendt) and, if so, how does that sit with the previous contention?  Are ordinary objects on the verge of turning into the banal, the fragmentary, when not charged with any greater significance?

If anything I think modern trends make it more difficult for us to invest too much meaning or see much beauty in ordinary objects:

1. Mass production. Producing beautiful objects on such a wide scale almost seems impossible. Is that why hand-crafted objects are considered luxury items for a niche market?

2. Technology: when we think of beautiful objects is there, lurking in the background, the mysterious presence of human hands? What happens when "hands" became a synonym for labour?

4. Speed: Is there now a greater emphasis on turnover, on producing rapidly new goods? If so, the very notion of durability sits uneasy with the profit motive and with other trends in modern thought.

5. "De-materialization" : in contrast to the earlier points, is it the case that over the last 30 years or so capital itself has become not only more fluid but more intangible? Does value reside in the immaterial? (the crisis of capitalism).

6. To what extent does craftsmanship depend on supporting institutions? Here one could perhaps include the guilds but, more generally, the ideas an practices embodied in Tradition and religion. 

7. Utilitarianism: questions of beauty or truth get reduced to: how useful is something? In response to that view art sets itself up as totally "useless" to prevent itself from being 'tainted' by commercial standards, the market and the view of philistines.  There is the realm of "pure" ideas and art for art's sake, "pure" research, contemplation, and then there is the realm of worldly affairs.

Whirling, whistling, johnsons

Anon...if you are a chef as you say you are, tell me the recipe for Eccles cakes. Go on, lay the secret on me cuz. (er..that's a line from The Jungle Book, in case you were wondering).

'In a couple of minutes, in the middle of a whirling square dance, the screen turned black, the cinematic summer ended, the snow went dark, there was nothing but my breath.'

'All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Saviour comes.'

'...the green and the grey plains pressed down flat, and all the grasses of Iowa whistling one note.'

---D. Johnson?

Time is whistling through us at an alarming rate. Synopsis: the synapses dimming, the matter being that the grey matter lacks being. Even from God's point of view things appear a mess. 

The judgement of the eye, imagination housed in his hands. 

'Right now what interests me is the calligraphy of a tree or a rooftop, leaf by leaf, ...tile by tile.' His parent's house, from memory, from time out of mind, and all the things he loved. The house, pieced together with time. Lost in blue, and yet not nothing. A trace, precisely, which marks an absence, like a cross in a school register. Mir(o), can you explain your not being here? 

Some things grow truer in the dark.

'Calligraphy: a single explosive brushstroke of black by some monk, a concentration of decades into four seconds of control' (E. de Waal).

Decades of control, exploded by four moments of seduction. A friend has six wives (three official, the others on the side) [aside: where does he get the time!?]. You, on the other hand...if you are even seen talking to a woman you will be ruined.

I shall write your name in Indian ink, brittle atoms falling apart. Page and heart blank for you. 

= Unequalled self
two individuals holding one another. The same, but different. Forever, or a short while.

'The capacity to strike out a new line'. To strike out an old line. I wanted to say something but it slips my mind. Age is feeling without words. When I read from a book the continuous line is interrupted.

This world without world, these desert years of wilderness. You wait for the rains, for Autumn to break the spell, to see blue-grey clouds in a puddle, light reflected off high windows in the city, trees and passing darkened faces in or on dark car windows, people holding up their trousers, to keep them dry, revealing stubbly legs, women with long black hair, loosening strands, jolting open wooden shutters with the palm of their hands, sensing the freedom to breath, children splashing one another in excitement, middle-aged men hunched over their steering wheels in the blocked traffic finally learning to dream. Parts of Lahore look like London when it rains.The rain in our lives, how it was missed.

after life

(photo, courtesy of Roxana, artist of a floating world)

Death is the same whether whined at or withstood (Larkin, or thereabouts).

'But poetry in its very essence has always been on the side of life. Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time, and it has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.'
---Milosz.

What is lost when we lose that 'second space'? What happens to us, collectively, when we fail to imagine a north, north of the future? 

Deep in life one is surrounded by life. And still one thinks of 'others'-other lives, the lives of others. Already this breaking away is carried within a life and for some it is accentuated, heavily outlined, a source of reflection. Our lives, a series of broken circles...each ripple moves outwards then in, has the same centre throughout.

There is a nihilistic spirit that would have us accept that we are only mud, only impermanent creatures, a flash event  in a universal process of manifestation and disappearance and that would convince us, if we had any sense, that we should associate ourselves with this grander, cosmic scheme that is indifferent to particular individual lives. Sit on top of a mountain and observe the passing show, delight in one's own objective spirit, one's sense of detachment.

The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.
---Iris M.

I suppose a part of us is always drawn to deathly abstractions, or attracted by the desire to submit ourselves to some great process or collective will or towering institution. More humbly, we may believe we are an insignificant speck in a vast open and empty universe or subscribe to a utilitarian view of sacrifice. Religion, too, has often been and often is just such a negation of the individual and of a full life, or at least a devaluation of a worldly life.  

But, to ask Hans Jonas's question again: is the loss of  the perspective of immortality any great loss? Is a life in which everything is consumed and that leaves nothing after it, really a truly human life? 
 

The saddest face she wore, the bluest star she knew. The autumn light that is on her face, of what I speak, light to light, both of us turned by the light. So is recorded in my memory, that I turned...

The light lasts on out of history or memory
in the face and turn of head
toward the endlessness of everyday
that is precisely eternity.

an offbeat
unexceptioned survey 
of the heart, remembering 
everything.

I have no defences, am an open road, hum a song forgetting the words. I know you by the slant of the light. Which is to say: from a certain angle you had become the light, italicized.

Post-title

If truth be told you have no love for any country, let alone for any religion. Can there be a love of place that is not tainted by hatreds? Is a place, a land, ultimately anything but the set of our relations with other people? Is it anything more than a crossroads where we exchange our words, our stories and our laughter?

A time for reflections, the reporter said, when he meant reflection. If I think about it, I feel I somehow have grown to love the mythical beast, London. When I concentrate I see more clearly and precisely it is east London that is the true object of my love.

(The Kenyan harping on about how his country was one, how the people were true patriots, generous, caring etc., etc. Brecht does the same: from the North Atlantic to...and if Obama wants to add flourish to a rallying call he'll say something like: from Ohio to Alabama, from Wisconsin to Idaho...that always works..Transtromer has it best, though: a flag blackened by the wind, bleached by too much sun, so that is everyone's)

Then with something that amounts to self-knowledge I find another dimension to my thoughts, another way of characterizing them. I have only loved a small part of the world, in a way that suits my limited capacities and lack of ambition.Woodford. Green and black, she holds the cards, so close to my heart.

