the return of spring

A certain tilt of the earth and the light is just right; there is a re-entry into the world of things, from time out of mind. An image of plumpness, of season's fall.  

'Everything she wore was black. Flat black shoes, black stockings, black skirt, black cardigan, a black band in her hair.'
(---J. Berger)

"Of course I am a witch," she said triumphantly. "How else could it be?" There was gold on her shoulders and a steely look in her eyes. "But now I am tired. Let us rest a while". 

There is a certain tilt of the earth and the light is just perfect.

~~~

There is a song that leads me home but whose words I have forgotten. Many an error follows from not knowing the name of things, or from the lack of courage to name it, the way one may shyly hide one's face before a mirror. And yet there is also the idea that that from that shyness will our true face flower and that the knot of the mirror will be undone, remain bright and naked-at least for a moment. Then everything flows. Time moves on and the image cools, becomes a memory. But if the red is true, then it may also become a promise, an anticipation of an outline of reality that can barely be conceived. Spring returns and the high windows are opened...everyone waits, and it is like a wound that has befallen every soul before. What spring brings is a memory of this distant shore, this ancient future that resides in the last room of the heart. 

the anchor of the world

An anchor caught in the mud keeps hold of nothing.
By what kind of arrangement?
It might as well be anchoring the earth.

---Lavinia Greenlaw

One retains, mysteriously, a sense of verticality, some audible order on the periphery of our lives. In the middle ages this would have been the gold, centering and weighing us up/down. There are many lights and many names to remember. By chance some slip of the mind or coarse fumbling of hand will temporarily take discernment away from us and we lose touch with our own image, the great circling of time around our house... 

What we have lost is the imagination's mooring on a long beach of time, the endlessness of summer, the ease of eye not distracted by everything fleeting. The Chinese clock that tells the time only once every hour. I am brought back to myself when someone speaks my name or am remembered in a dream.

With each passing year it seems as if there is less left. Old buildings, a long book, a bit of green wood framing some dark glass, a family meal preserving familiar gestures of hospitality, holding them well into the cool summer evening and its open skies. A few empty and cold bottles, the last peals of laughter, the moon's pale shadow on our face...old toys, notebooks, random accumulations of faded newspaper articles, certificates, an ikon, lists, photographs kept in thick red and burgundy albums above the boiler.  

With each passing year the words to describe your feelings become less precise, your face vaguer and less distinct. Our lives jumbled, our mind practiced on abstinence, the low key notes of recognition. Everything you say and think feels like from another century, another place. It's strange, A said, how when we we're children there were less things to remember. Your style is to resist much, to have no style, the master of no large-hearted gesture..what strange histories work through you. Must you always stand at odds? 

'I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.'

Russian Pastoral

This could be Essex, this could be Scotland. Or Romania or Russia.

I think human greatness is the ability to sit under a tree and imagine the world as it really isn't. I take great solace from trees and their silence. I, like them, have nothing to say and merely smile-the smile of a wise mad man-at everyone and everything that passes me by. I have become old within the span of a week. Sun and shadows riddle my face. To think is a kind of disease. 

Nothing is much more beautiful than to release every thought back into the silence and to feel the dark intensity of evening cover your face, to sit in in-between places, oblivious of time, daydreaming as the light filters down. To be sane in our times is to sleep well and not care if the world goes to hell in  a handcart. None of this matters. Drink well! How wise you were, Khayyam! 

There are trees whose nature-or so you think-it is to choose 'verticality'; there are others that always grow at an angle to the level surface, as if gently reclining in an angle of repose, dreaminess, casualness. Is that angle there from the beginning, in the seed itself? Do the degrees of inclination work themselves out for every tree of this species? There is something wonderful in the thought that for tens of millions of years, a time when moons have passed from youth to adolescence,all such trees have found themselves leaning into the light like old men. These millions of years of shade and solitude, incalculable pleasure, of being at home. Stone. Lizard. Wind. Stars. Then a human being emerges and the tree becomes a poem. Love is found and lost. More time swings through the seas. The last tree is still there: a word, a shelter, all that stands for rootedness. Still more ruins are heaped up. The skeleton of a fish gasps for breath.  An individual tree, even now, is not so very different from the first tree.

when the child was a child

"What is in papaya?"

Nothing. Well, I suppose papaya is in papaya. What a question you ask! [Here I sound like a 19th century bourgeois German father]

...I mean, what is in a chappati?

"Flour!"

Okay, smarty pants, what is in an orange if not orange?

"Juice!"

And so it came to pass on this particularly beautiful morning that I was dis-invested of the idea that everything is always what it is or that everything has an unchanging essence. Even sturdy old papaya may one day find itself, when looked at in a kinder light, to be as delicious as a mango. 

the way of all flesh

The way of all flesh is to grow with splendour for a while and then turn grey, the way the clouds in the last moments of the sun's light one by one lose their colour and inner vivacity. The wheel turns and the clouds freeze in their fifty shades of grey.

There is no peace in the depths of my heart, that old well in the far corner of the estate long since sold, the memory of childhood locked up under the dust of an attic in someone else's house.

Pessoa here sounds like a Bedouin: the abandoned camp, the ashes in the desert, the trace of the remnants of human warmth, laughter, fellowship preserved only in song or in a faint memory that is stirred to life by the smell of tobacco on someone else's thick and rough coat. The smoke in the mirror of life is like an unlived truth. I carry with me a flag, the flag of my defeat to Fate. The face, the face behind the mask rests on her bosom. She carries in her heart many such faces.

What can all this mean? You live a life as if time would automatically return you to some state of innocence and understanding, as if you had some kind of personal arrangement set up for you....instead there is only bewilderment and confusion in middle age. 

My hands grow darker with time. 

It is not leading a double life that troubles you but, rather, leading half a life or, to be more accurate, being led by those fractions.I remember the hours clearly when I am dead. 

