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.

The end of a day

And how does a day begin? With what light, and whose hand brings it forth? Not, 'how did time enter the world', but how is your own life formed by the warp and woof of time and silence. Which gifts will you deny, asks the Qur'an. 

Denise:

And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the oceanic chant the wind
transcribes for them!
A day that shines in the cold
like a first-prize brass band swinging along
the street
of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds
with the claims of reasonable gloom.

Another (extra)ordinary day in London

A perfect ending already contains another beginning.

There was news of falling stars - or was it just what remained from another world, from some distant, deep time?- making itself available to us, even if only briefly. Stay with the news. In the darkest hour such wondrous gold and silver flare and shine, these silent journeys flowing into our lives, like a dark fish, like a shadow cast by the black sun. 

Remind yourself of small circles, how much is mercifully unknown. There was something of Blake about the time. Seeing things in a dream can be more real than reality...

Over the years some beautiful poetry: Supervielle, W.S. Mewrin, Sappho, Transtromer; and some very good poetry as well: Gunter Eich, Ceravolo, K. Irby- each with their moments. And now, Denise's sublime Evening Train.

What are these lists but a concession to a bourgeois point of view? 

Our own endings a series of imperfect deaths.

Another day: what was sent forth, and what was received? 

The season draws to an end. The light of a late summer day falls suddenly as an autumn evening arrives out of nowhere. The back doors are no longer left open, your hand finally understands something of the heart. You're more aware of your clothes now, your ageing body, the distances, the empty roads, the memory of arrivals, departures.

~~~

You sit on the bench with the swami, waiting for the W14. It is evening and the street is deserted. We sit and silently remember all the meals we've had, all the time that has passed and seems so long ago, so recent. We sit there without much to say. We both look out to the road. Long pauses. In the 14 minutes it takes the bus to arrive she grows younger by 20 or 30 years. There is a wondrous blue light all around us and no time whatsoever. 

You made it to the centre but had one hour to find the place.

At The Lebanese Bakery you met an old friend, an Islamic scholar, and over delicious flat breads discussed Ibn Taymiyyah and the importance of agency in the structure of Islamic thought. "I doubt," I said, "that the universal and singularities has ever been discussed here". 

"Yes," he replied. I bet it's usually: w'ala..Gucci..al shaikh..Armani..brother.."

Strange to learn that he's into minimalist electro. But then again, that could be because he's a wahabi...voices and lyrics distract him; the slight modifications of the same tune bring an openness with them. Like fiction, I said, so much of it is simply padding for western sensibilities hooked to bourgeois security (paraphrasing Ghosh's thoughts in The Great Derangement). M. Asad had written, all those years ago, that there was something monotonous-almost hypnotic- about the way 'eastern' music circles around a still centre. 

Maybe that's what we've always wanted, I suggested..a broken circle..or maybe a spiral?

¬¬¬

Outside of Foyles you saw a man with a shock of henna-dyed hair, suited in  the kind of lawyer's garb that one only sees in Lahore. I had to take a second glance to make sure this wasn't an apparition. Am I here when I'm here?

In the time I had I bought Murnane's Plains book and Byung-Chul Han on the expulsion of the other (really good, as usual). there was still time to quietly read the first half of Lavinia Greenlaw's moving poems on her father's dementia. 

¬¬¬

Kempowski's book was a disaster. All for Nothing. You said it. The desire to immerse yourself in fictional lives wanes by the hour. It's not that all has been said and done; it's more that there's never any real engagement with reality- just a childish rolling out of cliches. I'll write more about why it was such a poor book later- or maybe i won't.

Broken Britain

If the deal doesn't go through- which is, I suspect, what some who want to impose yet more 'austerity' on the country really want- then things will only get worse. 

I've seen a lot more homeless people about in Woodford. One man, youngish, can hardly speak, he;s in such a bad state. Tears just well up in his eyes. Just saw a middle aged man, slumped to the floor, his legs askance, as he sang into a traffic cone (as if he was some kind of aboriginal). Absolutely tragic to witness.

Around Bank a solid looking man stumbles on to the train, as if he's been pushed. He speaks with a wonderfully rounded intonation, full of confidence and old-world solidity, the words ringing off his lips; he still retains his Mancunian accent and the looks of man who has years of practical intelligence behind him. Not a banker, that's too abstract. The man who had pushed him has a narrow face and sports an old, used black thick coat. He hisses and foams at the mouth, shaking his fist at the northerner (who laughs at him and then mocks him). The rat-like man then starts shaking his fists at God (this is almost a caricature). Some people try to quietly move away from him. The hissing and swearing and cursing goes on, like a poor silent movie. The northerner (who looks a bit Kashmiri, now that I think of it) turns to his wife (who, in her leopard-skin top is obviously above all these shenanigans) and mutters something in German. 

I'd just got back into Laurus. In fact, there's a peace and simplicity and gentleness to it that makes me want to forget about the so-called real world altogether. I lift my eyes to look at the German-Kashmiri-northerner and feel like telling him, "Give it a rest, mate, he's obviously not right", but I fear the other one will hear me and turn on me. Like everyone else in the carriage, I don't even bother rolling my eyes. "You pratt," he says, as he gets off with his wife/mistress/partner. Unfortunately, unbeknown to them, the rat-man also gets off at the same station.