Then it dawns on me that all this time my love has been drawn narrower, the band of its focus a golden arc that sweeps through this place, that falls like golden pollen. I know now after six years-or is it seven- that it is only an unremarkable street that holds my attention, a short corner of suburbia is at the centre of all my memories.

I take my top off, my breathing still heavy from the run. Sit down alone, to think with a steadier mind, without any haste toward some conclusion.

With my hands on my knees, God, I realize it is only a simple house, and nothing else. My mind has reached a kind of plateau, another road, a light simultaneous to dark windows, a formal equality of the subject's understanding with the known 'object'.

'The light in each room of the house is different
But the light of the whole house
Hangs suspended in eternal afternoon.'
---K. Irby.

Clear-eyed, sea-bright, your face burning, I see it too late, and it is a strange kind of seeing and knowing, like when your senses catch up after a delay with the body or when you realize you've been mumbling something to yourself. Like a Buddhist, you catch yourself.

This house, hidden in green shade, taking it all in; this house, a threshold of my self, that I enter to lose myself. Now a moment, now a movement inwards, my heart finds another shore, another distance. What I love now falls away from me and lives in me, and I forget the need to name my love.

the dark

Students like to sit in the dark and have their breakfast, their shoulders hunched over their cereals, quiet and reflective, as they eat in silence. You search out the darkest corner of the hall for yourself so that you can be like an animal, invisible and functional. Some distant light weakly shines on a polished table. A girl, all in black, is bent double over some textbook, trying desperately to remember something.

We sit, we sit in the dark most of the time, we human beings. Part of us likes to be unknown, like a black niqab over our souls, assuming any kind of revelation will be hidden. You think to yourself: where will they all go, where will all this be? Already some walk with enlarged hips, as if they've got four children; already some of the boys have grey or thinning hair and a stern, implacable middle-aged look on their faces. Time is washing over us...

At home the last dying light flares and catches the right angle so as to enter our rooms. The orange light is on my forearm, making the hairs on it look sticky or brittle. Little r is horrified by the deepening orange light. She tries to move me out of it. Then, seeing it is on the back of my hand places her hand over mine. But now it is on her, covering her small hand as she stands in the darkness, sidestepping it. I place my other hand tightly over hers, so as to keep it out. She repeats the action, as we build our tower against the light. "I'm running out of hands here, kid" I say to her.

Then it is gone, running over dusty tracks, glittering on some cobbled road, down from the high windows onto the floor now. Low, low. Across vacant plots with long grass, the way a startled hare might run with its diagonal dash to the open horizon; the hare blindly following a non-existent path that only God, our silent witness, sees. This light from the 1970's, since that's the only date you can give it, is millions of years old and this scene that is repeated before my very eyes is some old tattered rag-doll ritual. The orange light becomes sadder then shallower, like a puddle, then a thin line, a few dots in some bird's eye, a glint of possibility on the inner silver of some used throw-away wrapper, as it starts its terminal break up, losing all structure, any former coherence it once possessed, any ability to cling to an object, no matter what form. The atoms of orange make one last desperate attempt and take siege of my mind, entering my memory, reminding me of the trip from Wales to London on the motorway. But this, too, will slip away along with the light and earth and mind, heart and hand, will be dark once again....

~~~

Talking of dark ones...there are the silent visitors from Craiova and the Michigan area and Karachi, hares of another order, who also drift away like so many beautiful clouds...

scraps

The scraps of our lives...against who, if not ourselves?

but of carton crushed
into a gesture, say
yellow scaps of newsprints

coming into flower, old cigarette butts
held in their last agony

you were becoming visible..or else these worthless scraps
were fragments of a language that offered you
the prospect of change...

---Tim Liardet.

~~~

"What did he die of?" they will ask, when they should have said: what did he live on?

"How much money would you put on me?" he asked, shakily. "If you were an investor, you know". Not much to be honest, I replied candidly, too candidly. If you were a greyhound I'd say you were number 6, wearing a black and white striped coat, running on the outside, near the circumference, with long odds on his back. "Is there no way out, then?" Out from what?

How to make it back, back to the time when there were chances? And change.

You take a large plastic bag filled with copper coins and, bending forward, almost bowing, give it discretely to the tramp slumped up against a part of the London wall at Tower Bridge. He hurls it back my way, even though I'm in the dark by now, in a drunken fit of exasperation, as sweat and coins fly off in all directions, the coins hurtling towards me like arrows, some grubby, others shining, and with the remaining ones in the bag collapsing with a thud as they strike earth, the loose ones rolling and spinning beyond the cracks.

A medieval life of confinement, the mindlessness of the city, madness stretching like a howl into the dark Thames sky. He was completely and openly a mess. Meanwhile the rest of us go on trying to fool each other.

How does anyone end up where they are is a mystery to me. We can't imagine the shape of our fate, that's for sure.

(words by Dennis Johnson)

~~~

"King is looking for you and he's looking for a fight," says the informer. You think to yourself in a crazed moment, with your heart still in your mouth, that he isn't that big after all and you might stand a chance. But King has pedigree and you don't get to that status without having strong fists and a mean heart. "It's not you, but he  has to." Word has spread, circles form. A few blows to your chin and then there are no more words. You get away with it, and live to fight another day.

You sometimes wonder, not about King, but the informer, the kid with lesser glory who lives in the shadows, spreading the word, sounding fear into other people's ears, the stooge, the scraper, who knows no points, has no schemes, but drifts where he's told to. He rings the bell, announces deaths, perhaps he works in a morgue now, or a factory that's closed down. This tall, stooping boy, hunched over the clueless with his shuffling, unsure gait, his dull eyes and thick hands. 

Man will fall, the crowds will flow, dispersed like pigeons frightened by a gun shot. Some with brows beaming, others still grubby from the day, and nothing would have happened, nothing would have registered. The brown satchels will be thrown causally to the floor, a cool glass of milk drawn and innocence restored.

A book will be opened, a light will go on somewhere in the house, and the world will somehow have reconstituted itself. "And how was your day?"

Like any other. One for the scrapbook.

LGS-55

At LGS, one of the best girl's schools in town a course called 'comparative religion' has come into question after a television programme by an otherwise fairly moderate person stirred up trouble.

The principal has stuck to her guns, saying that the course is not 'religious instruction' but, rather, an attempt at presenting a history of religions. The Constitution (article 22) says that no student is required to receive religious instruction in a religion other than his/her own. That in itself is fairly understandable in a country that is riven with conflicts although why not go on and say one is not required to study historical stuff that doesn't relate to your own country's (or, further, that doesn't relate to your own ethnic group's)? Why should you be required to study anything written by men, say, if you are a woman? But, of course, in real terms it seems as if the minorities (and one should include shias here, I think) do not have the option of escaping the dominant paradigm.

In the LGS-55 case there are, you suspect, various sources of resentment at play: this is a fairly elitist institution and so the principal has been labeled a liberal or a stooge of the west; LGS provides a fairly good education to young girls (God forbid!). We all know that they should just be instructed in how to produce kids; it seems to be giving equal weight to different religions when, as we all know, there is only one true religion. Amen.

Reading the comments/responses to articles written about this lunacy it is heartening to see that-at least when it comes to those with access to the internet-there is a lot of support for the liberal, common sense point of view. Facebook and twitter are awash with derision guided at the conservatives. But you think its probably a battle that can't be won. The tide has definitely swung towards the Saudi/wahabi/deobandi side.

The Punjab govt. has now stepped in and banned  the course (even though this is a private school), citing the constitution. Follow this by the attack on a church in Peshawar, killing over 60 people, and you've got some idea of where this country is probably heading. And I don't want to be around to see how it pans out.

