'a great builder of bridges in space'

If I could, I'd build a bridge made of nothing, nothing but my dreams. It wouldn't reach anywhere in particular but it wouldn't be here; a direction, maybe, something like north or north by NW. And I would come to love everything I've passed over, everything I've missed.

'One day Earth will be
just a blind space turning'
and I the last man with sight
am blinded by you.

'One of your heartbeats has strayed into my heart
and I can distinguish it from all others'
Angina days are like a foreign word on my lips.

'The drowned man seeks the song
that shaped him long ago'

Jules. S.
~~~

Book. Coffee. Book. Light. Shade. Words arranged in lines, a cloud over my head, and the waves a miniature scrawl of confusion.

Book. Green apple. Book. Sound. Silence. Words fall from the page, the night stands over my head, and the waves lap and bounce like an unrestrained dog at my feet.

~~~

On the plane back a man in a large black hat chats up the woman next to him. He has haggard look on his face and can barely stand up. She complains. The liberals on the plane have no sympathy for her. The mullahs want the man thrown off. The plane is divided. "What do you do?"
"I'm a housewife"
"Strange, because you look like a servant to me"

A bald man in a tight three-piece grey suit then proceeds to punch the man in the hat. The hat, miraculously, stays on his head. The son now gets up. Others restrain him, holding his wrists down. This is a question of honour. Up in the air there are no bridges between people except for our bloodlines. We watch like villagers viewing a wrestling match, our in-flight entertainment having been cancelled. The real wretchedness of human beings is a poor substitute. Everyone's at everyone else's throat. The low-level bickering continues, the insults continue to fly. Suddenly, I'm homesick for the earth.

Time and the other

 'The western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a asocial and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.'

---C. Geertz.

~~~

The strangeness of the frontier, where the past is an utter blank, a dark room devoid of any memories or mirrors. One can only look forward and see time hurtling towards one. In the evening of the heart even a small light looks like a sun. 

the words we have lost

'There are days when
time’s lead feet do damage,
when the sea resembles
the tear of a melancholic god,
the desert a scab
on the ribs of the land,
& the sun a shower of coals.
Days when hope
crosses her arms.

But there are days
when time is just a grin
that flies away,
days when I crave
to mix the rainbow’s every color
on a pallet,
fashion a brush from a feathered cloud
to paint a world without an axis but with several poles
& throw dice with the cardinal corners.'

~~~

There are words we will never hear, as immobile as stones, rooted to one place for all their lives. There are others that are destined to cross the seas, be translated, lovingly recorded, contested, shortened, elaborated upon, analyzed.  Further, books will be written in support of (or against) them; chairs will be set up, careers made or broken on the splinter of a sentence. Eyes will be ruined, the glass will become  more opaque, its density and curvature warping to a unique calibration, the dust will inch its way into the cracks and our hair become thinner, greyer and still the secret of those words will carry on. Some words will enter the world stage, but others will become obsolete like an old love in one's heart, reduced to the memory of a moment of infatuation on a Monday morning.

The poet, like the nomad, lives in time. Most likely neither his words nor his heart will become a legend, or part of the folklore repeated by children and the old ones.  

