Ghost Dance (the Penultimate Speech to the White Man)

There is no time now to stitch together the song of what is lost.

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It is true that Malcolm only became a problem when he stopped talking about "the white man" but something needs to be said. Of course, that is not to say that "the east" isn't a sham, the "mystical" east of the swamis, sufis and fakirs. You'll still take the secular and progressive Quaid over the religious and backward-looking Gandhi any day. If truth be told, though, neither matter today.

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'...The white master will not understand the ancient words...
because Columbus the free has the right to find India in any sea...
and the right to name our ghosts...
but he doesn't believe people are equal...

Take the gold of the earth and the sun, and leave the land of our names
and go back, stranger, to your kin..and look for India.

So do not bury God in books that promised you a land in our land
as you claim...

You will lack an hour of meditation in anything that might ripen in you.

[He said]: " I am the master of time, I have come to inherit your earth."

[but] Time had enough time for us to be born in her, and return from and to her.

Don't write the decrees of the new god, the iron god, upon us, and don't ask the dead for a peace treaty...
we had longevity here, before England's rifles, before French wine...
and time is a river, when we stare into the river time wells up within us...
Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

I will not sign my name to the peace treaty between the murdered and the killer, I won't sign my name to the purchase of a single hand's breadth of thorn around the cornfields...

I wrap myself with my name
to fall into the river.
And nothing remains for us in the new time.
Here our souls glitter, star by star, in the space of song.

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build..
there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct
there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead
who come by dawn to drink their tea with you

so leave

some vacant seats for your host..they will read you
the terms of peace..with the dead.'

Darwish.

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It is hard not to see this in the context of Palestine: I will not sign my name!

But there is something more general here, something that needs to be said (not just in reference to the destruction of the Earth...50% of wildlife destroyed over the last forty years). 

What will the historians write of all the defeats, of the nameless ones who don't make it to their books? Shikast: already we have slipped off your page, out of your memory, the last word on your lips our freedom. To imagine that here, too, were human lives, broken hearts, is not admissible in an age of minerals, and the iron cross. What music will you play for us now in your chambers if not a death march or something out of tune?

  

why can't everything be purple?

'Blind certainties that were going to prevail
Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch...
Make free
Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife
high on a windblown hedge.'

How to get back, you know, eye-level, leveled breath, down to the last moment, square with me. What goes on after the cards are dealt, face-up, telling it like it is?

north

 I love the sea and the mountains. Brooklyn really had the same sense of being beyond measure.
---D. Nurkse.

No one missed him.
The pool players cleaned the table,
rack after rack, adjusting the score
with beads on a string in midair,

the dart players paused, with pursed lips,
pushing the feathers through air
as if they had just found an opening,

but my father had not returned,
not even as a ghost, not even
as a tremor in a punter's hand.

I locked the iron door at first light,
lowered the steel shutters,
clicked the seven padlocks,

and instead of my father,
to whom I'd spoken all my life
with bitterness, with sarcasm,
I spoke to that uncertain moment
between false dawn and dawn
when the traffic roars north,
just streaks of trapped light,
lamps go out in the charity ward,
and the tenements light up,
the highest floors first:

why can't you rest, I said.

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I woke in the middle of the night in perfect calmness, except not knowing what time it was troubled me; the clock still in darkness, a blank face on a blank wall. You tricked yourself into believing there was some special insight, one particular word, that you carried with you all this time, like a seed in the dark-and that it was important not to forget it in the first light of the day. 

Your calf muscles still twinged and you pictured yourself a few hours back: at the ice-cream parlour with little r, at the gym before that, looking down at your life as if from a great distance. Little r had asked why we needed words or names at all, why couldn't we just point to what we want. Why did God give names to things (there she was again, about to go off on one of her 'religion-tangents').That is hard to say. 

"Why aren't the traffic signals purple or different?" We need something in common to recognize or else we'd be all at sea. 

I return to London, two or three times a week in my dreams. Before, in childhood, dreams were about running; now I seem to always be on a train, looking out of dark windows, or looking back at my life.

Coffee

The great combinations in the world: coffee and chocolate; chocolate and orange; chocolate and cherries. Some things by their very nature like to combine with other things (There, a bit of old-world mysticism for you!).

Stilton and coffee, and Frau Wilke by my side...