~~~

Actually, if I had a magic wand I'd wish that they would teach from Michael Wood's great book, 'Legacy', perhaps to 'O' level students or maybe to those even younger. That is where I first heard of Peter Brown (long-standing readers will know he's one of my favourites). It is also where I first came across the wonderful Li Po. Actually, I'd supplement it with music and art from those different civilisations and also from nomadic groups, starting with the first cave paintings.

Civilisation: an ideal, something that endures across time, place...the "long now". As opposed to, I guess, the spectacular now. 

the impermanence of impermanence (or a refutation of the refutation)

'To value something is to resist the transitoriness of time; it is to insist that the passage of time lacks normative authority. Things may come and things may go, but we decide what matters...Time does not have the last word; it does not tell us what is important.
---S. Scheffler.

 Nothing lasts forever; but I will always love you.

For a certain kind of god the whole of human history, the whole unrolling out of the universe, even, is nothing but a brief sparkling show in his eye. but we are not that god and nor do we aspire to such a perspective. perhaps animals have little sense of time passing-where each day is just another day and perhaps they accept that because they do not have any other vantage point. But you doubt if the distinction between them and us is so radical.

'All that is solid melts into air'

For the last few centuries anything that reeked of structure or permanence (the state, the church etc.) was seen as oppressive, something to be resisted (and rightly so, in many cases). But in our own times you feel that slowness, stability, continuity, are a form of resistance (if not co-opted by the Right).

We are told that we are modern day nomads; that the world is a desert and its shifting sands will reduce everything and everyone to the same elemental condition. Religion is appropriated...give no thought for the 'morrow, etc., etc. and isn't it fundamental to Islam that 'all will persih save the Face...'?

But such a reading flies in the face of history for if that was the case why such an incredible emphasis on architecture, on texts, on learning, on finding beauty in the world and, even more, in creating it? Why the emphasis on character-which is surely about a habit of good intentions and actions extended in a temporal context- if our lives are nothing but a flash in the pan?

Scheffler's question: what of love, friendship, and art if we are denied the sense of things carrying on? What kind of time horizons do we need to be truly human and is the current shortening of them-via the internet, say- diminishing those prospects?

We live in time, we live in that space we carve out of it and from it. The very notions of 'valuing' and caring and 'mattering' is itself inextricably bound to the passage of time and us finding a thread in it. The human chain. Seamus, you old fool, where are you? We are born into the world, not the wild. We live in the context, net, of dependencies..and make sense of our lives against this backdrop...that is the cross we bear.

'The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding'
---Iris M.

Our sense of responsibility, our obligations to others, would these be possible if everything were impermanent? Our games, our entertainments...would these too seem flat to us because their 'uselessness' would no longer be a 'relief' against too much meaning in the world. And erotic seduction would certainly lose its gloss as well. Would there, instead, only be the lust of the moment, the moment of lust?

a novel cure

What if reading is the poison, the symptom, the disease and not the cure? What if we have darkened our minds with books for too long?

I don't know why I detest De Botton so much. Maybe because, like Grayling,  he epitomizes the kind of  southern-England wanker, the type of person who harps on about Darwin and has a secret crush on Hirsi Ali. When he cites George Stuart Gordon saying: "English literature now has a triple function, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State" I feel like throwing up. Smug and pretentious to the core. Save our souls? Fuck off!

~~~

Pessoa is someone to read on your deathbed; Pessoa is the deathbed. Man, there's grim, and then there's grim.Yes, there are insights but you wonder: is it worth trudging through a book that is so devoid of artistic merit? It is, you suspect, similar to trawling through a manic depressive's private diary. My suspicion of Pessoa and what he's trying to do stems ultimately from the fact that he is not a saint. One can easily imagine someone from a religious order narrowing down the scope of the world, concentrating on repeating a few essential rituals, living a life within a tradition. The problem for modern men and women is that there isn't much left of anything that goes by the name of tradition. Also, mundane rituals do not necessarily open up onto some higher experience. To say that any old ritual will do..of that you're not sure. Rituals do not always provide order...sometimes they can be a symbol of inner disorder (a Nazi salute, for example).

~~~

It is a joy to return to Calvino or Primo Levi (The Periodic Table). There is something clear, assured, tranquil and unwavering in the writing, in the tone of the writing.

The Spectacular Now

Quick thinking, on the go.

'Instead of ordering knowledge in tidy rows, information society offers cascades of decontextualised signs more or less randomly connected to each other'.
---Thomas Eriksen.

This picks up from fff's reference to Hannah Arendt's essay on the cultural crisis (a theme that runs throughout the book, the tension between tradition and natality, between the past and the future). One is tempted to say that the past is necessary for the new to emerge, or else all we have is a succession of 'events,' fragmentary experiences. Can we even say that we have experiences (Agamben)?

The modern world, or late capitalism, wants to divest us of  these anchors, the weight of the world, and the weight of the word. Instead: temporary contracts, fleeting contacts, glimpses of reality, side conversations overheard, a whirling montage of impressions. The hegemonic domination of fragments. The uncertainty associated with any kind of 'investment ' or commitment (in friendships, love, work, education). Why bother when there are so many other options out there, and why bother sticking when technology and values are changing by the year.

An ever rising volume and intensity of desires. Insatiability. Which suggests replacement, obsolescence, a rising tide of uselessness and superfluity and triviality. What was once meaningful has crossed its sell-by date. 'Usefulness' is so, you know, 20th century!

