'Human life is like a day in the existence of the world'
---K. Irby.

The spaces between out words, our thoughts, our lives, as new as spring, as old as winter.

"Why did you say it is 'aadi-raath' (halfway through the night) when it is not?" asked little r, as she started to cry and howl.

Is it worth crying when there is no reason to, I asked. But reason can only take you so far. Anyone who doesn't get that there are limits to reason, to what one can know, has led a particular life of confusion and illusion. 

So that you could sleep for thirty minutes more, so that you would be ready for Halloween. 

The witch's outfit is ready, along with broom and pointed hat. A few years back Halloween and Valentine's day were frowned upon. Now, along with 'English' breakfasts, they are readily accepted and looked forward to. When defeat is all around us, we must be thankful for small and partial victories.

Yesterday the mothers were half-heartedly strolling around the campus with their kids racing ahead of them,all bright-eyed, pestering any hapless person they came across: "Trick or treat?" I quickly walked behind the trees to avoid them.

I have my own cloak and mask ready. Or, I should say, I have another one of my masks close at hand.

A sketchbook of one's inner feelings...

---

_ a _

:

,

~~~

When, you wonder, will the stammering come to an end? To find a word, in the death of the heart.

there are some people who build bridges; some who destroy them. You, on the other hand, just want to walk across one on a Sunday morning.

Success/Failure

She would often say that she was "drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost". That affinity was at the centre of her work. The world divided, according to Fitzgerald, into "exterminators" and "exterminatees"
---Hermione Lee, on Penelope Fitzgerald.

I don't know why, but this immediately reminded me of Hannah Arendt. The drowned and the saved.

Ali wrote to me about how some man (in Afghanistan, perhaps), thinking that there was so much evil in the world, wouldn't let his kids out until they were sixteen. The strange thing is is that I didn't find that a totally obnoxious idea. In some sense, I really don't want to step out myself.

Anton pointed me to these words/thoughts:

It is discovery without ownership, it is trading a word for a vision, it is touching without possession.

(Who understands his own ambition, dare anchor in a sense of his survival, pocket a life and let the profits pass? None is quite arrogant or sure enough)

Not sure which words are Elizabeth Jennings's and which anton's. Doesn't matter, really.

To see ourselves and others in the right light-if only we could. I hold a picture of myself closely; it is hardly recognizable now and the edges have turned up, as if the picture wanted to curl up.  The grey in old photos glows in a way that it doesn't on our face now.  No matter how many poems you seek out, none will match this mystery.

'The sight at any moment
is as complete as the heart is.'
---K. Irby.

One does not want to say it, but I feel blessed with good fortune. 

Someone told you recently that God tests everyone only according to their capacities. I felt like saying: "please, I don't have any."

You meet an old friend, just catch a glimpse of his familiar face and turn to stop. He looks world-weary, his flesh withered by doubts and confusion or some inner turmoil. "I need to re-invent myself," he tells me, with a hint of desperation in his voice. This seems to be the mantra of my generation, or at least of a significant proportion of them. Not success or 'validation' but something altogether more startling: survival. 

The storm is on us, blowing through us. Not many can look up. Some think they can make preparations, arrangements. 

Today I tired on a brown Fedora. Yeah, I know, who am I kidding!  Two sizes too small. If I can save up enough I'll buy a bowler hat this summer. I used to be able to stand in the winters with a t-shirt as long as I had my coffee in one hand. But now the times have changed and my old head dimly understands this. Understand this.

blue notebooks

A place that is not home, but a temporary resting place; the feeling that things will be okay, maybe, that I'll pull through, somehow. In the small hours a strange 'fellowship of sadness'. How to get on with oneself? 

blue shadow

Ahmad Jamal - "Saturday Morning (Reprise)" by JazzVillage

There was a word in her heart, and it was as cold as ice.

Biber's Mystery:
The first notes of the music, like everything else, cleave to their origin. There is sigh, and it is like the first frost on a dark window.

You turn the heating on, gently, and the glaze on the glass thins out, evaporates, first at the edges, then at the centre which becomes bright, radiant, clear. The world is seen in a moment of clarity, as if one were coming out of a thicket, out of deep north. It isn't more beautiful, nor does it make more sense, but that moment of appearance brings about a certain delight.

Elephants have the saddest eyes imaginable, almost human-like. I look at a child's face and think of your warm eyes. Is a gaze transferable down the centuries?

Grapefruit pips remind me of tiny fragments of whale bone: bleached, square and fragile, flattened out like folded envelopes.

Jazz seems to reach out for connections...and finds them! The soul of jazz: purity, structure, improvisation. Baroque?

In cricket there is a kind of genius who has what appears to be a limitless repertoire of appropriate responses (gestures): the ability to deflect, to late cut, the dance out, to play straight, to defend, to stroke (through the cover), to time to perfection, to thump, to guide, to steer, to find the gaps, to steal...the swashbuckling cut, the hook (where getting into the right position is everything)...it is a type of wisdom to know how to respond to each particular situation, even to know when to 'leave alone', to know one's bearings, or acknowledge the fact when one is beaten. For this kind of genius the line between instinct and learning is blurred.

M. Ozil is another kind of genius since he brings out the best in other players, sees where they might be, what potential they have, and creates space for them without being too flashy himself. Each 'gesture' is about allowing others to flourish, to find their form. The more he renounces his self, the more he finds it.

Saturday Morning:

'At his most fluid there don't seem to be enough keys on the piano to accommodate his dazzling runs...'

___

Saturday morning, before the holidays come to a close, snowed in, the Radio Times frayed, the memory of a feast, the turning of the New Year, the seeds of expectations, the beautiful silence and stillness of the first day. Saturday morning in January, the light bright, dazzling, the cold air on your face, your hands dry as leaves, the whetting of fingers to turn the pages of the Guardian Review, the old tree with its torn branches, its melancholy inwardness. An amazing sense of freedom and lightness, freedom from the weight of the world.

What does it mean to hold on to a tune, through all that time, to keep the thread running, letting it return, accepting, finally, the distances we allow ourselves? And yet, not accepting them, since memory holds them up to you, and you stare into them, as if through a latticework of ice. What is this blue shadow that others see in my face?

Little r told me.." I saw a picture and it's ugly...I don't like you any more".

Why???

"Because you looked happy holding my baby brother".

This is not going to be easy.

But, I said, I always thank God that you are in my life, r.

She looked me in the eye and said, coldly: "I've never seen you pray."


