the things women explain to me

The things women explain to me are not the things I can oft remember or fully understand (why does this automatically sound snide and disingenuous)? You just liked the sound of the beginning of the sentence but nothing true emerges from it. 

'She stays in her own time. She stays in the middle.'

'Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of.'

'Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times.'

'It may be I'll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way.' 

~
Of the many words that are written how many can be recalled, retrieved? What do we remember if not silence? Is not remembering, too, a kind of silence, a mark of absence?

 ~
~
Someone once said I'm a unique individual, but then again everyone is! There are even non-individuals who are unique. You bumped into someone. They had absolutely nothing to say, just a clogged up throat and boredom masking under a sheepish grin. Convinced that it had been love when in reality it was the pain of not being in love that was sought. 

~

How to tell the time these days? You stopped at a sports shop and nearly bought a sports watch with a massive square face. How comes this is so cheap, I asked. "Because it doesn't work." Ah, I see. Chinese?

~
Anne Carson.

~

You gather all that was not said and hope it is read. A strange compilation, a bleak skill, and only a half-blind person will make any sense of it.

~

Of course, the truth is that most of what people explain to you goes over your head and most of the explaining is done by men. More accurately, men feel that they are in the privileged position to explain. 

So, everyone thinks they've got the explanation, the story right down to its specific details. Religious people specialize in this conceit.

~

Daniel Fuchs's West of the Rockies is good despite the 'staginess' of it..characters walking in and out of the sets. But it is as if something essential, fundamental in the human story, is being played out here, albeit in a modern form. 

'I guess the people who don't talk just don't have anything to say.'

'Everything came to a halt. A lightness took hold. Car radios played. People stepped out of their cars, stared at one another in the sun and smiled, walking about where they normally wouldn't be walking..

He saw the landscaped roadside banks-the spread of the portulaca, the ice plants, the wild California poppies on their high stems. the great stretch of the highway ahead of him, the peace and the kindness, the feel of the country air set up longings, making him think of the time when he had first come out to California to live,...'

The social sciences

I sometimes wonder what, precisely, is social about the social sciences? Can there be a science of human behaviour and if so, what of freedom?

Human beings are a lot more complex and diverse than our simple, general and reductionist models would have us believe and what constants there are-whether one call them human nature or historical regularities-are not discoverable by scientific analysis, or not by analysis alone. 

There is, perhaps, a technical kind of knowing, one that is replete with a particular kind of sophistication at its own, limited level, and an understanding-and one always comes to an understanding- that is dependent on both other people and our passage though time. And here we should add: not time as an empty and abstract category, but time as a lived experience, a sense of duration and a genuine orientation to something that is higher in us. This something other is inextricably associated with the virtues, all of the virtues, and not simply a projection of a dry and formal intelligence.  

superfluous people

Yes! Now, I'm a human being!

(A refugee's first words on stepping on shore).

Do we still live in a world? 

