The Last Days

(Alejandro Kirchuk)

(Santiago Arcos)

In the last days, the last hour, the human hand gives itself away.

In the morning, light and colour return, objects- and life itself- take shape: a smile, spilled milk, your face turned away from me, the sleeping child, sharpened pencils, ironed clothes, mirrors, Van Gogh's Sunflowers...

The sun brings forth all these things but it is, after all, only a burning star and, like our days, a wisp of smoke.

~

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates the animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020.
--The Guardian.

Lost time

We stand, in wonder, and look at the time that has been lost, with empty hands.

~
'The unlimited cannot be attained by organization.'

---Rosenzweig.

What is given, is accepted, with empty hands.

~

What would it mean if that one hour on Sunday morning, the one hour of aimlessness and detachment, was carried over into the week, gave it order?

The small impulse to look around, without the need to grasp at anything. The small pictures we carry with us that we can still hold up to the light. Most questions have ceased to be important, or questions, even. Things grow and decay; the old way of being passes like an evening shadow in the long grass. This, too, is a way, you think. 

'She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way'

Each blue morning you think: someone grows a little, someone else is diminished; some star is on the rise, as someone else, in some distant land, trips and stumbles. There are other stars, at least one.  

If each person's soul is an aspect of revelation, then what of the blank spaces between the words?

`

In the old country we moved into a house with many layers of the past still only half-buried. Great rattling windows and creaking floorboards, the house alive in the silent, small hours of the morning. Old 78s in a dark, dank room under the stairs, crackling voices from a bygone era filling the stunned room. The dark cellar in which we kept cartons of malt vinegar. How did we end up here, of all places? Why this town, where all those who lived there lived as if they had already disappeared or knew someone who had? The old people visiting each other, as if on a last visit, some last rite, as if to say, "yes, now we understand" or "forgive us". November, a time of forgiveness, said the poet. 

Stop. Listen. Look both ways. 

Old Mr Baldwin, born before the War, in thick brown tweeds, a childless teetotaller with boiled sweets in his deep coat pocket for spoiled nephews and nieces. He would sit there, alert, blind to the world, resting both hands on a wooden cane as he listened to stories from a country even older than his, knowing something of what it meant to be stranded.

The Sunday papers sprawled on the floor. You sit arranging silver emblems in your scrapbook as you wait for the roast beef and mint sauce to be done. 

And on faded tapestries, the chill certain sunlight from those childhood hours'. What you write today, is that also not another kind of arrangement of silver, one that has inherited the black? The room filled with warmth, the unplayed piano-apart from 'Once in Royal David's City'- to one side, simply forgotten. The hands, always lacking skill. The slanting rain pelting the rag-and-bone man for the last time, the coal smoke, the crumbing fires. This flame-like image..brief, brief our hearts..and then it is gone.

{words borrowed and mangled from Rilke}

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 world of late antiquity

(Image by Pelligrin)

(Tamas Dezso, Romania)

~

An inventory of things lost:

I remember lunch, at the Old Dutch pancake restaurant on New Oxford Street, with a pretty Cambridge girl, who went on to achieve great things. Oh well, the pancakes were very good.

The colouration of your hands doesn't bother you any more. The sun has bronzed them evenly at least and I still have my knees to remind me of my childhood: a scar from a fall. I remember it well.

My hair is thinning at an alarming rate, so that I look like an bemused Koala Bear if I grow it long. A friend says I look like Gene Wilder. It must be my sad eyes, or some ancient Jewish strain.

The lines on my fingers are deepening and becoming more pronounced no matter how much I avoid them. Yesterday I met someone who said he had a unique hand for he doesn't have a 'heart line' on the palm of his hand. Everyone turned to examine their own, for we rarely care about the fate of other people. It turned out that three other people in the room were missing that line.

I walk around with a green ink mark on my thumb. It will wear off in time. Even the mark on the obscure document will eventually wear thin and be reduced to green powder.

Little r shouted at me: Why don't you go from here! Leave this house.