By chance,  a fragment of what I say makes it to her before she closes the window. I slip into the cold country of her heart, my temporary visa nearly expired, my migratory impulses dashed, to underscore the point.

~~~

What existed in the inland for all those centuries? The dry heart, the set routines, unchanging like the waves that lap the shore. The millions of waves every year, each the same and yet different,  and the tens of millions of years that pass before someone speaks a single word. 

How did they navigate the seas in the old days, before technology had extended its hand? Through songs and the stars,  the placement of each word as fixed as the star, the story remembered off by heart, the mystical union of what passes on earth with that which remains imperishable.

Pearls are substituted by oil and words by the flash of a light across a screen. Interest peaked and waned, the sap in the trees settles, the heart regains its constancy. Our lives, a brief moment in the open, a boat that forgot to count the waves but remembered the words we have lost.

the view from nowhere

Each time there is something in my silence that you note, that breaks you. It adds another feature to my face, as I change inwardly, like a statue's eyes, gazing outwards and backwards at the same time, the heart balanced precariously.

The shape of the unmade bed, human warmth draining from its creases and folds.

What words we humans carry with us, the vast square spaces, as calm as a dusty, late afternoon. We could be anywhere...this universal music of the shopping mall, the same fake gestures, the same migrant workers only really half here.

We could have been anyone, me and you.

The first light of day touches his sleeping head,
Glides on his forehead,
Reassures itself he's the same man as yesterday.
All the colours creep through the window,
As soundless as ever.
The white from Timor via Palestine
Leans across the bed and spreads itself out.
The grey is so sorry to have left China
It lies on the mirror,
Gives it depth simply by approaching it.
Yellow dabs itself on the wardrobe,
While black repaints the human condition
The fate of the man lying in bed.

Madrid

On the fast train you wondered why the trains in England were so slow. Fascism was always in a rush to get to the future. You hurtled past a built-up environment: cement-trees-cement, your life flashing past you. The slowing down of a train into a platform, the muffled voices in the loudspeakers, the bustle of departures and arrivals, is a thing of beauty in the world.

Everything in Madrid seemed new, even the parks. At least compared to the south. Here you saw radiant new lovers hand in hand in the park, speaking freely with one another whereas deep down, in Cordoba, Al-andalus, all that lost country, there were only restrained glances and dark faces. The south is a dusty place, full of people sleepwalking to their death. The taxi driver stopped the car. "Why have you stopped?" I gestured. He nodded his head towards a woman crossing the street, her hips swinging wildly from side to side.

You searched out the cheapest meal, the place where you'd have to say as few as words as possible. Did con carne mean with meat, or without. 'Con', your mind told you, meant together, as you walked alone. Without any knowledge of a place, without any words, well, you could be an American or an Englishman, just another passer by, someone who will add a bit of green to the economy. Stick to the fish, even when inland. In Madrid you were told people party until 3 a.m. You went to the Prado and saw Goya's black pictures instead, choosing to be reminded of how much Spain loves the spilling of blood...

What is a kaffir? you said to yourself, looking into the mirror. The tall, elegant windows opened onto a blank wall. "It's the cheapest room we've got," said the man. You just spoke the magic words, I replied. In the lobby old men with thick moustaches and blue blazers read the newspapers with such repose, as if they were sitting in the balcony of their own homes!

Every poet/academic/ tourist/ junkie, walks around in the city in a state of bewilderment, invisible and precisely because so, the most visible. You think to yourself: the disappearance of a letter can take the plural and make it singular. Each person walks around in his own desert. It is said in an old poem of the desert that a man is half his tongue,and half his heart. And if you lose both?

~~~

You return to London and it is like being smacked in the eye. Despite all the bridges London seems like a very unromantic city. Madrid appeared formal, elegant, and far more beautiful-well, at least from the sky.

Selections

The law is consistent; grace is inconsistent.

Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect.

Our vocation is precisely to be imperfect, incomplete, insufficient in ourselves, changing, hapless, destitute, and weak, hastening to the grave...but His peace must somehow find its way into our lives, secretly, while we are here...

And the secret of sincerity is to be sought not in a love for abstract truth but in a love for real people and real things...[sincerity: to say what we mean, to mean what we say (intelligence and will).]

The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure...

We must somehow strip ourselves of our greatest illusions about ourselves, frankly recognize in how many ways we are unlovable...we must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be.

---Thomas Merton.

~~~

A life with limited possibilities is not really a life, for life itself is a breaking into the unpredictable, the open, fresh ground, as well as a returning home. A life where one is held fast by possibilities also diminishes us in some way and makes us homeless. 'Home' and repose is then a projection, something deeply imagined, longed for. A life of persistent longing doesn't seem like much of a life. 

Without any ideals or principles would our lives just consist in a succession of moments strung together after one another? 

Sincerity: to see oneself honestly. Are there limits to how long one can look?

A child sees some spilled ink and immediately asks: "who did it?" A grown up sits down and analyzes the pattern.

What if our desires really did express what we are at heart? The loss of courage, the wrong turnings, the words spoken in anger...we say to ourselves, consolingly, "I wasn't myself", keeping this precious image of our "true" self somewhere safe, deeply  buried, as if we could retrieve it at will. We open the cloth and see that it has faded and the frame is being eroded by rust. 

In revolutionary times there are those that seek some new gesture; there are others who marvel at the deep continuity of the shapes human hands make. Start at Year One or hope that time will come around again, that the past will carry on into the future, as something lived, known, even if unspoken.

And now, when things change at such an alarming rate, the hands of the father are not recognized by the son.

Does the last moment seal, put a stamp on, all the moments that went before it? Does the last moment reveal or upturn, confirm or bewilder? There are hands that are full of sin, and there are poor hands of simple, elegant grace; hands that have known the years go by and that bear witness, others whose movements say nothing.

There is universal human nature, national culture, the genius of place, continuity of work patterns, family inheritances..and against all this the individual scrambles his or her way out into the clear, emerging like a bright, clean shoot. Against the solid and slow moving way of life each individual gesture could be recognized and each find his or her place since stock phrases, facial expressions, ways of speaking and hand gestures would be repeated year after year, unknowingly. Now? Our hands are more anxious.'Talk to the hand' means: there is no more mutual comprehension. Increasingly you see hands and fingers busy texting.

The revolution, she said, will be me & you.

Above: a picture of Tina Modotti and one by her. What a life! Stumbled across her looking for Paul Strand's Mexico pictures (which you saw at the Tate a few years back).