~~~

We sit at a swanky restaurant under the stars, our chairs and table placed near the sea. The stars and the wind and the sea the permanent background to our fleeting conversation. The wild blue-green shore of our lost lives. You remember your days of tramping through the city with sandwiches wrapped in silver foil. The hours of silence and rest in parks and bookstores, as close to being invisible as is possible for someone who doesn't suffer, a monk of the streets, oblivious of all that glitz. You catch your dark reflection in a window and stand still in the day, where you are. Is this what you've been reduced to, this caricature? And how will you ever find yourself again. My father, my Jew, would have placed a coin in my hand. I may have lost forever my umbrella and the dignity of my soul. He will stand in front of the sun and offer me a shade in which I can catch my breath, remember an image.

The inner shadow of our lives is encapsulated in a name you do not utter. I fumble in my pocket for a chestnut that fell early, in late, late summer; I keep it safe in the dark and know its contours like the back of my own hand. 

I sit in a garden cafe or on a bench next to a graveyard, the warmth of the sun on my back, the degrees of light perfect for recollection. My hair grown long, my shoulders rounded like a whale's. You have learned very little from books or other human beings. In fact, like Launcelot Gobbo you mouth off to power without any forethought or seriousness.

I am the prisoner and the jailer who has forgotten the key.

There are days when I follow the diagonal out of my life. This Saturday was full of death and the talk of death and words spoken in the wrong way, at the wrong time by the wrong people.

~~~

I sat on a grey chair with little r. "Where is God?". He is in heaven. "Is He dead?" No. "Why can't we see Him...is he very small? " Don't say that. "did He colour in the whole world?" Yes, I suppose he did. "What is He doing now, then?" Having a cup of tea, I suspect. 

It is like a Sunday from my own childhood, the hours after the newspapers and before Sunday lunch and The Big Match. Mint sauce and lamb is being prepared, and much of Wales is in disarray. The dark country of our childhood glistens blackly. A kind of peace that is not earned but just falls your way, crosses your path like a tramp. Or so it seems. The way of all flesh is like our memory, too.

There are days in your life that are full of blank spaces, conversations that you never had. Your heart like a library of unread books. No tree grows out of the green shadow. And I am there, by the coal fire, with my scrap book pasting in the silver badges, shielded from the fierceness of the day, from any consciousness of time.

'All is fixed and root.'

(words by Pessoa and Lavinia Greenlaw)

what happens

What happens in a library happens in my room or in my imagination. I open a book gently, careful not to bend the spine too much. The cost of the book is the last thing  on my mind at this stage. All thought of the history of its transactions and exchange is banished. Whose hands held the book before mine is nobody's business. I have a number in mind and find it with ease. With a light pencil I make faint grey marks at the appropriate place. If an outsider were to see these marks only she would think I am marking time. A pencil always reminds me of distances, of the difference between the eye and the text. I may at times wet my finger to turn a page. The palm of my hand is never allowed to rest. the most perfect book is that which can fit in the inside pocket of my jacket. In a library, of course, one cannot possess a book, only flirt with it.

