Let

Let your self go, man. You been perched up there a long time, bro'
Let England shake, I don't give a damn.
Every white artist that dies is a genius, a lyrical, misunderstood prophet against his age. 

Let go and let equilibrium be restored. 
When night comes it's just me & you.
The prison walls fall.

The black sun shines,
but you can't see it.
Loss holds us in circles
-- broken.

Fragments of a life

I dreamt my own death and the light was calm, serene, easy and simple and gentle. I'd always imagined it just so, the perfect light of late summer, just before Fall and the evening chill.

"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".

He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.

Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.

By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.

~~

'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'

--Macintyre. 

Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was. 

Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.  

The cult of youth

It will come as no surprise to the long-time sufferers on this blog to discover that I really am an old man. I have been old for ages, in fact. And that remains true despite my naivete, stunning impracticality and inability to consider what grown ups take seriously to be anything but comical. In other people the refusal to cower before authority would probably be taken to be a reflection of anarchist tendencies or a religious leaning; whereas for me it is, I suspect, a form of childishness. So, old as in: old-world, out of date, a relic from the past, etc., etc.

In this line of work you always stand still while everyone else gets younger. So, in effect you age at double the speed. 

Makes you wonder what "value" (to use that horrible word) old people actually have. In previous times, culture was essentially conservative and backward-looking. The past was never truly past and everything was about the origin, not the periphery. 

Also, because time passed more slowly and nothing really happened we were closer to the natural cycles of the earth. In fact, it would be fair to say that all of our thinking was circular. Birth-growth-death, the great cycles within which we would weave our story. At another level: poverty-labour-luxury-poverty. Perhaps there's something truly frightening about the inevitability of those closed worlds-except they weren't completely closed as long as they had a transcendental dimension (broken circles). 

But if we live in linear time then time always escapes us or we always flee it. There's only a chance encounter with what is lost and there's no "redemption" of time. If the past is remembered then it as the "past," something that is staged for consumption and not something that stands as a model or that offers exemplars (I told you I was old!).

What counts is what can be counted. The experience of age, the accumulation of experiences, doesn't matter any more. But why is that? It's not just that there's a cult of youth and beauty; it's not just that the economy increasingly values productive skills and knowledge rather than craft or wisdom (the latter being reduced to some kind of woolly leftover from a bygone age). It's also that given the way technology develops, cities and places develop or are transformed, nothing stands still..nothing is allowed to stand still. 

In that sense, even the idea of a linear narrative is broken since we only live in, are encouraged to only live in, the moment. There is no continuity and therefore no experience to speak of. We do not grow old but are stuck in a perpetual adolescence, clutching onto our toys in the belief that they will offer some semblance of order (memory?) against the momentariness and fragmentary nature of the modern world (religion, to state the obvious, is one such toy).

So, given this wild desire for the shock of the new, for novelty, we end up thoroughly bored, needing an ever more exotic and erotic 'fix' to keep us going. And we must keep going. The only thing that can be conjured up is a fake stability produced by fake images infinitely repeated. Repetition and ritual do not disappear from the modern world (Calasso).

{Poussin, at The Wallace Collection, one of London's little and relatively unknown gems}

broken circles

It is somewhat of a platitude to say that our understanding of something can be heightened by its absence; not it's absolute disappearance, mind you, since the continued existence of its trace must always be there or thereabouts, offering the distinct possibility of a restoration.

The ageing of one's hands is astonishing; the experience of an individual's life (fundamental gestures, what has slipped though the fingers) is something to behold. The ancient affinity between hand and eye (Lowell: finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the heart follows its trackless way). For hundreds of thousands of years the repetition of something in our lives leads to a form of understanding.

The hands, that in the final hour, bear witness to all we were. 

~

'Their eyelids were always downcast; and, if now and then they were raised, no treacherous glint appeared, nothing but a sedulously cultivated  calmness, withdrawal and mansuetude and occasionally an expression of remote and burnt-out melancholy. The muted light...'