"But it is my house!, " I said sternly.

She started crying, which was a bit unfair. I hope she isn't a Communist.

Something is lost in tears. The history of the world could be written silently of all that has been lost.

~~~

You sit in a large oblong room, brilliant white walls punctuated by beautiful round windows. You look out to the sea. Twenty five years ago there was only desert here; desert and bedouin with no history and no memory (except, perhaps, some distant folklore or tribal storytelling). There were pirates and smugglers, an inward looking people for whom the shadows of the stars were enough of a mystery for a lifetime. What can be lost in such a world? 

Breakfast with Francis, an old Indian hand. charming conversation-mostly cricket and Peter Brown. A good selection of food, Francis?

"Frankly, I find it all obscene!"

Which was a shame because it meant I couldn't get a second Danish pastry without going down in his estimation.

~~~

To lose track of what one was saying. To lose track of what one was stalking. The lack of orientation in the Orient. My heart sinks day by day for no reason, until it enters a reverie and remembers all that is lost.

: Language, grammar, old letters (aerograms), a simple watch with a grey face and silver hands, newspaper clippings, time,..

Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place?
Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask.
Originally?
And I hesitate.

--Carol Ann Duffy.

if not winter

There’s precedent for it. The angular sun on windows or the blustery light through the wind. The leaves and trash raised an inch, dying down, settling again. It gives me great pleasure to view this ancient power fading, to see this orange disc through the latticework of a leafless tree.

Today, a day for gathering: loose money and fresh walnut bread, apples, old white shirts- starched and dry-cleaned. To look at one's own life from afar, as if one were viewing one's hand with a great and mysterious detachment. 

The words we know and the words we don't are mirrored in our gestures. Nothing translates in winter and our heads are filled with second thoughts. My hands are dry and empty. 

A story by Breece sounds hollow,contrived. There is nothing to follow, no letters, no staged performances, just this slim volume, a life condensed within this thin jacket, the imprint of a hand on a windowpane. If this is not winter, then what is?  

'...and like Lear unable to say if your hands were your own'
---Tim Liardet.

What does that mean? You'll have to ask the old dougal who has probably read Lear a hundred times. 

But you get the drift. Most of what you understood-which wasn't much-was always second-hand, derivative...about right. As you age there are no new things to understand (or, more accurately, that you want to understand).Instead, you fumble over the few familiar things, trying to tease out something different...

Everything seems to be moving away from you, at an angle, with greater speed (and for that you are also grateful).

Back in the old country the first days were spent peeling off wallpaper. There were at least eleven distinct layers and it seemed we'd never get to the first wall, primal, pure, the beautiful blank space. Each layer put up was someone's life. How many hands have changed? 

We lived without colour for a month and warmed ourselves with coal brought from thick sacks from the garage. There was an old piano, on which false notes were played. Some of the keys were mute and when pressed only produced a dark thud. The central keys were bright, on which we started Once in Royal David's City. Gradually we forgot. We were among the many who disappeared. 

Turn the pages, peel them back, finding, not finding, the hand's fixed pose, the word, like love, stuck in your throat....everything is a return, to a broken world, where you are still. I can't even remember the last time I spoke, I mean, spoke. The lost self, the dream, the name you can't recall. That's the least of it.

Tony said: you always have books in your hand; your hand has permanently curled around them, even when you walk. I carry books with me, not to read, but in the way a religious person wears an amulet to ward off evil.

What will you re-read? Cheever's prison book, perhaps when you're out of prison. I have books in hand, I have time on my hands.

The Nature of Connections

Across the generations, the final boundary itself, hands reach out. There's a remarkable painterly quality to this picture. K. Clark, in what seems an age ago now, wrote about Leonardo's hands and how they showed the self-revealing gestures of the soul.

Nothing new here, just the same old sins committed in the newest of ways, just the same old hands lamenting the fate of lost children.

In the mean-time, the old communities of Iraq (Christians and Yazidis) are being driven out. Your first instinct (always the wrong one) is to return to M. Wood's Legacy and Peter Brown's masterly World of Late Antiquity.