I note a word I do not know (which is often). In the margin I draw a small _ as a reminder of something I'll come back to. Much could be learned from the words we don't know or don't speak. Better to leave a blank than choose the wrong word, though. Better to keep the mystery of the unknown word with you than rush to a dictionary-even if you never come back to it at a later date. At the back of the book, on its empty pages, you make a list of such words.

What happens at a library is that people do not speak to one another. There is a kind of reverence-true or false-for the word. Outside there is reverence-conscious or otherwise-for life and the cycles of time. This is not so different from my room, or my heart. Some fall asleep with their heads on broad tables as if they were children waiting for a bell to ring. Even though these people may be sleeping together each lives in their own world, never making the leap across into the other's dreams.

There was a word for this in olden times:  ___

You draw a circle around yourself with your thoughts. The last man standing forgets what he's standing for. There are fragments: ___ if __ and __

which Sappho will write out in vertical, which is the way things fall

[
if]
[]
..]
and
[f
all]

I hide in the library and spy on other people. Or see when the last time a book was issued and delight if it has been over thirty years (which is often). For some a library is a return to childhood; for others it is an escape from home...all that silence must mean we've grown up. Have I said that right? 

At a library I once saw a bookish woman with thick-set glasses nearly choke. Everyone got very upset and turned to her, all with their individualized frowns. She coughed some more and blushed and quickly made for the exit. No-one followed her but it was, I thought, an excellent way to steal some books. I sometimes wonder where that woman is now, and what books she reads to her children.

~~~

A borrowed tense.
Achievement of the provisional.

Paraphasia.
A gesture made in musical time.

The unarticled world.
A lapsed geography.

Description in action.
Her rooms always somehow at sea.

A childhood home.
The sprawling brightness of the return.

The intimacy of the telescope.
The becoming of quartz or iron

the discovery of slowness

timescape

The purpose: to keep time together. Everything is working against this.

"The lived duree is not a question of length but of depth or density."
---J. Berger.

Fractured times. Return, again and again, to the small things and places you know, against the tide of what you don't. 

There is a locked-in quality to the day. I sit all day reading about the dissolution of time and before I know it the morning has passed and it is late afternoon. I sit all day without a cinnamon roll (yes, hard to believe, Roxana!) and am oblivious of the quality of light outside. 

No-one believes in walls any more and yet still we stand naked to one another as strangers. 

When time is money...I realize I'm very poor.

Keep it together. Time is abstract, empty, quickening and thinning by the day. Watch the trailer, read the review, get the gist of what's going on, skim an article, get to the bottom dollar, "keep it brief and simple", read a guide book, a guide book for dummies...Marx in less than 100 pages, cut & paste, chicken soup for the soul, instant coffee, scroll down or fast forward to the good bits. Is there such a thing as soft-core porn nowadays? Send an sms, receive a "like", every site trying to grab my attention, flog me something. Plug in, tune in, get with the flow.