I sometimes wonder that, R-ko, my oldest of friends. 

~~~~

The stateless and the superfluous are not the same as the superficial.

What now of human rights? Wasn't that Arendt's point way back when? Without the backing of the state are refugees and displaced people just sheep thrown to the wolves? Bare-forked animals on the heath? (Forgive me, dougal).

This isn't the story but, perhaps, the beginning of one for with the increasing likelihood that due to climate change severe changes will occur this century one can only expect more people to be on the move. 

The idea-if that's the right word-has an older lineage, though. Useless people and useless knowledge..people who can (and therefore should) be dispensed with. Do the statistics of the state inevitably lead to the treating of people as if they were mere numbers (the Camps)? 

Focuault's succinct formula: Nazism = state racism. 

Are the Palestinians even a people? Can you be a person without belonging to a territory, without having your own flag and army? To ask the question reveals the shallowness of the conception. As you enter fortress Europe and are asked to fill in the forms: date of arrival, date of departure, "have you suffered...", religion:?...ethnicity: 32 (or was it 33?). On one of my own passport I have to declare I am a Muslim but there is more; in addition I have to declare that another group is not Muslim. I kid thee not! What next..sexual preference? Can I prove that I do not endorse extremist views, do I really get and sign up to "British values", pass some kind of citizenship test (I think this already happens in Holland or Denmark). Am I sufficiently liberal to be allowed to live?

In another sense, we might ask: without spirituality (I do not say religion), art, music, poetry, education (again, this does not mean schooling), time, a set of relations to other people and things of value, to what extent are we really individuals?

As we destroy our natural habitat, and as the social, the public realm and sociality are hollowed out, whittled away, we have to face the very real possibility that in some sense we're all adrift now.

(photo courtesy of Tom over at Tomclark.blogspot.com).

A lament for the old solid bourgeois world (Adam Gopnik's lovely intro. to Molly Hughes..Rembrandt's local burghers), Simone's "bridges", de Waal's worldly objects, 110-A.

A line from Neko Case:

nothing stays the same
and i will always love you.  

a small world

These images remind of me of the small, self-enclosed worlds of Samuel Palmer. Perhaps it's just age that makes one think that all that is time-worn, weather-beaten, small-scale and low-key retains some tenuous link with human values and a human scale of perspective. 

Abstract cities and abstract time are in the final analysis a product of impersonal capitalistic forces (and the culture it spawns).

The distinctiveness of customs, local habitat, language or dialect, ways of dwelling (Ivan Illich), architectural styles, religious sensibilities, apparel, various senses of humour, flora, species...all that must be lost under universal exchange and the reign of quantity since everything must be made commensurable. 

~

This is a beautifully produced book and the images have certainly captured something of the mir. Berger writes simply-and that, too, you think is something that is achieved, worked at over time, through time. A significant part of our thinking, on the other hand, takes place from nowhere, a timeless point (what else is theory and mechanical thought?). In another sense it takes place at a disjointed point in time ("time is out of joint") because there is only the moment. And the utilitarian vision, which has held sway for swathes of modern times, sets itself up from 'the point of view of the universe'. 

~

In the end days there will be no more 'days'; the 'time of no time' (Merton). Words are forgotten and species fall, distinctions are erased. Time stands still for an hour. Just me & you, kid.

The final act of love

No ritual can hold the hour together.

You stand looking at your reflection in the dark glass of the 176. As the bus moves on your image broken in each passing frame. I have stood in this place before. Then, twenty five years ago-though you've lost track- there was another series of images...

Portugal Street. Houghton Street. And I walk out of deep shadows. 

And I glance back
with a slow step

Take leave. Take heart. A path. Is this a path?

The slow ringing bells heard in the distance, a high web of sound, a pattern that is a thousand years old. Out of the past someone once decided to fix this exact arrangement..

Down below sirens, emergencies, the flashing, pristine  red of the buses, the ceaseless flow of traffic. for a moment you let your wrists go limp, the book fall at an angle and look out at this passing scene. The clarity of things formerly known returning. Glancing at each old thing anew. This ritual hour of departure. The traffic flows on without taking a breath. Nearby, workers pause by what is billed as the greatest reconstruction..work in progress. 

I have a brittle pencil in my hand. At any moment hand, heart, mind or nib might give way.

Too much dreaming. And when you awake you find much time has passed, many things have changed. There are fewer familiar faces around. 

For a brief moment the sky darkens and the brown leaves of autumn flutter, tap on the paved stone floor of a wide street. A woman in a baggy pullover lights a cigarette on the third attempt. Not to live in the moment, no, but simply to observe it all, each brief detail every new day and not change at all. A little life.

The stream of life continues. You never stepped in it, not even once, you think, or that you can remember. 

The sky brightens, and the moment is gone. 

nowhere near

the way things end

I think W.D. is one of the best writers on the fate of the university today. Stefan Collini is also worth serious consideration. W.D.'s latest article in Harper's is full of so many things that resonate with my own experience that it's tempting to just link to the whole article (online) rather than post excerpts here.

Sent it to my colleagues, the Dean and the VC and it must have put the clappers up them!

... 

The way things end reminds one of the beginning. The way things end make me forget how they ever started. The first day of summer now distant. The first day of autumn is also a last day, hours and days seamlessly running along. 

The clouds darken but the sky stays grey and then brightens, mysteriously. You've become more acutely aware of the subtle gradations of light and the changes register somewhere that feels true. For a while your heart aches at the astounding beauty that is a memory of something lost, too. Summer and winter are in this faltering hour.