~~~

Wahabinomics.

I've often found economists to be a bit asocial (or anal) and one wonders whether anals are drawn to the subject or if the subject makes them like that?

With their quest for purity, their simple, reductive assumptions, and construction of 'pure worlds', they are a bit like the wahabis! Also, given the imperialism the analogy may not be too far off the mark!

(photos courtesy of Roxana)

Our dwelling place, the light above, a ribbon of  warm light in the old corners of the house that are somehow found and seen again, against all the odds, after so many years of neglect. 

The centuries-old light that mysteriously returns in summer-as it always does. The warmth on your back, your hands unloosened, the deeply veined green shade cast by tall trees, the high windows in the elegant streets around London House, the library windows jarred open, the women becoming more dreamy.

The old medieval light, your exquisite, starred heart, the darkness that picks out the light and gives it shape.

'History in stone and wood and glass.'

This knowledge of the window is something that eludes you and these distances another kind of beauty in the soul. The death of the heart is not so unlike the life of the heart, though it is seldom commented upon.

This shadow that grazes the light, that snicks it, is like the last word you spoke, the filigree of absence.

when the saints don't go marching on...

Prompted by something Bob said about music being banned in Islam and by today's article in the Guardian on the decline of the shrine culture in Pakistan...

First of all: cards on the table (cards are also unIslamic, by the way): you're from a wahabi-type background.

Secondly, you've never really had much interest in Sufism or "spirituality" and only a passing interest in religion, if truth be told. I see myself or I'd like to see myself as probably very much like my grandfather, the old jew, muttering away to himself in the shade, alone, or like the dougal, who despite all her Catholic friends is really more like an Anglican or a Quaker, or the swami who strikes me really as an old Hindu, with Sanskrit in her heart, or Ubo who always prizes being funny, conversational, practical and sensible over religious (boy, do I come from a confused family!).

Ubo, Aba, Abbot...from the Syrian.

But there was something to be said about the old, eclectic ways and it was this: they were messy, confused, full of remnants of backward customs, agricultural practices for sure, but they allowed for all sorts of accommodations, a space for music, dance, gatherings, devotion and encouraged a sense continuity and community.

The wahabis, on the other hand, with their austere, sober and harsh interpretation encourage only a petty individualism and suffering. Culture is reduced to "innovation", a deviation from the pure ways. Sit at home, pray, procreate, stuff your belly. This, in a nutshell, is the message of the mullah.

Of course, that's never been accepted. People like to eat with other people, look and talk with other beautiful women, listen to music, watch films, joke around. More to the point: the religion-or the approach you're attracted to-has always been more 'worldly' than either some strains of sufisim or the wahabis allow for. Great schools of learning, the creation of architectural spaces that emphasize balance, repose, harmony; art and beauty as an expression of one's faith (jamal and jalal, together), radical social justice..all of these things suggest something quite different.

In the final analysis could one say that a human society without music isn't really a human society? Of course, that is what the Taleban and other nihilists aim at. But it won't happen. Because even if the saints don't go marching on there will always be love and friendship, compassion and beauty.

(p.s. If anyone wants a copy of Hans Jonas's brilliant essay on Gnosticism and Nihilism just give me a whistle...you know how to whistle, don't you?)

dream house

Given there is so much disorder, chaos in the world, why should we add to it?

Anyone who has visited the South Bank, lived on a council estate, or seen the university of Essex will immediately understand just how soul destroying and ugly modern architecture is. One can only imagine Eastern Europe to be any worse. Underlying both, of course, is Bentham's utilitarianism/communism. The irony being that what is seen in purely utilitarian terms ends up as useless (and at a much quicker rate).

