crow country

As I was writing this the electricity jumped to a stop. Then it drained from the machines, a siren in reverse. Then-suddenly- the caw of a crow, cracking the silence, startled into awareness, and other birds, as if from a distant past.

Someone sent me this..I don't know the original (forgive me!) but only hear its echo rising through the descending fog.

In the silent courtyard of my home, a crow cawed
Then the sweet rain fell and I remembered you.

--Nasir Kazmi

The birds carry the memory of the stars with them in the morning light. 

Someone is sweeping the leaves in brisk, short movements of his brush. Inside, a janitor cleans the floor with his mop in wide, unnecessarily expansive sweeping movements (when you think he should follow a figure 'eight'). Perhaps his mind is wandering as he works. The movement of my own hands tentative, as the light returns and things find their shape again. My heart rests in silent forms, remembers the words not spoken.

Otto

in the forest, in the heart of the forest, so deep that you don't know if it is the heart. you see trees. today. 'the forest' is a concept. you don't live here. but you might die. maybe you already did that and are just wandering. no, not that. how do you make your way back. there is a something to go back to, you're sure. or maybe you just want to believe it so much that you can't bear the thought of it not being true. 

okay. now. what. what if there is no way. or what if there is a way but you don't know it. if someone just told you there wasn't then maybe you could sort of get by and your old face wouldn't matter. or if you god forbid. lost your memory. this isn't a question of theory. idle speculation. this is where you are, in the midst of it. some line in a book, firmly closed now..will that help. i don't know. go your own way. time. essence of. reason don't matter don't much don't expect. then. something else. auxillary. the old ways. love the only. now. where is this other room. 

your true heart.

k.

Celia says,

"I walk in a forest every day. Actually, it's only a wood. It even has a name, just to confirm: F_ Great Wood.I know its tracks and paths by heart. I shan't get lost. Because here I walk with ghosts who'll guide me back. Beneath my feet a maze of long-abandoned mineworks. Folk who died there, men and women, never got to have old faces. Being old, I think now, is an acquired skill - which I'm working on."

Love that- especially the use of the word 'shan't'. Will try and and say something about it soon.

"When we have reached the point that we no longer know where we are headed, we have gone as far as it is possible to go."

"In a stark warning over global heating, Mark Carney said the multitrillion-dollar international capital markets – where companies raise funds by selling shares and bonds to investors – are financing activities that would lift global temperatures to more than 4C above pre-industrial levels."

--The Guardian.

Those in the know, know. Handke, Trump, Brexit..all that is going to seem like peanuts pretty soon. Occupy yourself with the Kardashians or with Literature. Good luck to you. No, I mean it. 

What was that song by Lauryn Hill:

you can keep the money

you can keep the power,

I got my eye, on the Final Hour.

What did the day bring forth but an accumulation of strangeness. You read into the dark, the words barely visible in the last of the living light. You carry the book with you like a talisman. Settle on the green bench under the tree. Not much is understood but the white of the page becomes bright, clear, as the sun goes down. A gentle breeze, with something of winter, North, in it reminds you of former times, some other life you once lived..

The day spent. Few words, almost invisible, like an old man who looks back on his life, askance at the world he no longer belongs to. 

The birds in the tree above are restless but not distraught. The hour is upon them. A frenetic remembrance of home. High above them the pigeons settle on the ledges of the brick building which is otherworldly in this light. Everything is free to finds their true nature, their own version of North. Humans, even if still, are lost, bewildered.

Herr Lukas looks for the stray cats, carries two metal plates of bones and a syringe for them. 

You can’t make out the last words in the evening. Organic material falls on the open book, leaving a faint green smudge. A small red ant scrambles quickly over the cold text. Luckily it climbs my warm hand and I avoid any more smudges- which in this case would have been a single death. 

The lights come on. Orange light falls on the page and now there are shadows too next to the black ink. The light flickers or the breeze picks up a degree so that the rustling of the leaves above is mirrored on the page. My own ‘I’ is no less stable. I haven’t been reading anyway, just observing and thinking about my own life as I look into this silent mirror I’ve placed on my lap. Some of the pages are just holding together. You fear that sections might randomly come loose and then you’d have to read it closed.

winterground

S crushes some garlic in a pestle and mortar, the rhythm of her hand movements carrying something from another place, a long time ago. Awareness of mortality rises to the surface, heightened by the dim artificial lamplight that burns futilely in the morning light that moves to fill the house. Like the moon in the late morning, unreal, undecided, out of place. 

It feels like Spring. Your frame of reference is the hour-by-hour but the seasons seem out of joint. Perhaps it's only a global imbalance in the cosmos and not you.

There is a kind of silence here. Other places and times have words, sounds. 11 and the light has become more even, entering its long phase. Still, you carry within you last night's dream where you were there, though I can't recall your face. In this late stage of the day one must do without images. 'And then, face to face...'.

I note the hours by the pages turned. Time has passed without any sentences being marked by/with the lead pencil, whose blunt tip makes double lines, as if to emphasize something. There are whole stretches where nothing has happened- or, you just haven't been in tune. You've been reading the book for years, so it's almost become personal- not because anything inheres in you but simply because of the passage of time. So it is.