--Fermor.

~

What remarkable simplicity there is the faces of those who have lived a life of hardship: bare and elemental. Theisger's 'Visions' offers a wonderful glimpse of this. By contrast, our faces cannot belie a fundamental set of anxieties that stalk us, not the least of them being the impression of lost chances that forms in pools of shadows under our eyes. 

Fermor, it is said, is a great stylist but in our own day and age this is increasingly understood to mean a person's outward character or skills do not refer to a substantive notion of the self or to an unruffled centre. Style, in this sense, is superficial, incidental, a tangent away from our true focus. And this disjunction is, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the marginalisation of an older way of thinking about taste; for taste now is the most rudimentary of our senses, and not the vehicle of a specifically human quality that allows us to meld the general and the particular, principle and expediency, desire and thought in the form of judgement. And, it should be added, judgement itself suggests an openness to our approach: we often say 'in our better judgement', thus allowing for the possibility of second spaces, re-vision, the entry of other considerations over time. A judgement is decisive, but very rarely final. Our hands, too, retain something of this ultimate ambiguity and mystery. 

The Platonic Form of McDonalds

'They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work'

~~~

McDonalds is the same all over the world. The same food, the same design of the "restaurants", the same colours, and even the people are trained to say the same things: "Have a good day, please come again". Fuck off! It is very odd to hear a Punjabi being so polite and one can almost see them gritting their teeth as they switch to McDonalds training mode. Follow the rules and repeat after me: I am a human being..I am a human...I think the background "music" may vary but it must be an equal music...i.e. equally mind-numbing.

The funniest thing at McDonalds is their attempt to add a "cultural element" to their "menu". This year it's 'the Brazilian' because of the World Cup. Ain't no way I'm going there to order one.

In this way capitalism resembles communism-and that isn't too surprising when one considers that both are deeply (though not necessarily exclusively) materialistic in nature.

It is perhaps surprising, unless one thinks about it, just how conformist and mechanical capitalist societies are. Of course, the state has played a large role in the homogenization of the population (education, national myths, language, exclusive loyalty..Simone Weil: the state and money are the new gods). But the market also requires standardization (property rights) and commensurabilities (how else can exchanges take place?). The false universalization of the market (and economic theory): we are rational, self-interested individuals.

At the Camps: "I was just doing my job". Each being is just another number, replaceable by a machine or another "human". Does it make a difference? When does it all begin, though? Is this not just a continuation of the practices and thought of the war machine? Line 'em up. The disciplining of bodies. The speaking up for "one" nation, the zeal to lose oneself in abstractions, to imagine the map is the reality.

~~~

Nature likes diversity. Was thinking about this when a  friend said: the mullahs' attempts to enforce uniformity (from dress code to profession of faith) go against nature. Is that why fundamentalism leads to so many deformations, so many warped souls?

~~~

The role of the unstructured in our lives. The permanent background of it (death, laughter, play, the imagination, grace). The law vs the lawless heart. The unsayable. The name that names least is the name. Of course, one might also say that it is a different kind of order. Eco: the open work is still a 'work'. A broken circle.

~~~
Will Self has a fab. article on the end of the novel.

Stokowski, Nikki

Listening to that awful Nicki Minaj. I won't repeat some of the lyrics here, lyrics which make Prince's Nikki seem tame in comparison, but if that's what passes for music these days then God help us!


On the one hand, we're told (yes, told, the irony!) that individualism is about the free expression of one's self or true self, once one has cast off all the socially defined constraints: to see oneself clearly, find one's true name (or, rather, create it since existence preceded essence). Spontaneity, creativity means being true to what, exactly? 