"Ruin porn".

An interesting term, suggesting a kind gaze, full of of lust for disasters, signs of disintegration, abandonment (is this so very different from the Romantic age's love of ruins?). Perhaps. There, 'brokenness' suggested wholeness, the idea that something was lost: we live in a broken world but to appreciate absence we must have a prior notion of 'presence'. Or it suggested the continual survival, even in the barest outline, of something once loved and valued. But now all we have to go by are fragments. We live in a fragmentary world and that's all there is, all there ever was. God and the cosmos are not even in the equation. If-and it's a big 'if- anything is of value it is because I say it is so. There is no discovery or finding, only a making. There is no 'world' so to speak, only 'I'. The world is lyingly added.

Why does beauty matter?

You've thought about this a lot recently especially since you live now without much music or art and see fewer and fewer beautiful women (the women are either "aunties" or silly young girls). The city of gardens with its leafy suburbs is now a city of crass commercialism: glaring and tacky billboards, awful cheap imitations of Dubai-style building, and the insulated bubble-like shopping malls that are a feature of just about every city nowadays.

Music: dissonance.

At a store you heard some rap music being played and it was the most awful rubbish one could imagine. You wonder if anyone could even understand what was being played: "I'll take two women and fuck you ho" sort of thing. Charming!

To even mention the word taste today is to open oneself to the charge of elitism and snobbery (whereas, of course, you are arguing for just the opposite!). Khair...Here's some Scruton: Roger

take it home

"The treasure . . .lies buried. There is no need to seek it in a distant country . . .It is behind the stove, the center of the life and warmth that rule our existence, if only we knew how to unearth it. And yet – there is this strange and persistent fact, that it is only after . . .a journey in a distant region, in a new land, that . . . the inner voice . . .can make itself understood by us."

---Denise Levertov, via Zimmer, via Buber, via...

There's this line in Becket where he criticizes the Welshman (or have I got it mixed up?).."you were only looking for an animal kind of warmth," he says. The warmth of friendship, well, that's another thing, in a different league. Even loyalty to religion can seem cold, distant and mechanical. 

The nihilist/fundamentalist/academic/scientist will often say that the warmth has drained from the world. All that is left to do is to articulate how the world falls in each specific detail with utter detachment and objectivity(your old village mullah is far superior in the sense that at least he dreams up interesting stories of the decadence of women!)

But despite everything it goes on and you don't believe all that tosh for a moment. The fact that in Lahore at least ten thousand women put on lipstick each morning and/or diligently get their kids ready for school says-to me at least-that the old ways will survive. 

~~~

It is strange to think of it now but we actually saved up to buy music. There was no "instant access" or "one click buys" and, given our lack of money and our wise parents' reluctance to indulge us- we ended up with very small collections (the only other alternative was taping stuff off (or off-er, as the yanks would say)the radio. 

The dougal had this album which in its astounding brilliance was the cheez when it came to coolness. Who else could sing: "There was the Queen, looking tired,just back from a holiday..."? And then there was wonderful tape-sadly misplaced despite your best attempts to keep it safe- of Elkie Brooks'-she of the husky voice fame-selection. Janis Joplin, Peabo Bryson's Feel the Fire (yeah, Peabo!), Sam & Dave's Don't knock it. 

That tape, despite its awful quality,and despite only being only thirty minutes long, had all the warmth of our childhood in it. It is often said that music opens up new doors, extends one's understanding, enlarges sympathies, broadens our outlook, touches some mathematical truth or gives us a glimpse of some greater, finer or grander sense of meaning, harmony, "oneness", even. Without music no tribe, no civilisation. But for us, music was never about a return or about picking up the loose threads; it was and is always about this breathtakingly simple emotion: take it home.

~~~

Still haven't got much money and youtube is down and out in the land of the pure, but the music... "

The Reformation interior

"...the 17th-century Dutch painter of church interiors and perhaps the first purely architectural artist. He created beautifully complex spaces out of Reformation interiors..."

The frontier has been drawn in, the wilderness is everywhere. Your hands broke, the words slipping through them. If I could remember, I'd feel less cold. The human soul in November awaits the first light, forgiveness. You have a sense that there's another room in this room. 