How many connections go into the world we see before us, the settled patterns of life, the wood and glass from unknown quarters, the idea of high windows, the lyrical slanting light on the practical and minimalist bookshelves?

The rain descends, the light fades and winter finds its place again in the human heart. In summer, everyone finds their own way, their own singular patch of shade.A small grove of trees is like an island. Little r stands on the tree stump at the centre of it. 

"What do you have to say?" 

"Nothing. Nothing to say." 

Palestinians have a low IQ and "deserve to be dead" (Joan Rivers). And in the Knesset there is talk of "shipping" the Gazans out. Er..in the good old days that used to be called ethnic cleansing.

The art of listening, like the art of looking, is on the wane. The are no iron-clad arguments, just intuitions.  

In revolutionary times there are those that seek some new gesture; there are others who marvel at the deep continuity of the shapes human hands make. Start at Year One or hope that time will come around again, that the past will carry on into the future, as something lived, known, even if unspoken.

And now, when things change at such an alarming rate, the hands of the father are not recognized by the son.

Does the last moment seal, put a stamp on, all the moments that went before it? Does the last moment reveal or upturn, confirm or bewilder? There are hands that are full of sin, and there are poor hands of simple, elegant grace; hands that have known the years go by and that bear witness, others whose movements say nothing.

There is universal human nature, national culture, the genius of place, continuity of work patterns, family inheritances..and against all this the individual scrambles his or her way out into the clear, emerging like a bright, clean shoot. Against the solid and slow moving way of life each individual gesture could be recognized and each find his or her place since stock phrases, facial expressions, ways of speaking and hand gestures would be repeated year after year, unknowingly. Now? Our hands are more anxious.'Talk to the hand' means: there is no more mutual comprehension. Increasingly you see hands and fingers busy texting.

The revolution, she said, will be me & you.