I think I've read those five pages at least five times now. Makes me think back to Connaught Hall, just off Bloomsbury, and of the wide stairs in Wise Blood. The spaces between us that are not a distance, the importance of the word 'and' in human history; at any point in time we are known by the depth of our connections: between East & West, between the past & the future. 

'Trane: freedom and structure, each breathing out matched by a breathing in, the old song of joy and sorrow...

ghosts

There is a way
if we want
into everything
I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the
    small and glowing loaves of bread
I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night
The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
    poems
You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables
What do you love?
I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on
    despite worms or fire
I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth
There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave
Both
My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
particles of skin
The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned
    helix of dust and cinnamon
Breathe in
Breathe out
I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them
There
There is a way
if we want
out of drowning
I’m having
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel
A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel
    Face, a Corpse Reviver
What are you having?
I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round
Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice,
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,
and the two fingers of gin
that make up paradise
There is a way
if we want
to untie ourselves
The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark
There are lots of stories about intestines
People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake
The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new
    bright plastic curled around the older brother
Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned
Some people climb them into Heaven
Others believe we live in one
God’s intestine!
A conveyor belt of stars and saints
We tie and we loosen
Minor
and forgettable
miracles.

---M. Dickman.

Our love of: abandoned places, the ruins of the heart, rich pickings, the sudden moment of discovery when the wall falls. We love our loves; our failing love, too, is not without interest. The moment frozen, the crowd shuffling out for the last time. Each day underground begins again, unseen, unknown. The parallel lives, the lost glances, the loves that were one step away. We look back at the ghosts of our lives, touch the shells we carry with us in deep pockets and recall each journey and the brightly painted numbers. The map of endless possibilities opening up like the palm of your hand. Here we are, in the belly of the beast while up above gold is greedily exchanged between blind men. 

The long steps, the short, squat tunnels, the flickering white light making no impact on the grime. The city folks in from the suburbs, numbers floating through their heads, the Japanese on their way home via the deep blue. The university students bright and keen, the only ones left with a sense of the future. You run up, burst out into the open, and see lines of friends and lovers waiting by the overpriced flowers at the flower stand. I thought I knew you Holborn, the central line to my home, but all I really knew were the exits, the ways out. There is another station here and maybe there always has been, but no matter how hard I try I can't remember it.

burning water

Some thoughts on climate change: the question is not whether average temperatures will increase or not; the question is by how much. We are faced with a "cascade of uncertainty" (IPCC, 2007): how will economies and technologies develop? What will be their impact on emissions? How will those emissions translate into temperature increases and, finally, how do you put a price on the damages to work out the cost and benefits of mitigation? Uncertainty could be the central feature of it (Weitzman).

The current consensus is that the Copenhagen figure (stabilizing at a 2 degrees Celsius increase-on average, mind you) will not hold. What type of ethics or politics will put a hold on it? Don't think markets are the solution (since they're actually the problem...still waiting for N. Klein) and Utilitarianism is too abstract, doesn't motivate ("from the point of view of the universe") and erroneously tries to reduce all value to preferences. More specific problems: it doesn't deal with future generations very well (Discounting: W. Beckerman). A global solution without global institutions?

Which leaves us with community, local solutions (Wendell Berry), an inter-generational moral community (to paraphrase A. Baier). Except capitalism and the markets focus on the short-run and work to dissipate the chances of 'the long now' taking root.

We're in a fix and about to spin out. No-one wants to say it but our insatiable desire for more and more looks like it's bound us to a desperate trajectory of catastrophic changes. Austerity: joy within limits is something we can work to, fashion ourselves, or it will eventually be imposed on us.

(Don't know why, but the light reminded me of Strand's wonderful Mexico pictures).

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Pitanguy: "The most important thing is to have a good ego and then you don't need an operation."

Somewhere when

'The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness.'
---D. Athill.

'I had something to say..
your voice-
it would be faint
and strange,
belonging
as it does now
to another age.'

What time we have, what time there is. No-one knows. All the things we couldn't name, in time.

"Why is there so much dust here?" the little one asks. She rants like a born-again: "We are all the children of Adam. [She just needs to add a " I tells ya" and we'd be deep in Bible territory].
"Okay then, where is his uncle, his aunt?"
 She smiles, knowing she's been stumped but carries on.  "God made everything, he made Himself."
"How did he do that, then?"
"He got some help from someone."

Storm House

It is hard to imagine, I know.

