The unbuilt moment

My father has lost his way out of the present..

The act of forgetting used to take time.
Now it accompanies him through each day..

What unlocked this emptiness?
He knows not to ask. He knows how small he is,
how small his island, how small his spell.

Lavinia Greenlaw.

Through the built up countryside, its lines, tractors, and terrible sense of being manufactured (Hugh Brody was so right here!). Death itself is manufactured here.

This was an impossible day for me. I don't think I can write about it. The last day I will see my dear, dear uncle, who I love so very much. Old world style and charm, an even older Jewish-Kashmiri intelligence, a mind always keenly alert. He introduced me to Peter Fuller's lovely book. I feel I have to somehow keep that safe now.

And now he has just a few sentences left. He keeps repeating, "this is terrible, this is terrible". Keeps his hands busy. Writes down a sentence in a beautiful script but barely recognizes what he's written. The struggle to say something is unbearable. I do my best to hide the horror and sadness in my heart. I just hug him and say "it doesn't matter". I have tears in my eyes now. He doesn't want to let go. I can't speak now. 

The world carries on. The taxi driver utters something utterly pointless. I don't blame him. He wants to drive away as far and as fast as possible. I don't look back. I can't. Everything is falling away in this dullest of environments, the sun-and-wheat consciousness making me choke.  

So, here we are, bewildered in this unbuilt moment. Everything will pass away, but I will still love you. 

Meditations

On Hillside Avenue you were witness to the timeless enactments of the human story.

On Hillside Avenue in the silent rain.

The darkness there around you in the falling light.

~~~

A young girl walks in the rain, with just the hood of her coat on her head, her arms free. A double decker bus heaves up the hill in its low gears, its passengers staring into the infinite distance, imagining other worlds. They see me, perhaps, unshaven, unkempt, a wild man from the east upsetting their bourgeois stupor. A woman asks a mother walking with her child: "How old is she now?"An old West Indian man walks ten paces behind his grandson and tells him to wait, wait. On the radio: the pound buys one dollar twenty five. Two Romanian women-fairly attractive (or maybe I'm just old)- take deep drags of their cigarettes and remember a warm summer's day from only a few years ago.

The voices change, the accents too. Even the modes of transport might be different. But, yeah, it's there..know what I mean, Roxana? Not all good, but mixed up with it. It all goes on. That's the way it is. Am I here?  

You made it to the centre but had one hour to find the place.

At The Lebanese Bakery you met an old friend, an Islamic scholar, and over delicious flat breads discussed Ibn Taymiyyah and the importance of agency in the structure of Islamic thought. "I doubt," I said, "that the universal and singularities has ever been discussed here". 

"Yes," he replied. I bet it's usually: w'ala..Gucci..al shaikh..Armani..brother.."

Strange to learn that he's into minimalist electro. But then again, that could be because he's a wahabi...voices and lyrics distract him; the slight modifications of the same tune bring an openness with them. Like fiction, I said, so much of it is simply padding for western sensibilities hooked to bourgeois security (paraphrasing Ghosh's thoughts in The Great Derangement). M. Asad had written, all those years ago, that there was something monotonous-almost hypnotic- about the way 'eastern' music circles around a still centre. 

Maybe that's what we've always wanted, I suggested..a broken circle..or maybe a spiral?

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Outside of Foyles you saw a man with a shock of henna-dyed hair, suited in  the kind of lawyer's garb that one only sees in Lahore. I had to take a second glance to make sure this wasn't an apparition. Am I here when I'm here?

In the time I had I bought Murnane's Plains book and Byung-Chul Han on the expulsion of the other (really good, as usual). there was still time to quietly read the first half of Lavinia Greenlaw's moving poems on her father's dementia. 

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Kempowski's book was a disaster. All for Nothing. You said it. The desire to immerse yourself in fictional lives wanes by the hour. It's not that all has been said and done; it's more that there's never any real engagement with reality- just a childish rolling out of cliches. I'll write more about why it was such a poor book later- or maybe i won't.