...

A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He 
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture 
for them. 
They are like grains of rice. 
He wonders if it is possible to shrink something 
out of existence. 
He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess, 
if they have any sense of scale. Perhaps they think 
the test tube is a glass barn ... 
He wonders what he should do with them; they 
certainly have less meat and wool than ordinary 
sheep. Has he reduced their commercial value? 
He wonders if they could be used as a substitute 
for rice, a sort of woolly rice . . . 
He wonders if he shouldn't rub them into a red paste 
between his fingers. 
He wonders if they are breeding, or if any of them 
have died. 
He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep 
counting them . . . 

---Russell Edson

~~~

+++

---

The cypress is in pieces...it's asleep

in the road, in its own ascetic shadows, green and dark,

just like it is.

M. Darwish

The anarchist spirit...free not to make sense. The story, the sturdy, improbably impulse [that has been with us from the beginning].
(Tim Winton)

the mirror that faileth

For anton,

What comes after this Homeric pause?"
…as if this were a lovely dream
in which prisoners of war are relieved
by fairness of their long, immediate night,
as if they now say:
"We mend our wounds with salt"
"We live near our memory"
"We shall try out an ordinary death"
"We wait for resurrection, here, in its home
in the chapter that comes after the last…"

---Darwish

The pause between our lives, our words. 

You drive in the swirling dust storm, the lights clouded out, bags and debris either caught in a vortex or suddenly freed from its gravitational pull and set free on a tangent. The city is transformed and barely recognizable. The same road that you travel on a thousand times now appears like a side-road in some provincial part of a country you've never visited. A few people twist and contort their bodies to avoid being caught up in it. 

Each year the dust adds a layer of greyness to your face. An image fades, the music hisses and I wonder: did I ever know you?

From dust to dust. This is how I speak. 

~~~

An hour before we had sat together with a sense of last things, a group of friends at a farewell dinner. There were succulent legs of lamb, chops, chicken grilled on hot coals. The wives were tired, bored, somber with their plotting eyes. Only the young and unattached spoke with any freedom. Little r and the twins ran around the long tables. Someone asked me: what's A's story? In five minutes? 