....

....

....

You walk slowly down from Monkham's Place, down past the leafy chestnut trees and the cricket field at the corner. The summer dust is mixed with sweat. Up again past the one-storied houses, flat and painted pale blue like temporary shelters. Up to the old railway bridge with its darkened stone near the Roding and you look out for miles ahead, see the land parceled out (by capital?) into an abstract pattern. The land, time out of mind. A church spire. The church empty, no doubt. It is hard not to think of other people before you who have stopped at this point and caught their breath or how others will walk on with heads down in the future. We walk in places nowadays without any sense of continuity or connectivity.

The high summer grass, the light from your childhood which blissfully never changes, the golden light from 1976 like cells or seeds of time itself. The way the light and the seasons change, the moon finding its old position every number of years or so, the ancient sway of the universe and down here in this corner too. One finds in a narrower perspective a wider perspective. As if to say, by being nothing everything can be seen, reported. A bit like Walser or Pessoa, those artists of the small zero.

"Wider, too, the passage of time, the turning seasons, all the lush liveliness that comes and goes and comes again, nature that abides."

---Lawrence Weschler.

You wonder about the lives of your readers, the people who have come and gone from the black sun. How do their lives go on; have they aged, for instance? And what do they have for breakfast? I shall try and remember.

The purpose of time is to keep us together as companions. But, in truth, if that happened time would be timeless, time would cease to be time; time would be space and I would find your name.

~~~

Everything that is good is perfectly still.
(after Zeno)

the inside world

This is nothing like the world you know. Which makes you think: the world you know is a very narrow one. Why is it that the words of academics ring hollow, sound contrived, fake, unrealistic?

In economics one of the reasons for the dullness and academic academic discussions is that the people walking through the gates have no experience of life whatsoever. The academy will attract nerds, losers, social misfits, wankers, berks, people unable to communicate with other human beings at a human level. As if to say: the life of the mind has nothing to do with emotional intelligence or sociality. The structure of the Ph.D also has the result of focusing on small problems and technicalities. Studying such an isolated issue in depth doesn't really lead to depth. But it's also partly down to the way the discipline has evolved, becoming more mathematical, esoteric, ahistorical, and abstract. This implies less understanding of the history of ideas as well as the relation between ideas and ideology and politics. It also means there is less discussion across disciplines which might have led to a more relaxed and open atmosphere. The third factor is pressure: the pressure to publish means writing in a particular way, for a particular audience. Academics, by and large, write for one another.

"Critical thinking". No-one quite knows what it is but we've been-irony of ironies-been brainwashed into believing that we must all be critical! 

The university as a refuge, as a place that is free from commercial interests and the gaze of the philistines. Which isn't necessarily true, of course. The uncomfortable question: to what extent does the university reinforce the dominant trends in modern society? Universities have always been elitist but, more to the point, they've always embodied this division between "knowledge" and "life". The university helps in debunking, de-mystifying and alienating. It helps in encouraging the fashionable idea that "everything is relative" and the very notion that ideas are "fashionable". And when all is said and done: many of the people at the university are thick as swans. 

The problem with criticizing the university is that it opens the doors to the barbarians and fundamentalists who would do away with books, openness and learning. so, one must tread carefully here.

But universities are also full of 'gamers', people who understand what the game is from the beginning: publish, get on the conference circuit, write something trendy, pull the research grants in, dumb down to the students with videos nod and wink to those who have some power. It is also full of mindless bureaucrats who face no accountability. 

What is the difference between an intellectual and an academic?

letting go

The varying degrees of silence, ingrown or homegrown, expanding a friction-less white space. The depth and intensity of different types of silence fluctuating according to temperament, culture, circumstance, levels of freedom. There is a kind of silence in music and there is a stunned, surprised silence; a silence that is cultivated, tended, like a plant, and there is hammer-like silence that is imposed by some blind, gross, heavy-handed process.

One can choose not to speak and in this cacophony of mad voices that might be the only way to keep one's wits about one. Reading rights/writes: what you say can be used against you. 

