I don't know why you loved this song so much but I do as well. The music, like everything else, all seems like from such a very long time ago now. Life is a strange and mysterious dream. You would say, of course, that it's also a beautiful dream. But right now it doesn't feel like that, Ubo.
Today, in the late evening never have the streets seemed so empty, never the world so paper thin. It's like you can see only the polish on the table and not the table itself... So many journeys together in the 275- and now I make it alone. You'd always ask at least five times for me to sit down so that my legs wouldn't get tired. I'm sure you remember that. Or try and pick up all the bags yourself. Well, not today, Ubo. Why does this light remind me of so many other summers? Like the time we stayed in a caravan. There is no more time, not even hours and minutes, just these memories that go around and around. How I have longed for you today. How I have wished you to stay.
~~~
I won’t write much more.I know everyone has their own life and grief to carry on with so I won’t burden you but..
Do you believe in signs? I think the distracted mind will always look for coincidences and patterns. We always “ intuit unity”, join the dots. On the other hand, Over the last few years I’ve come to believe that there are signs, it’s just that we don’t know how to read them.
Last night I wrote something ( for myself, about my father) called the ‘long road’. In the morning I woke up with the ( ridiculous?) longing for some sort of sign to try and ease- is that the right word?- the emptiness.
I picked up a book at random ( only read bits of it before) and turned to an unread poem at random.
It says something about driving in the late afternoon on the 19 th of June, passing a dark cloud from a freight truck from Budapest ( I’ve been in regular contact with a dear student whose brother died in Hungary just now).
Even if you don’t believe it, it’s okay..the poem itself is beautiful..it goes on..
Hours after your death you seemed
Everywhere at once like the swifts at twighlight
Now your moments are clouds
In a photograph of swifts.
It concludes with:
Dead, you whispered, ‘where is the road?’
There, through the last of the sentences, just there-
You said, “There is a time and place for everything.” Already this ‘you said’ sounds false, a way of creating a distance from you when your actual voice was always close by. When your spoken words, however plain, were real in comparison to the ghostly memory-voice. Moocha phoned and the way he abruptly and half-quizzically says ‘yes’ at the end of his sentences reminds me of you. Did you even really say that? What if my memory fades, falsifies? How many false notes before it becomes a different tune? Or is that just another way of living: through stray words, images, the things you once held or wore? I half expected to see you cleaning the kitchen when I woke up. In the park I catch myself looking for you. What a mystery. Today I thought, for some reason, of the moment you were born, how you must have played as a kid. And this I remember clearly because the image is deeply lodged in my memory. Do only jokes and tears remain after all? You had dressed up as a fakir and, as a lark, went about with your friend collecting money, from street to street. You went to your own house and even nearly got some money from your poor old mother. But at the last moment she recognised you and then beat you proper! What a mystery. A bird flying through one window and out the other. Is that it, then, the time and place? But you would never have settled for such an ascetic view, never held it to be the whole truth. It is true-and I have to agree with you here- that life on earth will always have some kind of imperfection and that it will never be complete. But that’s only the half of it for there is so much wonder in life. I think you would have liked this: "In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground." I know you would have appropriated it and pretended they were your own words! Nothing happens all day. Some letters are still arriving for you. I hate to think what will happen when they dry up. Well, what time would you call this now? I think you’d have been amazed yourself to see it. But even this no-time you would have passed through, worked out. Even this rotten time is part of the whole of time you would say and that it has its place. But more than anything you would have shielded me from it, negated the negation, and let time flow again for me. It won’t last. Everything must fade. Perhaps even our memories. Maybe that’s true. Let’s see. Right now, all I can say is that I know that nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.
You said that when a person's gone they're gone- and that's it. A wahabi till the very end! But you were wrong on that, old man! You made me promise you not to get old. Well, I've tried. Now I won't see you get older, but it's okay. Guess it was your time. But we had so many good years- and for that I'm grateful. Well, on your way then. I know that since you always looked out for us even now you're trying to find a good place for us. I know your heart is true. My heart is still, as time will tell. 'But your dance is ended so sleep on and take your rest, my father, my Jew.' No, not even Denise gets it. I will always remember you dancing, almost hopping on one leg, arms outstretched, about to fall, free, not knowing beginning or end, with those deep sorrowful eyes. So, dance or rest in your own way, as you pass down that sorrow to me.
I don’t know why I don’t write more about dreams and sleep when they’re such an important part of my life. I sleep a lot; much of my life has been spent sleeping. I look forward to it and can sleep almost anywhere. After lunch is usually the deepest, most perfect. Or in a chair in the sun. I sleep on the floor in my office, in trains, on journeys. Even when people are talking to me I’m half asleep.
I remember lots of my dreams. From years ago. Sometimes I revisit them. I sometimes get confused and am not sure whether I’m dreaming or awake. Sometimes I’ll see words or whole sentences and then wake up to scribble them down in pencil on a scrap of paper. Dreams can be so deep that you do t remember them but when you wake up the feeling carries over well into the day, dissipating by 10 or 11. Often, the first word in your waking life is just a continuation, or a summary of, or a connection to the dream, a floating bridge to that carefree world which you love to inhabit.