~~~

Under the bridge a man was sitting on his motorbike, side-saddle, as he pushed it with one leg. He was wearing all black, had a well trimmed beard, dark black shades, and a smart black bag on his back. He glided past us. If this guy is a terrorist he's got some style, I'll give him that.

On the way home I saw a young man in a green T-shirt. On it were printed the words: ' To live in Truth'. It seemed as if this was some hidden, personal message just for me.

Preparing for a talk on Tarkovsky's Solaris here at the university. An interesting idea: faculty have to choose an object and say why it's important to them. More emphasis on personal reflections than academic ones-one hopes.

stoned

'And there is something in even those first paragraphs, an un-show-off-y assurance in the prose, like the soft opening notes of a virtuoso or the first casual gestures of a master artist, that tells us we are in the presence not just of a great writer but of something more—someone who knows life, who maybe even understands it. It’s the same thing I sense in reading James Salter: the presence of wisdom. And wisdom is, of course, perennially out of style.'

---from an essay on John Williams's Stoner.

'My heart pains me and is heavy-alcohol, tobacco, anger, or grief-and the future, when I put my mind to it, eludes me...

I sit on the stone steps, still warm from the sun, and wait for the evening star.'

---John Cheever. 

There's a lovely rhythm to that last line, a bit like: 'Carried by silver and star and reflection'.

the long now

'The US is not the only country with advanced short-termism. It merely provides the most egregious example of the disease. This is a world of fast food and short attention spans, of politicians so dominated by a 24/7 news agenda that they have lost the habit of planning for the long term.'

---Larry Eliot, The Guardian. 

'Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes.'

---Abigail Haworth, The Guardian.

'Everything that exists today was imagined long ago'
---Blake.

To be modern is to understand that so much of our lives is fleeting, contingent, that we never step in the same water twice. Everything is universal flux (except that statement, of course). And to talk of identity is mistaken, too, since our lives are just time slices loosely held together (by habit, imagination?). The 'I-today' is not the same as 'I-tomorrow'.

Of course, Lea, Roxana, Sadia, C and fff will know that I think this is utter bullshit and just another expression of the culture of late capitalism. Everything must be dated and everything must have a sell-by or use-by date. So, if you say you love someone today that other person, assuming she hasn't gone totally bonkers, will feel slightly disturbed if 'you' turn to her today and say, sorry but "a kiss is not a kiss, a sigh is not a sigh, as time goes by."

Why is classical music called 'classical'? Why is it that people from different places around the world, and across the centuries, can still appreciate Bach? It might be said that there was never one Bach-the person or the music-since each individual listens to the music in their own unique way. From that, I suppose, we should also admit that no-one knows what the fuck the next person is talking about because everyone understands words in a specific and unrepeatable way.

And what of the will to permanence? Why this profound desire in men and women, as evidenced throughout human history, for stillness, immortality, timelessness (in architecture, poetry, music, love)? Hans Jonas, writing about the loss of the sense of immortality, is right to say that this is an aspect of a fundamental strain running through modernity. If nothing last should we be concerned about its disappearance? At the extreme: if a person is just a random number, why not stamp that number on her forearm and prove it before consigning her to the flames?