And the old distances remain old, even now.

The light is so frail, I'm sure I've lived through this life before.

How far away my old hearts seem. Was I ever alive?

Now it's as if my heart has moved many miles away. While I've been here all the time, South, adrift.

I've forgotten how to speak (don't flatter yourself, kid, it's a general ailment). Some words passed down, unknown. That's the way it goes. The books, words, people, and images falling back into mystery. The light is brief, carries with it its own darkness, waiting to reverse, faltering under its own weight.

What is not gathered is far more- perhaps the main thing.

Why, then, speak of your heart instead of absences if not out of an old habit? As the heart no longer nourishes the heart it hoped to nourish. As I write this clouds gather, making the letters on the keyboard hard to see. Acknowledge your own faults, mistakes.

I must have lived many days like this once, my face darkening in the backyard sun, my hands shielding me from its glare. The kitchen doors flung open, bits of broken conversation and laughter from long ago floating though the smoke while all the time you concentrated on the flowers making their way through the cement floor. Now, I grown dark, is it so very different? Except the voices have fallen away..

As winter comes on
our fate to have the colder moon born in us.

Lines from K. Irby and yourself.

Night & Day

..
..
..
..
..
..

The day looks like night; the night like day.

Turn all the lights right down. Stand in the still moment of darkness. Even the crows can't be heard. 

Don't read the newspaper, don't watch the television. The only rectangles that interest you are books. 

You make it through the morning, spending a few hours in oblivion, reading something that is both fascinating and irrelevant. Now the afternoon... 

The way back

And when we're gone, who will ask, when no-one asked when we were here. 

The light fades, autumn returns. Many years have passed. Sometimes, in the stillness, it appears as if a moment is carrying with it many, many years. These years have no weight yet they seem to fill the space of your life. It's not that they're remembered or stretched out in front of you like a map that you could read; rather it's as if I've entered that time again and they take me in again for some unbidden reason that remains a mystery. And then, just as suddenly as time was breached it flows again. A bird chirps, there is the clanking of teacups in an adjacent room. I look at myself in the untrustworthy mirror again. Am I dreaming?

The Handke Question: "You can stick your corpses up your arse."

I 've got very little to say on this. My instinctive reaction was: "I don't give a fig about his politics". I think that was rash.

So, the defence goes: since you haven't read any of his books can you comment? Fair point: I cannot comment about the books or what they say about his worldview/politics..what if the books consistently (or not) demonstrate views that would make a mockery of the claim that he's a particular kind of nasty nationalist or the kind of person who would support that kind of nationalism?

Defence no. 2 Even his private or public views are abhorrent -which remains to be shown since all you've got are newspaper snippets and hearsay- his work itself stands out, is admirable, exceptional etc. and he/it should be judged on those grounds alone: play the ball, not the man.

Again, I'm torn here. I'd love to read Repetition. It sounds like just the kind of book I'd like. On the other hand, isn't there something to the notion of what Frithjof Schuon calls 'integral intelligence'? Someone can be hugely intelligent or even profound in some senses and a complete idiot in another sense? Isn't that just the fragmentation of the self in modernity and something that is actually conducive to liberalism's battle against totalitarianism or a narrow determination of human possibilities? 

So, for a moment let's take for granted that his political views are, to say the least, weird. So what? I dunno. Can one look at Freud's paintings in the same way once you've read that he (allegedly) said that a woman has only truly submitted once she's been sodomized? And then there's the slippery slope argument: how far do you go? What if a writer/artist/musician has been racist/misogynist etc.? Can art ever be "pure" or, to put it another way, is there a danger of politicizing everything? And then: whose politics?

Over the last few days there's been a lot of vitriolic reaction to Handke being awarded the Nobel. On the other hand, there seems to have been a lot of intellectual somersaulting trying to make sense of his statements..did he really say the Bosnians were "staging"  atrocities? And what exactly did he mean when he said he stands with Milosevic. What did he mean, if he said it, that "all sides" do wrong? "You can stick your corpses.." Really? Is that linguistic integrity?

I don't know if there's a coming down on one side or the other. One would hope that one could still recognize someone's work as being profound or even brilliant but at the same time be deeply uneasy about their political views. 

I'm suspicious of people who are not suspicious. 

Does that mean that those people who don't express any kind of  unease are naive? Or is there something darker to it? 

Books, etc.

The book I am currently reading

I’m always reading 5 or 6 books simultaneously. At the moment: Simic's Book on Joseph Cornell, the collected poems of Ken Irby, Mounier’s Personalism, J.Aldred’s Licence to be Bad: How economics corrupted us, Derek Jarman's Chroma, a book on R. Spaemann ( forget the name but an excellent introduction) and struggling through Spaemann’s own dense but rewarding Happiness and Benevolence. Just finished Rowan Williams’ superb Being Human.