~

There are many nice things in the article. What appeals to you is the idea that education is a counter-cultural institution, a way of being ec-centric-which means not just being on the margins, the periphery of things, but also the ability to find another centre, a quieter, more capacious one; and education as a counterbalancing force in the lives of individuals and society.

Transtromer: the balancing act: keep your pockets empty, lean slightly to one side. There is no time for rhetoric now. He who would take heart must let go of many things, hold on to others. 

~

This picture and the one from a previous post are from a marvelous blog.. 
link: ;First known when lost'

~

A late evening in the park; the sky overcast but not gloomy. The air is still and cool so you walk with just a simple t-shirt on. The day is done. At a great distance little r realizes I'm here and so gets off her bike and runs toward me. For how long will you remember this moment.

We think, mistakenly, that we can halt time...  

Bird under water

I didn't know...

it's 1962 March 28th

I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain 
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it 
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
                         and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before 
                         and will be said after me

I didn’t know I loved the sky 
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish 
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard 
the guards are beating someone again
I didn’t know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest 
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish 
“the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
                         lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high”
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief 
                                        to a pine bough for luck

I never knew I loved roads 
even the asphalt kind
Vera’s behind the wheel we’re driving from Moscow to the Crimea 
                                                          Koktebele
                               formerly “Goktepé ili” in Turkish 
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute 
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
                                        when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn’t have anything in the wagon they could take 
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I’ve written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play 
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
                                       going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand 
   his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
      with a sable collar over his robe
   and there’s a lantern in the servant’s hand
   and I can’t contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason 
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika 
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky 
I didn’t know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison

I just remembered the stars 
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below 
or whether I’m flying at their side

I have some questions for the cosmonauts 
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
                             or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don’t 
   be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract 
   well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to 
   say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them 
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad 
I never knew I loved the cosmos

snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind 
I didn’t know I liked snow

I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors 
but you aren’t about to paint it that way
I didn’t know I loved the sea
                             except the Sea of Azov
or how much

I didn’t know I loved clouds
whether I’m under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts

moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois 
strikes me
I like it

I didn’t know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my 
   heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop 
   and takes off for uncharted countries I didn’t know I loved 
   rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting 
   by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette 
one alone could kill me
is it because I’m half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn’t know I loved sparks
I didn’t know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty 
   to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
   watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return

                                                     19 April 1962
                                                     Moscow

Courtesy of Tom (TomClark)

110-A

'All that's beautiful drifts away
like the waters.'
--W.B. Yeats.

'A cloud in the wind, 
at the corner of the world.'
---Tu Fu.

I see it now, now, brief as the world, my face.

'Dangerous pavements.
But I face the ice this year
With my father's stick.'

Serving Time

Half way though Factory #2, Derek Raymond. Have to say, so far: thoroughly disappointing. Don't know if the second half will redeem it or not, but the writing is very patchy. Perhaps it's the weight of expectation since the other three are books I'm really fond of for their strange mixture of grittiness and gentleness. But this one is just thick on sordid details and quite forgettable.

I suppose we're always looking to time to get us out of the hole, imagining a single moment or turn could bring something to fruition, or reverse a trend. 

Perhaps we're coming to the end of a stage of thinking. For two centuries or so the idea of a linear progression of time has dominated, replacing older notions of cyclical time, bound to agriculture as a mode of production and culture, but also-if there is such a thing as a history of time-to older, mythical notions still of eternal return (Eliade).

With linear time nothing is repeatable and a terrible anxiety can set in if you think there's no going back, a point of no return; on the flip-side, though, the adventurousness and creativity of modernity wouldn't be possible without this ability to tear up and jettison the past: the thrill and the fear of uncharted territory.