Above: a picture of Tina Modotti and one by her. What a life! Stumbled across her looking for Paul Strand's Mexico pictures (which you saw at the Tate a few years back).

~~~

Wahabinomics.

I've often found economists to be a bit asocial (or anal) and one wonders whether anals are drawn to the subject or if the subject makes them like that?

With their quest for purity, their simple, reductive assumptions, and construction of 'pure worlds', they are a bit like the wahabis! Also, given the imperialism the analogy may not be too far off the mark!

the lost moments of our lives

Susan Bell on Epstein:

"Gesture gives many of these pictures their pulse. Tender hand, strained shoulder, swivelled hip. It isn't the fact of 13-year olds smoking that shocks, but the grace and knowledge in the young fingers that hold the cigarettes."

"Epstein's world is one of quiet individuality. It is about the pursuit of pleasure before pleasure was commodified, he says. now everything is so packaged. People drink, dance, hold hands and gaze out to sea, independent of the frantically consumerised world growing up around them like a jungle that gradually blocks out the light.

---Carol Roux, The Guardian.

"There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown."

---Flaubert.

Last week a dear uncle said: we're living in times when each bough, each branch, doesn't know what's happening on the other side of the tree. Is it so very different for human beings, for a single human being?

This accumulation of glances, turns of phrase, gestures, inflections, the thick and warm darkness of the past intuitively known that holds us together, like a single thread that shows up now and then in patches; the "patchwork heart" with its own territories, distinct laws. Our minds: a kind of play between shadow and light. Your hands a witness to what you are or have become, the self-revealing gestures of the soul, of a life lived underground. These timeless forms taking shape, linking us across generations...a hundred, a thousand years have passed and yet for all man's progress we remain strangers to ourselves. These solid, unknown selves. Is it me? Is it you? The rain in our lives; clay gapes; clay agape.

Take any man

Walking on a road

Alone in his coat

He is a world

No one knows

And to himself

Unknown

Yet, when he wanders most

It is his own way, certain

As spheres astronomers note

In their familiar motion.

---Menashe.

Gestures, jesters

By the end of the 19th century gestures had ceased to exist for the western bourgeoisie.
---Agamben, The Man Without Content.

The self-revealing gestures of the soul.
--Kenneth Clark commenting on Leonardo's 'Last Supper'

There are some gestures that appear to be highly stylized-the 'mudras' in Hinduism/Buddhism, the attestation of divine unity in Islam and so on. There are others which are culturally specific or maybe linked with a particular vocation or the land..anyway, such a connection, if it did exist, remains largely forgotten in the mists of time...

[aside: the Greek 'Moutza' seems quite similar to the Punjabi 'lanath' and both are, perhaps, connected to shame.]

Traditional civilisations remain faithful to their decor. A Chinese interior of fifteenth century could equally date from the eighteenth...compared with China and the rest of the world, the characteristic of the West in matters of furniture and interior decoration was undoubtedly its taste for change....The beautiful was represented by the feast-day costume, often handed down from parent to child. It remained identical for centuries on end, despite the variety of national and provincial popular costumes.

At that time [1700] the world gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere its new meaning: keeping up with the times. From then on fashion in the modern sense began to influence everything. In fact, the further back in time one goes, even in Europe, one is more likely to find the still waters of ancient situations like those we have described in India, China, and Islam.

---Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism.

Is this, then, the secret of the west's success: the ability to constantly re-invent itself? Is this an indication of its boundless, restless energy, its joie de vivre or might we detect something else going on here?

The quote has the authority it does because it destroys all authority; it is picked up and isolated from its social context where it had meaning and value. It is abstracted from a living tradition, a lived experience. In a similar vein, the collector acquires things whose value has either become completely privatized (my things) or destroyed in the process of being brought into the nexus of market exchange: a mere thing amongst things. It ceases to remain something fundamental to our social world and belongs to a spiritual economy whose barest outlines we do not even fathom.

In some sense, then, the modern west can only accumulate relics from the past, can only stage the past in some spectacular display (museums). The art-objects of other cultures are , first and foremost, viewed as 'objects' in setting that has no or little relation to the web of life from whence they came; they cannot be touched or handled and they very rarely touch us. Instead, they must be displayed behind a protective screen, to be gawped at like a fetish, some lost remnant of a past that no longer informs our present or maps out the horizons of our futures. For sure, we may marvel at some technical ingenuity but on the whole, we are only moved by surface phenomenon. Our response is merely an aesthetic one.

Could there be any clearer indication of the negation of the past as a vibrantly illuminating principle for our current thoughts and actions? Instead, the past is well and truly 'killed', stuffed so that we can think of it as passed. Our unhappy consciousness may on occasion be struck by a sense of nostalgia but this quickly evaporates on coming into contact with the real world again.

This loss of tradition (call it what you may: authority, continuity, cultural transmission) is something that is not to be mourned we are told. But perhaps art can now only be a story that tells of the ending of all stories, a perpetual state of mourning is all we have to cling on to....

Modern dance always seems so clumsy, clownish-a free for all. Just do it, go with the flow, express yourself. When the most elegant of dances grow out of highly ritualised movements and one can say the same for the most passionate as well-Flamenco. Perhaps we need to think of creativity in other ways now...

~~~

Gosh, re-reading this makes me sound rather conservative and highly opinionated! Er...don't even start reader!

Strange, when you really don't care much for authority, when you think that much of what passes as 'continuity' is really stagnation or a desperate kind of boredom. And isn't it true that what is said here flies in the face of a lot of the 'open' , 'blue' and 'broken circle' posts?

Certainly you still think that the 'staging' of the past (for political and cultural uses) is one part of modernity-but it's only one part, and evidently not a central feature. To say "can only accumulate.." is bordering on the polemical.

But what about the gestures? Cut to the chase, Watson.

No, the world is till the world, and simple gestures are still unmiraculously understood by most. The fundamental things still apply as time goes by. A sigh is still a sigh. There is no failing of language or words, there are still as many (good) storytellers as there have always been; I wave, you wave back; I say something, you blush. I have to make a sign to show I've no more soul to reveal to you, and you're still a clown. Which gesture, jester?