~~~

The 'Examined Life' has its moments. None of the "aha" ones that you have now come to expect from a book but this whole approach is part of the problem, don't you see?  As if to say: you can just take a word, a sentence, and think of it as a "point" to be tallied up at the end of the day in your wisdom score or as contributing to your understanding. We're hooked to the idea that it's got to make some sense at a deeper, fundamental level. 

Marx was right here: everything has become a commodity, an "autonomous" thing that exists only in a set of impersonal relations, and that is only a part of the universal flow, the underlying swerve of atoms. 

What to let go of, what to hold on to?

~~~

A few pages into Danilo Kis. Demanding. The pages are saturated with images and one's sense are almost overpowered. He writes with a free hand (or it is crafted to give that impression), and an image is always on the verge of exploding into a surreal other world. What keeps us grounded, keeps the story line true, if it isn't sadness, if it isn't memory, a nostalgia for the real.

~~~

Late at night you go for a walk. It is a cool spring night and the stars are out, the moon unusually bright. You walk among dark leaves and the shadows of dark leaves. How old and ancient the stars and moon are! How can our transient lives be linked to them? Before human beings were on earth she too was silent for vast aeons and will return to that condition when we're gone. Already you get the feeling that earth is preparing for our departure.

~~~

The silence between men and women. You somehow thought there was a lot more space in your heart, a lot more things you could say. Even here on the blog you reproduce two or three main thoughts, at best four, again and again. There is always a sense that one day you will wake up and realize you were only a faint dream of a pale moon, one of millions of others, a self on the dark side of the moon, weightless.

~~~

'I forgot your name; the letters of your name move about now unconnected, unknown to each other / Rearranged they form advertisements on buses, they’re on envelopes shaping other names / you’re somewhere now, but all in bits, dismantled, impossible.’

---Pedro Salinas.