It is said that the world is always a floating world, always full of denials, nullifying our concepts, undermining our structures at the roots. Ours is an age that is governed by the idea of 'process' (Arendt), of random mutation, mutable forms, chance accumulations of swirling atoms and ceaseless change. But I, for one, am not so sure. I think Augustine would say that it is our improper desires that makes the world 'the world' (in a negative sense). But if so, it is also true to say that a proper love of the world makes the world a common world, one that we hope endures and that our children will inherit. There is something deeply nihilistic-not in all cases, for sure-about those who think everything is, essentially, new and that past has to be either ripped up or that it will fall away naturally. Such a view is at odds with the whole notion-and it's a central part of spirituality- of remembrance in the Qur'an.

What is that remembering? Not just a memory of love and of loved ones, but also of our origins (an 'absolute past'). In a sense it is a gathering up of what we always knew was true. Culture, history, traditions, rituals and a sense of place-all of the things Simone Weil called "bridges"-are things that warm and nourish the soul if they do not distract one, and are not made into 'idols'. It is no surprise that the fundamentalists-who are really just nihilists-always want to destroy such things. It is only the radically impure who seek such "purity". History sweeps all away and all one can and should aim for in this desert-for that is what the world is to them- is a moment of blinding revelation, a point of truth in a  fallen world.

'So let us rush, then, to see the world...It has churches of indescribable beauty raised to gods that have never been seen'; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; and thousands or perhaps even millions of museums where man's drive to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women's breasts...the colors of waters, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses the shape of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe is celebrated...

They serve steak there on jet planes and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to the sound of music and bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer...They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos,..They explore space and the trenches of the sea. '

---John Cheever, The Journals.

The Bronx

'I have to clutch at the few things I know-stroke them fondly and magnify their importance in my mind. Some people's lives are triumphal processions-one long process of adding spoil after spoil, decoration after decoration to their life patterns but others of us don't seem able to do this even though we try and are left with just a few friends and a few ideas, accomplishments, possessions-only one or two motifs in our life patterns and these not overlaid on the woof but rather built around imperfections in the warp.'

---William Bronk.

How a name changes, a few letters modified-usually at the end; or a European "au" becomes the anglicized "ow". We want our names to sound solid, hide their origins, the old place of old uncles with their minds and clothes in a shambles relegated to a lower division of our memory, some lower shelf of recognition.

It amazes me to think that the existence of each person alive today is just down to the accumulation of good luck. The millions of shadow selves that didn't make it or whose lives were snuffed out-by some silly accident or by war or disease or by the break-up of a family or a one-off decision to migrate. People who might have met end up never knowing each other and that blank space is filled up in another way. Someone randomly takes a left turn at the lights when they were determined to take the longer route, a right turn, and they end up in a whole new world. We turn our backs for a second and miss some startling moment. 

In mid afternoon, with the dying sun sighing, people hang out their towels to dry and this whole scene, of sturdy hands reaching upwards, of dense shadows forming on white walls, of the first nip of autumnal evening air on her face, seems timeless. But also hidden from the world. We want to witness and be witnessed.

You run for six miles and the next day your mind is vacant, your legs hollowed out. Who was on this ground twenty years ago? Will I be here in five? Our horizons shorten as we grow older. It seems like I have been old for a long time now.

I discover the most beautiful drink: mitha (sweet lime) and grapefruit, chilled. A single glass is perfect, two would be an indulgence [he says, putting on his Puritan hat]. A friend turns to me and says: nothing compared to an ice-cold beer, bro'.

Try as we may, we live in a world we will never understand. Some retrace their steps, wondering what false start led them to this particular juncture. There will always be people who fall but grace will restore some. A friend said: God's system is working in us-whether we know it or not. Who can say with any confidence whether things will work out or not, or in which direction we will be drawn: west side or east side story?

We seem to drift and there are no anchors in the world. We drift, trying to find our name with God. 

Roxana: a short story

Prompted by Roxana I'll try and say what it is about Alice Munro that appeals (since you're only halfway through Dear Life that means this is going to be a short post). 

To my horror, I can't even explain my tastes (so much for rationality!). I suppose a part of our desire or our preferences is always blind, though. Maybe only after the fact can we look back, when things have calmed down, cooled down, and see what it was that drew us to something in the first place?

Short stories. In general I think the jury is still out. A short story seems too light and breezy, almost one-dimensional, a stand-alone deal; they're a bit like a good breakfast: unique, of a particular time, greatly satisfying but once you get to work you've forgotten about it. I think a part of us enjoys such forgetfulness. Light up a cigarette, smoke it, then its done. Return to life, dear life. There's some sort of instant understanding, a moment of clarity amongst the dross and confusion, and then it's gone.