T told us of how one wise old villager was asked by the youngsters: "old man, tell us how much food have you eaten in your life". He looked puzzled. "We mean, if you could add it all up how much would it come to?". The old man thought and thought (for he was one to take all questions seriously). His memory is good, his mind agile. "I think," he concluded, "if you put all the chickens and quails and other birds in one room, back to back and on top of one another it would fill this very large room." It is hard to tell whether he or the audience were satisfied with this answer. It is not always easy to add up what we've brought to and taken from this world

~~~

Dust, dust...I think I saw your face, Khayam, in the gaze of a world-weary dog. Something of your ancestor's temperament entered my soul, too, and now I recognize your single pulse which beats irregularly amongst mine, a gold coin with foreign script. There is dust on my hands and in my hair but A brings me only food, no wine to forget. I reach home and look to the mirror of bronze and hidden silver. She pauses and my mind clouds over with sleep and a vortex of dreams take shape, and there I will see myself more clearly...

privelege

We think of certain moments in our lives as being representative of the whole story. There is a story, there has to be one. Nothing is quite as essential as believing there is a category of things, places knowledge...that is essential, real, primary. We privilege that arc of our lives or those particular sentiments, thoughts, behaviour over all others: this is me...all the other times I wasn't really myself. Of all the selves I could have been this was it. Or that " me" was all thought, all will, not the frail, uncertain, and changing body.

We privilege our own situation, too. The times we live in are the defining ones. It's a turning point, a time of crisis or glory but always a time that is central to the unfolding of human history. One expression of this is our inability to imagine other people in different times or places as being genuinely happy or satisfied. Our lives will always appear to us as the best. We live in the best of times, the worst of times. I am the first man, the last man.

We privilege certain people over others. There's a central class or group and then there are the outcasts, the marginals, the " lower" types. There's no " up" without a " down"; no centre without a periphery. The damned and the saved...

The trinity of centre/ hierarchy/ origin doesn't always have to hold. At times we have imagined each person to be a centre and sometimes we' ve  believed in many gods.

This sometimes gets extended: humans are at the apex of all life and deserving of greater rights. The earth itself is the great pivot on which the whole universe turns.

Or if we are not the centre, or at the centre, where all the action takes place, then we imagine some other, fundamental place or being that represents this carved out area of privilege: God or Eden or utopia or home being the real deal, the sacred, the central realm that resists change or dissipation. We will walk through the door and things will fall into place, come together, make sense again. The fractures will be healed and we' all be whole again. The music stops, finds its resolution, the image comes into focus, two people meet...to find a centre that was previously lost...is there any other story we tell ourselves?

To have a centre, an origin...what would it be like otherwise?

On the other hand, aren't large parts of modernity opposed to this view. If there is only sovereign becoming then we posit a centre/ origin, construct the foundations ourselves and they are only provisionally fixed points. Don't Darwin and Freud work to de-centre us? Democracy, too? If the centre is everywhere then why bother talking about centre? Also: a rose is just a name, red is just a secondary quality. Our lives are brief and full of jumble. What holds them together? Is there a fixed, given stable central identity any more or do we have to accept the fragmentary position we find ourselves in? Value doesn't inhere in things or places any more..it is just 'lyingly added'. That is the summation of our predicament, then, and the full blown consequences of accepting a floating world is that we, too, become insubstantial, drifters, nothing but a "thinking reed".   

old hat

He gained one formulation from Sufism which exactly matched views he had arrived at independently: this was contained in the word baraka […] Graves compared it to the Elizabethan word ‘virtue’, in its meaning of ‘act of blessedness’. Essentially, however, the word means – in his words – ‘the sudden divine rapture which overcomes a prophet or a group of fervent devotees’. He assimilated the concept into his own scheme of thinking and feeling. In his hands it becomes more familiar and understandable than it is in Shah’s [account of Sufism]. Thus, durable goods that have been used with loving care, until they disintegrate, possess baraka, as do handmade objects, with their ‘glow of care’. ‘Baraka will never become a scientific term’. In literature baraka means ‘quality of life’; and, like religious ecstasy, is attained by ‘self-hypnosis’. The poem – the true poem – that has barakahas an ‘inspirational quality’ which defies critical analysis. Baraka came to mean, to him, ‘love’, while ‘anti-baraka’ meant ‘lovelessness’. The concept figured strongly in many of the poems he wrote after 1960, but its essence had always been an essence in his poetry.
(Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, His Life And Works, 1982: 506)
---from Melinda Lovell's lovely page.

***

The chances, the statistical chances, are that something will go wrong, pear shaped; if not today, then tomorrow. The random gene thrown up, the moment of thoughtlessness, the movement of historical forces, some iron law, working its way silently into your path...fate up against your will. Art or love may give it the temporary slip, but it is as permanent as gravity. 

***

You bump into a friend after ten years...it is painful to write this...your best man, in some ways a younger brother. Already this sounds false...But there he was. He walked past you. Then you realize he probably can't recognize you. There's no spark left on his face...it's as if he's not really there but locked up somewhere. There are no words spoken. As I turn to leave he nods as if to acknowledge me. It is profoundly sad to see the liveliest face, the brilliance of a mind reduced to a shadow, a shell. It dawns on you that you may never really see him again....

"So, you're playing fast and loose"

~~~

'A name, a life sum, a mere mark left by a man wholly in that succession of centuries.'

We are carried apart, me & you, in two different directions by two currents of time.

On the fifth day...

I read the book backwards, reciting marked words and passages into the unknown. There was a face that translates the emotion shared by a whole people; a face that has an infinite repertoire of expressions, like that of the first man, the first woman.

Some hands hold all the gifts within a moment of time, or so the ancients believed. 

I find words and little else. Your image reaches me at set intervals, like a wave. Despite the years I reach only the outer limits of understanding. The picture is never that clear. What range of possibilities is open to each human being and for what duration; that is the eternal mystery. There is a single place in the world where a woman looks in a mirror and adjusts her hair and the world lives on, passionately.

The heat surrounds us today, we are bound by it and a thought begins to stir in the mind. The shades are drawn down, a kind of oasis is created in the heart of the city. The city is the mirror of the soul. The sun traces an ancient pathway, familiar to others. What unites us often blinds us. There was a word for this spellbinding moment but it has fallen, fallen out of use. 