Spontaneity is a response to the conditions of life


On the other hand, there's a sneaking suspicion that 'the self' itself cannot emerge without a social world and set of 'languages' (words, meanings, practices, concepts, traditions, norms) that it's born into; moreover, for autonomy to kick in, to take root, we need 'bridges', and relationships that both sustain us and allow us to help others as well, now and over time. What lights are lovingly handed on, nurtured, and what circles we weave for one another.

So, broken circles. Freedom is neither arbitrary nor is it asocial. 'I-We', even if there isn't an 'I-Thou' any more.

same difference

The creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and of your colours are many wonders for those who reflect.
---Q:30:22

May our love not be centered upon ourselves! May this love not incite us to love only those who are like us or to espouse ideas that are similar to our own! To only love that which resembles us is to love oneself; that is not how to love.
---Tierno Bokar.

He who only sees ratio only sees himself.
---William Blake.

It is important to find one's own space (not to 'own' space), to find one's name, but it is equally important to find the right direction and pace; there's a skill in that...working with time and not against it (and for that one surely needs a sense of the timeless?).

There are many things that cannot and should not be said, spoken of. Stop, look, listen. Look both ways. But there are many beautiful, wondrous things, many different types of good-and beauty always shines through.

Every direction you find is chosen by you or chosen for you. The line between is incredible. Some stars are constant, others less so. Each lives in relation to another.

~~~

This is a tough one. On the one hand there is, at the political level, respect for difference, the uttermost need to respect the individuality of the person in all their uniqueness. Religiously, too, the notion that you can or should view other people and traditions through the lens of your own particular perspective, as if everything could be reduced to the terms of your own self-understanding is the door to fanaticism. What place, then, for mystery,for uniqueness, for 'unknowingness'? Is there not a kind of violence involved in (or implied in) looking at the world and other people in only one way? You must do as we do, or else..., the domestication of the exotic.

And Bokar...are these not startling words that shake you from any preconceived ideas?

On the other hand, though, is there the possibility, at the political level, of marking people off as radically different in order to dispose of them or, less extremely, to deny them certain rights? Is the idea of 'sameness' the same as 'universalism'? To see someone as fundamentally the same as you, with the same rights, the same aspirations, the same loves and failings...isn't that the meaning of the Enlightenment project (a project that has such a bad name nowadays)? How to be attentive to difference whilst at the same time affirming one's shared roots ('unity in diversity'...tawhid). Simone Weil: rights and obligations.

Bokar: This is where you stumble. What do we love if not ourselves! How do we see if not through our own eyes? Do we seek contact with some radical other or do we seek ourselves in the other, the other in ourselves. Mirrors. Tarkovsky.

This love of home, the nostalgia for it, for 'coming home'. Does it not exclude too much? The narrowness, hierarchy and conservatism of 'home'. And yet, it was always here. Mystery is not to be sought outside our human lives. Why are our images of God always human? (Thoba! So much for Muslim sensibilities!). But no, even here, the 'attributes'. We talk of God's 'hands' (if not his eyebrows).

What do we seek? We. Not 'I'. Not 'the other' as some vague, non-specific being, but a person. A reflection, not a projection, of ourselves.And to be reflected in turn. To be on the same wavelength means what, exactly? Is this image of 'brokeness' and completeness, that has been with us since God knows when, the story of our lives?

.

There was truth in the first moment; and truth in the last. In both, I found your silence.

No heart is as whole as a broken heart.

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
---Robert Frost.

In the last moment there is a revelation of what we are. Already, to say 'we' is to move beyond the circle and to be at one with it. To look out for you. I saw a face, and all of humanity was there; you saw a crow...But the existence of the image at the end implies it was always there. Wouldn't you agree, Roxana? The last moment is also a beginning...

The circle of our lives: to some appears full, to others empty. Some see this as life, others as death.The whole of truth contained in a full stop. There are no distinctions, and there is no knowing how things will turn out. In love, what is 'inner' and what is 'outer'?

Friend, we are meant
For each other...
Let's cohabit,
Mindful of all we share
---Guillevic.

(link to Guillevic courtesy of P. Joris, at nomadics)

khalwa...

That's it,
that's joy, it's always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself that one knew.
