g

"Is that Tennessee roughcut?

 No, it's Pakistani black"

 “This tapestry moves

as the morning lights up.

And they who are in it move

and love its moving

from sleep to Idea

born on the breathing

of a distant harmonium, To See

is their desire

as they wander estranged”

The trail led to a great-grandfather, 102 years old, living in complete squalor with a wife who was willing a death that was slow to come. To talk, Dorn had to put his mouth right to the old man's ear. He could hear, but he wasn't responding. Then he broke into a lovely, long line chant. It became important, Dorn says, to register this, beyond the immediate circumstances of the contrived meeting. 'We think death is some rather large event. We don't have the sense that death is simply another occurrence, like any occurrence that might happen on this string we call our lives... And death is not any great thing. It's either there or it's not.' The poet justifies his decision to stay and watch, even when he doesn't know what he thinks about the scene he is working to remember. That will be decided later, when he sits down to write. 'I have to be there with the Indians. I don't have a country any more than they do.'

---Iain Sinclair. 

What the desert teaches you is two great things: Endurance and Abstinence.

When a man is down on the floor he usually speaks the truth. 

You walk absentmindedly against the stream of Friday worshipers, ambling away from the mosque. You hear the good-natured banter amongst the faithful, their easy-going relation to the world and one another, their bodies free from any sign of anxiety, their faces calm against a weak sun that beats a shiny yellow film of light on the cool marble. You walk against the tide, knowing that this kind of fellowship is strangely beyond your reach.

For a moment you stop and observe the thick green leaves, unusually luxuriant for this time of the year and you are absorbed in something, transported to summer time in London, Watford or Woodford, by the stillness, the thick and dense light filtering through the trees. This rapture of the green moment holds you, and is like a jewel amidst the dross of the world.  This may be all you are afforded. It passes. You are changed slightly. And you walk on in the light which is now less mysterious.

~~~

A friend tells you that he's gone too far in his infidelities with some woman: it must stop; it mustn't stop. In a car, a second-rate hotel room. "The problem is," he confesses, is that I'm neither a pure saint, nor a pure sinner. Instead, I'm torn between what I want to do and what I should do. "

Can you picture the solution, the endgame when things sort themselves out? I ask.

"Part of me thinks: if I had enough money I'd buy an apartment and keep her as my mistress...it could be, though, that all this is merely a compensation for my failure in life."

Endurance and Abstinence.

In the moment in which we fall, we tend to speak the truth, or at least think we do. 

"I am fallen. I should accept that others are too. But there is something in me that is too rigid, too narrow, that makes it impossible for me to accept another's faults. Is this it? Is this the way it ends up?"

~~~

'And the sad men, the lonely men, those who are unhappily married, drop to their knees in garages, bathrooms, and motels asking God to help them understand the need for love.'

'I must sleep with someone, and I am so hungry for love that I count on touching my younger son at breakfast as a kind of link, a means of staying alive.'

'Sleep is my kingdom, my native land, ...Do we see our age in the poverty of our dreams? The threadbare dreams of middle age.

---John Cheever.

~~~

You steal ten pages in the morning. The sleeplessness still deep in your eyes, your bones, your walk. You hold a book with you wherever you go, the way a cripple holds a cane. Not to read it under a tree but for the simple feel of it in the palm of your hand. 

In a dream she asks you for Venus and Furs. For two consecutive mornings you see a Chinese-looking girl, round face with lots of blush, and a Russian fur hat, black leotards. You have no lurid thoughts: at six o'clock in the morning it is still possible to sleep and be yourself.

Steam enters the pages of the book, opening them up, making them go wavy. Another five minutes and the front page will turn up and then eventually curve horribly. Will the steam affect the text itself, transforming a 'g' into an 's'...'K' morphs into 'R', forgets its sharpness, makes peace with the time it has, the shade it has.

'When the car gave up the ghost outside Lahore
It would have been around a hundred and twenty
In the shade, had there been any shade.'