The flesh of a peach is so soft and succulent; the cold heart of stone a stark reminder.

We move in time imagining everything else stays the same, that it will be there when we return. We move, we fall, and each moment of that descent is a pause, a guide mark, and a segment of a curve as solid as a chain of gold. Each movement in space brings us back to a point which, because we happen to be on it, seems to us a center.

There is much longing within time.One might go so far as to suggest that this longing is time. 

The Land of the Pure

In the land of the pure there can be no innovation, no false idols; only the same old hypocrisy that doesn't change year after year and  the same whoring heart, faultlessly unfaithful to the last dregs. Nothing much holds the wall up. On that side wild growth and snakes; on this side decay and falsehood.

Ready to go...but where? Get the shots, the dope, then north by north-west and I'm out of here.

~~~

Religion, you feel, would be quite a good thing if it wasn't for religious people.

~~~

The centuries. Everything in Yourcenar's book is marked by the need to be understood against the background of time. Nothing could be further from the thoughts of the moderns (you suspect).

Evaluation, judgement, reflection...all that requires taking a step out of the stream. One can deny the flux or say there is only flux; alternatively, the third way suggests a way of accommodating oneself to it. The great line: 'nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.'

Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' and 'Ugetsu' (finally!) have been downloaded (er.. "bought"). 

~~~

After Life

recollection

Is nostalgia just a construct? 
I can't remember.

Tea is just an excuse. Why does tea bring back memories on its own?

~~~

There is a surprising amount of nostalgia (what, are we talking quantities here?) on the black sun. You suspect that in a life less stalled there would be a lower quantum of it (is there some magical formula?). There are lists to remind us of what we're missing: the 20 books one must read; the 100 films one must see; the ten places one must see before one dies and so on and so forth. If you live in linear time something will always be lost and never regained. Come again? There is a list which I cannot find.A list that is lost.

~~~

There will probably be less nostalgia as time passes. 

If you're constantly on the move, if technology is rapidly changing, if you live in a shape-shifter's world defined by the latest fad, fashion, or trend..then what will you be nostalgic about? Is something deep-rooted in human history about to to be lost, erased from memory-or at least set to decline in significance? 'You are reaching the limit of your storage capacity'.

Nostalgia for the book, for instance, only makes sense if one has been brought up in a culture where books are part and parcel of the culture or your individual life. But what if that isn't the case? Will people even remember that there was a different way of paying attention, of being friends, of preparing food?

But there are limits..and if you don't let go how can you move on (gosh, that does sound like Oprah, doesn't it!). Is nostalgia a function of limitation? Surrounded by things I have less attachment to any one thing? 

~~~

There is a restaurant on High st. Ken where you can sit for two or three hours and not think of time. No matter how bright it is outside it is always cool and dark inside. You have been going there for ten years and have only ordered one dish (I kid thee not!). And the tea is probably the best tea in the world. Tea, conversation, and ease represent the old world (not that you're averse to coffee). There's a small bit of Persia in London. And that is the great thing about global cities: they gather people who bring with them in large carpet bags a treasure of objects and memories and stories so that even when the original place has vanished a trace of it lives on (in a word, a gesture, a taste, a recollection). London, the great whore, the great hoarder. 

Nostalgia: for what we could have been. 

He sees a woman in the train across from his. In a casual moment both stare out and catch each other's glances. That is how faint the connections are. He wonders. Two hundred years ago they could have been master and slave. Now there is the formal equality of strangers. The equality of exchanges. Is nostalgia anything but a moment for a moment?

Words were spoken. A world away from my heart. Your star is rising, mine is falling. A note was played, and the fingers retained a dim memory of its form. There was the tinkling of china in Kyoto. Introductions were made as the snow fell effortlessly. London was the beautiful city in which everything happened, and I its exile. Of the thousand days that have passed, the mornings lied through, and it appears I lived but one night unspoken. Outside, beyond the glazed windows it was winter time, summer time, and only my head and book above water. Outside still further, the Roding found another day, forgiving all those who walked by her side. What ocean had she left?

Little r stood on a tree stump, we at her feet, and she proclaimed all time had come to an end. But inside time passes faster than I can recall.

There was a time when I did not know you Why do I find myself in what is lost?