---Denise.

and knowing isn't everything. this you always knew.

someone asked me: with regards to the things that you are instinctively drawn to: do you always make them your own? but surely such a thing is neither possible, nor desirable? for the desirable comes to us (or it doesn't)...all one can do is be open to it, not will it or possess it. a question to myself.

but, also, to 'make something one's own' requires an incredible amount of creativity, inward concentration, human generosity, or 'expansiveness'. does it also mean one ceases to be oneself? and even then, the beautiful is never owned and never fully comprehended. mysteries are only deepened; there are always veils and there is a thirst that is never quenched (he says, putting his jewish hat on).

the following was shared with me by flowerville. you can read the full chapter online.

slow learning:

We have to learn to give up more and more of what we have accomplished, what we have gathered in and what we cherish. Getting old means giving up something forever at every stage of the process. The trick is to learn how to give up things gracefully and without despair...

We must accept what is and prepare to let go of it...

As long as we are alive, we have the capacity to develop compensatory skills and seek new insights...

Living consciously...one strives to make new relationships in order to stay rooted in life...

Much more than at any previous stage of life, the old person has to be flexible...

Old age is the ripening of the fruit, the preparation for the harshness of winter, when the roots grow and strengthen, a time when leaf mold decays, making a seedbed for the new growth of mushrooms. It is the closing of the circle...'

---Gerda Lerner.

but, also, the opening of another circle...

broken circle

Have you ever considered any real freedoms?

---Brando, in Apocalypse Now.


n and r (but not the vowels, I daresay) are sceptical of this idea of freedom and bounds. Well, yes, so am I ! Being brought up in a very free way-how else to put it?- I guess I've never been a stickler for rules, order, system. Danke, swami, ubo. Perhaps that's why I can never take any authority figures seriously and why I'm so sarcastic/irreverent toward them (and you thought it was just my bad manners and untidiness!) Well, okay, don't make a song and dance about it. We never really took religion seriously, either...which was, I think, actually, a profoundly religious approach. If you get it, you'll get it.

So, here are some excerpts from a book I'm reading (please note, O mighty Dougal, I say reading, not read!).

In order to enjoy negative freedom a person already has to be a person.

Having any old preferences, interests, wants, desires, is not, actually, what makes us distinctive, or individuals. As Frankfurt (and Sen after him) says: the idea of a person depends on second-order preferences, the ability to take a step back (and out) and evaluate our impulses. Judgement requires distance. Negative freedom is necessary, but not sufficient. What, ultimately, counts is the expansion of our capabilities and that is bound up with the very notion of positive freedom: human flourishing...what we can do, and can be.

I act, therefore I am; or even better, as the Russians might say (see Lesley Chamberlain's wonderful 'Motherland')..I act therefore we are; we act , therefore I am.

freedom as genuine self-realization, as the growth and enrichment of each person's experience, according to each person's lights.

Is this a substantive notion of the good? If so, is there a (democratic) consensus or does this open the door to paternalism. One must be sceptical of general theories, but at least here we're being made aware of the delicate balance between freedom and necessity. The question becomes not: how can I know, but how can I think, here and now or, even better, how can I live, here and now ('can' is not necessarily should or ought).

But here's the dope:

To view institutions as enemies of freedom, and all conventions as slaveries, is to deny the only means by which positive freedom in action can be secured..convention and custom are necessary to carrying forward impulse to any happy conclusion. A romantic return to nature and a freedom sought within the individual without regard to the existing environment finds its terminus in chaos...Not convention, but stupid and rigid convention is the foe.

the wedge

Saddened yellow came to me in a dream-in the shape of a star, not a flower. Nestling in the stillness of my heart. And words and image and colour were one. But still not the thing! In the dead of night a storm starts up, the door rattles (fixed by a slipper-come-wedge). Some ghost of the dead wants me to wake, sit up, and scribble her words down. But they're gone. Just a dream within a dream within a dream...

In the morning my eye becomes alert, fixes on everything that is yellow in the world-the soap, the plastic top, the strip of cardboard on the pack of shaving blades, the flowers strewn across the paths-as if I was seeing the colour for the first time today, fresh, quivering, vibrant, newly created. (In the same way, there is a green thread running through Bellow's Herzog-that wise fool!).