What stands out for me in the short story is that so little stands out. There are few memorable lines and so little time for texture, for layered meanings and character development. Not many lines to mark, fewer passages that give you some much-desired density. I guess we want to see life in three dimensions sometimes, not flattened out. We want to experience life in colour, informed by the richness of ambiguity and diversions, meanderings. The short story seems, to me, to be bare, essential, a distillation of experience, which is why great stories are often described as 'gem-like': a hard, concentrated, minimalistic and refracted telling. Catch some details in a fine light but don't allow them to grow. The art of the short story seems to me about how the world revolves around a single sentence, how a life can be missed or turned around by a few words said in a particular tone. 

Our story is a short one; it could have been something else, might have panned out in a different direction had we the courage or the intelligence, or if destiny had been on our side. A short story, a profile,a  brief glimpse of one of the manifold possibilities. When all is said and done not much was really said or done.  

How is time organized in a short story?

In Dear Life one can hardly catch one's breath. There is something hypnotic in this book in the sense that it has real momentum. 

A short story is like a single black brush-stroke on a white canvas. That may be enough for some people: a world in a grain of sand. But is it a world? It seems more like the earth briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning. Don't we want our stories to connect, to link up to some kind of discernible pattern, as in a fable?

You've read half of Lorrie Moore's Birds of America (which you also like) but haven't had the heart to start Lydia Davis's collection. Someone mentioned VSP and Grace Paley as must-reads. Penelope Fitzgerald's short stories are also a delight but if you were pressed you'd be unable to say why, exactly, that is so.

My favourite short stories are by Karen B. Why? There's something magical and child-like about them, something that touches on the dream-world, a bit like the book you once recommended, Berberova's Book of Happiness, which turned out to be remarkable despite the awful title.

~~~

Listening to Celia's Biber after all these years and loving it. It seems as if there's a whole world here in this music-and it's so selfless. On first hearing you thought it was too light, breezy..superficial, even, and it glanced over you. But there's a kind of confidence to the music that moves without knowing; there are distant reminders of childhood winters, perhaps also some notes of Turkish influence (that's just something I dream or instinctively feel).

A friend listened to it and it reminded of his time in Vienna with his Austrian girlfriend and how that part of his life had a firm and distinct line drawn under it now.

I think good short stories have that firm line in mind, since they point to what isn't said. Each short story starts somewhere but there was something going on, in the background, beforehand. 

The best short stories, though, are just a set of wavy lines.

~ ~ ~

What we want is spirituality without religion, religion without faith, faith without God. We do not know what we want, only what we don't want. Do we have any idea of what we need?

When one thinks of the horrors committed by the followers of organized religion, the stupidity, ignorance and barbarity of the self-styled faithful, it is hard not to conclude that we'd be better off without religion. (Of course, no one wants to mention the awkward fact that the Trenches, the Bomb, and Auschwitz all happened without much help from religion).

You're drawn to Dewey's idea of a common faith, though...a kind of religious spirit without God. Why even stick with the word 'religious' if that's the case...why the nostalgia-for that's what it is, isn't it? And why do you always harp on about 'frameworks' when you don't personally rely on any? Must you always mean what you say and say what you mean? Is there much merit,that is, in discussing an 'idea' of religion, from the outside, as it were?

Well, I doubt it really is just ' outside'- if we're moved by such questions. Is this just the logical conclusion of the Protestant Reformation...each man is a saint, has their own interpretation. Forget the law, there's only the heart.

In South Korea there are 5 million t.v. channels since it's totally deregulated. God knows who watches what or who can broadcast what.

At one level, then, pluralism and fragmentation fit in with other trends in late capitalism. The lack of any framework means there's less chance of any slowing down, any resistance. And with the greater emphasis on subjectivity come the attendant dangers of solipsism. Everyone's got their own opinion, their own two cents; finally, freedom from the monopolization of knowledge and truth by the men in pointy hats, the old fogeys. Forget all these meaningless rituals and show me the dope, the three-step guide to instant enlightenment (and if you click now you can have it delivered to your doorstep in 24 hours.

In the land of the pure, if you're rich enough you're a sufi; if you're poor, you're just a fundamentalist. The proliferation of of t.v. evangelicals, women's groups (al-hoda), pamphleteers, propagandists and on-line access means, effectively, that everyone's got their own spin on religion, their own little set up. Build your own mosque with two and half bricks. No training, no discipline, no reflection and no qualifications required.

What of common faith, then? As always, the question becomes: what are the tradeoffs between promoting a certain kind of freedom and solidarity? For a consumer-oriented age this kind of pick-and-choose approach has its charms. And, Jesus, no-one wants to go back to the stifling orthodoxies and conservatism of the past.  But when all is said and done, one can't but help feel that when you get rid of the institutional backdrop, the daily fabric that is made up of the small rituals, etiquette, specific uses of language, ways of looking and ways of talking (both of which include ways of not doing those things) then something is lost, then the door is open to a plain old worldliness and forgetfulness.

together, alone.

Late afternoon, the sun hanging low, a strip of the kerb illuminated by a deep orange tone, as if the colour has sunk deep into a few inches of solid world, as if the sun has handed down a small disc-shaped token of its self.  The yellows of the sun growing darker by the minute, life intoxicated for a moment by some dream. The dust on the car windows ensure that the last light of the day is filtered to a swirling, grainy mist of memories and regrets. This light that right at that moment makes you feel old, makes you think of all the autumns in your life.

The holidays empty the roads, the city, the houses...our hearts. What is there left to say?

Slip in a quote to cover the gaps.

The school looks so peaceful today, on the holiday, like an abandoned ship or the conversations at a party that continue aftter you've left. The white fluttering paper chandelier that the students have made dangles down and sways with an inestimable freedom.

We were ghosts; by being true to ourselves we became less real. One must take account of the times.

You breeze through two short stories..Munro and Carver. Stumble across a phrase, like " darkly undermined," and the solidity of the words seem to carve out a small dome of space for you, a few inches of the solid world.

Gopnik's winter book is a delight. You're drawn to Wilkinson's arctic book. Escape is on your mind again, as I suppose it's always been, and always will be. Can a mind be anywhere else?

Seurat already points forward to Hopper and the lonely, halfway houses where people meet, together, alone, a strange fellowship of sadness. Seurat already points back to Holbein's Dead Christ,

junkyard angel (II)

'Insatiable cravings, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics and rebels, and its angry, bullying, subversive preachers...The naive artists who is suspicious of anyone curious about his inner life, wholly, even grimly, impersonal, dryly objective, at one with his music.

Verdi's art, like that of Bach, is objective, direct...It springs from an unbroken unity, a sense of belonging to its own time and society and milieu, which precludes the nostalgie de l'infini.'
---I. Berlin.

This is from one of my favourite essays by Berlin. I think a shorter version can be found here.

Having written about the importance of eccentricity yesterday I feel the need to write about the importance of the centre today, of being centred, that is.

"Humility should help us to lead quite ordinary lives, peacefully earning our bread and working from day to day in a world that will pass away."
---Thomas Merton.