A fisherman's net lay discarded, heaped under the sun's hours, dreaming of one particular fish.

She asked, "would you a day, a single day in which to drown in the white room or,like this, the sound of the sea, the movement of time's hands?

This return, a reentry to the place before the first things were broken, the first words spoken. The glance, the hesitation deep in your voice, the edge of desire...

You look for dim reflections of the sun' light on pebbles, the thousand-fold universe of self-sustained miniature worlds. The light spills from trees, but at ground level it is already darkening, disappearing in this final act, as transient as snowflakes. It breaks into shards, fragments, warm globules, narrowing down to essentials in acute angles in dark corners. A black sun..

The white room of your heart, a world of many directions, in which a black sail from the east strays, dark and true as the words of night.

nothing to lose

Let us not talk of injustice today. If you are a man you have already forgotten woman, if an Israeli then you barely imagine the rags Palestinians cling on to. Let it go. Let us not think about the injustice against black people or against jews or against muslims. There is no injustice against the poor by the deservedly rich. What would it mean, today, to think of and speak to another human being? The lost, the list of things and people and things lost is no longer a list.

...

I scatter you before me line by line with a mastery I only possessed in beginnings.

....

Darwish.

Time is a scarecrow
Time is a crow
with nothing to lose.

In the cave/stove
I assume an 'I',
assume a you,
together, 'we'

I have my eye on you.

[Before]
You[
Scattered like petals before my bride,
like petals after my death.
Sun and scar, indelible,
one.

Post title

Books, maps, ways out, enigmas, the enigma of capital buried. The unread, the unsaid. A clearing, a  grove, a patch of land hidden from the world. Old Hazlitt, a memento from Kyoto, the blurring of the old and the new. Leonardo, commodified, down to the mystique. Dollar ink to write a book, shades to protect your eyes from the excessive light; headphones to keep the world of sound out. Gelpi's beautiful book on Denise. Jonas, quiet for the moment. The tree of knowledge, the tree...

"If you continue to work and to absorb beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old."

The opening gambit from Casal's book, Joys and Sorrow. Isn't that another Mir? why is 'gambit' a tripping up? In the beginning must we always fall? For who, what? First base.

The old maps were more accurate and so were thought to be less accurate. Abstraction and the clearing (Scott's Seeing Like a State). This distancing, in order to see more clearly. Here we are, post title, with nothing to say...

~~~

"For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free".
---John Berger.

Are there any other kinds of freedom?, Brando asked.

~~~

There is something a lot more enjoyable in writing that comes from personal experience, from having lived well-with an open hand a free heart-in the world. The first lines of Casal's book suggests just this quality; others include: Peter Brook, Thomas Merton. The writing is not about ideas of knowledge per se (if there ever is a per se), but the simple expression of forms (of words, music, images) that have been lived through...an incarnation of a truth in the body's gestures: the wave of a hand, a wise smile, a restrained gaze, the resigned shrug of the shoulders, a laughter that doesn't mock, and a thousand other manifestations or possibilities.

Why do you struggle to think of female writers in the same way, or do you? Carol Shields comes across as wise and you'd expect any biographical work to show that. You're very keen to read the new biography of Penelope Fitzgerald since she, too,  appears to have had a wise head and heart. Then there's the more enigmatic Stella Bowen (who you've only heard of via J.B.). No, this isn't a gender thing. If there is a distinction then it is about abstraction and theory on the one hand and a worldly 'philosophy' on the other. F. Rosenzweig, again.

a mysterious unclarity

After the storm there was no storm.

The memory of things lasts, like the afterglow of a brilliant, vanished world, or an image that survives down the centuries, inhering in the blood- memory of a people.

After the storm the world was not the world. Everything was inverted, strange, and yet familiar. A tree at your feet. Like a drunken Li po you wanted to dive into the watery image, the imaginary world. Your hand would lead the way and your heart would follow. Your hand pure, full of sin...

After the storm the light returned, the sky brightened. Hours could be found in a moment. This late flaring of the sun like time regained. The light leaned into a mild blue breeze, touching every surface, becoming universal. It reached the west of Wales, a bay that suddenly lies flat and open to the skies. Like a grave, the pool that gathers leaves and twigs and bits of broken images to itself, it was a time of indistinction. Like Monet's pond, or love, or something.

