Gadji beri bimba Glandridi lauli lonni cadori Gadjama bim beri glassala Glandridi glassala tuffm Izimbrabim Blassa galassasa tuffm Izimbrabim. (Photo: courtesy of Tom) ~ __ Da-Da, everything will be alright. "Here I am" Where? The Blue Fox doesn't exist. It is important to state this [as a ]fact. Anymore, that is. [Expunge]. The blue fox wasn't even blue but red. Always red. [Retract, Comrade] The blue fox has never existed. [Last orders]. This reeks of metaphysics. Why posit existence only to negate it later? [The first philosophy]. Logic demands putting things in the right order (first and last). You must break an egg to make... Now you are on the right path. Finish what you have begun. The blue fox, like the blue flower, never existed except in the sense of a fleeting wisp of a dream in the hearts of men. The blue fox slipped away and was only a name. Is only. A manifestation of the sickness of the minds of decadent bourgeois renegades, of the men & women who do not accept reality and imagine an escape hatch. The blue fox walked in the snow and all we ever saw were her footprints. That is enough, brother.
As the brim of the life is lit, And breath pours softly over the earth, And as Heaven moves ahead to the next city With deep airs, and with lights and rains,
He plunges into Hades, for his search is desperate! And there is so little risk...down there, That is the benefit of searching frenziedly Among the dust-shops and blind-alleys ...there is so little risk of finding her
In Europe's old blue Kasbah, ~~ On the other side, this will be no more. Departure dates etched so firmly to remind you of the transience. You're passing through. On arrival: the green lane: nothing to declare. Fires fragment this winter: the red and the blue...
'It says somewhere in the Iliad , Blue death closes his eyes.' 'Won't you come and say If you know the way to blue' || |||| | The life that went under; cold crystalline sea, diamond of foregtfulness. In the evening shade, by the trees, when I didn't speak, then I was true. 'Sadly, a long time ago/my voice fell mute.' Blue is the light that doesn't reach us. In the south, it is said, black becomes lighter, a shadow in summer, a word in parenthesis [ ].
What is the true colour of your feelings, when you sit alone in your room and sip your tea, the lights dimmed, the moon broken? As the hours twist and fall gently away, the reflection of your face pale, just visible on the cold windowpane, yet more real, and more beautiful than anything else in the world. Are your eyes green or brown? I forget. Or maybe with time they've changed. But what does remain the same, tell me? And nothing was in the details anyway. The snow was general all over, blinding me at first, until I awoke from this dream in which I was dreaming of you.
And you, yourself: a darker shade of white? Parts of your heart darker than the rest. Not to speak of. How strange, patching up the tear, preparing ourselves in shadows for the new life, unimaginable though it may be. This exile, this island-life, the blue all around me, never inside me.
It was evening, and the sea and sky were one.
Sea and sky were one blue flag, with no design but for the darker bluer line but no matter what we do you can't be me.
I've gathered all your pictures and stored them for safe-keeping in a box, cross my heart and hope to die. So that (when) the time comes.Then the hand will know what the eye could only see.
I think of you, of love, that foreign flower. The music stops. Come close.
...and the colours entered the world, like the first rays of the spring sunshine melting the ice. and there was no east or west, though your heart was north, north by north-west. the red mingled with the blue, the grey inherited the black. yet still the beloved's colours remained unseen. this blue beneath the black you wear...is it out of sorrow, or something else? what is it that makes you flow from my heart? the mirror turns to iron again, keeps your image locked away from me.
~~~
interesting post by bob (on the overgrownpath) on the relation between music and politics. you'd like to think there's a connection between, on the one hand, a sensitivity to beauty, greatness, the tragic, and on the other, a recognition of particularity and/or an aversion to generalizations that is consonant with, fundamental to, political liberalism. you'd like to.
the title of this post comes from something obin laden said. Guardian article here
She not only gets inside me, she worms her way into my heart like a snake. Deeper. All the way in. I take her in like a slave. I play my part faithfully so I, too, can get to her heart...
---adapted from Lust, Caution. Love wearsforbidden colourslike the blue beneath the black. The world carries on in astonishmnet, merriment, gracefulness. The settled quality of a life at ease with itself, the splendour of abundance, of borrowed finery, the peace of not knowing. The given-ness of the world, Their love of fate knows no bounds. Your lip curls, even though you're an oriental.
But elsewhere, far away, there are hands that would know, eyes that would tell. The grey of time passed through us. For a while it seemed as if the universe itself was nothing but a series of grey lines. And it lasted but a moment, like a snowflake falling on your face. But the moment was all. The queen shed a tear, and it fell like a shard of glass into my eye. Now everything is tinged with the blueness of her soul.
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.. ---R.Hass.
Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated. --Simone Weil.
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven Fromgreenandbluethings and arguments that cannot be proven.
Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even if for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.
