What will be lost?

Lots of speculation about what a post-C19 world will look like. Lots of uncertainty, for sure, and probably lots of suffering (economic, mental and otherwise). The simple pleasures of social interaction, going to a restaurant with friends or family, reading in a bookshop..maybe they'll all be effected. 

Will reading, music or art be as important to us in these troubled times? How will we think of nature? Will our relation to time itself be restructured as we stop investing so much time and energy in future-oriented projects (a theme from Scheffler's great book, Death and the Afterlife).

What will you miss (or mourn) most in the bleak near-future? That was a question posed by someone on the internet.

Not sure if I’d use the word ‘mourn’ given the real suffering other people are going through right now- and that lots will probably face in the future. Beyond financial concerns, if I lose my job I think I will be sad because I will have lost a big part of my identity ( which makes me think, what exactly is my identity?).

But I still think it’s important for those who of us have lived a privileged life to be thankful for all the good things that have come our way over the years. I’ve travelled, had some great food, seen some great art but I live a pretty basic life anyway so as long as I have my family, friends and books close by I don’t know what I’ll really miss. If we are what we love then who am I?

In any case, I wouldn’t want to think just about my own life; what I’d be really sad about above all else is that my children might grow up in a much harsher climate. But let’s see. I know a lot of religious people would say ( and genuinely believe): if that’s what’s meant to be then that’s what it is ( even if though that doesn’t exclude regret).

There’s this amazing line in ‘Radical Hope’ where Plenty Coups, a Crow Indian, says:

My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

The light is clearer, the birdsong and the silences more intense, but in some sense much remains the same here in London: trees, clouds, river. Are we returning to an elemental state or does this point to an awareness that the fundamental things that underlie the goodness of our lives are constant?

Much speculation on economic, political and institutional futures.Interesting and necessary but also, perhaps, a distraction. Social solidarity or a surveillance state? Ultimately, I marvel at the human spirit that imagines continuity and a 'north of the future'. But another part of me-a deeper part?- dimly recognises all the interruptions that have gone up to make my life. Isn't life itself this broken circle, a song of joy and sorrow?

So, to think too much about the future seems both impossible and something of a false consolation. The past, too. February nostalgia, a Bardo-like hankering for the simple pleasures we once enjoyed but took for granted: coffee, scrambled eggs, conversation...

For me this has been a time to reflect on what's really important in my life (that makes it sound too self-referential for in reality there is no life without others). If we are what we love, then who am I?

I zig-zag up the street, trying to avoid people. If someone gives me way I nod my head in an exaggerated fashion or, in an old eastern gesture that people in London are calling 'the Turkish,  I move my hand to my heart in gratitude. Maybe something of the old gestures will remain or maybe we'll learn to recognise smiles by the sparkling of someone's eyes.

So, in the time that remains it seems important to not think too much about the future or the past but, instead, about what Rosenzweig called 'the demands of the day'. Time is given to us and is not ours. If that was *truly* believed, I think to myself, there would be less anxiety.

Personally speaking, I'm not there. But I am grateful for all the beauty, friendship and love that have come my way ("Which of My favours will you deny?", asks God in the Qur'an). All the striving of the ego seem hollow and shallow- more so than usual. I'm haunted by what Merton once wrote: "I want to be somebody that nobody knows".

When everything appears to be in lockdown it is important to recall, as Rumi said, that freedom is the ability to thank the Almighty for his Beneficence. Now, right now, more so than ever.

Rock paper scissor

Souffrance

I think of you in that sea of graves beyond the city,
where many stones have been left, among them,

mine: a little piece of dolomite to weigh down a slip of paper.
I would have put your gloves and umbrella in the coffin,

along with one more morning in Berlin with Tanya, an hour
of pigeons rising around you, lilacs wrapped in news

stories, a minute at the barricades, another riding
on your father’s shoulders through the garlic fields, even cigarettes

left over from the occupation I would have placed there.
Instead, this notebook, a pen full of ink, and that short

poem by Hölderlin you loved, so you could go up in smoke
together: you, the notebook, the pen, the poem by Hölderlin.

In the aftermath, you are emulsion on paper, a corpse listening beneath
the ground to a train passing through a polaroid of clouds.

It was Joseph who said that for all eternity, Venice would happen only once.
You are a ghost then, following a ghost back through its only life.

Or as you say now: there were many cities, but never a city twice. 

¬ ¬ ¬

Rock paper scissor

¬         ¬         ¬

Judith Butler continues to amaze. Why on earth didn't I read her before? Was it because, subconsciously, you associated her writing with queerness (but why the superb Wendy Brown, then?). Or did I just think that the writing would be too dense, convoluted? The book has led me to Adriana Caverero's Inclinations. Looks fascinating..in line with Mary Midgley's great lecture/talk: 'Rings and Books'. Is the problem, or part of the problem, then, that there have been too many male thinkers? 

Carolyn Forche has a beautiful way of speaking. Only started the poetry but her memoir, highly recommended by Rowan Williams, has been on your list for a while. 

Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights was a dream.

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,
stones loosened by tanks in the streets
of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,
agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of the city’s entombment,
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

Wanted to say a few things about Hardwick's Sleepless Nights..not sure if it's just my jittery state of mind or if the book is genuinely excellent, but I'm surprised the book hasn't received more acclaim (cp. Stoner, for example, which we won't hear the end of for the next five years..if there is a five years, that is..sorry, sorry..I told you about state of my mind).

Okay, I think I've realised that I'm more drawn to the tone of voice in books than to the plot or maybe even to character. Yourcenar's perfect steady and calm voice, in which you can almost hear the breathing; Breece -and this may just be my bad memory- for his gnarled, condensed, gritty sentences that hide a shadow meaning; or Fermor for his..what.. flow, exuberance?;or Paley's wise and humane manner of speaking, so to speak (thank you ll!).

Elizabeth H: stylistic brilliance and a warm, sparkling intelligence.

Somehow she had retrieved from darkness the miracle of pure style.

Her lyrical utterance is saved for her work.

The last two 'chapters'- if that's the word-are possibly the best. away from New York, with its graves next to its banks, in Maine, she lives through

winter after winter, a decade falling like snow on the top of another, soundless.

and writes about cleaning women; those who battle with repetition and the gathering of ashes, their beauty formed out of negatives.. Wandering people who gave up and take on their destiny. What can these people talk about in winter, how they fade -like all of us-with their questions unanswered.

The book is 'about'-that horrible word- what is lost, washed away to sea but also, perhaps, the idea that you cannot destroy a ruin and that sometimes, when the light is right, something of the old structure of our lives returns.