~~~

S's wife was punched outside her home (next to mine) by two east Europeans. He looked at me exasperated the next day and said, "You know what, Karl, something's broken. I don't know what it is, but there's something not right. I was going to spout off something about us not being in sync with the cosmos, or how the Qur'an talks about the "scattering" at the end of days then think to myself, I'll only come across as mad. If I said that back in the land of the pure they'd just look at me and say, "Well, yeah, like what took you so long to get top that conclusion?" Keep quiet and cut the tree. It doesn't budge and the three of us expend huge amounts of energy to uproot the bugger. I wanted to say, in an old and wise Russian accent (or maybe Jewish): "Every living wants to cling to the earth with the last ounce of its resolve." Totally superfluous and uncalled for, so I let it go.

Yes, I do manage to purchase Sharov and Kempowski. I even find the shop without thinking, my instincts back to normal. Space, that I can deal with. Time: now that's the problem!

All for Nothing.

No-one knows what they really look like, or what they sound like. I told my students this term that they come across as idiots. And that that's to be expected. I said so many stupid things in my twenties, now that I look back. I suppose when I'm sixty I'll look back to now and think: what a plonker!

Early morning. The taxi driver is probably Arab (maybe Syrian). You meet so many different people and don't have an ear for these kinds of things so everyone sounds sort of Greek-ish. A small and sprightly woman gets in the front. Full of bluster, throwing her arms up in the air, her unkempt hair flowing in all directions. She turns to me with a surprising old face, deeply creased but the features also weirdly young. That throws me a bit. "' Morning." And that's the last I speak to anyone for the next hour. She's the practical kind; world-weary. Seen it all. East Ender par excellence. She strikes up a conversation with the driver and it goes on and on for at least fifteen minutes. Navigation systems, the state of the roads, etc. I can't imagine anything more boring.

As we approach the hospital her thoughts turn elsewhere. People are already up and working in the big banks (or maybe they're just finishing up from the night before?). "Look at all these people, running to and fro. For what?" the driver is unimpressed so she continues: " It doesn't matter in the end. We all get ill. I wish I'd known that earlier. But didn't have time. All we need is a beach and the sun and a quiet life." The driver, who is obviously trying to make something of his life disagrees. "I guess it's the journey, not the destination". At this stage in the proceedings I couldn't give- to use a delicate Americanism-a rat's ass about either of them. 