~~~
In what sense is a love of the world already an expression of a religious outlook? There's a certain strain in our thinking that wants to view religion as merely a kind of feeling,a remnant of some archaic past, a blind faith that is on the one hand distinct from knowledge, and on the other either something that negates love and sensuality because of its either supposed asceticism or its focus on love that is too narrow, standing opposed to worldly things and ordinary life. 

But if religious art is intent on producing beauty in the world how can this be independent of love?  

~~~

How to live a life with lower expectations, one in which one realizes one cannot read everything,see everything,understand everything? To concentrate on the essential, think about what one really values and avoid distractions- the fantasies of what we could have been or could be- requires courage, patience, and honesty. It's too easy to reach out for something beyond oneself, to cling on to some image of your life, dream of settling accounts.

junkyard angel (I)

The mangled and damaged are in the best place to receive enlightenment..the metaphysical illiterate, the junkyard angels...

---G. Dyer.

Only in the rhetoric of the mad and inebriated can the old freedoms and continuities survive.

---Jonathan Raban (on Lowell).

Of course, not too inebriated. Just on this side of the border to make sense, or to have at least crossed back into familiar routines after a darting stint in foreign territory. And you return, and everything is the same. Or rather, everything is different by a degree or two, a slight displacement here, the strange slowing down of your voice or the quizzical look on some people's faces there.

The stammering century, full of crackpots and weirdos, who look in dark mirrors and see only themselves. One shelf above the abyss, your thoughts unhinged, uncoiling from reality, a spiral of imaginary thoughts and relations to the world. Your clothes two sizes too big for you, your shirt stained with coffee, the collars roughed with age. The fragments of lines from the books of writers you've never read, the copies of words scribbled in a notebook, the dimly guessed at sense of a poet's truth. Where is the word that stands before the law, fresh, bright and clear?

Take the line, the necessary steps, with a grateful heart. No time like this will come again.

At the border, the frontier, JFK..

"Have you had any kind of military training?"

"Does it look like I've had any military training?, I felt like asking, but in dark times humour breaks up the seriousness and shows up stupidity-and that's the last thing one expects: on the frontier identity is a matter of life and death...

Americans, let me tell you, are now just one stage away from a delusional state. That sounds a bit like Qutb, but you know what I mean. This mania for confession, for reassurance from a stranger and for "authenticity" is something that immediately struck you as quite bizarre. The artificial sweetness of a false intimacy and easy-going worldliness.

~~~

We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...