From Mirror, Mirror:

'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed. What if the self is unknowing, all the way down?'

Which is to say: one must take into account the passing of time. How do you do so, though? We imagine or posit some deep structure underlying all that is ephemeral, the blue skies behind the passing clouds. There has to be something more to all this. For Christ's sake.

"I was not myself" we say to ourselves as we recover from some bout of confusion. But who were we, then? Who were we all this time? You fall in the direction you're leaning.

You veer from one extreme state to the other: you are everything, the centre of the world; you are nothing. The intellectual history of the world is not so different: materialism/idealism.

'..the Real Me, a butterfly escaped from the chrysalis of the social and conventional, a self untrammeled by the artificial restrictions of society, beautifully free from the sleepwalking and the mechanical drudgery of modern life.'

Not the repetitive and predictable bourgeois self that leads a crab-like existence, half-resigned to mediocrity and plain speaking, a self that looks forward to "special deals" and whose only escape from it all is a daydream or a drug-induced stupor. 

We think of ourselves (but not others) as inhabiting some special zone, as having the ability to shake off the powder to reveal a wild, romantic, creative and wholly original-but misunderstood- person. Underneath all that dull metal was gold all along. You have my word for it. Just waiting, waiting to be discovered, recognized, spoken to in the right way. The storm was over, order was re-established. No ambivalence, only the surety of undivided desires, the clarity of sound thought.

But what if there is no high road, no low road to the True Self? The purification, the analysis, the cool self-reflection, the mind straightened, the honest attending to all that has passed, the grieving, the lapses and the harshness finally owned. What if there were only fragments, stories along the way, one no more real than the other. Where we are is where we are. 

To imagine wholeness today, an image, peace, is to strike out against the dominant tendencies of the age. We love our brokenness, the fierceness of our conflict-ridden inclinations, the fragmentary point of view, tentative, resisting all absolutes, all definitions. A rose is a rose. Anything else stinks of metaphysics, childish stories of simplicity, or old rehashed ones of completeness and redemption. Men and women without qualities. Everything is reduced to the question of power or is mere play, a game, a stage in which we stagger, drunkardly, half-forgetting our words. "Every answer is a part-answer". Nothing to say; everything is for its own sake and ends there, or it is for less, the way everyone is for themselves or sold on something.

When the day is done

And all the times and all the places
where I pitched my life in shadow

"For the life of me I cannot work out where it all went wrong," he says, deflated by a series of wrong turnings, events turning pear shaped. "The strangeness of it all," he says. All those hours, years, drawn into the curve of a life, a life I do not recognize, that I could never have imagined would be mine. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Am I part of a mystery whose origins lie in some fault line, some fracture, that is destined to remain hidden from me? For the life of me. So we begin...

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There was a time when I didn't know you or myself. That time is now.

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'And he thinks his way much further back
through ten, through a dozen years
with giant stumbling, backward strides.'

We have our backs up against it, the future. He thinks further back, with a rare determination. I must get back. As if to say, as if to say. All the time, the plague of thought: what if there is no time? What if you get back and everything is exactly the same, right down to the medieval paintings, the vase and dry flowers, the door about to come off its hinges, the one patch of wooden floor boards that creaks, the wrecked light, the silver still turning to white in the old photographs, the books to be burned, the inheritance letters tightly wrapped in blue ribbons...all that you know, every square inch..but what if you look finally in the old mirror, framed in dark wood, and fail to recognize yourself, the inner life as insubstantial as the outer, as plain speaking.

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She stood with her back to the kitchen window, dunking a biscuit in her mug of tea. The best cups kept for special occasions. Where was everyone, she thought to herself.It was too painful to ask this question with too much awareness. What if this was it? The sound of the clock in all that vast silence, the evening frost rearing its head on the darkening windows, the gnarled apple tree untended. 

The boys were settled, she tried to convince herself, though she knew that their lives were being upturned, that something dark was being sown. Must each suffer on their own? At least darling M had found if not love, then warmth. Yes, that was all one could hope for. Our times, out time...don't think too deeply about it. The ground of faith stood.

Fall was in the air, winter on the edge of understanding. It is impossible but has happened, is always happening. These wounds we live by are nothing new. What is there in the books, after all? Sign up or refuse. And it is over. Another day is done, she would say to herself and everyone's heart is broken by their final face.  

Mirror, mirror

'There is no royal road from anatta to agape.'