¬¬¬

Later in the day there's a mad rush to find two books. I lose my bearings -which is unlike me (in London). Hop onto a 15 bus and then quickly get off. What a state I'm in! I imagine someone on the top deck looking down and wondering what is going on. I see myself running down Charing Cross, almost out of breath, trying to hold on to my hat with one hand..and the tears, the tears are streaming down my eyes for no reason at all. I'm just the fool playing his role in a moving stage set. Before I know it I'm close to Temple when I should be at Piccadilly. Completely thrown. Leave it. Sidestep the whole curs-ed thing and let that train of events brush by you. 

Anyway, started Laurus (at the third attempt). My mind is much calmer now and so I'm on it. I've placed an order for a book on Bulgakov (texts selected by Rowan Williams). The books, in case you wanted to know -I'm sure the excitement was getting too much for you, Roxana and fff- All for Nothing and Sharov's The Rehearsals. 

One more visit (probably to Roti King, with the boys) and then I'm out of here, down to the deep south-east, hoping there will be sun and a lot of forgetfulness and triviality. Nothing like returning to being a superfluous person. 

Gosh, there were some very attractive female doctors around. The big 5- O approached and went, and still those dreamy eyes and still those hands without grace. Instead, I dream of an age when Terry's chocolate orange was as good as it was in the old days, as if some kind of normality could be reclaimed. How many more acts in this play. [b exits quietly for lunch]    

London, May 17th -August 3rd

Faraway one

~~~

Slow it is
a slow business
to grow a few words 
to say love
----Anselm Hollo

How long it took, the tens of thousands of generations to produce this clumsy hand. And how quickly things unravel! It took all this time to find you. What can seem most certain in life turns out to be as fleeting as a cloud, as short lived as the dance of a gnat. Where are you now? And why do you sigh, my soul? 

~~~

Where is the world in which I dream?

~~~
Will I cease to be
or will I remember
beyond the world
our last meeting together?
will I cease to be,
or will I remember
beyond the world,
our last meeting together?

Will iiiiiii

Will       

Will       

Will       

  i  wwww 

            

Where is the world in which I dream, if not here? And yet, in the dreamworld there is no world, only a remembrance of it. When you meet someone after a long time it is customary to say, "Where in the world have you been"? As if that person had crossed some invisible frontier and has come back disheveled, bringing with them a look, a word, a sentiment from that other place. 

Do we only see our true selves in dreams nowadays?  


~~~

the dark swimmers
their heads in the sun

if time shd stand still

which way does the river go?

The day in the house
each room with its own time
the sun's light enters obliquely and falls 
away
and time is marked by absences
(a pluralist till the end).

'An incremental tyranny'

News from a strange planet:

"Israel sunk in incremental tyranny," says former Shin Bet chiefs.

Kendall Jenner is 'very upset'. "Anything offensive is just not her. She means well, always." Pepsi can, incrementally, alter the world of tyranny.

Aung San Suu Kyi claims the violence was partly down to "Muslims killing Muslims." Slowly, incrementally, of course.

“Forever is one thing born from another; life is given to none to own, but to all to use.” 
---Lucretius.

You wake in the small hours and wonder how long you've been sleeping for. You hear voices, children's voices off in the distance, out there,..is this a dream, your own childhood re-emerging from the time when you would play in the dark and run home, down from Victoria Park, past the warm and safe houses, your heart in your mouth, the street lights' downward glow making the world lighter, more artificial. The empty streets with only a faint whiff of salt and vinegar in the air coming from the Cypriot chippy (Steve, who always gave you extra chips, would kill himself a few years later).

The voices, strangled now, almost metallic, coming to you from a great distance, like those of children in a swimming pool, the words mixed with the dappled light, broken like the waves that slap against the side of the pool. Life moves into another life but some shadow of all that was remains, always remains.

After the heat of the day, the cool evening air and the crystalline clouds. Something had ended in your starred heart. We live without knowing.