'A long sentence of history and tradition behind them..to retrieve particular experience with unprecedented brilliance and lucidity..in which the immediate moment brushes electrically against history...a new freedom.'

Scales glitter on our bodies as we fall.

God, who would have died or killed for a conversation, must have seen this scene forever: man, skilled in his loneliness, his blood thinning, the soil below his feet loosening with the warmth, the old patterns of beginning and ending. This man, this particular man, desiring to see himself undone, to see himself with burning eyes, as flesh and bones and not spirit. The centuries that have passed so that this lost gaze is found in his eye, the eyelash of recognition. The desire to know his own drunken heart.

..and the laugh
Of death is hacked in sandstone, in their year...

..and age
blackens the heart of Adam.

it is not easy to face with an open heart, an unflinching hand, the estrangement that is worked into our lives from a distance, like random luck. The ceaseless flux, the uprooting, the knowledge today that today's knowledge is tomorrow's ignorance. Blessed is the man who stammers, who still speaks.

How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

"You can't know everything!" a dear friend tells me, caustically. We talk over one another. Keep your head down until something goes right. "We must find meaning in small things," he adds. Perhaps because nothing "big" is left for us.

car keys and razor blades
shine in an ashtray.

Harsh and sharp times we live in. The poet's words won't help. Life sticks it to you. But I do like these words,

a greyhound's gentle tautness.

(words by Robert Lowell).

~~~

Should have mentioned Jean Stafford here somewhere, but since I haven't read her...

A German shepherd:

'He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tail...laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.'

religious art

The other day I thought about how religion continues to fascinate. One aspect of this is, undoubtedly, religious art. When one thinks of the music, the poetry, the paintings and the architecture that have been influenced by religion it's really quite remarkable...one of the great legacies of human civilisation (Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, to name but three). Of course, what exactly is meant by "influence" remains to be elaborated upon but you suspect that it's something more than a superficial relation between the two.

Can we talk about creativity, imagination and discipline in the arts without religion? That is not the question since it seems obvious that they survive and flourish without religion. The question I'm asking is: how is the mind and soul of men and women fired by  religious inspiration? Or, to put it another way: can one deny that religion hasn't in the past vivified human beings' creativity and imagination? If one were to look at some beautiful Kufic manuscripts with their condensed, reserved lettering (as if to say: truth can only be told slowly) or if one were to sense the peace of the interior space of a simple Church, or listen to Bach across the centuries reminding you of something-even though you're not sure of quite what-or contemplate the dark, time-worn Russian icons, or marvel at the tile-work at the Rustum Pasha mosque in Istanbul, could one really say that these were simply the product of a human endeavour and that religious sensibilities played no part? Really?

It's an uncomfortable truth for religious people that religion has produced so much bloodshed and barbarism. But, equally, for the non-religious it is an inconvenient fact that religion has been so deeply wedded to the beautiful and the sublime.

'The austerity, gravity, sobriety, and strength of Gregorian chant, of twelfth century Cistercian architecture, of Carolingian minuscule script, have much to say about the life of prayer and the religious consciousness of saints'.
---Thomas Merton.

The visionary detective

Writing Home

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena — organisation, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.’

---Anthony Marra.

You watched the first reel of Jonas's Walden again and were reminded of how dazzling it is--a line from A.B. says that for Hopkins a tree would be "dazzling"--There is the interplay between written text, spoken voice and images. Is that not a world in itself? There is the graininess of it, the momentariness of the images, real life and reel life, something that is private that will become public: the old problem: art and life. There is the solitude of the artist capturing moments in the lives of his friends. There is the roar of sound, the dizzying stream of blurred images, life all around us whizzing by..then there it is stalled, slowed down, peace is found,a  child touches a flower and wonders, just as millions of other children do all around the world, just as millions of other children have done since time immemorial. And wondered to themselves: what fragile beauty is this, that speaks no name?

There is the ideological stance-which must also be made in these times: how to escape the possibility that art, any art, will be swallowed up whole by industry, the market, and then churned out into commodified pieces with string and price tag dangling from them? Can the private realm, the sacred, the slow inherited ways of living a human life resist or will they be broken and broken down?

The opposite possibility: that you will enter the rarefied air of deliberate obscurity, fake elitism and snobbery to keep them off the scent. Meaning and the higher life ("contemplation", say) can thereby survive untarnished...the romantic disdain for the world, its love of boundaries and for outsiders.

Is there a middle way, a way of being at the centre and still not compromised, a way of returning to life, of making use of the ordinary circumstances one finds oneself in? Nothing mystical here, don't overdo it. How to write, write home.

~~~

Don't know why, but it's nice reading Alan Bennett's diaries. There's something about the English not being too clever that appeals (as opposed to that awful European intellectuality). They're light, casual, gossipy and funny.