There was a mole on your face, a full stop on the blank page..that took me to you. You looked for the place: a hole, a well in the sky, an opening so you could fall upwards...it took time, it took light, it took time to find my human form.And it was not so different from yours.
This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.
Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then placed her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.
I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.
Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.
I am not the space where I am. I am not what I am.
All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them. ---Raban on Lowell.
The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them. (originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)
~~~~~~~~~~
Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')
Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...
In the depths of the forest your image follows me.
And how are things today? Kind of better?
Kind of.
A category of blueness that shades into different realms. A category that is not a category. The chill of the warm mind, the tangible slowing down, the intangible evasions. Abstract, obtuse intelligence, a second thought. Still life. The cracked reflection tells a true story.
When you leave a place you remember to turn the light off before you go. Same as it ever was. Darkness. And then reality dawns, filters through. So many faces hard-set, a picture of harshness endlessly mimicked, when kindness, well, that's original, one of a kind.
Caught a fish. Thought she was the moon. Sweet she was. Though salty tears. Tender flesh. But bones. Sharp! Speechless. Threw her back. To where she belonged. With the moon. In the river of the night.
And now, b, repeat the rituals you have of beginning and ending...
fish sandwiches on brown, grain mustard, latte in a paper cup. the same seat. the New Yorker. The whirl of nostalgia. A book of poetry, scribbling, Strauss (the Blue Danube, if you must know, since knowing is something you set great store by). A final glance back at Charing Cross road, your home away from home. Fading light on the street, in the trees, on the windowpanes. You knew this moment would come, remember seeing the printed date of departure when you got here and turning your face from it. You try to hold yourself together...
Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or sand could by itself much better than real sea or sand or cloud. It chose that way to grow and not to move.. But roughly but adequately it can shelter what is within. "I grow", she said but to divide your heart again. Shelters. How precious they are to you. A star inside a rectangle, a recollection. When I first saw you I was there, looking aimlessly through a dark window, looking at books; I stopped in my tracks, saw your face for the first time and those sad/funny eyes looking back at mine. What took you so long to find me? I smiled and quickly turned around, in case you were a dream. How was I to know that you were there in front of me all the time, a reflection of my very own soul?
into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me.
I looked up. Clouds and time passed. And now you, a blue flower that doesn't exist, are like a blue light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame in my heart, casting a blue shadow.
Life is a dream within a dream, or so it seems to me. Or maybe it is a series of dreams that I stumbled into and couldn't remember? When I am asleep you are awake.
You were beside me and I saw you, like the snow, asleep among appearances. Time, with no help from us, invents houses, streets, trees and sleepy women When you open your eyes we'll walk, once more among the hours and their inventions. We'll walk among appearances and bear witness to time and its conjugations Perhaps we'll open the day's doors And then we shall enter the unknown. How strange is the time between us! You walk forwards and I backwards, into my life. The swami explained: this is the way it is in the end of days, this is how it is when the world ends, when no-one loves no-one.
For Manuela (sorry, the last post was rot; thought this was better)
The blues defined a kind of perpetual internal exile of people who couldn't go back. ---Rebecca Solnit.
Hard to 'know' what this sense of feeling blue is. Perhaps the blues are precisely this not-knowingness, the bewilderment that follows from the gradual dawning that what is near is also far. That we are lost, and to be so is deeper than being found, that from time out of mind we have been alone with the Alone. The blue flames of love mourned the loss of the red. And Time will not heal it, and no words will help soothe it. I am still me, you are still you.
Courtesy of Astarte:
And the cities will be bright with blues
because the unhappy one
Burns once again, even if all is burnt,
Burns once again, even if too much or too little
Tries to find himself by breaking
To reach the inaccessible star
Something here reminded me of Montale's 'Little Testament'. But it is gone. Instead, Akhmatova:
Do you forgive me these November days?
In canals around the Neva fires fragment. Scant is tragic autumn's finery
This story by Isak Dinesen is retold by RebeccaSolnit:
An old English aristocrat, caring for little in the world, sets off with his daughter in search of beautiful blue china. On one of their journeys they become shipwrecked and the daughter is rescued by a sailor and for nine days the two are alone together on the sea.
.
Eventually the father finds his daughter and banishes the sailor to the far side of the world and once again all the daughter can think of is collecting blue china. "In her search she told the people with whom she dealt that she was looking for a particular blue colour and would pay any price for it. But although she bought many hundred blue jars and bowls, she would always after a time put them aside and say:'Alas, alas, it is not the right blue'.
.
Soon, she began to wonder if that blue even existed any more. Years passed, decades, her father died and finally a merchant brought her an old blue jar looted from the Chinese emperor's summer palace. When she saw it she said that now she could die, and when she died , her heart would be cut out and put in the blue jar.
.
"And everything will be as it was then. All shall be blue around me, and in the midst of the blue my heart will be innocent and free, and will beat gently..."