These last moments rich in their suggestiveness. The older you become the more time is rolled into a single moment. Memories of previous summers suffuse this instant; your hands are loose and open...

What is there to hold on to?

There is deep silence. An unseen dog barks some streets down and then stops for no reason. A child laughs somewhere. Then from up in the hills you hear a train on the tracks. And then, as the breeze picks up and the leaves rustle, you hear the gentle tingling of wind chimes, a signal of presence. But all these sounds are heard individually and they form no " picture", only a pure succession of isolated notes. They are the faint and ghostly reminders of the life not lived. Nothing on earth remains or will ever remain but these cycles of appearance and disappearance- and yet we still dream of gold.

A drain pipe is illuminated by the last flaring of the sun. The light forms a solid horizontal bar of gold above the stone and the shadows. But before long it too is absorbed in the great samsara.

In my coat pocket I carry my ticket with the printed details of my departure. The stars have never looked so beautiful, the rose never so ephemeral. Everything comes into the summer light in time, for a time. Khayyam saw it, this brief, flashing world: drink, and drink well!

Notes on 'Notes on the Death of Culture' (or: the End of Eroticism)

One sign of decay is the proliferation of, as it were, 'secondary markets': notes on 'notes to..'.
Derivatives, in other words. You can't but help think that the history of capitalism involves greater and greater levels of abstraction, a movement away from the real (economy) to the frivolous, stylish, fashionable. At the root of it-putting my religious hat on-has to be credit/interest/usury. What is, ultimately, being purchased here is time (Le Goff: Your Money of Your Life).

[The fact that one can talk of a religious sensibility that one can 'put on', like a hat, and then discard at a later stage is also, perhaps, symptomatic of the times we live in].

Not incidental to that trend is the hyperinflation of the word (or, more accurately: babble): "light literature" and criticism, analysis and the deconstruction of "texts" accompanied by a pseudo-intellectuality and "passion" for cleverness, playfulness and obtuseness. But if it's all a game then why bother in the first place? 

'Shallowness' doesn't quite cover it because implicit in the idea of shallowness is the counter-vailing notion of 'depth'. When there is only the surface, when there are no second spaces (as it were, as it is), then a kind of nausea can follow, but one is more likely to witness or experience a stupefied indifference. The metropolis and the blase attitude. Yeah, like, whatever. 

Everyone today wants to be a clown, an actor. Not a "stone," but an actor. Just watch TED and you'll see academics craving for attention. "Visibility" is what they call it nowadays. Or "cyber presence". But politicians and other charlatans, too. You sometimes wonder if you were the only one who was serious. The seriousness with which people devote time and energy to accumulating possessions has always ended up in frivolity and boredom (luxury as the beginning of capitalism as well as its ultimate symbol).

"Everything is a puppet show that can use very cheap tricks to win the favour of a public greedy for entertainment." 