Gagarin, at the frontier: "there ain't no God here". And when he got home?

~~~

'at last no longer longing
in a flowering of lights
[here]
low in the historical dark they disappear into.

...

desire/desire's
inside track.'

---Alan Shapiro

There was a time, there was a time when man was nothing-do you remember? Nameless, sort of. And that time is like now. But for a while we are like nothing, survivors from a golden state, the way golden pollen is older than the mountains (JB). 

Each love, each pleasure is, it seems, also a memory of something else, some older time. There is a kind of "Platonic" remembering which stretches beyond experience (as narrowly construed). But if so much is true, then something of the future, too, is with us already. It is incredible that so much of the world could find its way into such a small space. 

Somewhere, off the central line, there is a tree, a house, a room crammed to the ceiling with books, mostly unread or unfinished. There's something of my life still there. 

Now that Ariel Sharon is dead one thinks: the stark interior, if projected outwards, makes a wilderness of everything.   

habits of the heart

Given the way things are piling up in your life (time, most of all) you have to decide what to read and what not to. It's that simple. Lacking many possessions and not being fastidious toward them has resulted in a blasé attitude to things (though you suspect your wahabi sensibilities have something to do with it as well). So, the question of what to give up and what to keep has never really been a pertinent one. As long as your books are there, your comb is in the right place, then God is in his heaven and all is right in the world ..well, that's probably the only kind of order one can expect (in one's own life) given the way things have panned out.

But the pressing nature of time  means asking, really, what do you want from a book. More to the point: what do you need, and is reading the best way of fulfilling those needs? Already that sounds frightfully self-conscious, far too much like a utilitarian. The lists will pile up and you will end up, like Buridan's Ass, paralyzed by indecision. And if someone were to say to you: east or west, Islam or enlightenment, you would turn and say: Yes!

Ultimately, the problem is that thinking about goodness and being good can often drift apart.  

What kind of wisdom is it you're after, what kind of understanding of life can there be except from within life itself (which must include reading and a stepping back from life,but not be reduced to distances)?

N.Lezard highly recommends John Williams but the thought of reading about the wild west in deeply unappealing. Instead, a name is thrown up in the comments section....

"No new ways to be new, as Frost said. I think that’s a reasonably good statement. There’s nothing new under the sun, sayeth the preacher. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. I think more circularly than linearly. I don’t think there are beginnings and destinations so much as circles that end by closing and starting over again. I can’t think of any fiction that introduces new elements of what used to be called “Human Nature,” nothing that isn’t present, say, in the Iliad and the Odyssey. 

The qualities of character, the machinery of suspense and climax, of mounting action and falling action: I don’t think we’ve seen anything new in that way. There are new clothes, because civilization can change, and we get out of armor and into doublet and hose, and then Brooks Brothers pants, but we’re still the same people, and doing the same things essentially. I think it’s a mistake to think originality amounts to that much...

Chekhov said he worked all his life to get the slave out of himself. I guess I feel my obligation is to get the selfishness and greed, which often translates as the Americanism, out of myself. I want to be a citizen of the culture, of the best the culture stands for, not of a nation or a party or an economic system."

catch a boat to England

The blues ruin the game.
The blues are the game.

Nick Drake's Milk and Honey is still the version, unsurpassed in its melancholy. There something-you don't know what-almost Elizabethan in the singing, as if a tune, a sentiment, a gesture, could somehow slip by, unnoticed, through all those years.

In my mind a line, in the still of night, as your eyes seek out a face, the early hours on the clock (though it's twenty minutes behind the rest of the world) blurred, and a thought is clear, is clear to you now, you know. After the entry of the world-a croissant, a hard boiled egg and some coffee- you've lost it. Something like: conservation isn't holding on to the past; it is allowing the past to grow. A way of life is allowing ourselves the distances. If there was no 'between' there'd be no past or future.

If modernity isolates one man from another (and, more importantly, one man from a woman) then it also isolates us across time. This is the theme of something I'm trying to write on: future generations (and the inability of utilitarianism to capture all of what we deem important in our relation to people and things in the future). The idea can be traced back to Arendt's brilliant opening chapter in Between Past and Future but also is central to Scheffler's 'thought-experiment' in Death and the Afterlife (can be read online: Tanner lectures).

There's no solace in the impersonal, abstract movement of thought across time. I'd rather watch the waves at Penarth, or an old home movie. How do we see other people if we cannot see ourselves?

Sen's Idea of Justice is a real drag and written so poorly. There's something dry and wrinkled, cramped and dusty, about the style of his thought in this book. One can be overwhelmed by the word 'justice'. And do we need a theory?

What of all the drifters, the lives that are barely registered (in the books, the photo albums, God's scrapbook...)? This thought came to you as you started Don Carpenter's book with its clear and crisp writing. In today's Guardian there's a story about Jackson Frank and that in itself reminded you of the great blue's singer, Skip James.

The ultimate story of loss you want to read is Exley's Fan's Notes. But, also, you don't want to just read...

Adam Gopnik on the culture of great drinkers:


'Send out for whisky, baby,
send out for gin.
Me and room service, honey,
well, we're living a life of sin.'

Been invited for drinks this Saturday. But drinking with other people seems like a terrible thing, a terrible waste, too.

Hard Rain Falling.

The only criteria that matters right now is: is it real? A time in your life when you can't take much more artifice (which sounds kind of extreme, of course...putting on your old-world hat you're reminded: there always has to be room for duplicity, hypocrisy, masks,...no-one, except a saint, can live naked)