'Pointillist time'. Each moment  can be the revelatory moment, the time when things hang together, when what is true makes its appearance. There is no more notion of 'progress' or even of the linearity of time (who reads 'linearly' Franzen asked).  The 'new', the revolutionary moment, is that is what was really desired? But a moment unconnected to the real passage of real time, unrelated to the narrative of your life, soon becomes a flash in the pan. No moment can be allowed to have enduring value, nothing can be grasped or possessed. There is an unending stream of goods to be fished out ('goods' range from high-end ones like cultural goods to the more techy communications goods that give impetus, forward momentum to the stream itself).

'They appear to the blase person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no object deserves preference over any other...All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money.'
--Simmel.

'There is no flow of time. What does exist is a discontinuous, non-causal succession of situations, or worlds or periods..each situtation is an entity in its own right that cannot be derived from proceeding ones.'
---Kraucer.

And what does this say about ourselves? Is there any underlying unity of the self or are we just a loose collection of time-slices of different selves? Me-today is not, really, me-yesterday, except by illusion.

Speed as the essential feature of modernity. Slowness is a form of resistance (Solnit). Switch off, turn off, tune out. If you want to remain sane, that's how it's going to be.

'Every perception of the world is reduced to to an expression of the monad itself...the libido vivendi, which satisfies itself with the solitary pleasure of the screen, does away with love by forbidding sight of the other face-invisible and real...We live in a relation through what we see to what we don't see.'
---Jean Luc Marion.

A few lines:

 'He moved through the fields like a sleepwalker, lost in thought, waving his cane high in the air, following his star, which he would lose amid the sunflowers, only to find it again at the edge of the field—on his greasy black frock coat.'
---Danilo Kis (via Lea, sort of).

 'I can't help it, but it seems like art for Eskimos.'
---G. Breitner on Van Gogh.

Van Gogh could distinguish between 17 shades of yellow, the way an Eskimo can distinguish between the different types of snow. For others, snow is only general all over.

In the break you rush down for a double-shot espresso. I.R. sees you and says..."you seem barely awake...barely". Yes, true, but I'm still alert to what's important. Possibly. Another night passed without a proper sleep. A few hours maybe.

As if by magic, K-bless her-has bought me a chocolate pastry which is bound to clog things up given its richness, but on balance it is probably just what I needed at this moment. Who knows what they need any more?

Kis does sound very lyrical, poetic. I'm not sure if I can take much more lyricism.

Life, life flows. Everything flows,  the years blowing through you- as if you were a hollow man- at an alarming velocity. Your face, changed beyond recognition, as you try to cling on to a few lines. Your reflection, your recollections, dark on a windowpane, as you look out onto a landscape, your faithful lead pencil in one hand, a deeper green than the forest, the lead point poised. Yes, this is how time passes. Listen. Your words are grey.

Sand, dust, the great equilibriating forces of civilisation, the democratic process at its most elemental, bringing king and slave to within a breath of one another. In this universal flux, I wonder what part of me I share with Roxana, anton, lea, fff...

~~~

On the mud jogging track there's a patch that has grass woven into it. It reminds you of some farm road. On other parts of the run the air reminds you of school lunches. On the far side, as snatches of light rain descend on you and the air is cooler, you are reminded of Saturday mornings or training for the Colts back in the old country. A white gull-like bird floats inelegantly down and you think of Southend. You run in circles and each part of the circumference opens out on to some distant and very particular memory. A moment comes when you forget your breathing, forget the track, stray thoughts are kept at bay, to one side, and any recriminations appear child-like, illusory, not central to the story. A heart free of bitterness (Camus?). A moment comes when all you care about is pace..the darkening sky, the slanting rain, the cold on the tree tops, the crows swirling around a still point, the hidden moon, Dizzy Gillespie's music, your father returning from work as you look out for him through black windows, as you have always done, the brilliances of the stars poised, the things I would find/lose/find as I race against myself....    

N-W

But this is still your country? And the snow-wind blew over my face and the ice gripped my heart. Do we still want to talk of countries, religions, languages...and I walked quietly, alone in the snow, my thoughts lost... The years held together in a silver frame within you, a web of reflections, a thin mirror-like resistance to time's bronze rust. And earth and home carried on without us...

There is a picture of you somewhere-each person has their own-of a young person, knee-high in the snow, adrift, suddenly looking up for an instant in a bright blue and white scarf, and those smiling eyes glinting to keep the sun out makes you look slightly Oriental.

The road back seems distant now, the voices fainter, like traces of grey in the snow. You remember the open days, days that would re-shine and re-shadow.  You dream for an hour, sprawled on your chair, your hair disheveled, your stubble thicker than usual. "Are you drunk?", she asks. No, just reading Nescio. You dream for a quarter of an hour, hoping to find the key and think of a name that reminds you of the sunshine.

there is just sunshine on the sidewalks.

Winter is the only kind of certainty you know. Fall, fall through time...

Which way will my soul drift now? Eastward-facing heart discovers empty conversations, like returned bottles in the morning. The harshness of the light makes me forget the directions, as you long for that dark Arctic structure of the world you know, you know. Again, backwards and far North...

you won't know how to get there by direction
not even the Sun's.

the bright in the dark, this black sun.

The old way back. All is concentrated in a simple gesture of your hand.

There are no roads here, no sidewalks, no footprints except your own. There are no roads. It messes up your mind, this world without anchors. That is the road you will take or find.

He takes it North again
He takes in North again

he takes it N and W.

(words by Kenneth Irby)

a day for the statisticians

The match, by late-afternoon, was heading for the inevitable draw. Everybody could see it. And there was something terrible about the fact that everyone knew how things would play out, read the script .

The shadows on the field lengthened and then deepened their hold on the players, making all sorts of acute angles and jagged shapes beyond the playing surface. But they seemed to be moving at an unnecessarily slow pace, like the slow drawing of the curtains after the final act. 

It started with the fielders themselves. The man at third-man was sunk deep into the still and quiet shade, so deep that he almost merged with the shadows, his mind blank and tired. The other shadows were crouching, some were stretching from cones or towers to great elongated spike-like shapes. towards cow-corner they were motionless. And all this was like a second, mysterious life, a foreign dream. 

The bowler ran in, mindless, like a puppet in his last show, or an exhausted horse on his way back home. The drawn-out call of the muezzin could be just faintly heard but it made you think of other things. Your mind starts to wander and you picture people in their homes making tea, washing themselves, arguing, the whole sweet world beyond the boundaries and the drying, cracking stadium. The vast, inscrutable world that continues without you.

Inside, the dull security of familiarity. The false camaraderie that will slip away and be forgotten by the time you wake up to a hearty breakfast. The crowd is filtering out now, a few people glance back as they leave, half in love, but mostly it is a steady stream of devotees who shuffle their feet, adjust their clothes, and start talking idly to one another.  For the few that remain at their seats there is the pleasure of thoughtless immobility. There is a brief interlude, a moment of rare enthusiasm and merriment as a small plastic pink bag blows across the pitch, across the path of the batsman, disrupting his immense powers of concentration. If he is out the next ball the statisticians will make a note of it but nothing will be said about the chance interruption. Such is life. His zen-like stillness eliminates all superfluous feelings. He does not think of his child, his wife's affair, his lack of money. His warrior-mind is solid, focused, on the one necessary thought: how to see out the day.

The small bright world of the pitch is now losing its shine, as the darkness descends and covers it. The dazzling artificiality that is a world into itself sinks into triviality. It is a world of data, statisticians, and last rites. For once the balance between luck and order has tipped far too far in one direction and this makes the proceedings unreal. The final over. What is required? Block it out. Safety at all costs. There will be other days. He carries this thought with him like a talisman. 

