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?