What would we do without italics? What would we be if we didn't stand askew to the world? What would I be if I didn't stand straight, sober? These old jewish roots of the non-jew non-jew stand me well in these times.

A land, unknown

Nothing is changed
but the world is ended.
Green radiance of a streetlamp in the trees
Shines quietly upon here and now
For time is ended.
The quest is ended.

The single star among the myriad stars
Stands steadfast at the end of night
Over love's earthly house.
Distance is ended.

The single grain of infinitesimal dust,
The mote in the lamplight enters the field of vision,
Is seen, is recognized, is known
As the unique one.

K.Raine (mangled, somewhat).

'K' and 'R' are not so far apart; one is more crooked, the other more gentle. There is the terseness of medieval rigour, a Latin uprightness or reserve to 'K'; R, on the other hand, with the slightest modification becomes a southern letter, utterly open, known, the Sanskrit of the heart.

With time we become a land unknown to ourselves. Our faces and hands darken inexplicably. And time will have taken us upstairs, to the unused room, where lie broken and discarded things, scrapbooks of your childhood, documenting not progress but a lazy Sunday morning spent pasting emblems of silver and gold, heraldic badges, in a wide grey book.

With such soft brown eyes a woman looks my way, her life full of failures and half chances, her breast full of sorrows, a word unspoken on her lips. The clothes on the washing line are frozen at their points; a crow-the fastest I've ever seen- crosses my path, cutting through the cold like a pair of mindless scissors. I remember a day from years ago, chequed flares, a floppy head of hair and a sunken heart, when I was the mayor for an hour, the gold chain placed around my neck so heavy that only a horse could have borne it. The heavy weight of clunking gold on our shoulders, like a chain of names from the past. The gold thread on S's sleeve, thin, delicate, patterned; it catches the light, draws it to itself, is like time freed from itself for an hour.

'Intent on one great love, perfect
Requited and for ever
I missed love's everywhere
Small presence, thousand-guised.'

same as it ever was

Words shall never reach you; my silence will, breaking open like a flower under the spell of the winter light. I have conversed with the black sun, she said.

The same. The same.
then once, in a flash,
fresh ground,...
black, grey, green, and blue
water, stone, grass and sky
and each unique set stone!

---Robert Lowell.

To walk on the road home when the sun is in a different place; to walk with different thoughts in one's mind, sometimes troubled, sometimes not. To approach the road from the east, not the west or to walk down it with other people rather than alone. Everything is the same, everything is different. 

There are no more outward journeys. But in an instant, yes, that close, there was no time either. There are thousands of ways back---even in winter! 

What preparations we make...the lit fires, thick scarves, the extra layers of clothing, wool replacing cotton, the rubbing of hands dry as sticks, stodgy food, tea that scalds the roof of your mouth..and yet, still the cold can't be kept out.

The old place in summer exists-not just in one's memory. It is there, the green that stays green, that is older and truer than all the days passed. It is there like a flower you keep in your top pocket, the brown leaf in your book, an emblem that lasts through the changes, like Zuzu's, or like the two white flowers lasting through the ages.

The colour of the leaf has faded (love dies too), drained in the presence of the black and white pages, but the shape remains essentially the same. Even when we have nothing to say we will have something to say. The red and the green of my country lies open before me: we are bound and free, you & me.

The rains. The wind blows the light away, dancing down the street, kicking the trash as it does so, swirling in a mini whirlwind around the public swimming pool as all the old people wait for the 275. The old people walk like the wounded, less sure of the ground beneath their feet. The wind blows right through us like a ghost. My reflection is dark on the windows and this is an act of kindness on their part. My face, for the world to see, same as it ever was, except for the fine layer of dust that covers it, that makes me look homeless.

Talkin' about a revolution

The starting point of economics is still in the wrong place. It lies in the Platonic world of perfect markets rather than the real world of markets as they actually work in the human and social world.

---Robert Skidelsky.

"Economists have sidelined the once conventional assumption that contracts and markets are complete....market exchanges are endemic to exchanges that are central to the workings of capitalist economies."

---S. Bowles.

At the heart of most economics (though economic theory is, strictly speaking, more open) are the following ideas: economic agents are rational, self-interested individuals. All three assumptions are now under question. These are taken as axioms and are not really refutable (Robbins). 

The result of such self-interested interactions between individuals is the market economy equilibrium. This, it is argued, is the best overall outcome (Pareto efficient) in the sense that it maximizes overall welfare (strictly speaking, it maximizes the satisfaction of preferences or what people want, which is not necessarily the same thing as what's good for them (i.e. their welfare). Also, since the processes of market choices are supposedly free and open they avoid paternalism and encourage liberty (or a particular view of liberty). In addition to this, markets further innovation, risk-taking, and dynamism. 

But here's the obvious thing: markets are not always in equilibrium (and are even subject to periodical crises)...they do not "clear". Secondly, underlying market behaviour is a mixture of all sorts of motives. Thirdly, we live in a world of uncertainty (Keynes, Frank Knight). The old idea of equilibrium ignores money (pure exchange is modeled along the lines of barter even though,as D. Graeber points out, there's very rarely been such a system) and it ignores time and uncertainty (the latter not being the same thing as "risk"). Another way of stating this last point is to recognize that there are imperfect contracts, since some things simply cannot by their nature be foreseen or they may be too costly to work out beforehand and put in the contract. 

The economics of the future, therefore, has to be more pluralistic. More pluralistic as to what drives human beings, more open to the possibility that we are not as self-centred as imagined by the theorists, and more pluralistic insofar as we have a wider set of evaluative standards (i.e what counts as "the good"-both at the individual and social level).

Less Plato, more Aristotle.

MCMXIV

Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