~~~

What is cricket?

A game.

But no, what is cricket?

Life. A game.

Watching Cook all day long reminded me of the way cricket used to be, the way in which it used to be played, the old ways and the old style. There he was, in the zone, carving out a mental space for himself, like a monk who's forgotten the world; pure concentration on the 'one thing needful'. Awful and fascinating at the same time: the single-mindedness of a killer. The creation of an immense world in that small space, impenetrable like a diamond. The stolen singles, the dabs to on-side, the utter devotion to blocking out risk, to finding one's tempo and one's style and then sticking to it come what may. The calm stillness of someone who's playing within himself, who's become a master because he knows his limits.

Comparisons are unfair. Each player is unique, brings something to the game. A shot is played. The end result is the same but the way in which it is achieved can be vastly different. Only the result will be recorded, not the flair or panache of a player. Think back to Viv Richards, without a blemish, apart from his friendship with I.T. Botham and his arrogance; the expansiveness of his play; so much so that you felt as if everyone was involved in the game, brought within the circle of his mind, whereas with Cook you feel as if everyone is slowly being poisoned to death. Then think of that drowsy, lazy genius of Inzamam who played it late, as if he had all the time in the world. At the time of delivery he raises that dull eye, looks up with that grumpy, slightly tortured expression on his face, as if he's just been unceremoniously woken up and is seeing for the first time what's before him, realising that he's reallyhere: a moment of awareness. In that huge, slow body of his there's a spark somewhere, like a distant star in a creaking universe that explodes at just the right moment, firing his imagination: is it instinct or learned? He sleepwalks through the innings, showing flashes of intermittent brilliance.

At the end of watching Cook's innings you return to life, grateful that there are mundane things to do in the world, like boil a cup of  tea.

lost futures

There is a place where all that fell by the way-side is retrieved. It is like the vanishing point where the lines converge. Our lost futures, the dead branches of the tree, all the glimmers of possibility seen in the glint of an eye pan out as they should have. But, no, perhaps not all things and not all people. Some will remain sunk, lost forever, and the world will be brighter.

You run and think of your body as a cage close to your breath. Buckle down and let the world disappear.

The crowd in the terraces are thinning. A Swedish club is playing (Malmo?) and that match is petering out into a stale meaninglessness as the players go through the motions, the way they often do in friendlies or when defeat is inevitable. The night sky is cold and brittle. You dare not take your hands out of your deep pockets. A group of eight punk kids approach you, looking for trouble, some excitement. You just happened to be there. They attack us. A middle-aged man tells them to clear-off. Not out of any great sympathy for us it appears, but really because deep down he doesn't like this disturbance to his enjoyment. If he'd been at home watching this match he probably would have said something similar to his wife as she brought in the tea. But, nevertheless, it was our moment, a door out of the stream of events that were hurtling towards us with a kind of rigorous inescapability. A stranger, good fortune, and the blood racing through our veins.

