Today

 

Just feeling human the way a cloud’s a cloud tinged with blue.. Human, a kind of element, a fire, an air, today.. a house without doors, open to sun or snowdrifts. --Denise Levertov.

The Tree of Life

 

Rootedness is the precondition for verticality..[for what] leads to reverence,revelation. --R. Zaretsky. When the trees have burned down,their darkness remains. ~W.S.Merwin.

A day in the life of:

Coffee. Silence. Reading. Four minute walk home. Lunch. Prayer. Karak chai. Chat with KP: cats,Islam. Notes, markings. Put things in order before Maghrib. Walk. Dinner. A small but blessed, charmed life. The form, not the substance,is monastic, an old rhythm of life somehow surviving, returning. In-between: birdsong, a few questions,maybe a lecture.

~~

Music, language, architecture,knowledge & places become generic,bland, homogeneous, neutral. A grey & blase age of likes, whatever, meh, androgyny (Spiderman, Manga), boredom, untact, zombification, hikokomori & narcissism.

'My intuitive sense is that it has to do with pessimism and a sense of pointlessness in communication. When a place becomes an airport terminal of totally unconnected individuals with no shared culture or sense of a public, there is no coherent entity to express yourself to and it becomes pointless to signal or communicate something outward from within. Who would you be dressing up for?'

--Angela Nagle.

~~

It is a task to come to see the world as it is -- Iris M Falsehood,illusions are comforting. Academia fosters this smugness, 'knowingness'- which is really ignorance, technique or a shallow, outward knowing (econs, Marxists). To see the world one must see oneself & others in it.

~~

'Inscribed on a Wall' I set out to find you Facing you in the dark, the way home lost..I feel it drifting, this whole empty boat, [drifting, drifting] -- Tu Fu.

~~

The first day of spring carries with it the last day of summer. Started here 25 years ago! And now time curves back on itself. "The strength of a man's spiritual capacity measured by his ordinary life." "And the eye that sees refuses to see further, rests on the frail strawness of straw."

--Denise.

~~

Well, for one thing,” he [Don Cherry] replied, “it’s actually not my music, because it’s a culmination of different experiences, different cultures, and different composers that involves the music that we play together.” --A. Shatz.

"Philosophy is not a form of knowledge but a quest for wisdom; what moves us towards it does not come from us. It is not something that can be owned or traded." -- Marcel Henaff.

"He looked no one in the face, as if his relationship with the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand..an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined exchange." --Pasolini

The decline and fall

 

T

Ec-stasy: to stand outside of oneself. The centre doesn't hold; let it go, let it go. This time, right here. Now. 

After the flood

 

The same. The same. then once, in a flash, fresh ground,... black, grey, green, and blue water, stone, grass and sky and each unique set stone! --R.Lowell Not things but a web of connections, "indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence" (on Monet).

~~~

On how silence works:

"I find the here-and-now of vital [but not ultimate] importance. It’s important because it is ephemeral; this moment is here and gone. How I respond to it is the vital question. Do I respond to it from my deepest values? That’s the reality of my faith."

~

On consolation:

Consolation without faith, salvation, grace? İf this is part two of The Needs of Strangers then I'm looking forward to it! Can it, must it, now only come through art, music and texts? Not touching but to be touched. Can there ever be a complete acceptance of pure randomness if we are, in reality, sense-making creatures always searching for meaning?

Perhaps we humans have wanted God most as witness to acts of choice made in solitude. Acts of memory,of sacrifice. --Denise Levertov

Are secular forms of redemption/hope destined to fail- or worse, turn into nightmares? Capitalist modernity's freedom from nature brings forth and perhaps always contained the seeds of climate catastrophe; Marxist utopia results in hopeless architectural brutalism and hell on earth. The structure of redemption narratives (just barely) remains but the substance seems hollowed out.

 

K

We want the mark of time, that streak, wound/gash; the dazzling riddled light held in the loved one's gaze-for a moment, the deep sense of ease at seeing the first step, spring, calendars. The point of intersection, a cross, a turning point, the solstice of the heart. The words not spoken when there was time now recalled, the photograph kept in a deep inner pocket, faith under the left nipple, the worn- down shoes in winter, the clocks in your house all pointing sadly to different hours, the lighting of the fires in the darkness of the morning with darkened hands. The learned skill of forgetting, the amazement that things continue. God in the high, eastern windows, His light reaching us-somehow-marking out time for you, for me.

 

Ich ruf zu Dir Herr, Jesu Christ, BWV 639, J. S. Bach from Lalentituddelosgramófonos on Vimeo.

Time will make you..or it won't. You find yourself in fallen, failing light. All the mystery is in the here and now. This cloth, woven from green and red, gold and green. Each thing has its season. And now is winter. 

Floating Light

 

Promises for C

 

K

We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person.. -- Frost.

When the news arrived you closed the books, collected poems- Irby, Ceravolo. Years pass,mid-morning silence in each room now, the winter mind stalls, all the mirrors cold like a shroud. But amidst the words,a photo & "A picture of everyone i love passes thru me." --Ceravolo.

"Never submit to the flow of time..Deal only with those difficulties that actually confront you." --S.Weil

..scarcely holding yourself up on the bank of the here & now.. connected to fixities subtleties.. January shines now & the glory of January enfolds you in itself-- --Zanzotto.

 

k

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 pale fire

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. 
 

The quality of light

 

The days of our lives

 

 There isn't much to say any more, I guess. 

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:

Nothing lasts forever

But I will always love you.

 

The tangled web you weave

 

River Man

 

 

Free Speech

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.

Woman in the Dunes

Rod's excellent comment on the film misses: the absurdity, deception & demonic that make it a 'home' you rightly want to escape from. Not simply conservatism. Existentialism! A world drained of meaning means there is no 'world'