~~~~

Childhood: To be at the centre of a circle, a maze, and not know it, not be amazed by it. There is only the centre. One simply finds oneself there.

Adulthood: to renounce centre, long for boundaries, the periphery. Walk on! , said the Buddha. To wander, aimlessly.The 'knight's move'. The leap into the blue, the walk in the wild. To slow down, wait. Dream a lot. To become someone else.

Life: A broken circle.

A path is a prior interpretation..and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation or to stalk your predecessor on it..To walk the same way is to re-iterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It's a form of spatial theatre, but also spiritual theatre..in the hope of coming closer to them oneself.
--Rebecca Solnit.

The dream where you are always to be found

Love, oh my love, it will come
Sure enough. A storm
Broods over the dry earth all day

You are outside, lost somewhere
I find myself
Devouring verses of stranger passion
And exile. The exact words
Are fed into my blank hunger for you.
---G. Hill

Broken Circle

Is this how it ends, my oldest of friends? A full stop that is empty? The pupil of finitude, the iris of infinity-controller of light? Focus: black sun orr the houri. Isis was a magician, wasn't she? Or a clown? Or a goddess? Why do you make distinctions? Is this a passageway to the white room or the land of the crows?

I am with those whose hearts are broken for My sake.

---Hadith Qudsi

The heart's endless desire to break...

Why so downcast, my soul
Why do you sigh within me?

---Psalms

the redemption of time

Aim, the black sun is in your range. Steady, now. Nerves. Fire! Ah, what a good shot the Queen is.

Bruno Ganz - Lied vom kindsein


warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch.

It is time to kill. And I shall do it with my silence, she said.

Roger Fenton is immediately known for his Crimean photographs, for the way in which he conjures up a private world, rendering it familiar and warm, so that one almost forgets the harshness of war itself. But I like best his attempt to capture and freeze time itself, in some of his landscape photos.

In some we see people caught in the light of a doorway, or small children climbing a fence, oblivious of the gazing world. All that transitoriness is played out against the solid bulwark of the masonry of Churches, abbeys. It is as if a meditation on the most fragile could only be possible against the backdrop of what is most permanent: time-worn stones and faith. Against this relief it appears that life is always slipping away, always in danger of falling back into the inorganic, of disappearing around the corner, retreating to the shadows-like so many of the subjects of the pictures themselves. Out of sight, out of mind. Even the huge, solid edifice of history and memory that we erect around us may not be enough to hold back time. Perhaps Fenton is saying that given this inevitability there is nothing else to do but portray something of our ineradicable ephemeral nature.

Even the stone sculptures are composed with their shadows in close attendance-their alter egos. The dark knives that cut into our being are really just death-masks that carry our imprint with them. The wilderness photographs. Always a solitary individual surrounded by the emptiness of nature. The foreground-a river, a stream-is slowed down by the exposure of the camera revealing a stillness and an elemental simplicity that doesn’t seem to be out of place or artificial. On the contrary, it appears that this is the essence of its real nature; that at the heart of all this rushing and striving for definition there is a contemplative nullity that embraces everything in its totality.

In a few it is the sky that is slowed down in this way. Reduced to a white, blank canvas so that the landscape below is a fundamental land, a primordial place, once again. The land in these photographs is barely anything more than a contour, a cold unredeemed place. We are back to the Old Testament, to the heath that is only briefly lit up by starlight. This is the world of pure potentiality, the pre-formed garden before Adam has named anything. One can imagine how alluring such a picture would be to a world-weary generation, one that was questioning the infinite advance into the future, the sunlight.