The playful banality of the dominant culture, in which the supreme value now is to amuse oneself and amuse others, over and above any form of knowledge or ideals..to forget serious, deep, disquieting and difficult things and to indulge in light, pleasant, superficial, happy and sanely stupid pursuits."

~~~

The Queen in London

The Queen arrived in London, slightly tired, mysteriously so. There were rumours but she ignored them. For a change, she thought to herself, I will walk through the streets of my country, even though London is hardly recognizable any more. So many subjects from distant lands. A city with too many bridges and not enough lovers, she thought. I will walk alone with my thoughts, without regalia and ceremony, without the burden of history, simply I, I this unequalled self.

So she let down her hair, put on her green and red dress and applied her kajol. Preparations for a meeting?, wondered the paparazzi. 

She walks by unnoticed and the earth tilts slightly. The May light sways with her but the crowds only throng to the window to watch the live telecast inside. And snow is falling in Kyoto, falling deeply. Soon it will be evening. Introductions will be made and she thinks of her first formal words to him.

It displeased her to see that London is not as she remembered it, not what she had read about. There was no fog at all! And many of her male subjects had taken to wearing grotesque, thick beards. Their language was coarse and so lacking in dignity, any sense of poetry. As she adjusted her skirts she thought: The women were hardly dressed at all! "There is no religion to be found on the streets of London," she would later say to him. He would reply, in order to embarrass her no doubt, "Faith is under the left nipple".

Between a Church and a coffee shop she found a small gate to an enchanted world, a small and quiet square garden that no-one seemed to know about and that was certainly on no map to be found in her kingdom. 

She sat down on a bench and read the names on the wall. They formed a tapestry of all the lives that were not lived. Was her name there, too? Then she sat solemnly with a closed book on her lap and waited and waited, but he didn't arrive. She looked at the sad, golden fish in the dark pond:

I am a fish without the Tigris.
I am the Tigris without a fish.  

  
  

I, not I

"Not my pride, not my spleen nor any other appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."

---Thomas More.

"Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the woof and warp of the universe, that sets riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of this order but we remain, quintessentially, unknown."

--D.H.L. 

~

You think of Gissing, standing on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court road, over a century ago now, hungry and bewildered, with sixpence in his hands. You have stood there many a time as well, deciding whether to go down to Leicester Square or back up to Russell Square. From a top floor flat a woman looking down on you would be greatly amused to see this bundle of confused stillness amidst the unceasing to and fro of strangers.. And in a hundred years from now, what of that glance? 

A small part of you, perhaps 1/5th, derives a perverse kind of pleasure from the consideration of the fact that books and people and buildings are forgotten, nay, more, that they are destined to fade into memory, that all of history collapses like a pack of cards and what we now decipher of it is nothing more than a few faces turned away, a search for the ace, a grinning joker..

But for the greater part you are held stunned by the thought of all the people-great and small-who traverse a given place and who are are ghosts in the sunlight. I, not I, I...

'The phenomenon called "I'
is a blue illumination
of the hypothesized, organic current lamp
(a compound of all transparent ghosts).'

Last Acts, Disappearing Acts, What has Happened, Hold on Dreamer, Dark Mirror, Snow in April...have you not been talking about your own soul all along? Where have you been all this time? A question to myself.

I have lived many lives, which is to say I have lived none. 

The great mystery: there are people from different eras, ages and historical worlds who walk by each other quite oblivious of the fact that the other exists. One's star is rising, the other's is falling. I know some old people who can remember a few stories their grandfathers told them, so that words and turns of phrases from the mid 19th century dimly live on somehow. My inheritance: a stray and unique gesture of the hand, a Jewish nose.. 

You are under no illusion: the grandness of the "I" is today without anchor, is but so much dust without the illumination of faith. But, equally, with faith in the world today as it is that anchor sinks it, not into some timeless truths but into a shadow-world of pettiness and hatred, a hallucinatory world.

Another I, that has failed to, and continues to fails to, take definite form of shape, that briefly glitters under grey skies, knows of no resistance or acquiescence, blue and green, am I, not I?  

The Dream

Now, each year, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of renters are put out on the streets.
--Katha Pollitt, The Guardian. 

In the U.S. 27% live alone (up from 5% in the 1920s). Stockholm: 58%. Of course, living alone doesn't necessarily mean you're lonely, just as being old doesn't, but they might be contributing factors. As is the decline in social capital-the lack of permanent residence in a place and/or a lack of job security. Transience and flexible labour. 