garden, ashes

Marriage is one year flames, thirty years ashes.
---The Leopard.

~~~

What were you looking for? You do not know How will you find it then? I don't know.

...

With a  few minutes to kill before the food was ready (Afghani naan and a dish from Baku..and if you ain't had an Afghani/Peshawri naan, you ain't had nothing) I decided to check a small bookstore. Of course, that's a caricature. I was lured there by the doors that were flung wide open and the bright lights and so it was hardly a "decision" by any stretch of the imagination. 

You walk down the steps and your first impression is: there's no chance in hell that these people have ever sold a book. This has to be the worst bookstore in Lahore, I thought to myself. Some of the books were laid out on a 1970's table the way you'd expect fruit at a village store or wares at a roadside establishment to be arranged. Half of the shelves were taken up by old, tattered books with garish covers conveniently labeled under the heading of 'Romance', the kind of books that are supposed to attract dreamy, lost teenager girls I suppose. Most of the books had cracked spines, fading covers and titles that it was a strain to even make out. Your eyes wearily glanced over the titles, mechanically, and it was if your eyes were working but your mind had refused to register the information. This silly, robotic act just to pass the time. 

Faced with a vast, overwhelming sea of information what do you do? Somehow my mind kicked into gear and I decided upon just reading the titles of the books on the top shelf. I would come back again when I had more time and was less rushed (which is never), I thought. Start at the north-east corner. Directions, orientations...where would we be without them?

Then, lo and behold, what do I spot? Again, one wonders at how a small part of the brain-and it did feel like that given the lack of attentiveness-comes to strike upon a particular facet of reality. "What is the final price of this book?" I ask, trying to cut out any scope for bargaining. Let's just get to the end moment and forget the "you said this", "I said that" (this does not work in marital relations, by the way).

So, there you are. That is how you acquired Danil Kis's book. The first page, intensely lyrical, sensuous. To enter a world through attention to a simple object, a door, a brightly lit door that leads downstairs to nothing...

1907-2007

'One day the Earth will be
just a blind space turning...'

There was a final journey, with grey skies above and the timetable neatly folded in his top pocket. The deathly grey look on the other passengers' faces did not trouble him. He noted the number of the carriage and looked out to the slightly curved window one final time, only to see his own insubstantial reflection gazing darkly back at him. It was as if the whole of human history had flashed before his very eyes, down there in the vacant underground spaces. Morpheus completed his crossword and then turned to share a joke with Mises van der Rohe.

Some people tumbled out not realizing it was the final destination, the last day. Businesses and restaurants would continue to flourish up above in the world of men and women, and yet down there a forest would grow one day and one bird would sing in it. The sounds from this sociable little world of theirs gradually lose their amplitude and peter out into a set of muffled half-truths, as if they'd been born beneath the sea, next to the curled seaweed.

A man in a dark grey suit makes his way to the lost and found only to realize it is closed for the day. Nothing can be retrieved he is informed in a matter-of-fact way. There is no good reason to unnecessarily upset the poor man. A woman will look nervously around her and suddenly feel that she shouldn't be here at all and that there's been some terrible mistake. An old man, full of doubts, wonders if his grandchild is waiting for him now that it is teatime. "What must they all be doing?" he asks himself, scratching his head.

When no more exiting passengers can be seen and the shutters of the lift tightly sealed, a woman from eastern Europe suddenly jumps into the last carriage as the train enters the cave's mouth and disrupts the whole solemn passing of time. 

"What do you think you're doing?" asks the stationmaster with what authority he has left.

"I'm only here for a short time,"she responds. "Am I going in the right direction?"

A hundred years later she gets out of what she calls "the green room," calmly steps out of the station into the bright sunlight, her face darkened, her mind stunned by the light's brilliance. She asks me, "is it November now, the time for forgiveness? and proceeds to tell me her story? Despite all this time passing I recognized her immediately by the way she said "Pffft!"

"What took you so long?" I ask.

"Don't you know," she reminded me, "royalty always teaches ordinary people the virtue of waiting?"

lovesick, homesick

'People who are lovesick put off testing their fantasies against reality."
---Wendy Cope.

The life you never lived, the life that went astray, straight out of the picture, was the only real life.

An early childhood that is excessively happy or excessively sad is not something one can escape from. It seems mediocrity is the only way to be well-adjusted.

You would like to think that there is something deep to all this homesickness...that it isn't just you, and even if it is everyone it isn't just some sort of universal delusion. 

homesick: sick of home as well as...

~~~

1912. 

The sun is out on a Sunday afternoon-as it always is. The scene is timeless. It will go on forever. But already lurking around the corner is the Spanish flu and the deep shadows of the Trenches.

~~~

Life is change, life is resistance to change. There is no more time to imagine loss; it is slipping through our hands, minute by minute, staining our fingers yellow. 

The East End, with its vagabond soul, has always been a place of transience, sunken rivers whose names would be forgotten, of languages that introduced spikes and hisses and a new way of imagining the sky. The laughter from a village is transposed to the boxed-in streets. Our love is missed in the twinkling of an eye! I see an old picture and think I can recognize someone; I look in the mirror and think I have become a stranger to myself. 

~~~

You may be suffering from a fundamental incapacity to understand life. Which in itself is nothing surprising. It's just that at the age of 27 you thought there might be some clarity, or some progression to it. With the passage of time words have become muffled, thicker, less comprehensible. Cling on to what you know to be true and repeat the dark words that glisten on your tongue. 

If one could go back would it be a century to this day of charmed innocence? Why are some people destined to live life backwards?