Crow, who knew the colours, imagined blue to be the distance of the soul. Crow, wise to the seasons, thought of space as the absence of time.
A restless god had created crow restless in the idle hours. With His fingers he folded her destiny into that darkness, whispered her name, gently smoothing her feathers down with the blackest of Indian inks as he sharpened her tongue. The Kajol around her eyes would often smudge when she remembered.
Odd, even. She has large eyes, marked in black. And take her mouth. A wide mouth as pale as wax. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened up to me.
(--after James Salter).
But on the day of her departure a small fragment of blue glass fell into crow's eyes. And it was as if there was a whole world in that small speck of coloured dust. How crow loved to live in that blue world of hers!
But as time passed crow began to realise that her friends were disappearing one by one, and this began to weigh heavily on her heart. Many a man had tried to ensnare such a wondrous, strange creature-unique in all the world- capture her secret, but each time she would escape their nets -even if she sometimes enjoyed being bound, sometimes rested her head on their shoulders for human warmth, and even though she occasionally clawed her way into their hearts, softly craa'ed "now!" or "again !" into their ears in the early hours
An artist of the floating world. He thinks to himself: What is real anymore and what but an illusion? Am I any less real than those around me, was I the only one who wasn't serious?
Do the lanterns hanging above the heads of the characters represent the state of their souls, each encapsulating something of what is quintessential, each a veritable world in itself ? At one level the painting seems to me to be about the gaze and how we avoid looking at what cannot be looked at. The void. The clown's abstract look into the distance, the man in the beret-the Frenchman-with his sharp, this-worldly look, the man on the extreme left of the picture, isolated, radically cut off from the world and society (indicated by the vertical beam that acts as a symbol of separateness)...each has a way of looking at, engaging with, reality.
The man on the left-the pimp- holds himself, as if for reassurance. He is wrapped up in himself and quite oblivious of the others. It would be true to say of him what Augustine would say of man in general: he doesn't even know that he lacks , or what he lacks. There is only a quiet, almost resigned, desperation about his whole demeanour. The lantern above him bears an uncanny resemblance to the moon. Is this a co-incidence or are we to infer some sort of mystical union between the universe and the self? In this case, someone, something, that is sad, reflective, heavy with thought. Maybe, then, the painting is about our connections and relations with the stars and ourselves and maybe that order has come unhinged...we are left to freely float in an alien universe.
I think, however, that the painting is really about the connections and relations -or rather the lack of them-that we have with other people. It is about people who are isolated from one another and the world. And what of the central figures, the only ones that seem to form some sort of worldly relation to one another? Who is the woman defiantly looking at us? A prostitute, an outsider who is someone beyond the pale of normal human relationships that go up to make the solid world of bourgeois respectability. The man with his back to us , a client , is a person from such a world and he freely intermingles with the undesirables, the marginals. What does this tell us? That the only exchanges between human beings are artificial, tainted with self-interest, a search for nothing but the meeting of bodies?
But perhaps the woman doesn't really belong to this group either. As a misfit, she is closer in spirit to that other painted figure, the clown. Both are theatrical performers, both see the illusionary nature of reality and help others find joy in contingency. But I think the figures-perhaps stereotypes is a better word- are also linked in a different way: the cigarettes. Perhaps it is the three figures who we see smoking who are linked by some inner bond, some common outlook. But if they are, it is not something we can divine and it remains hidden, only a symbol like some undecipheredhieroglyph whose meaning escapes us.
In one sense, though, the story revolves around the clown and he is the central axis around which the others might be understood. Since here we are presented with a uniqueness and singularity that we can read (the man on the extreme left is also isolated, but he remains a closed figure and we can never be sure of exactly what he is thinking. It is this mysteriousness, these thoughts of his that are incommunicable, that places him beyond the frame). Where one might expect an angel or a hero one finds a clown! At the still heart of the universe is there only a cosmic joke? Is this what the clown sees and is this what he is trying to look beyond, to out stare the nothingness? The lantern above him is hell-like.
Behind the characters lies nothing but different shades of blue; they are engulfed by it. Is this, then, the wreckage of human history. Perhaps there is nothing left to say. In the last days there can be no further developments, as each person becomes what he or she was in truth, each is reduced to their own essence and nothing else, and this thought fills them with horror.
The figures to the right are obviously from the upper-middle classes. Again, one can see this in the lanterns which give one the feeling of opulence and restrained splendour. Here, again, we are made acutely aware of how people inhabit utterly separate and distinct worlds. And one begins to notice the infinite distances between the lanterns, the abyss of desert spaces. Robert Hughes was right to say that Hopper had recognized that in America the great frontier had moved inwards. I see the woman as talking to herself, trying to explain something but the husband's gaze has left her and his thought is elsewhere. Even in what one might expect to be the most intimate relation there is a terrible chasm. It is as if Hopper is saying even in what is most familiar, the sure world of marriage, there is little else but the avoiding of eye contact, there is, in these 'evenings of the mind', a deep chill in the heart and one cannot help feeling blue.