---S. Blackburn.

Then what kind of road is there?

'We find ourselves in our world.'

To find yourself, be found, in the time and space in which you exist. There is no 'I' without the other..the 'I' itself is a mirror...There is no 'I' in itself (except a small one). The small 'i' of islam is a way, shared by others. The large 'I' is crystallization, an oasis, a place of determination and settled natures. The small way carries with it the sense of loss, of being lost, signals second chances. The rose is a brief flame and would not be a rose otherwise. What you hold on to is the memory of red, and he pointed to her. "And you, black crow?" And she pointed to him.

One does not talk of roads in the desert...

Clarification is not negation. Distillation is not "purity".

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'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 

---Thomas Merton.

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“A leftwing vision of the world requires you to imagine a future utopia, but one doesn’t have the right to forget that the most important thing for every human being is the life they lead now,”

“All we are doing is recognising something as old as humanity,” Mujica said. “The best thing is that people can live as they want to live.”

“I don’t think it inevitable that the world should live in capitalism. That is the same as not believing in man, and man is an animal with many defects but also with startling capabilities.”

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The small world you inhabit is not really a world to most people (the world of big money, politics, false mirrors, staged (guest) appearances..) but it is the world to me. We find ourselves in our world. Of course, the kind of continuity now available is likely to be supplied by memory and a few dearly cherished individuals rather than anything material. Work , for example, is you imagine very rarely anything like Wendell Berry's description here

writing home

'I could go on, about the cases of colleagues and their experience of managers’ ‘instructions’, arrogance and ignorance, and the devices they adopt to impose their will, but individuals like Anthony Forster and the executive dean for humanities are not single spies. They’re minor but willing operatives in a larger mechanics of power. Within this structure, they have been allowed to wrest authority for themselves, and neither literary scholars nor long-serving teachers have a say; individual students, once enrolled and committed, are not much attended to either.'

---Marina Warner, Why I quit.

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In a dream you find yourself at a familiar crossroads, the whole of London opening up before you. Bridges and the river one way, crass materialism the other. 'Every step an arrival,' every step a departure.You spend ten pounds on a poppy and think of a long walk (you have the tanned legs of a mountain walker). In a book you write a note: 'for all the people who have died in wars'...such universalist sentiments obviously quite unpopular today, so you add: ' especially for the people of my city, London'. And I get the approving glance, though belonging is a mystery to me. Later on Ubo out talks a lanky black Jazz musician who slumps in his chair, resigned to his voice not being heard

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Two biographies on Denise this year. The Dana Greene one in particular looks quite good. The Welsh/Jewish roots appeal-for obvious reasons.

'...and like Lear unable to say if your hands were your own'
---Tim Liardet.

What does that mean? You'll have to ask the old dougal who has probably read Lear a hundred times. 

But you get the drift. Most of what you understood-which wasn't much-was always second-hand, derivative...about right. As you age there are no new things to understand (or, more accurately, that you want to understand).Instead, you fumble over the few familiar things, trying to tease out something different...

Everything seems to be moving away from you, at an angle, with greater speed (and for that you are also grateful).

Back in the old country the first days were spent peeling off wallpaper. There were at least eleven distinct layers and it seemed we'd never get to the first wall, primal, pure, the beautiful blank space. Each layer put up was someone's life. How many hands have changed? 

We lived without colour for a month and warmed ourselves with coal brought from thick sacks from the garage. There was an old piano, on which false notes were played. Some of the keys were mute and when pressed only produced a dark thud. The central keys were bright, on which we started Once in Royal David's City. Gradually we forgot. We were among the many who disappeared. 

Turn the pages, peel them back, finding, not finding, the hand's fixed pose, the word, like love, stuck in your throat....everything is a return, to a broken world, where you are still. I can't even remember the last time I spoke, I mean, spoke. The lost self, the dream, the name you can't recall. That's the least of it.

Tony said: you always have books in your hand; your hand has permanently curled around them, even when you walk. I carry books with me, not to read, but in the way a religious person wears an amulet to ward off evil.

What will you re-read? Cheever's prison book, perhaps when you're out of prison. I have books in hand, I have time on my hands.

The formal place of mirrors in a man's life

Lana Del Rey - Chelsea Hotel from Soup Factory on Vimeo.

'The sight at any moment
is as complete as the human heart is.'

---K. Irby (?)

From memory.

