It is as if there is only a single hour,& in that hour all the provender must be gathered,..He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...
--Salter.
Broke(n), he remembers the silver coin kept in his deep inner pocket, stored all this time just for a moment like this. & he recalls a word found in no-one's heart, "carried by silver and star and reflection" (Anselm Hollo).
A surprising dust storm in mid-afternoon. The dust whistles through gaps in the windows, rises elegantly from the dried-out playing fields, makes my hair tangled, blows into my eyes. I gather rocket and salad leaves. On the way back, this pale fire fluttering in and out of existence. Wisps of seeds from a tree around it, ghost-like, perhaps forming the beginnings of a shroud. By evening the flower would have closed and the clam stillness of the evening returned but for the moment the earth is alive.
In this last year it seems as if a hundred years have passed by in a flash. What is left of my old life seems like an inscrutable mystery to me. And now the shadows have lengthened and become more distinct I find myself wondering if there are only these islands of the heart that remain...
You find yourself more alone than you could have imagined. So much time has flowed under the bridge..the old stone bridge itself, Tu Fu might say, is nothing but a dazzling moment under the eye of heaven, a dim reflection of some other place and time that we witness darkly. The days of our lives like the days of the world now...
And so now your relationship is to one of absences. The past has not disappeared but changed shape and lives within you now in a different way...
Loss: the point becomes a circle, the line a square; what grows in me day by day is my own diminishment. A part of me wants to cling on to the idol of the old days since the path that has now opened up before me leads who knows where? And who would this "you" be then? I have become a question to myself...
I need to weave fragments of texts, sentences that spontaneously emerge, into my thoughts as a way of establishing some kind of continuity; either that or face the prospect of silence, of coming to terms with the lack of words for the way I'm feeling. What kind of place is this...
There's that scene from Offshore where the tide turns and objects slide, move about, swap positions. Nothing's steady anymore against these interruptions that weave their way into a life. Thinking understands the limits of thinking and ceases to be 'thinking'. Like Drummer Hodge you're now a northerner living under a strange southern star. Or maybe that star, north by northwest, continues to flow glistening darkly like the Roding in its season of despair. How to find a sense of being at home in your homelessness...
This song reminds you so much of a time of your life that is so distant and yet, weirdly, all the more real for existing on the borders of your consciousness. You can't name it but it drifts your way...
You've been drifting for so long. Perhaps you need to be truer to this de-centering before "the drift find the drifter"?
When told by the doctors that nothing more could be done the swami, citing Knulp, said: "The desire to sleep overcomes all other desires." Only she could have said that, half wanting to communicate her feelings and half wanting to remain a mystery.
One of those 'strange reversals' (Rumi). For so long you'd asked not to become religious and now you find yourself willing but unable! Taste and see!, said the poet. And yet the words of poets and novelists mean much less to me, strangely superficial..a shallow form of intelligence. Was I the only one who didn't grow up?
These lines by Hadot deeply affected me: Cut out everything; welcome everything. Familiar -at one level-to any Muslim. The question, as always, at what level?
Too try and grow into simplicity. To be less, to speak less in the time that remains. But to speak is to allow stilled time to flow again. 'Allow' suggests too much agency when you know it's otherwise. Does it make any sense now to ask where?
There is just one thing I can say- and maybe it's all I've got left:
Free speech has become the last thing western civilisation can believe in now that religious redemption is a distant dream, and now that climate catastrophe and economic stagnation loom on the horizon. It’s threatened by wokesters, Muslims, a cancel culture, the enemies of liberty...
The last convulsions of a dying man. Free, free at last.
It takes a long time to find your own voice.
Miles Davis said that.
Can you think about ‘free speech’ without talking about the meaning of freedom under late capitalism? Freedom as being ‘free from’..a lonely kind of freedom, negative liberty.
I have nothing to say and I don’t know how to say it.
What matters is the abstract right to say whatever one wants. Freedom here is not related to restraint, obligations, society, silence, truth. The freedom to not always say what is on one’s mind, in one’s heart. Austerity, techniques of ‘right-speaking’, ‘right-seeing’. A kind of austerity that is kind. Reserve, reticence, speaking in turn, at the right moment.
In paradise there is no idle chatter.
—-The Qur’an.
To speak freely with a loved one is not the same as speaking in public, which is subject to all kinds of norms and disciplines. Twitter-speak is free in a limited sense of the term...free to say whatever comes to mind, free to spontaneously react to any provocation.
Even in intimate situations do we speak freely or is there always an element of formality? Does care-feee speech become careless? And who is it that is speaking? The empirical self? Are you talking to me? Can we imagine speech without listeners, without conversation? We tend to think of free speech in individualistic terms.