The Undetermined Animal, मुद्रा

What gives such disturbing power to his [Leonardo's] drawings is that 'something within him'...was analogous to an objective truth of nature...We can see from his studies of grasses and of plaited hair that their vital interlacings were all part of the pattern of his being and that the intensity with which he gazed at whirlpools was the result, rather than the cause of this pattern....

That Durer should have looked with heightened perception at the human hand is exactly what his whole work and character would lead us to expect..all his life he saw humanity through the deeds of its hands, whether carving or arguing or praying.

---Kenneth Clark.

The stylized gestures of the soul. Sangeeta explained some of her hand gestures just before the performance. The path from illusion to truth was represented by two movements: her hand swerving like a snake to a finger pointing upwards-which is quite familiar to muslims, of course.

contemplating pigeons

Please do not feed
the pigeons.
They are a health hazard
and a nuisance.

I saw this sign, tucked away in the corner, at Acton town station. This is one of those places that is at the end of the world, half forgotten, half abandoned, and yet is still mysteriously populated by old people shuffling about in their 1950's thick woolen chequered coats, people with old- world grimaces and crooked teeth, a place that is permanently bathed in sunshine, as if it was always a Sunday afternoon there. Past Ravenscroft. It's better not to stop there, but quickly pass through, convincing yourself all the time that such places do not really exist...

That someone should say "please" only confirms that this is England. Note: it is not "do not"...not a command but neither a request; a thousand years of English tradition are summarised in those words: the law is binding but it is a tradition, a set of customs and precedents and common sense behaviour, not a directive nor a moral imperative.

What troubles her, though, is the use of the words "they are"; this has the ring of metaphysical certainty about it. Can one be so sure that all pigeons are a nuisance or is it only these ones that have reached the end of the line, the retrogrades that have escaped the centre? It is as if one wanted to define the very essence of pigeonhood in terms of this one characteristic (and let us not forget that they may have many other traits as well). Surely it would have been better to say : "they may be a nuisance"?

I imagine an elderly Benthamite figure sitting there, calculating the exact costs and benefits of allowing the pigeons their freedom; one has to weigh this against the "nuisance value" they impose on us humans; the problem of making inter-personal comparisons of utility pales before the difficulty of making inter-species ones!

Some pigeons think by being still, the Greek ones, that is; others, the muslims and jews, think whilst walking or fluttering their wings, as if in a mystical frenzy. Athens and Jerusalem.

My attention turns elsewhere. I see my shadow clearly outlined against the brilliant light; with my black hat and long coat the shadow comes to resemble a chess piece or a Russian priest against an infinite white landscape. Never have I seen myself so clearly as I did then....

---photo: courtesy of Roxana.

theatrical reflection

The problem with fucking originality is that it leads to reproduction.

Absence of mother is the necessity of invention.

Don't know why, but ropes seem to be featuring in my conversation quite a lot recently (don't ask). So, it was a delight to come across Hazlitt's essay: quick, and light, daring and agile, a dazzling virtuoso performance.

To grow up is to become conservative, mature; shake off that earlier childish coat of idealism and spontaneity and settle down into the received wisdom of the men in hats, settle for the conformities, platitudes and worn-out cliches of the bourgeoisie, or settle in with the flat-landers with their cheap pieties and tiresome religiosity.Make peace with your God. The stone-like, implacable faces of the intelligentsia are so serious and dour; to be lost in abstractions precludes all flexibility and suppleness.

my eyes have seen
what my hand did.

Certain movements and impressions of the hand and eye, having been repeated together an infinite number of times, are unconsciously but unavoidably cemented together into closer and closer union.

I am you, when I am I...
A net snared a net:
embracing we sever

---Celan

remember the colours

What I saw:

I sawe the grey spaces intervene and many clever people think themselves clever. Dull men in hats expounding fabulous theories, professors of Philosophies with their grand airs; and learned men of science tightening the noose around Mysteries. A buffoon Preacher with grotesque hands so puffed up at the sound of his own braying. All and one claimed to know what could be known. And yet, to my way of being, there was to be found no light in their words, no delight to be had in their companie.