I ran. We ran for our lives. Under a huge gate (which, on reflection, seemed like the entry gate to a factory), down the dark roads and up to the station, panting like wild dogs. Jump on the first train that-as would luck would have it-was just pulling in to the station. We collapsed on the plush seats. Someone laughs nervously but mostly we are just silent. Thin lines. Who knows how anything will turn out, who will escape and who will not. The randomness of it. The cold pointed stars tick over, indifferent.

~~~

At a workshop you run into a very strange character. I don't know why, but crackpots always feel they can talk to me. I was just about to put a large slice of shahi tukra on my plate when this person introduces himself with an American twang and a visiting card. "Do you have a card?"

No, I don't believe in them. [A bit extreme, but it always catches people off guard]

It transpires that he's a 'web entrepreneur' and is into online education (the latest fad). I say to him-and he is really only a kid: Son, you've just come up to the wrong person. I stand opposed to everything you believe in.This make sit sound confrontational but it was said in a light tone, mockingly.

The kid tells me: "Everything is a game. Everything is a brand. Religion is a brand. I am a brand."

Are you serious?, I ask him.

"Well, the way I see it...." and he steps in with his all-too familiar care salesman pitch. 

But there's something to be said about the physicality of the book, the idea of being in a specific place when one is at university. This was as wooden a defence as it sounds. Not that you didn't believe it, it's just that you couldn't find the right words or tone to sound real and convincing. And you just can't preach, you thought to yourself. This gut is the future. He'll make his money and move on, no doubt. He won't even give it a second thought. And when he's losing his hair and gaining pounds he won't even remember this conversation. Every conversation is interchangeable with the next.

"Yeah," he says, the all-Californian confidence oozing out of him, his wrists flicking any uncertainty off in a cool but sudden click. In contrast, your old-world silliness makes you sound childish, clumsy, and unsure of yourself. Can you say anything without mentioning  a book, without citing anyone?

"Yeah, university is good, like, for partying and stuff."

I can't win. You want to take your food and run. This is one of those totally insignificant comedies God has arranged to kill some time.

Er..have you read Bauman's Liquid Modernity, I ask. A bit of one up-manship, of course. He takes out his mobile and pretends to type in the name. Half-way through, though, he's lost interest. "Bow who?"

wise blood

You've never been a great follower of Shirley Williams' politics but  she's always struck you as someone who is deeply intelligent and thoughtful. Not in a dazzling, showy or profound way. I think it's the voice, more than anything, far removed from the whining of a certain class of intellectual. Clare Short had this to say about her: Her pure persistence and intelligence and reasonableness. You like that: reasonableness rather than dry, abstract reason, as if to say: knowledge cannot simply be about generalizations or theoretical constructs, a quality of the mind. Acknowledgement-of one's own condition and frailties but also, and pre-eminently, of other people. The point becomes a circle; the square a cube. If knowledge is grey then understanding is full of colours and warmth.

Is it fair to judge someone's intelligence purely on what you perceive to be their personality? The opposite view seems to dominate, namely: there is a "pure" kind of intelligence abstracted or independent from a person's personality. You can have, for instance, an intelligent Nazi. Or: the Gaugin problem: fantastically talented and intelligent in some aspects but lacking in responsibility. Or Celan, who anton says was awful to his wife (nee to verify that), or Nash who apparently would stand on his wife and humiliate her in front of other people. What kind of intelligence is there without kindness? 

Your own experience: you know lots of very clever people, some of whom have completed their Ph.Ds in three years from Stanford, for example. Written books, discovered formulas, and all that. But when it comes down to thinking about society, other human beings, they're very harsh and puritanical in their views. Accountants, engineers, and maulvis can be very intelligent in a limited sense of the term and yet remain, as the Americans say, major league assholes.

M.D. Foot: shabbiness without, moral clarity within. Again, I don't know why I think of another politician but there is something about being deeply committed to ideals, something to the notion that one can live out one's ideas. And yet that isn't quite true because we'd like to think that those ideals should be meritworthy in themselves. A suicide bomber may also have some courage, may also exhibit deep commitment but...

Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch, Denise Levertov. 

I think S.W. once said of Bernard, her husband, that he was terribly clever-at the same time hinting that he was not, perhaps, that smart at being a good husband. Should that count? Is it too unrealistic to hold up the ideal of what Schuon called 'integral intelligence'?

'To the question of knowing whether it is better to have intelligence or a good character, we reply: a good character. Why? Because, when this question is asked, one is never thinking of integral intelligence, which essentially implies self-knowledge; conversely, a good character always implies an element of intelligence, 
obviously on condition that the virtue be real and not compromised by an underlying pride, as is the case in the “zeal of bitterness.” Good character is open to the truth exactly as intelligence faithful to its substance opens onto virtue; we could also say that moral perfection coincides with faith, and thus could not be a social perfectionism devoid of spiritual content.'

This, I think, dispenses with Susan Wolf's objections to 'moral saints'. 

What the modern world is in accordance with more than anything else is the idea of a one-sided intelligence, a narrowness of perspective that goes by the name of 'specialization'. One knows in great detail a tiny corner of one's 'field' but it as if there are whole vast unexplored continents out there that one simply ignores or is ignorant of. Intelligence, then, is reduced to the operations of the mind. We are, after all, just information-processing creatures or thinking reeds.

'Wholeness', to us, reeks of totalitarianism. We have our fragments and can always shuffle them about. Is that what our notion of freedom ultimately amounts to: the ability to resist any greater narratives that stand over and above the moments of our lives?

What to make of Berlin or Levinas, then? Supremely intelligent, of course, but lacking in much sympathy-as far as you can make out-for the Palestinians. Is intelligence to be judged, then, along political lines? Can a person with right-wing views be called intelligent? I'm not sure they can since the shrill voice of the Right stands opposed to sympathetic understanding: the denigration of other people is a form of stupidity or, if you like, an inability to "see clearly" (where "seeing" is not just a matter of the mind or of the heart)

'Knowledge of a value concept is something to be understood, as it were, in depth, and not in terms of switching on to some impersonal network...Why not consider red as an ideal end-point, as a concept infinitely to be learned, as an individual object of love.'

---Iris M.

Is there something feminine, catholic, about the view of intelligence you're espousing? The ability to connect, to include, to not dominate, to think with others, for others? Ultimately, is intelligence about realizing that there are various forms of intelligence and that-this is the hardest thing of all-that intelligence isn't everything in life? 

Knowledge, certainty, invulnerability. Man stands at the centre of the world, isolated from it, detached, quietly contemplative, and ageless. Is there another form of intelligence though, one at the circumference, so to speak? One that knows the seasons, that is aware of what presses against the boundaries, dispenses with hard edges and is cognizant of the need for 'brokenness', even? To think in time and not outside of it, to think in the nick of time, timely thoughts.

the green and the black

'It was not till the winter was well advanced that he began at all to explore the region in which he lived. Soon after his arrival in the grey street he had taken one or two vague walks, hardly noticing where he went or what he saw; but for all the summer he had shut himself in his room, beholding nothing but the form and colour of words. [. . .]

Now, however, when the new year was beginning its dull days, he began to diverge occasionally to right and left, sometimes eating his luncheon in odd corners, in the bulging parlours of eighteenth-century taverns, that still fronted the surging sea of modern streets, or perhaps in brand new “publics” on the broken borders of the brickfields, smelling of the clay from which they had swollen. He found waste by-places behind railway embankments where he could smoke his pipe sheltered from the wind; sometimes there was a wooden fence by an old pear-orchard where he sat and gazed at the wet desolation of the market-gardens, munching a few currant biscuits by way of dinner. As he went farther afield a sense of immensity slowly grew upon him; it was as if, from the little island of his room, that one friendly place, he pushed out into the grey unknown, into a city that for him was uninhabited as the desert.'
---from Hill of Dreams. 

~~~

You woke up and stretched like a cat, your bones snapping into place (or maybe out of). The cheap plastic clock is losing time each day and now stands 25 minutes behind the rest of the world. You're still tired and wonder if you actually slept during the night. You lean on a wall for a minute, your head drowsy, your body sluggish like a sack of coals you have to reluctantly drag with you. You scrape around for some soap...if you hold the bits of yellow, amber and blue together you can get a makeshift bar-enough for today, at least.  

You collapse back on your bed. By nine o'clock you've already written the day off. Read a short story by Nescio ("Freeloader"). Good stuff. Reminds you of Herman Hesse. Everything you seem to be reading nowadays is about someone trapped in a life of incredible boredom (Pessoa, etc.). Doze in and out of sleep, the words floating in and out of your mind. You wonder about all the years that have passed, they seem as unreal as the night that has just passed. You will dream through the day, flitting away any chance of escape...

You think to yourself: the perfect book would be a book of lists, of words randomly placed together. Something like: green tea and black tobacco.

~~~

Why is it that light always reminds you of a certain place, another time. The second picture, for example. That has to be Saturday morning, a January morning in London. 

You stumble across a wonderful site (thelondonpost) which leads you to 'derelict London'. The notion of tramping appeals to you, especially around the Eastend. Your own little square of rambling was: the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross, the National Gallery, down to the South Bank...more books, in the shade under the bridge, kept on unfolded wooden tables. A brilliant Sunday morning, the white light high, clear and piercing. The sky is flawless, your heart still. Tea in one hand as your index finger from the other runs over the broken spines of the randomly assorted books. Mind and eye one at last. The names run through the shelves of your mind, filtered out, instantly recognizable or not. In real life your instincts are much weaker, your judgement is much poorer.  

