'Every true poet likes dust, for it is in the dust, and in the most enchanting oblivion, that, as we all know, precisely the greatest poets like to lie, the classics, that is, whose fate is like that of old bottles of wine, which, to be sure, are drawn, only on particularly suitable occasions, out from under the dust and so exalted to a place of honor.'

'I lower my eyes, huddle. Everything in me and on me hangs down like grey veils..I'm old, I sit and say nothing.'

'They say to me: "Philosophy!" Yet the death that comes before times cancels the later one.'

---Robert Walser.

~~~

We would walk and then dart into a museum, a gallery, a bookshop, small or large, to find shelter, perhaps the only kind available nowadays. Apart from home, of course. That goes without saying. 

To join the groups mulling around in the lushly restored National or to have eye and mind glance over the well-creased spines of the books in a second-hand basement shop amounts to the same thing, really: invisibility, the desire to lose oneself. 

There is no-one to talk to and there is nothing to say. Not that one strives to fail. It's just that the whole notion of success seems suspect. What kind of witness do we want is the question, I suppose.

As a Muslim one has to "bear witness" to (God's) reality. That seems like an incredible thing if you think about it.  

For the last three days I have dreamt of being in London. Someone once said, on escaping from a Gulag: the whole of Russia is one gigantic Gulag. There are prisons within the prison. But if that is true it is also the case that there are brightly lit rooms, unexplored, within the rooms.

~~~

Something as simple as buying a ticket. Floating in a train against the flow of traffic, the warmth of the light in the carriage amplified by the glass. A book, a pencil, a cup of coffee. Holes in your shoes, your hair uncombed and wild. The district line. It has to be. You cut through leafy suburbs where marriages are breaking up, over canals and bridges, looking down to spot some people who have wisely and permanently decided to live offshore. You feel at ease in your well-worn clothes. Have many deep thoughts-which you keep all to yourself. Where are you going? It doesn't matter. Find the stop that is yours, wait for the doors, and before the announcement walk back into time...