Sunday morning lie in has its own unique charms. The ‘king’s sleep’ ( I.e. after breakfast) is something of an indulgence. Sleep after a hard day’s work is supposed to be superb but I wouldn’t know.
In lots of my dreams I’m in London, on the underground. Very rarely in Lahore but, recently, like Drummer Hodge, the south has seeped in. Is there something to who we see in our dreams?
To the moderns dreams mean very little (perhaps because they live in a dreamworld anyway). They tend to see them as the working out of the subconscious, a frustrated expression, perhaps, of what is repressed. But there’s nothing quite like the sense that one’s seen a true dream or that it somehow gives you insight into one’s own life.
The heart's roots are here under this black soil. Every right word on your tongue Has a green taste. The truth's here Closer than the world will confess. --R.S. Thomas. ¬¬¬ The sullying of the mind, the heart, in this late hour. Bewildered. A time for sheltering, for gathering and taking stock. But what if nothing has accumulated over all these years? We're haunted by old ways of speaking, older notions of time from our distant past and so we still talk about 'conserving' and the 'web of life'. As if we still retained some deep connection to cyclical time, the cycles of life. The seeds of time. Where will you plant them now? Which filed will be allowed to lie fallow? The soil, turned over with love, will bring forth what new things, which green words?
It seems as if this will never pass. All that rose to the surface was more surface. What he had instead of a being, I thought, is blandness. --Roth. What if your personality has developed as far as it can go and from now on cycles around a still, dead point, like a vulture? Plenty Coups: After that nothing happened. There are fields, in each in their own wild time. You are nowhere. “Often I am permitted to return to the meadow” Lahore, 4 p.m. the suicide hour, on any day in June in any year. The centuries roll on, but the core feeling, the central dream, remains undisturbed. Nothing moves, all the clocks have been stilled. The mirrors serve no function, return to a quieter life of solitude. No-one appears before them. The human face has disappeared. Outside, if that's the right word, there is the structural rigidity of nothingness. And within? There is a deep shade, in which thought lies, quietly observing how a small gust of wind picks up the dirt and swirls it around at ankle level, makes it look like a small animal. The mind becomes elemental. In the corner a human waits for the fierceness of the day to come to an end, for night to fall. Think back, think back now, to your old life. In your own life-that's right, distance yourself as much as possible- in your own life that was never your own life your hands were largely idle, without grace. Heart and hand out of tune. The body at an angle to the light. The 'life of the mind' is not life; it is abstract rather than time-ridden, textured by place or interwoven with the lives of others. I thought I heard her say something. She knew a word found in nobody's heart. Which was useful for a time like this. Everyone's left. It's like the day on a world cup final, the day after human beings have left for space. It was always strange down here, they'd say. They'd forgotten, 'That each spring, Sky must meet Earth, that there is no life without both Sky and Earth. If you live without one or the other you will build a world that is bent on its axis, and that world may seem whole but will only be half-made.' --Kingsnorth. 06/06/20. The field in the early morning hours is quiet. The moon is still above it, connected to the dew. there are some cold shadows on its surface. In a few hours, to use the old mode of expression, it is bathed in light, flat, bare. Later still, the shade returns and this time it is soothing, pleasant to walk though. It weaves the whole field together. Then, when the sun is at its lowest, only a few brief patches of the field remain illuminated. The light clings on with such melancholic sorrow, hanging about the long grass, or at the feet of a small tree. Before, humans would have photographed such events but now they simply let them wordlessly register in their hearts and fade. 05/06/20 In the last days everything had been repeatable, everyone had been interchangeable. Gold, silver, hand, heart. But before, someone had understood this and had actually said, 'Instead of a world where things were unique but linked by an unimaginable density of connection and cross-reference, we had created one in which things were unconnected but endlessly repeatable and where everything could be exchanged in the market.' 04/06/20 An open book was found in the field. The curvature of the land followed the curvature of the river that ran adjacent to it. The moon, the flow of the river, the words.. Before, the humans had dreamt much, and in opium-infused dreams would travel like those people once called shamans and they would enter other people's lives and be allowed to do so. 03/06/20 Once there was a category of people called 'the poets' who cold see far away things, but also things that were nearby with great intensity. Some said they had the 'ear of a wild Arab in the silent desert, the eye of a North Indian tracing the footsteps upon leaves in a deep forest..they could know a face the way a blind man does, through only his system of touch.' 02/06/20 The desert returns to city. A man stood still, as if trapped in a mirror. Looked out into the empty world and saw the footsteps of a woman upon the dry leaves in the field. He'd never seen her in real time but her face still seemed mysteriously familiar, her voice as unsure as his.
We stand, in wonder, and look at the time that has been lost, with empty hands.
What happens when the hands fail? Those same hands that worked for so long and were also the ‘self- revealing gestures of the soul’? My own hands have darkened with time. In your own line of work your hands are largely idle. Heart and hand out of tune. The ‘life of the mind’ is not life; it is abstract rather than time-ridden, textured by place, interwoven with the lives of others. The dream of the unified field. Only half of it is revealed, as if out of modesty. ‘One in the Hand’:
A bird re-entering a bush, ..seeks the missed discoveries before attempting flight again.
