Stranded

"The mind and the world jointly determine the mind and the world."

Now that the mind is in retreat, faltering, stumbling at every juncture, the world stumbles, is out of joint.

It was as if the fish suddenly got scared. Of what?

The contract between the word and the world is strained. the future tense has been drained of meaning. We live, when all is said and done. We live, when all is said and done, in a 24/7 world. 

~~~
Is the only permanence now the constant flow of unjoined moments, the perception of a stream of moments, strung together loosely?

In the brilliant early morning light one can detect a hint-more than a hint-of spring in the air. It is never this clear this time of the year. A few labourers, some waist down in a ditch, work with such dedication they would, you imagine, carry on working even if the whole world around them collapsed. Shovels, spades, pick-axes, hammers. Next to them an elegant gardener, wearing a thin jumper, sits on his haunches and vigorously turns over the soil in a garden bed with a small trowel. The tool seems to be a mere extension of his forearm. The soil is thick, full, wondrously dark in colour and texture. 

What are they all preparing for? 

~~~
Ongietan sceal gleaw hælehu gæstlic bið 
·onne ealre ·isse worulde wela  weste stondeð ...

In his own world

I
In his own world.

And not too bad off. Just the way it is. 

for a long time 
and chance had been toying with them

Winter notes: He was in his own world. Always was, from childhood, which he never really left. For others, every beginning was also an ending. 

I suppose you think this is about you. 

He wants to and does not want to sleep. Zeus! The cells in the body stay startled, dazed-awake, through the early hours, and the floating grey half-light, as if covered by a shroud, or lost in gentle summer shadows, ready for some recollection to march into their territory. 

He was all flesh and blood for a few minutes, singing, shining, silver-back in the dark; and then he was all mind. 

Drift, drift, sail away from here. There are socks on the floor, frozen into shape. The mirror is still and lonely. On the table a large and bright golden bowl with packets of medicine in it.

In the morning he saw the moon, a large and pale ball, aloof, fragile, ephemeral, more beautiful than the green and blue world below it. The moon was a door, the memory of a fire, a houri. 

A child somewhere (and therefore everywhere) asks: "Who broke it?". Does he ever grow out of that sense of brokenness?

"I'm quite happy in the world I'm in," he said. "There is no need to disturb me".

She texts him and says, "You are angry. Are you an angry person?"

He says, calmly, trying to deflect all attention from himself, "Look at my words."

Last Acts

"You ain't no Mother Teresa, motherfucker," said the Russian ambassador.

"We didn't start the fire; it was always burning," said Mother Teresa. She secretly wished Billy Joel and not Dylan would have got the damned Nobel.

"You're just a bit of white trash," he continued.

"Uptown Girl..I've never had a backstreet guy", said the ambassador. 

