The voice of the stones

(Courtesy of Tom)

Each human life has its own propensity to illumination.
---J.B

The way you find a book is also a part of the history of that book. And people? How people come and go is a mystery. The times for departures and the times for arrivals. When did I first speak to you? Is there a person who does not live with distances, with some faint nostalgia for another place, another time. I, who stand here, was not myself for most of the time. 

An image of your face, a dark lake, a red room, old windows and lace curtains, a sound recording of a child's story and a childish voice...almost all of you.

The Muslim Problem

And they say, "There is nothing but our worldly life; we die and live and nothing destroys us except time." And they have of that no knowledge; they are only assuming.
--Qur'an 45.24.

Listening to Roger Scruton on the radio. On the need for "obedience" (loyalty?) to a place, a territory. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that immigrants carry with them-and he's talking about Muslims here- a nostalgia for another 'place,' and other law. I suppose by 'obedience' to the law and the land or to the law of the land he means a lot more than simply acceptance; perhaps he means to imply a kind of reverence or deep affiliation for the nation state. 

I do think he's onto something here. Personally, I find the notion of 'for king and country' a bit primitive (something akin to tribal loyalties that I thought, obviously mistakenly, the Enlightenment was supposed to dispel). America right or wrong. Adoration of the flag, love for the motherland, the fatherland..Blut und Boden..all that makes me slightly queasy. More: it smacks of idolatry. Which means to confer on something that has some relative value an absolute standing that it doesn't merit.

{Of course, you may be entitled to keep your academic or scientific hat on, to pretend that you're only interested in the sublime realm of the arts, and that, therefore, the messy state of affairs is of no interest to you. To be reminded of the slaughter of the Red Man..no, please don't!; it ruins the poem!} 

Loyalty and fidelity to what? Becket's question. Loyalty to the Fuhrer isn't, obviously, worth anything. And what of human conscience? People have protested against Vietnam, Iraq and countless other wars. Are they disloyal?  

And then you came across Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things in which there is a discussion of a (literary and popular) tradition that reminds us of a "higher loyalty". Isn't it clearly written, after all, that one cannot be a servant to two Masters? And what of St. Paul's "Neither Greek nor Jew"?. 

My pulse races when Wales beat England in the rugby; when the Paks beat England in the cricket I feel elated. Loyalty to what or to who? Of course, there are many things I love about England (or, more accurately, London) but loyalty, obedience, conformity? what is being asked here? If money and the state are the last gods in town then I'm not a believer.