Perhaps there were other truths to stumble on, other realities that had to be erased before the earth would be forced to yield her secrets to science and technology.

We have lost our sense of what the earth means; to turn, and turn, and spin-in the heart, and not just the body-this, and this only, is time...and the redemption of time.

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new !
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green ! the land how fair and blue !
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition ; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One ; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again !...

No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming ;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
----Dowden

Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There Is A Season) - The Byrds

The Door

I've been tagged. Not sure what that means but, as the saying goes, if you unclench your fist I will extend my hand.

I think it works like this..er...you post a few lines (your own or from a poem or something) that 'rings true for you' (yeah, that's it, or was it that you treat me to a cinnamon roll). Okay, jeez, I'm under pressure already since I'm not sure I even know three live bloggers (damn that Roxana!..probably some ancient Romanian curse on me if I don't comply)

So, I tag Anton, Celia, and Ali Hasnain (if you're still around..do you even have a blog?)

Now, what do I do again?

~~~~~~

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.
---Hannah A.

There is no moment when I forget you, except the days when I do.
There is no redemption of time, except when there is.

The Door?

First forget what time is
for an hour.

What can you learn by heart? A rose is not a rose, though each thorn draws blood. The rose is but fire, flickering time, sometimes ablaze with longing. The red mourns the loss of the blue. But listen: what once was, always is. Here, love wears forbidden colours; there, across the bridge, through the mist, beyond the garden is a door that leads to a white room. Mark it well.

There, you will find time within time, like silence within silence. And a black mirror. When you look at you, you will think of me, speak our common name. There will be an end to the granting of names. Like two stars in the day, or gold coins on the sand, invisible, except to one another. I will be me, except when I won't. A broken circle, or something that rings true for you.

Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of kills and
the sounds of lies
after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting

you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I had opened the door
believing you not far

(quotes from W.S. Merwin and Paul Celan)

The Magic Circle

A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide's change...
---Ezra.

The circle of the self is broken by what is other.

The invisible things of God are clearly seen.
---Iris M.
(with thanks to Beth for drawing me here)

The philosophical mind will say, half-heartedly: 'the other'. And who can blame the thinker? We've always been intrigued by what came before us, what comes after us, what disrupts thought, and there's a certain charm in drawing a veil over what cannot be named. But it's bad manners, always prying like that. Let it be. One wonders if our problems stem from our inability to give thanks for what is 'given'...give us this day our daily bread....

But there are other places, second spaces, all around us. Not some deep centre residing within (no Sufism for us!) but there..and there..and there. It is just a matter of tilting your head at the right angle to the universe, of holding on. Attentiveness, attachments. Alif is all you need. The one thing necessary.

Thought has exhausted itself. The moderns want to carry on to the bitter end. Tortured thought. But it was here all along. Hushed voice, downward gaze, the soft dew of early morning, the smell of fresh coffee, the sigh of youth, the laughter of children, the fading winter light, the heart that endures, the open hand, deepening shadows...in our knowledge of death we are superior to God (the Allama).

Perhaps the circle is broken. The fire is extinguished. No more wild leaps into the unknown. But let there be no remorse; we shall not untie our hair, or blacken our faces. For where others see a void I see a brilliant white circle, full of things we hold dear. And even if they convince you that the circle is broken, remember that the memory of it is eternal, and its light undiminished, unconquered.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Some people in this day and age still want to talk about triangles, so I give them this as food for thought.

Qalb

I must remember not to remember You. It is good for my soul. I must not think it is good for my soul.

But I see a group of white butterflies (what's the collective noun) fluttering around and over a clutch of orange flowers in their mindless way and I wonder to myself: do they think they're moths, if that's fire?

It's 10 o'clock and the day is done. The sun barely visible, too tired to make an effort today. And I know that the next two hours will not exist, a time out of time, just floating, drifting, softly past everyone. The earth has slowed down, is heavier, has recovered an old sense of propriety. I love this uselessness today, since it escapes all functionality, all introspection. Just is.

As usual, I walk past the mosque without entering. But I do notice some mud that has been freshly turned and then slowly baked under the open skies. No, I can't but help think of You...