What is near at hand is infinitely distant. It is not the light from without that fails, but that from within. ~ The perfect painting is where the human figure has disappeared. Just wave upon wave of blueness. ~ Meno: How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you? ~ ~ Rebecca Solnit:
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This is the light that got lost..the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not reach us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the colour blue. ~ Into the Blue again. Silent water Same as it ever was, Same as it ever was. ~
Call it what you will, Cuban blue or the sea, sorrow or longing. For what is irrecoverable, irredeemable, the colour of absence, this irreducible distance that is silence, is not bridged by memory or desire.
It is far away. It is close at hand. All one can know is that yearning makes the heart grow deeper.
Out of the blue. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.. ---R.Hass.
Let us love this distance , which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated. --Simone Weil.
Nothing is given; everything is fresh, wild. Unanticipated. If the wonder is that death, the impossibility, all of a sudden becomes a possibility; if the truly amazing thing is that life emerges from the infinite silence of stone, then it is also true that we are dazzled by the fact that death itself-even though for a flickering moment-becomes an impossibility.
This earth, this sky, this place I call home. Nothing seems more beautiful to me right now. I am the space where I am.
Near Snaresbrook, on the Central Line, a young girl looked at me as I sat absorbed in Richard Ford's Sportswriter. Her mother and aunt sat there like some commanding matriarchs, stone-like in their solemnity, the world rolling off their sad blue-grey eyes, making no impression. Mountain people. One always recognizes them. They've seen it all before. The elaborate and profuse red and gold embroidered patterns on their black veils indicating the presence of a human soul. Three young white kids got on, boisterous, full of themselves. The young girl just plays with her pony tails-a dreamer who curls up in contemplation of loops, who sees the end in the beginning- and then places her head gently on her mother's shoulder, pulling her closer to her by the arm, nesting in that immense black assurance: 'Mother, you mean the world to me'.
I listen to the Molla and Reijseger. To listen to this is to hear the music of the earth before human beings set foot there, an earth still quivering, still holding something of the memory of the Creator's hands, the clouds still clinging to the mountains, like a dream, the stone dimly aware that a thousand images lie captive in its heart: But a voice made me come out of the angle where I was beginning to die of an angel's dream.
Or, better still, it is the soaring cry of the First Man. The infinite is placed in us finite beings (if only Descartes had been a Muslim!). This is why we break. This is why we long so much for other skies, for the wild blue. Every act of true perception takes us there.
I am not the space where I am.
I am not what I am.
All the looseness, the dispossessed details, the faint hints, of the rest of the poem settle into the firm order behind the last line. We discover in retrospect what Lowell was doing was keeping all the ingredients of the poem in a state of fluid suspension, floating in readiness for the net with which, in a single moment, he could scoop them up and contain them. ---Raban on Lowell.
The poet sees earth and sky; the scientist or philosopher: only earth-and that too through a prism. The more this earth, this sky reminds us of others, the more we come to love them. (originally posted, Saturday, 28th of July)
~~~~~~~~~~
Today I was thinking of how little wild blueness is left; instead, we tend to speak in terrible cliches or, worse still, try to beat every ounce of "meaning" from anything we touch or come across. So, I instinctively flinch when I hear someone harp on about "class consciousness" when it comes to a film-in the same way I would if I saw a donkey being thrashed. Or the "nausea " of Hollywood, the "decadence" of the west (yesterday a student actually came up to me and said 'in the west they think freedom means you can have incest.' Yeah, like, keep on taking the pills bro')
Have you ever thought, maybe the beast was within.It's like hearing a mullah speak, or a Communist or George Bush. The same old record, stuck on the same old track. Thinking by slogans, painting by numbers! (Incidentally, found Mao's the Red Book last evening. What a load of utter crap! ) Science, Freedom, Progress..keep on repeating these words enough and, hey, who knows, you might actually convince yourself to believe them! There's no place like home, there's no ...
Came across Murakami's 'South of the Border' and paid 100 Rs for it. Regretting it now, could have had a coffee for the same price. Read 8 pages and trashed it.
As with all twelve year olds ..our conversations were strained. Strained??
We listened to those fifteen records a thousand times, and even today I can recall the music-every single note.Listening to Liszt's Piano concertos: I felt elevated, lifted to another plane of existence.
Don't know. Reading over some of what I've written I can't help but cringe. So much of what's on the blogosphere-or whatever it's called-is just so fake, phoney and full of this melancholy brooding.
[dougal, this is what your friend wrote in a review of this book for The Independent: This simple prose acquires a luminosity which raises it to the height of poetry]