~~~

The derelict, shambolic past, threadbare and barely recognizable. The lives we led and the lives we didn't. On the South Bank, at low tide, there is small patch of dark or feckled sand and on it you will see three children play and a middle-aged man with a metal detector, searching wildly for his moment, like a blind man. 

You raced home to see little r. She was already half asleep, dozing in and out of her dreams. I opened the door quietly but then walked out so that she wouldn't wake. It doesn't matter. But she ran out of the door towards me. "There you are!".

But I thought you were sleeping.

She wagged her finger at me. "I saw you!"

But how could you? It was dark and I was around the corner, out of view.

"I saw you in my dream and you were here."
    

the strange disappearance of...

Talking Heads - Once In A Lifetime by hushhush112

 The strange disappearance of our inner lives:

On the one hand we are encouraged to believe that nothing is permanent, all is variable...the situation is fluid, as the 'anchors' say. Sovereign becoming, eternal flux, you never step into the same river twice. There is only the surface, guest appearances, so don't start on 'foundations', don't get all 'meta'. What is the world but an image on the mind's screen, what is music but a swirling conglomeration of binary fragments. There is no human nature, no order of the soul, or if there is then it's going to slide. The soul a mere epiphenomenon of the body, happiness but a shade that can be detected like a litmus test. Lock yourself up in a room or hide in a stove. In the beginning was radical doubt: I'm a brain in vat so how can I know your mind if I can't even know my own?

There is no fixed identity-which just happens to be very convenient for capitalism: the constantly moving happiness machine must never slow down, must gulp down new products as quickly as it churns out new anxieties. As the kid says in Willy Wonka: "I want it, I want it now": I want, therefore I am. There is only "now", only raw sensation, a momentary pure experience and then it's gone.

If you want to understand behaviour then look at the external signs. What is it to follow a rule? Or, as the economists might say (revealed preference): you understand behaviour by looking at behaviour. The ghost in the machine. Compute, execute. The degrees of freedom reduced to a single point of choice (Iris M). The 'I' is an inconvenience that is, thankfully, rapidly dissolving with a bit of a fizz.

On the other hand, the world is unreal, fake, a disaster. I am at the centre of the world, I am the centre of the world. Gnostic leanings. The great attempt to uncover the authentic self, free oneself from all the dross: inherited positions, state and religious fabrications, the tyranny of society. Break free from the mirrors to see oneself in a clear and distinct light. This is not my life you see, only the external trappings, only the dim shadow of all that is true. This is not me, I give you my word...I could have been someone better..."I coulda been somebody".

My life has been divided into the one true equation and all the workings in the margins, and rough-work. But the latter stand in no relation to the former.

And so it is, we veer from nothing to everything, a kind of extremism that includes unlikely bedfellows, puritans and hedonists.

~~~

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me.

---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

This is a harsh doctrine- and even somewhat inhuman. What befalls the innocent? What of human suffering (Job)? But you do feel there's a half-truth in there somewhere. Not for everyone, of course. 

'&'

Deception

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

This is a kind of response to anon's comments. This is not about trying to convince anyone about anything-this blog has never been about that.

The first thing to say is: how does one respond? Obviously, people have their own life experiences and draw from them their own inferences. Even if you read the same books, watch the same films, listen to the same music you come at them from your own angle. I suppose there's always a desire that other people see things from your own point of view. But, then, how to respect difference, how to enjoy a genuine conversation, how to learn from alternative viewpoints?

Two dangers: too much "purity"; too much deception. Of course the world is full of fake people and fake things; it reeks of artificiality and triviality. Hardly anyone is what they seem to be or who they say they are. And that, I have to say, is a good thing! I'm bored to death of people who use phrases like 'the real me' or 'the inner me'. And to say that language always misses the mark, that the map is not the true place etc., etc. also isn't something I'm very sympathetic to.

To say that this is what we are, warts and all, is not to negate the importance of moving to clarity, both moral or intellectual. But it does mean a strong dose of scpeticism towards the Talibs and commies and the Utopian dreamers with their projects of discovering our "true nature" and/or imposing some version of the first state on us. The (gnostic) narrative invariably runs thus: once we were untarnished, close to reality/the truth/God/nature. Now we stand alone, as strangers to one another and to ourselves.  The world, this old hag, is full of deceit and intrigue. We can never really know anything in the world (we see through a glass darkly, or with the spectacles that we make with human hands).

What is red?

This deep scepticism towards the world and towards language is not something that sits easy with my jewish/muslim sensibilities. When the Prophet says "the whole world is a mosque" then you immediately think that the notion of 'prayer' must be expanded. In another sense, though, it's not really about religion (or, more accurately, you don't care whether it's formally called religious or not). And it's this: how can one be ungrateful for the incredible gift of being in the world? That is why, ultimately, you think that hedonists and fundamentalists, the druggies and the puritans are in the same boat: both groups have a profound distrust -which sometimes verges on hatred-of the world.

You have seen Fontana at Hayward, Goya at the Prado, Rembrandt in Amsterdam, Pissaro in Paris, Poussin at the Wallace Collection, Turner at Tate Britain, Constable's sketches at the V & A, Rothko at Tate Modern. You've had countless cinnamon rolls, fantastic cheeses, great coffee, sat under trees and read books, made friends wherever you've gone, had your own room at work. And family...

I don't know if it's just that I'm naive. There is evil in the world, I know. It is hard to be trustful of other people or the world if one has been touched by it and so  I do not speak for them (or anyone, actually). But there is also incredible beauty and tenderness, laughter and joy. There is the life of the mind, the life of the body. These are often full of deception-but not always so. There is a kind of crass kind of materialism and a headlong rush to acquiring more and more useless trinkets and baubles. But underlying that is really a spirit that wants recognition, peace, excitement. Is that, then, really just a problem of the seeking the wrong means?

There are different kinds of materialism. The one that you're inclined to is brilliantly drawn out in the book, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Still to read Primo Levi's related work. But there were also the lines from Gopnik's wonderful introduction to Molly Hughes ( a delightful book C gave to me):

'And yet, as Molly grasped and illuminated, within the precise terms of the realist memoir, these small shared pleasures were, and remain, no less moving or beautiful or real for being so precarious. Remembered pleasure is moving because it becomes a metaphor for family life, and loss. A life whose search for meaning lies not in a faith in the past, or in the after-life, but in family, in children, is fragile as no other can be.'

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said, meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

---Denise. 

Ernst Reijseger // Mola Sylla - Sanctus from ...El Exilio...y...El Viaje... on Vimeo.

Historical time was obliterated; there was only inner duration. I longed to return home and my heart became a song.

Before I would wear a hat to keep the sun off my face. Now I often walk, darker, with the old sun disfiguring me, so my face is nothing like I remembered it. My father's French berets, my long scarves, the Dougal's floppy hat from Costa Rica. But now I walk in the dazzling light, stumbling, unsure of any directions. 

Fidelity

'Intimacy shared with another person is often the first real betrayal to any union, and the first plunge out of one's depth. In fiction, characters misjudge the depth of the fall. Others rush headlong into the stuff of life....We see what it is to be human: to yearn, to feel joy, to suffer and to see the world transformed.'
---Alison Macleod.

I can't think of many words more redundant, more outdated than loyalty or fidelity. They sound, to our ears, almost medieval. Loyal to who or what, we might ask, when the trends suggest we should be foot-loose, freely floating above the attachments to a specific place, a particular person, or a distinct profession. Attachments or 'rootedness' spell limitation, or even worse: a terrible narrowness and bigotry, a one-sidedness and blinkered view that verges on blindness. Why 'invest' one's time and money, why dedicate oneself to one thing only when it is, more than likely, destined to become obsolete, useless, old and worn out in a few years time?