~~~

Wood: stable/unstable. The fragility of all that lasts, miraculously, through the passage of time.

Once you had a secret love: seeing 
even her photo, a window is flung open.

---after Frank B.

There is a kind of perfect light, more measured and less abrasive, the light from the 1970's, when I died. 

There is a type of light that hung about in the top apartment where old Malika used to live, the Egyptian aunt with one good eye and a gold tooth who adopted you, her husband gone six months of the year. We would sit there, unable to talk, and she would feed us endless sweet-dishes. God, the Egyptians love their sugar! With their tea "2" spoonfuls means "4", "3" means"5". Nothing means what you think. A lesson never learnt.

He would return, uncle Saleh, a small-time fisherman from the lowly backstreets who'd found his way to to the big seas and a big ship. He'd return and still be gone, listening to recitations of the Qur'an on a tape recorder with the windows flung open, the sound of it always more mysterious than the text, and he would wonder to himself: what had happened to his life, how had it been traded away so easily.

If a wound hath befallen you, a wound like that had already befallen others.

---Q.3:140

He would bring us back coins and stamps from exotic places but you don't remember him actually saying a word. His mouth always full of tobacco, his teeth deeply stained. 

Flowers die from too much light or too much shade. 

~~~

There is a kind of light that balances all time. In summer, in the south, the light is constant for many hours and cannot be faulted or dimmed, adding a bright edge to everything. In the north-or conditions approaching it- the light and time flow together. A moment of absence, a drifting cloud, and the land is dark with shadow again. There is a late flaring of the light, the "late sublime" of an old man who sees that everything is beautiful, with its own particular charm. He looks out of his tall window-for how many more winters?-down towards some woman and thinks of his own youth, the windows of opportunity. Even regret can seem beautiful on the right stage, if your head is tilted at the right angle.

Hopper and the 4 o'clock feeling, the third hour in a row of silence between them. 

At Essex, in those black-bricked '60s towers, the great monolithic monuments to the disasters of socialism, the windows were sealed to prevent suicides. 

~~~

A said that when the light fell on her skin it was perfect. "If only I could marry again," he said, clinching his fists, meaning: "if only I could bed her". 

the long road

'How I have wished for you
how I wish for you today.'