~~~~~

Only by the dhikr of Allah is the heart made tranquil. Dhikr is remembrance, recalling what is already present. That which is ever-present is not perpetually and spontaneously recognized and known by man, because he has been deflected by forgetfulness (ghafla).

Remembrance is not meaningful unless there is its opposites, forgetfulness. It is part of the play of duality. The deeper one is in ghafla, the greater is the chance that one will return to dhikr. The night becomes darkest before the break of dawn. These are the immutable laws of reality and have nothing to do with man

From the dictionary we find the verb qalaba to mean: to turn around, turn about, turn upward, upturn; to turn, turn over; to turn face up or face down; to turn inside out or outside in; to turn upside down; to tip, to tilt over, topple over; to invert, reverse; to overturn, upset, topple; to capsize; to roll over; to subvert, overthrow; to change, alter, turn, transform, convert, transmute; to transpose; to exchange.
---Shaykh Haeri.

Sheltering Your Heart

I wanted to remember a sad moment; I wanted to forget it. Who is to say what writing or an image or music really are? Perhaps they're nothing but the revealing of a quietness, an absence. Music holds the silence within it, dimly aware of the beginning before the first note and even more so of the silence that remains after the last note falls back to blankness. It is not by reminders of that first place, that first time, that we are spellbound. Heaven's roots compel us not. We love ruins and all that is fragile, all that fades...

But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
---Edwin Muir

No sadness or joy can be repeated, nor should they be. But we can be reminded of our forgetfulness, of loved ones we have turned our faces from or who have turned theirs from ours, of this shadowy existence riddled with light. And we find this both bitter and sweet. It fades, it soars. Look, there is nothing like it on earth or heaven. Can we bless as we sigh? If we could, we would not be that broken circle that is a reflection of your longing to be remembered. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, said the Rabbi. Then tell me, why should I complain?

I wanted to remember a sad moment. Not to hold on to it, but to keep it with me, a symbol of my lost lives...a low black flame that burns in a dark room....

Torschlusspanik

Chi m'a tolto a me stesso
Ch'a me fusse piu presso
O piu di me potessi, che poss' io.

Bulleh, who knows who I am?

I have come to think that life is a far more limited thing than those in the midst of its maelstrom realize. The light shines into the act of life for only the briefest moment- perhaps only a matter of seconds. Once it has gone and one has failed to grasp its offered revelation, there is no second chance. One may have to live the rest of one's life in hopeless depths of loneliness and remorse. In that twighlight world one can no longer look forward to anything. All that such a person holds in his hands is the withered corpse of what should have been.
------Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

Before one knows it one gets the feeling that certain lives have slipped away, as if from the dense knot of being one had only unraveled a certain thread, leaving the other, cancelled versions of our selves, in a state of cold limbo. Bi-location: the desire to be in more than one place at the same time, to be more than one-self, to surpass the narrow horizons of time that delimit a particular style of soul. We desire contradictory things: often rounded, always open (Goethe)...a broken circle, a script that is continuously being re-written. Nothing oppresses us more than the idea that things had to be the way they are, that certain doors will forever be closed to us.

The modern sensibility is nothing but a revolt against all that is 'given,' of any notion of a fixed identity. But we delight in and mourn the fact that we are unknown to ourselves and others. And this in itself is not so strange: Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

The being between birth and death scrawls -in matter and in events- a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique identity. This man is not a sealed personality moving through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where we are cannot ultimately be divided...In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger within him and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks finally upon his enemy and his death and says, So this is me. And in acknowledging so much that is part of ourselves (since our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons...) we make an act of recognition which actualises what was inherent in us from the start...recognising our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us from the 'outside' events through the course of time can be recognised as belonging to our own particular pattern only when it has happened.
---Gai Eaton, King of the Castle.