'The unseen cathedrals
the rivers unheard
the clocks deep in us.'

~~~

“Let me begin, going on from what I have just stated, with what you call “love of the Jewish people” or Ahavat Israel. (Incidentally, I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism, when it was first used in Hebrew language and literature, etc.) You are quite right – I am not moved by any “love” of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life “loved” any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love “only” my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this “love of the Jews” would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person… The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believe in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believe only in itself? What good can come out of that? –Well, in this sense I do not “love” the Jews, nor do I “believe” in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.”

---Hannah Arendt

Early morning in Lahore. The world looks beautiful with its pale lights and bright flowers. From the side mirror you look back at the empty road, the broad white lines, and find great comfort in this loneliness. At the lights a blind man and a boy beg for money, chant a few verses. In the elevator the man who operates it stands up and wishes all those traveling onward peace. that might have irritated you a few years back; now you feel like accepting it all (without necessarily agreeing with it. Let it go, man).

As you turn for home you catch the brilliant white lines on the road, reflecting the sun's flashing golden light..something from a very old summer, some inexpressible thought (which is really just a feeling) crops up...In the very next street, a side lane, the road is engulfed in shadows. Birds fly out of them and crisscross your path.

A croissant, warm butter...little H singing to himself, "Don't go there, don't go there..."; you have to squint, to keep all these beautiful images in, even if they only last for a moment. The swami turns her back, and walks into the darkness. Don't look back. "Too much life has flowed by. I remember reaching my first decade of life and that seemed like an achievement. Now eight of those have come and gone..but I still remember the first". 

  

Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.
---John Berger.

"That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going."

--W. Deresiewicz

Twenty Shadows

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years
Outward from there, to be the same ripple
Inside him at his last circumference.
--Hardy/Heaney

We opened the front gate gingerly. There was no car, but a black satchel on a charpai next to the fan and the main door. No answer and the bells all mute. The back door held slightly ajar with some purple rope attached to the door handle. Still no answer. And the house became stranger with each passing moment...

We asked the next door neighbour where the doctor was, the swami's childhood friend from over 75 years ago was? Had anyone seen her? It was strange since she'd been largely immobile for the last two or three years. The plump woman looked at us. But didn't we know? In February, when that terrible dust storm descended and the sky was red...

The swami repeated some words three or four times to the woman but was really speaking to herself. 

The old world etiquette, some remnant of former times: "But won't you at least come in for some tea?". Some formula read off: the ways of the world which translated into the local idiom reads: the way of God, the utterly unquestionable way. 

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.

Her father, the editor of a newspaper in pre-partition days (the paper would later be banned because the religious denomination to which he belonged was declared to be a heretical sect). And some would say that it followed from that, in the inexorable logic of the fanatic's hateful mind, that it was legally permissible-nay, perhaps even a duty-to slay them.

Uncle M, in fact, told me of one person who was killed in his locality (back in 1953 when the troubles started). He was riding his bicycle when a crazed fanatic stepped out from beyond the corner and chopped the cyclists head off with a sword. There is something ghoulish and almost comical in what happened next. Uncle M says that the decapitated body and cycle continued to move for some while because the body was used to the pedaling actions and the blood was still flowing through the veins. That shadow existence carrying on... 


...

There are many things I've heard this week that have made me wonder, again, what it is to be a human. In other words, what's so special about being human? About a girl beaten by her own kith and kin until she's driven mad, roaming the streets with a stick in her hand and a key in her pocket. Her mother, once fairly well-off, now sits at a window with an outstretched hand so that whoever is passing by might place some food in it. If that was just a story or a faint rumour...but you know it is true. 

And you still want to talk with me about the mysteries of the East?  

What was true

What was once true was true.

A mere molecule isolated in its chamber, its journey traced electronically, like a sparrow flying in and out of a high window; a speck of dust, a spilled drop of ink that spreads out like a small continent on the blank paper. To exist is no small feat; existence is separated from nothingness by a vast gulf, even as it carries that nothingness with it- just as the first note of the music carries with it the silence from which it came.

The unknowing ant is not a molecule, is not the spilled ink, although its journey resembles that of its mechanical cousins. To live..that is something!

The human being, with all its frailties, a mere speck of dust in God's eye, a small world in itself, like the ink blot. But to be human..what memories! To be human is not simply to live.

And what of you, my oldest of friends. Not human the way a cloud's a cloud but, still, with a sparrow-heart; but you, this person in this specific place, this particular time. I write your name on a blank piece of paper.

(After Ghazali) 

~~

There are still signs of hope in the Republic. John Berger's books were freely available...At the airport three flights came in at once. All were from the Gulf: Kuwait, Jeddah and somewhere else. the men who emerged from the plane were invariably old, ragged, and bearded. As they emerged, stumbling into the light, each one was greeted by loved ones rushing towards them. There is something old here. 

The wives, heads covered (mostly), fat and rosy cheeked with elation; the children seven or eight years old, dressed up like dolls with rouge and bright lipstick. And they all would cross the barrier and rush to their loved one, showering them with petals or placing garlands around their necks. The security guard feigned irritation, ran towards them with his semi-automatic at his side, and ordered them to disperse (but with no conviction in his heart). There are old human instincts at work here.

~
At dusk S stands out on the balcony and looks out for her daughter. "She should be here by now," she murmurs to herself, again and again. A mother's heart...    

Tao

Only he who practices the Tao understands it.

That there is much in our lives that is not simply unknown but, in fact, unknowable is not a view that is particularly appealing to those of a modern sensibility. To say that we live in mystery is to willingly accept a set of limitations or, worse, to favour obscurantism over enlightenment.

I believe in order that I understand.

One can imagine how that grates. Axioms, inherited traditions, inescapable frameworks; does all of that suggest a leap into the wild, the abdication of reason? To suggest so is to put the case too extremely for there are many areas in which trust, an accepted vulnerability (in Annette Baier's astute turn of phrase) is understood to be vital for the flourishing of any individual life-and for the sanity of a society that insists on resisting the despotic prospects of total monitoring, auditing and 'quantification'.

A soul remembers there is an up
and there is a down.
--Milosz.   

To say there is an order of the soul...none of that can be freely admitted. Instead: the body: a constantly moving happiness machine. Without the mediating function of the soul there is only a body with its blind appetites or an abstract intelligence that has no grip on us or the world as it is. In fact, a formal and mechanical intelligence is made the servant of the body.

The abolition of man (and woman) occurs when we lose the image of man (and woman). It is replaced with false images of who and what we really are. Or, as the case now stands, only shattered fragments of an image since the notion of a whole image, a life that expresses an inner unity, is not something easily granted by those held in thrall to the divisiveness of late capitalism. 

The way that is not the way is not the way.


  

&

This is a world of books gone flat.

This is a Jew in a newspaper hat

that dances weeping down the ward

This is the time 

of the tragic man

These are the years and the walls and the door

This is me, my country, my people.

This is the time I forgot

that shows my missing watch, the empty hands

this is my absent love.

(Elizabeth Bishop & me)