[And what about the quality of housing? China's "floating population".]

London (2025): estimated that 60% will be renters. L.A., N.Y. and San Francisco: around mid 50's.
--C.M. Gillies, The Guardian.

The dream of private property (Thatcher). Two things: what kind of dream was that and how was it connected to the ideology of the market? And, secondly, it ain't gonna happen.

Back in the land of the pure. Been teaching since 1993 and am, as salaries go, very privileged compared to most of my fellow citizens (who are only citizens in name). But still could never imagine buying a piece of land or constructing a house unless I prostitute myself a bit. Even then: unlikely. 

A London child

Well, I'm not really a Londoner (though it is the city I love mostest). Neither Greek nor Jew and all that. Too many stray thoughts by far, too many false starts. Where to begin? Wales, Kashmir, Taxila? And now? And now I live too much out in the sun, and my sensibilities are increasingly formed by this excessive light, though I maintain a craving for dark grey skies, the stillness and anonymity of a remembered grey. 

'Wandering races have such looks, the bones of one tribe, the skin of another.'
--another Saul.

The importance of not fitting the narrative: be ye not conformed. 

Q: How would you like your Paki, Sir?
A: Not too rare, thank you.

Of course, it's a lot easier when you're put in a box: are you a lunatic (fundo) or one of us, a barbarian or a lackey? What cannot be tolerated, at any cost, is the strange hybrid that loves aspects of western culture but sees through its materialism and detests its war machine (the reality, though you'd never know by watching t.v., is that there's quite a few of us out there. Iran, for instance, is full of young people who hate the mullah as much as they do 'the west' (politically speaking, of course)).

Ec-centric, off key. 

But this too is a game for some. The breakdown of narrative is precisely what is engendered by (one might even say required of) capitalism. There can be no narrative, just moments of instantaneous pleasure. Identity, as the academics love to tell us, is a construct (well, what else could it be when talk of essences or human nature is not permitted).

There's no place like home, there's no place.

The ridiculous claim to be a citizen of the world. Or, equivalently: world cinema, world music. One must accept this vacuousness on pains of being drawn to the other camp, the culture industry's manufactured nostalgia or the right-wing reactionary tale of the loss of purity. The false universality of market choice is the only 'world' that is allowed to stand, which is to say: one must take up a perspective that is equivalent to a 'view from nowhere' (or, to put it in its older, pre-scientific formulation: 'the view from the point of the universe').  

To see something today, to truly see it, is not to participate in its being like a shaman but, instead, to take a step back and think of it from a distance, as it were, so that one catch the phenomenon objectively..and already one eye is focused on what use can be made of it (Jonas was surely right here: we live under the shadow of technology). 

We live in the world like voyeurs. What would be meant, today, by the notion of 'right looking', the 'loving glance', the restrained gaze? We've lost the words for different ways of looking (Illich). 

To look out innocently again, the child's unchanged song of innocence remembered with great clarity..an older street in London that still exists, somewhere in the shadows, and even if unfound always there, indestructible, from time out of mind. 

In an age that sets great store in the expansion of knowledge it is surprising that it is never asked: what is really worth knowing or: how deeply do you know anything. Can an expansion in one domain lead to a forgetting in another? There is, no doubt, a lot of empirical and theoretical knowledge that is quite useful, but there is another kind of practical and empirical knowledge that has to do with how one can live a good life. And there is a different 'theoretical' perspective that is not pure method but aims to understand the 'higher' things. Theory, in that sense, is as much determined by its object as it is by its procedures. Such an understanding of theory goes against the grain of modern thought whereby everything (there is no 'higher' or 'lower') can be theorized (Jonas, again). 

In that older form of understanding one could be quite 'unread' and lacking in technical know-how, almost to the point of naivete, but still wise. Contrast that to the people who know an awful lot about their own very narrow field of specialization. That is not to deny the very real societal advantages of this division of labour, but only to pose the question of what actually counts as intelligence. Formidable advancements in the scale of information and knowledge still do not amount to greater understanding. In fact, the scattering of it across various disciplines and the increasingly theoretical nature of it means it has often lost its ability to represent anything meaningful to us. 

'The hand tells the bowstring:
   Obey me.
The bowstring answers the hand:
   Draw Valiantly
The bowstring tells the arrow:
   O arrow, fly.
The arrow answers the bowstring:
   Be my light
The target answers the arrow:
   Love me.

--Aleksander Wat.