The moment when all was possible, flashing like the silver across the room, the golden eastern morning light glinting into your classroom, ancient and open, lying the way a god would place it, the same way it's been for years, the old light on your back the same as it was on some other soul, many years ago. 

There was a long road in the long road, a hidden vein to our lives, unknown, thin as a grey word that you found abandoned on the roadside. "It's okay, you don't have to talk".

~~~

The death of a fly...

A fly rests dead on my windowsill. What of it. A plump raisin fly that will not be raised, that had no colour when alive, no gloss to his being, no myriad eyes, no rainbow, oil-spill film over its body. And now in death it has curled up, as if in some final act of resistance. There is no grave, no mourning or mourners. A death alone like every other experienced by his species you imagine. We share so much material with the fly,says the scientist/mystic. All our circumstances altered by a simple moment of forgetfulness. A fly is a fly and cannot escape this metaphysical fact either. 

There is no "individual" fly, no fly with some rogue, expansive character.

Each fly is like the other, living in this weird association, a life lived in mirrors, near windows, the old sun on its back.The tribal affinity of flies-without the extremism. 

This fly-your fly- is so silent, like the last word. 

Leave a window open and they will always make for the light, aim to be lifted on the currents of the wind straight out of the room. Without the fly there is no summer. 

visions of a nomad

"Scavenged images".

"Colour: the one single element that binds it all."

There is something about Thesiger's eye-or is it just the subjects themselves?-that picks out the most noble features of  human beings. You wonder: is there a unity to this book? And the answer is, of course: yes! There's a kind of hardship, a facing up to a threadbare existence, that etches itself on the faces and the hands of these people. What you don't discern is any kind of inner turmoil or division or anxiety.

Was just saying to Alex the other day: people like us (or of our class) will always be out of sorts, having but only a superficial relation to the world we live in and without any recourse to that alienation taking the form of religious consolation.

A shaykh (in Notting Hill, of all places!) once told me: at least people in the west live according to their own 'lights', their own vision of how things should be. And that's about right. For when all is said and done there is something to be said for reconciling oneself to the times one is living in, to finding beauty and meaning (or at the very minimum a modicum of being at ease) in one's surrounding environment, one's culture. Putting all the cribbing to one side, most people seem fairly pleased with their 'way of life'. Can any other life even be imagined? (Wasn't that Augustine's fear:  that people wouldn't feel any estrangement?)

1914-

The long century of exile and displacement. No person can live without a home, a shelter, without some grounding sense of permanence. Cheever writes of the 'American nomad', searching for love. And it has to be said, to be on the 'open road', to be so restless (a Protestant affliction?), can lead to all sorts of inner anxieties. The 'American woodsman' (Calasso). But what of the nomad then, or a particular type of sufi, since both lack the rituals, the deep comforts one associates with place, regularity, order, conversations stretching across time that only the recorded word affords?

J. Berger: the nomad carries the vertical axis of home with him (perhaps because there was always a unity to his or her life was this possible).

This reminded you of Levinas's wonderful 'Jewish Revelation'..how the Ark was carried on a pole, how the truth itself must never come to rest, or be fixed in any one 'image', as it were. Revelation (or personal revelations) are always openings, but they can never really be possessed, owned. What we know we carry with us, and is carried over.

Qutb, you think, once said there was something primitive about Jazz. Yes, but in a modern way...the way a few notes or themes are always present, how they unfold from the beginning and no matter how much the structure is 'loosened up' by variations, no matter how spontaneous or off-key the drift is, the music always comes home or, to put it another way, the memory of home is always just about present. 

The music starts off loyal to the original, down to each note, every key. Fidelity to the score, the way it is. A few random notes are then thrown in, appear all of a sudden. A change of pace, rhythm. Picks up where it left off. a new current, change of direction. The introduction of dissonance into the scheme of things. Playfulness that spins out, like a Greek god parceling out destinies. The first stirrings of something different. The music opens up slightly, like a spring day, the first day of the year, the sky becoming lighter. unlocked, unwound. Becomes expansive, loose, but retains the dominant theme at its heart. Curves out in ever greater sweeping movements, further and further from the centre. Vectors of hope, the unpredictable swerve.Freer, less burdened by fidelity to repetition and ritual. Freedom breaking out of structure. the dizzying thrill of the unchartered, of foreign lands. Into the blue, open space. 

How to keep hold of what is fundamental, essential, true?