But in this latest stage, the wheels have come off. No more forward dreaming, no more linear narratives and no more redemption of time in the distant future. Technologies and capitalism are leading to the valorization of the present, the brief moment that is not only destined to pass away in the blink of an eye, but that is a "pure" moment in that it isn't related to the past or the future. So, what late modernity is about, in many significant and various ways, is the break-up of duration, narrative structures, continuity, coherence. All that counts is the 'now' ( a fake kind of mysticism is really a mystification at the end of the day). Perhaps that is to be expected when the presiding sensibility of our times is precisely that we are nearing the end of the day ('It's later than you think..and maybe too late to think). 

A sign of the times we're living in is that there are no more signs. Instead, today we're encouraged to believe that for the last man (and woman) there is only the pathless path. With a sense of exhaustion and a feeling that it's hard to imagine anything new really emerging-despite the supposed frenetic pace of technological innovation the human condition and political ideas remain static-it seems as if the only thing left to do is either wait or serve time. A strange sentence, that.

I hadn't realised Transtromer had crossed over to the other side. Perhaps not for the first time. So many criss-crossings.Time is not a straight line. What distances there are between human beings!There are things we know from experience-even then, they are selected, partial, and rarely endure. There are things that are hinted at from memory, a memory of something that was before us (in some instances: of someone before us).

Here we are, chance interpreters of messages from long ago..

'It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.'

And Bly (not Fulton):

'After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.'

20,000 streets under

"I wonder, " said Ubo, "are we the only ones here who can speak English?" This was just before two rather unpleasant looking technicians drained some of our blood away at what is euphemistically known as a health centre.

Date of birth?
Confirmed.
"Clench your fist"
Done.
"Next"

Ah, the charms of the old East End. 

~~

At Bank station an old and fragile Japanese man got on. Could have sworn he was holding a golden walking stick. The really strange thing was that it seemed to be a plastic one, the type a crummy magician or a boisterous kid might have hanging about. 

~

At Houghton Street a group of six tired (disillusioned?) construction workers or painters sit slumped along the wall in their white dungarees. One of them gets up and starts lecturing (I suppose) the others in Russia. Really is quite harsh with them and starts to swish his thick fat plumpish pink arm at them as he speaks, trying to desperately convince them of something or the other. For a moment the hand seems to lose its distinctness and appears to be part of the gross arm itself. You think to yourself: Bacon!

~

On Chigwell Road on a still late afternoon a white Mercedes convertible approaches you; the passenger's door is jarred open. As soon as it passes me the car comes to an abrupt halt and a stout woman with short blond hair get out of it. She says a few terse words to the driver, flicks her hair back melodramatically, and storms off. I wonder to myself: did they stop because they were embarrassed when they saw me looking at them? Did I just save someone's marriage or ruin it?

~

Near Glastonbury Avenue the swami talked to Steve who for most of the summer (and around three quarters of the year) doesn't bother to wear a top. He now sports a fine looking thick beard. The swami comments: "You look like King George." He's chuffed by that. But I wonder. He's from a Russian Jewish background (many, many years ago). He thinks no-one should live in their house for more than twelve years. Why twelve, you'd like to ask. 

~

Near Denmark Street you think: Adler or Gadamer? The former really is far too trendy to hold my attention. Gadamer writes like an old man. Back in the land of the pure a punk kid told you, with some disgust: "Merwin?! He writes like an old man." 

~

On Marchmont Street you see two lesbians walk arm in arm. A waitress holds a wonderful looking Greek salad in the palm of her hand. On the corner, Valencia Cafe. The red cafe, old N would call it. Hard to believe that he's not alive any more. 

~

Stratford High Road: a soya latte for £2.45. Later on you buy one of Derek Raymond's Factory books for £2.50 at an Oxfam bookstore just off Museum Street.

~

St-Giles-in-the-Field now specializes, it appears, in serving street food. The Church provides a scenic backdrop.Man shall not live by bread alone (he says, putting on his Puritan hat).

~

On Kingsway a beautiful woman wearing a striped blue and white dress and bright red lipstick walks towards you. You take off your Puritan hat.

~

Ten pages of Moviegoer is enough to convince you this is not the book for you. Why do men always write about existential angst?

My Beautiful Friend ?

~

Gower Mews has to be one of the darkest streets in London. It's as if life has stalled there since the 1970s. Is that what gives it a creepy lost world atmosphere?

~

At Russell Square tube station someone tries to edge ahead of you to the front of the elevator. I'll be damned if I let her do so.

~

Near Remnant Street you pick up the Evening Standard and think to yourself: the Ashes must be over by now. Nothing signals the end of summer like the closing days of the cricket. Long shadows, the briefest chill in the late afternoon air, faces baked into a fixed expression of stupor. 

~

On the underground no-one looks at anyone any more. No stolen glances, no sly look to see which book someone opposite you is reading. Candy Crush rather than romantic crushes, you fear.

~

Charing Cross Road:

'And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary
chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,..'

Robert Bly's translation of Transtromer is more poetical (and therefore more true?). Maybe he's put too much of himself in the translation and maybe what you want is that anyone who writes should disappear from the scene. How does he do it, though? A simple change of words. So, for example:

'And the man who gathers the signals from a whole lifetime in a few ordinary..' 

'Gather sounds kinder, gentler, more in tune with the softness floating through the poem. But there is distance, too, and so perhaps catches is right. That balance of perspective in Transtromer appeals: seeing the precise details of a life from a great distance. Not the abstractness of a scientist but the detachment of an old man.