'A cameraman's experience of the world is more various than almost any other profession I can think of , and also more oblique. It's what would make a cameraman a good character in a play, and a useful one (all worlds known, all walks of life visited) in a thriller.'

~~~

For the life of me I can't get the tenses right: the right words for future, for the past. What kind of failing/falling is that?

There is the beautiful two minutes or so, 'Tim's place' (youtube, but no for us here in the land of the pure), that makes you think of  some sort of Jewish affinity but also, more brokenly, of your own home after the rains and when the light breaks through, making everything in the world sparkle again, as it did when you were a child. 

lower case, movable type

'The novel is encyclopaedic: all of the different manners of expressing oneself in words can find their place there...Surrealism is always non-academic, always looking for the source of human activity, looking into the back alleys and the darkest clearing in the forest for excitement. 

There are places that have an unbroken tradition, stretching thousands of years back, of telling the same stories over and over again. Mostly here in the West we have lost the ability to protect our culture orally, and maybe we are in danger. What will happen when all the books have flared up and all the Kindles lost their battery power?'

---Sjon. 

~~~

No more elites, and don't fret about it; we're all lower case nowadays. The end of capitalization/capitalism/K. Universal equivalences: everything can be exchanged for everything else, stood in its place, so to speak. Relative prices equals relative evaluations. And to the extent that labour, too, becomes a commodity...well, then you have superfluous labour: I am you and you are me. More: this machine is worth 5 'hands', has so much 'horse power'..bring it all down to some common unit: energy or money. 

Pushpin is as good as poetry. Every place starts to look the same, everyone starts to speak in the same affected way. 

The great publicizing machine that must find some lost long manuscript, drag some obscure author out of hiding, or reveal the most intimate details of a celebrity-and you ain't no-one unless you're someone-all so that it can be forgotten the very next day, repeated with new characters in the oldest game in town. But I'm repeating myself. Like Gaddis. 

The great machine, churning out 'research' papers and commentaries and second-hand exegesis and scraps and quotes and heavy tomes of deep criticism and marginal analysis...deconstruction, revisionism, distillations, concatenations. But by the time it's done you realize it's all been done before or you wonder to yourself what the whole point of it was in the first place. Another game, another diversion of the mind from life, another bit of 'play', which isn't so far away from entertainment and being an 'event'. 

With so much out there, drowning out the silence, the space for reflection, you must hoard the fragments or, better still, gloss them as they pass over you like so many flickering images on a screen. 

~~~

Gutenberg: the Reformation, scientific treatises: the move away from authoritative voices, the finding of one's own individual one. To be with a book, alone, is a kind of freedom. 

At the same time: standardization, the move to vernacular languages, and the book as the first commodity. What is the political importance of this (the twofold meaning of 'subjectivity')? Nationalism and markets. From now on everyone is the same, in some fundamental sense. To stand outside the market, beyond or below state definitions (of your own free will), is to be a heretic or at least an eccentric, a degenerate outsider.

~~~

A very interesting piece by Andrew Winer here.

How to find chance encounters again, how to escape technology? Is technology just a way of replacing ritual? In another sense, though, its allure is that it offers endless possibilities, indeterminacy-when what we wanted or needed was something more rooted, more specific.

...the way techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building to the way we keep “handing over basic memory function to a global corporate system of control” every time we reach “for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain’s responsibility to remember.”

~~~

 


'A letter always comes from the past, from elsewhere, rather than from the ever-insistent here and now of the digital. Thinking about writing a letter is different from thinking about writing an email.'

~~~

'The purity and beauty of failure' (which resonates with the Walser/Pessoa theme of the last few weeks).
Amit Chaudhri.

 

Notes from a distant, mad star

Duchamps...art? Taking the piss?

~~~

Saudi Arabia: three men sentenced to ten years and 2,000 lashes for 'dancing naked' in public. It appears that they were just dancing or that they were really just gay.

Question: can anyone survive 2,000 lashes?

Now this one is hard to believe but it would make great material for a comic novel (in fact, the whole of Saudia Arabia would be good material)...

A Saudi cleric says women can only work side by side with men if they first become their "mothers" (i.e. breast feed them). Obviously from the liberal branch of wahabism, you note.

~~~

The novel cure: A-Z of literary remedies.

Symptom: sick of  gimmicky books.

Cure: F is for fuck-off.

~~~

You often hear people say things are really complex. The Arab-Israeli conflict. There's one for you. Except it isn't. Once you start to see other people as human beings, that is, and once you recognize there wasn't a 'wilderness' but, you know, human beings living a life. Shocking, but true.

Of course, but in quite another way, Europeans are masters of this obfuscation, trying to read some metaphysical mumb-jumbo into the plainest of statements. An umbrella? What is an umbrella, asks the philosopher, just before he dies of pneumonia. 