To walk in the dark with an image in your heart. If faith is below the left nipple then where is a lack of faith?

The dark hunger of a life, a world in the dark pool of your eyes. A storm in a teacup, the tea sipped with infinite calm a thousand miles away.

A woman asked you for a word. You asked what it would be worth. " A picture," she said, a picture of a storm.

'If I have said nothing of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment...I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting..a face broadly formed...This tender body varied all the time, like a plant...'

---Yourcenar.

mysterious clarity

He achieved that rarest of  things; a heart free of bitterness.

---G. Dyer, on Camus.

~~~

What shape is the human heart, again? Oblong? Must one be outside it to see it clearly?

---after Holub.

~~~

It is said of P. Fitzgerald that she wrote (I like to say 'writes') with a "mysterious clarity". Nothing really happens and maybe nothing is meant to happen. That is life. Instead there is a cool, plane surface of prose on which, now and then, one detects a faint scratch; it is as if a whole world lives in that groove/grove or as if the backdrop to a life is suddenly illuminated by what goes wrong.

~~~

What would it mean to accept the cards one has been dealt, to not think or hope too much that the next twist will deal you an ace? For some, either by choice or temperament, either by ignorance, lack of will or because they've faced terrible circumstances, there will always be a foreboding sense of a deepening darkness. The world is a dark place and when one thinks of the coarse thinking, the violence, and all the hatreds it is not unreasonable to favour withdrawal, quietness, escape. 

~~~

Slowly reading Yourcenar and the question that strikes you again and again-and one that is quite alien to us in many respects-is the one posed by Hans Jonas: how do we go on without a sense of immortality or the timeless?

When one thinks of one's thoughts, words and deeds in the light of eternity one is brought face to face with the reality that much of what we say and do is fragmentary and not worth noting. From a Muslim perspective we are told that the body, too, will bear witness to what it sent forth into the world, that it, too, will be accountable since it is a part of reality and shares responsibility with the soul. Our lusts, our desires, our highest desires...how do these fare with time?

What shape is the heart, again? Were there other rooms there? Some abandoned, like camps in the desert when the travelers have moved on, the structure of the coals and ashes collapsing like the last lines of a poem. A thief, a thief has entered another with the stealth of a fox in the night. You dare not switch on the lights and let the fox tug gently...Everything has its time: the flick of the wrist, the card; the same constellation of the stars comes around again, and the fox's footprints, fresh, deep, and invisible in a heart white as snow.  

notes without a text

Bazlen was a great Taoist master. He taught me more than anyone else, without teaching anything. He was rather against writing, he didn’t think one should necessarily write. He thought one ought to try to be in some way, without necessarily writing about it. He had a stupendous line, which is published in his posthumous writings—“Once people were born alive and slowly they died. Now one is born dead and slowly has to come to life.”

---Roberto Calasso.

F. Rosenzweig:

"My life has fallen under the rule of a "dark drive"..The small-at times exceedingly small thing called "demand of the day" which is made upon me in my position at Frankfurt, I mean, the struggles with people and conditions, have now become the core of my existence..Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, bymen rather than by scholars...[T]he question asked by human beings have become increasingly important to me...

Everyday life, it is clear, cannot possibly be ignored; one cannot exist entirely in the sublime realm of theory, no matter how "essential" it may seem when compared to dull, tedious reality."

~~~

A book, what is in a book? Today there is only an imagined strawberry and a mouth.
What can one say? We live in a world where everyone wants to say something, and some people want to say everything. 

one must write, engage, communicate, "express oneself" (unless one doesn't have much of a self in the first place)..one must say "one"....but the name that names least...

Well, what have you got to say for yourself?

~~~

When you're grading papers even the movement of a fly appears interesting. Very rarely will a fly loop around a still centre; and there is nothing casual about its movement. The flight of a fly is full of suspicion and lacks any grace. It becomes apparent why it is so low down on the evolutionary scale. After all these millions of years you would have thought it would have added something to its repertoire, something beyond its innate cunning nature. 

~~~

When it comes down to luck or capricious decisions one often says something like: 'as the gods would have it' and not: as God would have it. Is there something about chance that necessarily implies plurality?

The Caging of America

The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time...

A prison is a trap for catching time.

---from Adam Gopnik's brilliant New Yorker article, The Caging of America.