~~~

I don't think I can take much more of Pessoa's moping around. Yes, there are great lines that you want to underline but, ultimately, you find it all too repetitive, suffocating and claustrophobic. The grey skies..blah, blah, blah. Life was a dream or my dreams were my life, etc., etc.

The desire to not do anything, to not be anything. After a while this grates on my nerves.

There are these lines which could, with a subtle change in gear, or a shifting down a step or two, apply equally to Pessoa as well:

'In walser's fictions one is always inside a head, but this universe-and this despair-is anything but solipsistic. it is charged with compassion: awareness of the creatureliness of life, of the fellowship of sadness....portraits of consciousness walking about in the world, ...radiant with despair'
---Susan Sontag
(No, I'm not sure of that any more)

Is this not the moment when one feels the weight of too much meaning, of being pinned down by too much history, too many stories..the cracking of language itself as it buckles under the pressure (Dada)? The job, then, of the supreme artist is how to tell the story of the end of stories, how to give shape to the desire for avoiding patterns? Subservience and subversiveness, idleness as way of resisting definition. Lurking below this is a suspicion that it's really just a specific malaise: the refusal or inability to grow up. On the other hand, one would like to believe that it's more fundamental, like st. Paul's 'be ye not conformed'. 

As with 'Jesus's Son'-to continue the religious theme-is it now only dropouts  the low-lives, the deranged and children who see through the falseness of the world? If one doesn't really belong or deep down believe in 'belongingness' then do you end up seeing everything in the world as deceptive? 

A photograph, a table of contents, a foreword (with summaries of certain themes, the web of linkages), a beginning, 17 poems, Prelude being the first. The poems across half a century, stretch back further into the past. Longer, then shorter. The final, crystalline form, found and held under glass. Memories, truncated. Nothing spectacular, just a background note. The early days, formations congealing at different moments of the sun's arc over us: winter dreams and summer freedom. Acknowledgements-how strange to find them here- an index of titles and first lines, the varying key of our lives, never settling to one stance. A biographical note, as if to introduce the writer when he's about to leave the room. The final words, written by hand, a formal equality between the words, in shape if not in spirit.

'On a side-track an empty railway carriage.
Still. Heraldic.
With the journey in its claws.'

'The blackened cathedral, heavy as a moon, causes ebb and flow'

'...there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love.'

'I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case.

The only thing I want to say
glitters out of reach
like the silver in a pawnbroker's.'

~~~

You would say there are shades of Menashe here, the same fluttering of tattered blue banners in a northern kingdom, a land we carry in our minds as a distant memory, careful not to lose the thread, or misplace a word. The same achieved stillness of an old man, the uncovering of peace like someone blowing dust off a dry stone to reveal an inscribed name. But what changes everything is the inflection of the voice, the uneasy sense we have that Menashe was in love with himself or his own words, that they were given, but not given freely. Whereas Transtromer opens his hands and releases the paper boats into the river. There was only one journey and its distance was measured by the shadow between us, the time in your eyes.

~~~

The unused road next to the canal grows dark even during the day. Birds return to the high trees that separates them. The road has become a country lane, eerily quiet, like a forgotten language, words we can speak, perhaps, but whose meaning evades us. Now and then a villager, a ghostly apparition from a bygone era, will drive his donkey cart over it, bringing fresh fruit or vegetables from the market, but for most of the day the road sits idly, dreaming away against the roar of the traffic from the bright new road on the other side of the canal.

The new road, with its gleaming lights, well demarcated lanes, is flashy like a new bride. The old road has become a long dark line, like a slashed word, an elongated sigh. It reminds me of Wales. On the other side of the road is a wall which has taken on the aura of a final frontier, since it is impossible to imagine what lies beyond it now.

The old road is becoming heavier with each passing day, as rain puddles collect in the potholes and the dark wind whistles through it. It has become a tunnel, a labyrinth, a line on a map with no chance now of being given a name. Broken shards of glass, golden spikes of straw, discarded newspapers and blue floating plastic bags are the only things to be seen there. Which is to say, it is only stray elements that make their way to the old road.

Autumn, then winter. The fog will roll in and the road will disappear completely from sight, become part of the forest it was a thousand years ago. There are limits, it thinks, to how much one can remember. Human beings, it finally understands, must always come and go. 

Girl-power

That is Rooh Gul Hirzad, an Afghani lawmaker and MP. She was shot at by the Taleban last week and sustained multiple injuries. Her nine-year old daughter was killed in the attack. What can you say: the world is a sick place-and yet there are still amazing people out there.

Against your better instincts you've started watching television again (after avoiding it for three years). You wanted to catch a glimpse of Arsne Wenger-a man who sticks to his principles and so this other stuff-Syria, mainly-kept on cropping up.

Then there was..er..ahem..well, if you haven't seen it yet don't waste your time. What a twerp! If that's liberation, if that's girl-power then what to make of the heroism of women like Gul or Malala?

~~~

David Frost: Not having seen That was the week that was, you have to say that his interviews were absolutely awful. They epitomized the weak, conservative, ineffectual and pro-establishment institution that goes by the name of aunty. The only thing you'll fondly remember about Frost was his voice-over on an old Cinderella  LP the Dougal once had.

~~~