Sensing his moment: "Take a chance on me. I'm still free," he replied.

~~~
I heard that, on a day when a car bomb killed three Americans, Paul Bremer's last act as Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority was to issue laws making it illegal to drive with one hand on the steering wheel or to honk a horn when there was no emergency.

--Eliot Weinberger 

I heard the rebels were just a pack of towel-heads from the desert, the remnants of a remnant that we whipped together. We, boss. I heard the Great Man say: Your enemy's enemy ain't your enemy. I see another axis of evil brewing before ma eyes. I aints got me no shame so I gonna call them out, good and proper.(Boss tell me wez got to fit the Yellowskins in there somehow) 

~
I heard these foreign names mentioned in a pub quiz. Do they mean anything to you: My Lai, Faullujah, Shatila, Hiroshima, Abu Ghraib ? Here's a question you won't hear in the pub..this is a tricky one, I must say. Even I was confounded for a while. How many people have been killed in the DRC? We said in unison: Democratic! And then we laughed. In any case, there's a repeat of the classic sketches from The Two Ronnies on the box tonight. Who's on who's side? It's all so confusing! 

Cities of Salt

It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif [Cities of Salt]..appears to be ..insufficiently westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face..or developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest..There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure-of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstane..which has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle.

--John Updike.

Here's Ghosh's radical point: it is the individualism of the market (and economic theory, I would add) that has made it so hard to think about a solution to the climate change crisis. And the background culture of the arts and literature is similarly geared towards the individual! 

The 'individual moral adventure' sounds like an advertisement for the frontier capitalist. Anyone who doesn't quite buy into this model is automatically consigned to the dustbin of history, relegated to the catch-all category: "the backward".

It's not just that this individual has resolutely stood against nature; it's that he's tried to control, tame, subdue and exploit it. 

Social media and the social sciences. The irony being: there is no social! Only narcissism on the one hand, and methodological individualism on the other. And you can't but help think that this detachment, this "second turning inwards" has helped narrowly define freedom in its modern sense: Freedom from nature; and freedom from the social are then inextricably intertwined with one another. 

Repeat after me:

I am an individual.
I am an individual.
I am an individual. 

Misc.

It is December and still there is no sign of any rain. The fog descends and engulfs us all, hushing the world. Out of nowhere, a red traffic light. By the side, some poor people on bicycles, wrapped in thick brown shawls. The fog is so dense that under a tree it collects into large drops of rain and clatters down on the rooftop; the dark space under the tree now resembling a small tropical island, with leaves strewn all over the floor...

~
On a day spent on the road you look in your rear view mirror, away from the sea of traffic, the river of lights, blues and golds registering a presence in the dusk of our lives. As if, as if looking at another, bright, clear world that has all of a sudden come into focus. The points, the fragments of a life momentarily resolved in a central image. With what eye do you hold such a picture? It is that eye, that gaze, that can never be seen. Who sees me now?   

If one's temperament the whole day long is affected by the quality of your sleep then the presence of a single mosquito at night can affect what you will feel and say and think during the day. Which made me think of just how susceptible the inner workings of the mind are to 'external' events. We assume our inner self is sealed in-a legacy of Descartes?- but the reality is that nature, biding its time, will come back to haunt us.

~
Reading Amitav Ghosh's fascinating The Great Derangement . One point that struck you was this: fiction has great difficulty taking in climate change because its moral imagination was shaped, from the beginning, under conditions in which bourgeois certainties were esteemed. Uncertainty is reduced to calculable risk. Narrative is no longer a sequence of strange events (that category is safely placed in sci-fi or Gothic), tales of the unexpected; instead what you have is a lot of padding, "fillers", the stuff of ordinary life. Is that why literature is comforting?  

~

There is no land in this land. 

To depart, through the chosen mirror. The last sigh on its face, the breath of the other world already there, the flash of burnt lights all around. The sallow flesh, pitiful eyes. Already traveled much, already seen the sights, floated down this very same river as a child and a young man. Where does it go? When I look back something in me shines. There were other times, looking out of the splintered windows. For a day, is that all there was, a final gesture in the slender light? 

The floodwaters in the basement, the weeds flowing indoors. The shrines of the world will continue, perhaps, even though the hands have no forgiveness, even though the word will be in no-one's heart. Down the last steps of the world to the hallowed river, asleep, awake, my home a dream.

“Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” 
---Lucretius.

You wake in the small hours and wonder how long you've been sleeping for. You hear voices, children's voices off in the distance, out there,..is this a dream, your own childhood re-emerging from the time when you would play in the dark and run home, down from Victoria Park, past the warm and safe houses, your heart in your mouth, the street lights' downward glow making the world lighter, more artificial. The empty streets with only a faint whiff of salt and vinegar in the air coming from the Cypriot chippy (Steve, who always gave you extra chips, would kill himself a few years later).

The voices, strangled now, almost metallic, coming to you from a great distance, like those of children in a swimming pool, the words mixed with the dappled light, broken like the waves that slap against the side of the pool. Life moves into another life but some shadow of all that was remains, always remains.