The book that changed my life

I think books only change our lives imperceptibly ( at least they do for me). I love books but I’m also a Puritan of sorts so very conscious of Goethe’s ‘ only read as much as you can live’(not that I've read him)..ultimately that means remembering that a book is only a book. Nothing compared to love and life. The tree of knowledge..the tree...

The book I wish I’d written

 I’d say Gilead. I don’t wish I’d written anything else though because that’s like saying I wish I wasn’t me (that sounds narcissistic but I hope you know what I mean?). But Gilead for the wisdom, for the quietness in the soul that could let someone write like that. Dunno. Maybe something by Robert Walser. I wish I could write like Peter Brown with his profound and imaginative sympathy.

The book that had the greatest influence on my writing

 None. My writing is crap and that’s down to me.

The book I think is most under/overrated

Alfred Hayes is hugely underrated. Yourcenar’s Hadrian seems to be only known in small circles but is superb. She gets the tone just right. Pitch-perfect.

The book that changed my mind

M. Robinson’s The Givenness of Things. Up until then I’d lazily gone along with the assumption that Puritanism was anti- culture. Peter Brown's exhilarating Augustine of Hippo changed my idea of what a biography could be and Chesterton's brilliant Orthodoxy changed my opinion of the man.

The last book that made me cry

No book has made me cry but I had to narrow my eyes to keep the joy in whilst reading Denise Levertov’s beautiful poems about faith, ageing and mortality. Breathtaking. Evening Train.

The last book that made me laugh

Spike, of course! Milligan. Laugh out loud funny. Dario Fo is also funny.

The book I couldn’t finish

I. McEwan’s Children Act. I read up to the last five pages and decided not to complete it just to spite the bastard. An anti- religious book written by a joker who hasn’t got a clue what religion is.

Not enough time so I end up abandoning lots of books.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Not ashamed because I don’t read for other people or to maintain an image of being ‘a reader’. That's  just another way of internalising the elitism of the self- righteous. Then again, I do feel that I have to read King Lear at some point since my sister reads it every year.

My earliest reading memory

Didn’t read much at all as a child. So earliest memory is really browsing the books on my sister’s book shelves and the thrill of picking out whatever interested me. Hesse’s Siddhartha..Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The world suddenly opened up.

My comfort read

I suppose I’m always returning to K. Clark’s Civilisation and Gai Eaton’s King of the Castle. The latter is a great book about choice and responsibility in the modern world. What do we really mean by liberty? The book that introduced me to Arendt, F. Schuon and G. Thibon..so that's saying something!

The book I give as a gift

I’m always giving books to my friends or trying to impress on them some writer or the other. I think it would have to be Muhammad Asad’s Road to Mecca, a brilliant autobiography of one man’s spiritual quest. Up there with Exupery in terms of the style of writing. Marred by his negative views of Shiaism.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

Well, I still feel I haven’t written the book I want to. Let’s see. Inshallah.

The wave

It was on the inside
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple,
About to be whole.

--H. Dunmore.

You make a single wave. It moves away from your hands and extended arms, slowly and gently curling away from you, held in your eye's gaze for a few seconds more..and then it becomes indistinct, not even a murmur, rejoins the still water. 

What would it be to think only of the moment from the perspective of the moment? To be in it as it unfurls itself.

You see an attractive woman reading a book, lost. On the opposite side of her is a small tree whose every leaf shimmers in resplendent beauty. Not easy to know at what to marvel at.

The morning silence. An espresso. Try to make some notes. Mounier's incredible Personalism up next- not that you know 'what's next'. 

Last evening, before your run, you witnessed the last dregs of the day ebbing away, the last few notes of the day finding their equilibrium. The mysterious light just hanging there, on a few trees, the tops of buildings, already darkened, already suggesting infinite distances.

You noticed the ground for some reason. While you run you try not to think of any negative thoughts-and just let them flow away from you. You notice the earth beneath your feet, wrinkled, dusty and soft in places and hard in others. 

While you run there's something in the air, or maybe it's the quality of the fading light, that reminds you of some former time. How many thousands of years do we carry with us? What was my face like then? So many of those years washed away, but sometimes a wave returns your way...  

  

The Chicago Boys

It can be said that Mi [Man i] loves Fj [Female J] if her welfare enters his utility function, and perhaps also if Mi values emotional and physical contact with Fj. Clearly, Mi can benefit from a match with Fj, because he could then have a more favorable effect on her welfare - and thereby on his own utility - and because the commodities measuring 'contact' with Fj can be produced more cheaply when they are matched than when Mi has to seek an 'illicit' relationship with Fj."

--G. Becker.

[The "commodity" measuring contact being children].

Here's another cracker from the man:

“In the early stages of my work on crime, I was puzzled by why theft is socially harmful since it appears merely to redistribute resources, usually from wealthier to poorer individuals. I resolved the puzzle (Becker [1968, fn. 3] by recognizing that criminals spend on weapons and on the value of the time in planning and carrying out their crimes, and that such spending is socially unproductive – it is what is now called “rent-seeking..” 

 "From the perspective of capital, what most of us see as tremendous 

ethical and even existential problems literally don’t count."