~~~

&




(Courtesy of Tom)

He was always just himself.

It is sometimes said that we live in an age of forgetting, or forgetfulness. The world is (supposedly) changing so quickly that we don't know whether we're coming or going; technology and skills and jobs are changing so furiously that what we once knew is hardly worth knowing any more; in any case, we can just off-load all that know-how on to some unsuspecting digital cloud (haven't we always been embedding and storing knowledge like that?).

What was I saying? 

Yeah, travel light, grasshopper. The age of 'bookishness' is drawing to an end. The text and the university: that 800 year-old alliance is falling apart. Watch this space/screen. 

Why read the classics? (Calvino). No more canons, standards, norms. Nature, if we talk about it at all, is free-floating, random. Human nature? Do me a favour, pal.

I wasn't myself.
I haven't been feeling like myself lately.

Is there still an 'I' to talk of/to? The political apparatus, the blind bureaucratic machine, is nothing but the production of the empty will, de-subjectification, the creation and valorization of a lonely freedom. Art for art's sake-and we're all free! 

The administration of things. Or, in other words: the management of bare life. To talk of a way of life is already to imagine too much order, consistency, stability. Accept you are nothing but a broken fragment with no determinate nature in a world in which there is no substantive good (C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man). I can be who I want to be, matey! But that's because of the ideological determination that creates the illusion that there is no ideology (or, rather, that the ideological belongs exclusively to the political-and to political oppression at that, too).

It's the economy, stupid. 

You are free to do whatever you want as long as it involves shopping.
(Zizek). 

This is all far too serious. Lighten up, dude. Or: let's just have fun. Or: it's those bloody immigrants/foreigners/refugees Muslims who don't understand our values.

When the axe first entered the forest all the trees could say was: "At least the handle is one of us".
---Turkish proverb

Today, they are making bread out of breadcrumbs.
---Karl Kraus.

Read some Ceravolo in the dying sun. My eyes hurt but my body feels at ease in the warm sunshine. Small leaves fly into the sun...

As evening descends you sit outside on the green bench, under a starless sky, the moon directly above your head like a cup pouring down its light. At dusk: a few immobilized students under the trees, like hieroglyphs; the birds flying back together when so many below them are alone. The light grows dimmer by the minute and I struggle to pick out the words, the last dark words on the paper, sinking back...

God created his image.
I love him like the door.
Speak to me now.
Without god there is no god.

--Joseph Ceravolo. 

Where are you from? Who were you?

Nadia and Olga