What royal lives mirrors lead, full of all the words we did not utter, the fallen glances, the dance of the heart. The clarity that comes from sequences of distinct moments, the broad acceptance of everything that has happened, when memory would paint a picture, distill an image, assume that a single word, a name,say, would conjure up the thing itself.

The unnoticed woman sitting in the corner, the furiously crinkled brow of a man in rage, all this is noted with the calm equanimity of a deathless sage being. The mirror contains so many lives, the continuation of lines abruptly terminated in mid-stream, the unknown. It says: "I want to tell you what it was like...I will have to speak a forgotten language".

There is a kind of formal equality between us but one side has lived more gregariously, with greater abandon. Is it true the mirror is bounded? Or sometimes kept safe in leather? This wordless domain, on which the quiet rapture of time's passing glides.

The one thing we cannot do today is see ourselves clearly.

One looks around and sees the pettiness, the squabbles, the shambles, the greater or lesser points of disputation and says: is this me?

The human heart is a broken mirror, revived at times but never at home. A mirror in a room when the lights are dark and everyone has left continues to wonder. 

A note to myself

like any mirror-writing, it’s slant rain. And like slant rain
it goes on falling and tearing, falling and tearing.
Like slant rain it quickens suddenly and slows down.

---Tim Liardet.

The first morning dew of the season, startled or petrified on the dark cold window. The first rumblings of hot water in the rusting old pipes, the ramblings of an outdated mechanism that promises relief, like the first breath of Spring. A word you can't remember, falls back into night. A woman glides past you with sleep all over her face, and your heart is unprepared...

...in the old country, it was like, like the camera from a different age kept behind the mirror. "It might be valuable someday". And so we kept it, unused, a mysterious relic from someone else's life. Holding on to what was lost, what will be lost as if we could one day return it to its rightful owner. It occurred to you: we stumble into other people's lives, and into our own, too. With what lack of grace do we take leave!

The days pass. The frail morning moon is where it was twelve years ago at this time of the year. The arc of your own life without trace, or unobserved. It goes on, when all the doors are closed, a briefly-lit interior that is more a recollection than anything else. We carry with us fragments of images, place them on the table, rearrange them, pick out and hide the visionary piece. What cannot be said must not be said.

So many false notes, your ear has declined recognition. Your hands have lived a life of their own and your eyes carry with them so many stray thoughts. The shadow-work continues in the morning; you draw lines and graphs and try to find the balance in an equation. No red ambition, no green envy, just a grey and calm indifference. The mind turns aimlessly, your heart trying to remember what. The morning stretches, is a vast and open space, your hands and your voice beneath all that space.

There is a sense in which you run to be broken, to detect the true note, the true self. 

Conversations with the devil

Much contemporary writing fetishizes style, and the priority is felt as a constant anxiety. Prose has to sign itself, establish its showy authority in silvery cutlass swipes through the air: clever insights, brilliant metaphors, unusual words, sharp observation, perpetually buoyant dialogue. 
---James Wood.

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All of a sudden, taking a break from munching down her sugar-saturated chocolate 'cereal', she turned to me, innocent as could be:

"Who makes water..y'know, if you want to drink some, how do people make it?

Me: "Well, it comes from rainwater"

the devil: " But who makes the rainwater?" And then she cocked her head to one side, closed one eye and grinned: "God makes the rainwater"
(if she'd been a southerner, an old woman with a crooked eye, she might have said: "God make da rainwater" or, better, "God make rainw'er")

Me: "Well, yes, I suppose that's true," I replied, not sure how to broach this subject and sensing that a trap was being set. "But some people say it comes from rain clouds" (just to keep the conversation open)

The devil, sensing the endgame, the first mover in her mind: "But who made the rain clouds? It was God who did so." And again, that sheepish grin, the smile of an inquisitor! I'm not having my faith put into question at 7.45 in the morning by a four year old kid!

Me: "Well, yes, I suppose so"

the devil: "Did God make the rain clouds or did the world?"

Me: "Finish your breakfast, sweetie."

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At the bank today there was a 'universal teller', a normal teller and a counter called 'Premium Red Carpet Banking'. I was half expecting a fortune teller (I hear Roxana and the Dougal groan). And there was actually a two foot red carpet and an aisle cordoned off with gold and red ropes. I kid thee not!

"Is this you?"

Me: "Yes, this is me."