~~~

Everyone likes a good survivor story...the man or woman who comes out of all the mire clean, at peace with themselves, not bitter but thankful. Of course, that helps deflect any criticism of the system. Focus on the individual case of redemption and not the damned in hell or about who helped put them there. Is this really just segregation by another name?

Who hasn't america been afraid of? Gooks, Chinks, the Yellow Peril, the Red Man, reds under the bed, niggers, joos, faggots, dikes, sodomites, muzzies, witches, drunkards, crack-heads towel-heads, catholics, Mongolians, the Irish; popery, fundamentalism, socialism, pro-lifers, anti-lifers, losers, liberals, drop-outs, people, the people, gun-carrying loners, big government, any government, high-finance, no finance, the insane, the U.N....

There is something, however, about the faces of these people which causes you to immediately think of one word: dignity.

~~~

America has more than 6 million people in jail, on probation (or parole).

3 % of the adult population.

700/100, 000 (which is 4 or 5 times the European average)

But that's just an average figure. For black men it is:6850/100,000

Pathologies of the institutional life

One of my greatest desires has to be the desire to be left alone (not to be alone, which is quite another thing).

At the university one increasingly hears a lot of jargon, bullshit, fakery, pseudo-serious posturing, a lot of old malarky, and codswallop dressed up as sophistication, and so on. We will "produce" (that should be a giveaway for starters): "leaders", "world leaders",..we will be "a centre of excellence" (well, yes, who is going to say we'll be a centre of mediocrity or just-getting-through?). Critical thought, critical reasoning..our students will be "global citizens" in a multi-cultural, fast-changing, technology-saturated, false world of soundbytes and meaningless aggression. Ethics 101, business ethics 102, will guide students on how to come across as, well, "ethical".

We believe in racial/sexual/gender/ethnic/ physical/religious and all other kinds of equality (except we don't). We must "look forward". The knowledge economy, for Christ's sake. In the space of 140 characters describe your contribution to the university. Absolute subservience, I would say, Sir!

Let us set up a committee to decide on the value of committees. Aha, communism lives on in the uni.

We must "empower" the students today, the leaders of tomorrow (and bollocks to all of you in the past). There is zero tolerance for zero intolerance. We must "equip" our students with the "skills" that will enable them to navigate an ever-changing future, but also prepare them for the worst (that they will not have a future thanks to us).

We must produce generalists for the market..that is what the market wants...people who are so general that they don't know or can't be bothered to answer any questions. We must move to massive online education. Why not multiple choice questions (they work so well for SAT)?

Descartes was:

a) a town in rural France
b) left back for France
c) an 18th century prostitute
d) I do not know.

Partial credit will be awarded for all rough work. Only answer in the space provided. This is a closed book exam, though you may phone a friend. Do not write in pencil. Do not write in pencil...Do not write...

Kandahar

'That will not bring back the things we loved: the high, clear days and the blue icecaps on the mountains; the lines of white poplars fluttering in the wind, and the long white prayer flags; the fields of asphodels that followed the tulips; or the fat tailed sheep brindling the hills above Chagcharan, and the ram with a tail so big they had to tie it to a cart. We shall not lie on our backs on the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We shall not read Babur’s memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way round the rose bushes. Or sit in the peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh.

We will not stand on the Buddha’s head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes-the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields; the sweet resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or a whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet.’

---Chatwin.

~~~

The long view.

For a brief moment you can imagine the vague light, the crackling fires, the poor people huddled around it,warming their hands, as not so different from a scene depicted by Brueghel.