~~~

In a survey the countries that are perceived in the most negative light:

Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan.

What is the fascination with such 'surveys'? Eight out of ten cats preferred...

But, hang on, 17 % of respondents  thought of Pakistan in a positive light. Are you serious?

~~~

'Dear Miley,

It is in fact the case that you will obscure your talent by allowing yourself to be pimped, whether its the music business or yourself doing the pimping.'

What if your talent is pimping yourself?

p.s. And put some clothes on, luv.


~~~

a panchayat (local village council) in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death after she was caught using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi was stoned to death by her relatives at the orders of the panchayat. - See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07/12/news/national/jirgas-cant-judge-observes-sc/#sthash.v8pRw1PE.dpuf

a panchayat (local village council) in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death after she was caught using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi was stoned to death by her relatives at the orders of the panchayat. - See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07/12/news/national/jirgas-cant-judge-observes-sc/#sthash.v8pRw1PE.dpuf

On a more upbeat note: someone writes: Ozil makes everyone play better; he raises the game of all around him. Now, that's a rare kind of genius because lots of people are really intent on bringing you down to their level.

~~~

a panchayat (local village council) in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death after she was caught using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi was stoned to death by her relatives at the orders of the panchayat. - See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07/12/news/national/jirgas-cant-judge-observes-sc/#sthash.DYzLybUr.dpuf

'A local village council in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death for using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi, was stoned to death by her relatives.'
---Pakistan Today.

~~~

a panchayat (local village council) in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death after she was caught using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi was stoned to death by her relatives at the orders of the panchayat. - See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07/12/news/national/jirgas-cant-judge-observes-sc/#sthash.v8pRw1PE.dpuf

a panchayat (local village council) in Dera Ghazi Khan sentenced a woman to death after she was caught using a mobile phone. A mother of two kids, Arifa Bibi was stoned to death by her relatives at the orders of the panchayat. - See more at: http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2013/07/12/news/national/jirgas-cant-judge-observes-sc/#sthash.DYzLybUr.dpuf

red

"...the Great Dutchman's severe, subdued study, no longer of nature but of reality."

---Z. Herbert.

"red, as an infinite task."

---Iris M.

~~~

The (f)utility of electronic communication:

Over the last two weeks a number of online conversations(?) have ended abruptly with statements such as:

1. Obviously I thought we only differed over semantics, let's meet over coffee so I can clarify my points.
2. I can explain myself if we meet in person. Let's have lunch.
3. "We" need to define our terms more carefully. I'll do that later. I haven't got time now.
4. I write because I write.

Now, this might be seen in a positive light in that the participants have realized that communication over the net misses out on a lot and that personal, face-to-face conversation is needed. On the other hand, I find it hugely frustrating and really a cop out since in all cases it was more like a get-out clause, a way of not having to explain anything or really engage with the other person. Instead, there is an indefinite and vague deferral to 'some other time', a casual indifference which basically means: "yeah, like, forget it." And that's the way the net works: one can unplug, disconnect, ignore others whenever wants to. A kind of freedom, yes, but something that in real life is not looked upon in a favourable light.

~~~

In front of you, a driver with a dark tanned and leathery face, hours of concentration worn deep into it, a profound sense of being deep in the world and yet also, strangely, free from it. In the grassy island between the two roads an old woman with thick spectacles stands patiently by her paraplygeic son who sits in a wheelchair under a tree. She waits, waits for someone to hand her some money as their cars crawl to a halt before the nauseating red of the traffic lights. I think of that woman's decision to buy those glasses, necessary in order that at least one of them can carve out some space in the world for themselves, which in this case simply means: merely to survive. When you read the words "the noblest function of things is to to be contemplated" you realize how much stupidity there is in the world.

If religion or philosophy teaches us that the highest end of men and women is contemplation then two hurrahs for the death of religion, the death of philosophy.

~~~

For tens of thousands of years human beings have been praying to some Being, some higher spirit, asking for forgiveness or that they and their loved ones be protected from evil, or asking, in desperation, for some kind of help. Is that making good "use" of God? Only someone without a religious sensibility would ask such a meaningless question or think of the divine in such a narrow light. For how can God open a door if we do not knock?

On the other side of the road is a beautiful remnant of old Lahore, a house that seems quiet and peaceful deaspite all the chaos beyond its outer boundaries. There is a beautiful old brick wall, parts of it painted in thick paint, and in the inner courtyard some dusty old trees, filtering the light, creating patterns of light and shade as old as time itself in the inner space.

I think of these old places, soon to be destroyed in the name of progress and development, as the last breathing spaces of the city, like dark wells in a desert, places of imaginings and final memories that will soon be torn up and thrown in the air, like so many fluttering scraps of brightly coloured paper.

Red is the colour of our memory and of our myths.