"How can I help you?"

Me: ("Have you got a poster of Rita Hayworth?")

3 a.m.

Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad,

so many years as a man, compromise,

in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle

he was never anyone of Olympian allure.

He walked slowly through the dreamscape

of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable

from early spring, with young willows

and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed.

Dreamy exposure to phenomena

that to nature in its administration

of various cycles—young and old alike—

are inseparably part of a single order—:

so he drank his gin and accepted a dish

of sausage soup, free on Thursdays

with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance

of sorrow and pleasure.

---G. Benn

This song, this song of sorrow and joy, is always with us.

---Mir Dard.

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You woke up in the middle of the night with some unknown anxieties making their way to the surface of your thoughts. In a dream vaguely remembered you had slept for a whole day and yet had not missed anything; no-one had missed you either and there was nothing to note. You wondered if the normal waking days were very much different. But you did have the sneaking suspicion that something might have happened, some great insight or sudden resolution may have occurred on that day, the day in which you were asleep and the world had carried on. You looked down out of the dark window onto the empty street, hoping that someone else would see this dark flurry of drifting snow.

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A conversation.

She said, I'm trying to live a simple life now; I have become anti-make-up. I don't wear anything now.  

I suddenly looked up at her plain face and saw it was true.

Distance learning: we learn at a distance now.

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What is there left to do but find oneself at home in this homelessness?

√

Radical: as in roots (plants, words, numbers). A free radical.

To be centred, to get to the centre, and resist change. But also: to look again at founding assumptions, key moments in your life, and look at them again in the light of experience, taking into account time. 

Radical: to resist the established order. But when the established order is disorder then there's a conservative radicalism that means withdrawing into your own world, finding beauty and meaning in what you know, you know.

The flowerbeds are full of rainwater, flooded and glassed over, the soil so resistant to absorption, to letting things flow. At night few of the streetlights are working and so you drive in the dark waters and later wade through it or search out the high points, balancing precariously on the raised kerb. 

A farewell dinner at the Afgahni place, a faint smell of hashish. A rooftop restaurant, probably built with drug money. Roast lamb, slow cooked on the bone for four hours in the traditional way. 

A Ph.D.: six years of Sanskrit and taking a fine lens to inscrutable texts. Well, good luck to you. There goes your life! There goes your youth!

What does a university teach you except that you will never read freely again, that every thought will be full of doubts and qualifications; that a simple 'yes' to life will be an achievement, a walk out into the dark, open field... 

second thoughts

'...that calm so propitious for work and for discipline of the mind seems to me one of the richest results of love.'

M. Yourcenar.

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Well, finished the book last night. Not going to put (m)any quotes up since I've grown sceptical of the whole process of taking out startling lines, reflections, from their context. It would be a bit like looking at a person and trying to excuse or put to one side all the boring, pedestrian and routine things that person thought and did and instead focus on the more interesting or "best" ones. 

I suppose there's a poetic impulse to find the one true word, the revelatory moment, the quintessential. Religion, too, in its own way strives for the 'one thing needful', that magnetic impulse that turns us like a clock, until we point true north. The role of the emperor/emperor-mind is, perhaps, to take it all in, to look back on one's life with a different cast of mind, one that is more capacious, more prone to see the mistakes, the lesser qualities and perhaps even the accidents of time and personality as also somehow being part of the fabric of a lived life and indispensable to the meaning of it.

One looks back and says, yes, this was me. That includes the disorder and the regrets, for sure. Not an acceptance, but not a revolt either. The true image is not one that discards longing...

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Instead, some of her fascinating notes on the composition of the book:

Still living in a past time, a time that has died.

The point of view of the man who accepts all experience.

That break in continuity...was necessary in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from myself.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's own self without thought of profit.

Everything that the world, and I,  had gone through in the interval now seemed to enrich these chronicles of an earlier age... 

A controlled delirium..a constant participation, as intensely aware as possible, in that which has been.

What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?

The road of return toward one particular point in time. Keep one's own shadow out of the picture; leave the mirror clean of the mist of one's own breath; take only what is most essential and durable in us, in the emotions aroused by the senses or in the operations of the mind, as our point of contact with those men who, like us, nibbled olives and drank wine...who fought bitter winds and blinding rain, or in summer sought the plane tree's shade; who took their pleasures, thought their own thoughts, grew old, and died.

The human substance and structure hardly change...