It is strange to think just how deep-rooted the instincts for human settlement and the great desire for regularity are? Habits and habitat. A phrase from Smith has always struck you: "habitual reflection". When does freedom become our second-nature?

~~~

In your darker moments you sometimes think Pakistan will go the way of Afghanistan. Certainly we've been pulled to the frontier and coupled with the influence of the towel-heads things have really deteriorated. But, on the other hand, there must be at least 5,000 women in this city who wake up and put on some lipstick before 11 o'clock-for work or the sheer pleasure of it; and tens of thousands who get their kids ready for school. That must count for something in the long run.

We tend to see things from the perspective of our own lives, the narrow time-horizons of a human life. It is difficult to imagine that others before us suffered the same wounds, were touched by the same rapture and joys. And yet that sense of strangeness is not so different from how we think about the lives of our contemporaries in far-flung places. The fundamentalists may be very different from us, but the fundamentals still apply..."a kiss is still a kiss.."

The Platonic Form of McDonalds

'They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work'

~~~

McDonalds is the same all over the world. The same food, the same design of the "restaurants", the same colours, and even the people are trained to say the same things: "Have a good day, please come again". Fuck off! It is very odd to hear a Punjabi being so polite and one can almost see them gritting their teeth as they switch to McDonalds training mode. Follow the rules and repeat after me: I am a human being..I am a human...I think the background "music" may vary but it must be an equal music...i.e. equally mind-numbing.

The funniest thing at McDonalds is their attempt to add a "cultural element" to their "menu". This year it's 'the Brazilian' because of the World Cup. Ain't no way I'm going there to order one.

In this way capitalism resembles communism-and that isn't too surprising when one considers that both are deeply (though not necessarily exclusively) materialistic in nature.

It is perhaps surprising, unless one thinks about it, just how conformist and mechanical capitalist societies are. Of course, the state has played a large role in the homogenization of the population (education, national myths, language, exclusive loyalty..Simone Weil: the state and money are the new gods). But the market also requires standardization (property rights) and commensurabilities (how else can exchanges take place?). The false universalization of the market (and economic theory): we are rational, self-interested individuals.

At the Camps: "I was just doing my job". Each being is just another number, replaceable by a machine or another "human". Does it make a difference? When does it all begin, though? Is this not just a continuation of the practices and thought of the war machine? Line 'em up. The disciplining of bodies. The speaking up for "one" nation, the zeal to lose oneself in abstractions, to imagine the map is the reality.

~~~

Nature likes diversity. Was thinking about this when a  friend said: the mullahs' attempts to enforce uniformity (from dress code to profession of faith) go against nature. Is that why fundamentalism leads to so many deformations, so many warped souls?

~~~

The role of the unstructured in our lives. The permanent background of it (death, laughter, play, the imagination, grace). The law vs the lawless heart. The unsayable. The name that names least is the name. Of course, one might also say that it is a different kind of order. Eco: the open work is still a 'work'. A broken circle.

~~~
Will Self has a fab. article on the end of the novel.

Faith & Doubt

"A chance transformed into destiny by a continuous choice": my Christianity...

A chance: from birth and more broadly from a cultural heritage. sometimes I have replied to the question: "If you were Chinese, there is little chance you'd be Christian." To be sure, but you are speaking of another me. I cannot choose my ancestors, or my contemporaries. There is, in my origins, a chance element, if I look at things from the outside, and an irreducible situational fact, if I consider them from within. So I am, by birth and heritage. And I accept this.'

---P. Ricoeur.

~~~

In the faith of the fundamentalists there is no room for doubt but you have to remind yourself that in the best traditions there has always been ample space for uncertainty. Laughter, trust in the unknown, too, are not unrelated to such attitudes, perhaps? To which the question might be pushed back one stage: at what level is there doubt and why this desire to move it back all the way to the origins? Isn't that just bad faith? Doubt love, one's senses, one's common sense, the world as it is, the mind's capacity to know (why does this even become a question?), then what is left? And why is this a starting point in the first place?

If to be human is to be finite, limited, then is it a superhuman capacity or effort to accept one's limits? In this light Rumi says: "He who knows himself knows his Lord" (to which there's an added commentary: to know the finite is to know something of the infinite). Of course, "knowing the finite" is only a limit.

~~~

I think as one grows older one understands less-or at least understands that one doesn't understand that much and probably never will. You also grow more confident in leaving the crutches of books to one side (I read that somewhere). 

To accept the "chance element" in one's life? To do so one already has to have faith, some kind of faith. You can't imagine an acceptance of all chance elements being a truly human response.

I sometimes pray: "please God, don't make me religious". To be religious is to be questioned.

~~~

Academics often get stuck on "perhaps" and "maybe", and have a tendency to say "yes & no". Given the certainties of so many other people this is a good thing. But surely there's a time to say: No. Yes. No?