Broken

Qalb: the turning of the heart is like the ploughing of a field; everything must be broken up; that which was silent must come to the surface...

'Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.'
---Leonard Cohen

.

Fifteen minutes out of the 'green zone', down through dusty roads and past a small village where kids, half-clothed and scraggly, played with beaming faces despite the filth. The approach reminded Alex of California: there was something completely vacuous about the open roads and palm trees, dotted with extravagant mansions on either side. That's all before one enters this other place, a place whose very existence only serves to make what comes before it even more surreal

.

Just after the village (and before the agricultural land he had come to survey) we saw a man, knee-deep in a ditch, digging away with an incredible amount of concentration. With a bent back and an intense look on his bearded, pointed face, my only thought was: I wish I'd brought my camera (so speaks the voice of the bourgeoisie). The lives of others: unimaginable. We have no understanding of, no connection with, the land-and a part of us thanks God for that. What do we see?

.

A theoretician might 'think' of his contribution to economic growth; a theoretical mindset might muse on the tradeoffs between incentives and security or talk about universal human rights (or the lack thereof). But how many of us see this individual, at this particular time. Someone suffering, broken by fate, yet resolute

.

We are among creatures but remain separate from all creatures

Just as, in 'rupak tala,' the first beat is also outside the pattern of counting

.

----Mir Dard.

Winter Scenes

Snow settles,
I am restless.
Fires fragment,
in winter afternoons.
The snow breaks up,
reveals rare earth again.
'Green thoughts,
in a green shade'
A forgetful heart,
that is mirror to itself.
A sigh on the dark glass.
Is it me, or you?
---b.

'Cassiel's Lament'

And we, spectators always, everywhere
Looking at, never out of, everything
It fills us. We arrange it. It decays.
We re-arrange it, and decay ourselves.

When the child was a child he looked at the first breath of winter frost and danced with delight; and now, he worries about how to keep warm.
When the child was a child he looked at the frozen puddle, its cracks, and thought of a mirror broken by the weight of the world's beauty; and now, he sees only his own grotesque image.

Note: Today a man walked in the deserted streets and thought he was walking in a forest. His head turned at an angle to greet a stray dog, and he thought to himself, 'how much he looks like me'. Is he the first one to enter this wood or the last one to leave it? As he traces the footprints in the snow he thinks to himself: have I chosen the wrong path... again?
The leaves have curled up on themselves, turning their faces away from the world. A few plastic bags lay strewn in the school yard-abandoned and forgotten.

Outside a restaurant, a taxi driver says to a Russian waitress: I want to marry you darlin'. She takes pity on him. I am married but you can be my lover. He replies, swooning, 'I'd love to be your lover, petal.'

Today, a man on the central line thinks: the failure of the world is the inability to look at the world and to be seen by it in the right way.

Yet still from Eden springs the root

As clean as on the starting day.

Time takes the foliage and the fruit

And burns the archetypal leaf

To shapes of terror and of grief

Scattered along the winter way.

But famished field and blackened tree

Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity

Bloom in these darkened fields alone.

What had Eden ever to say

Of hope and faith and pity and love

Until was buried all its day

And memory found its treasure trove?

Strange blessings never in Paradise

Fall from these beclouded skies.

---Edwin Muir

Medusa's Eyes

The eyes did not fail.
They believed, even from a distance.
It was the heart that was unfaithful,
fluttering like a tattered banner in the wind.
To be lost in the soul of the sea ,
or bound by your green vision.

Why lament?

My heart has fallen like a star.

Then it was fire.
Now it is stone.

---b.