To be the wind, not a statement about it.

I have become a question to myself.

Who said what? Analyse it, dissect it. Point to the passage in the book..and wouldn't you just die without Mahler? What does it matter if you cannot live it?


Alone. Together.
alone, together
alone together

Distinctness, singleness. togetherness. uniqueness. gem-like separation of our being. love is not a goal; it is only a traveling. only.

blossoming means the establishing of a pure new relationship with all the cosmos..this mysterious other reality of things in a perfected relationship. it is into this perfected relationship that every straight line curves, as if to some core, passing out of the time-space dimension...

creation proceeds from the ever inscrutable quicks of living beings, men, women, animals, plants. the actual living quick itself is alone the creative reality. once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from creative reality and entered the realm of static fixity..you can't make an idea of the living self...

the great lesson is to learn to break all the fixed ideals, to allow the soul's own deep desires to come direct, spontaneous into consciousness.

Education as a guard against falling into mechanical thinking..a proper approach to the past and the future, memory and desire. To keep open, free from "rust" ..the spontaneous, free-wheeling self that spins away from dead material reality, mechanizations, the satanic mills of thought.

there must be no fixed activity, no fixed direction.

---D.H.L.

May I run, run, and never find.

---Shah Latif.

The slow, circling descent through time. like the gentle curvature of the hand that encloses itself. a return to silence, a deep welcoming silence. you hear the profoundly familiar creaking wooden floorboards under your feet, the sighs of the white doors. the radio with its steel dial like a compass, pointing north, true north. when dust settles and you can see clearly. you are attentive, child-like in your wakefulness. the return of music and silence. they turn to their books. everyone lovingly in their own world. you sit in the conservatory ("the conservative") and allow yourself to fall and fall...a dizzying stillness. the hand learns not to reach out. all the colours were here. home.

Life in Stone

The night is also a sun.

And for many a year thou might have seen the sun, on its rising, incline away from their cave on the right, and, on its setting, turn aside from them on the left, while they lived on in that spacious chamber.
---Q:18:17

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever,
both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space
---C. Milosz

From Celia:

Here's a poem for you, too, Billo. Anna, of course - first, last and always:

Yet somewhere life is simple, after all,
A light to warm and cheer and glisten
A neighbour there at dusk across the wall
Chats with a girl, with only trees to listen
To this, the tenderest talk of all.

The life we lead is decorous and wearing,
Our bitter trysts impend, like rites to preach,
While with its gusts a harebrained wind is tearing
The clauses off a scarcely started speech.

For nothing, though, are we prepared to lose
Our granite city great with fame and woes,
Its spreading rivers with their crystal floes,
Its gloomy gardens dusky green repose,
All those half-heard accents of the muse.

Beneath the chill roof of my empty lair
I count not the days that are hollow,
The Apostles letters I study there,
The words of the Psalmodist I follow.

But blue are the stars, the frost all lace;
New marvels each tryst heaps on,-
In the Book a red maple leaf marks the place
Of the High Song of Solomon.

Anna Akhmatova. From White Flock. 1915.

10:49 AM

t

You keep your distance with your system of touch.

--Tears for Fears.

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
I am aware of the touch.

In that momentary touch, that solitary moment, is there a 'subject' and an 'object'? Is the 'I' still I? Before this takes place I have already delineated an 'I' and a 'cup' that is independent of me, "pure extension". And yet, it is also true, on second thoughts, that I find myself in this world, at this particular moment, thinking of reaching out. So, there must have been the possibility of a person like me, a cup like that, and a desire just so. A desire to bridge the gap, a desire that would be impossible without the gap. So, the fact that I can posit an I' is itself a possibility (necessity?) of the world.

I can picture the world but does that (can that) picture also contain the act of me picturing? (Escher). Does the world create the desire or is it that the desire is what makes the world 'the world'?

End of the Road.
Thought may tell me what I can know, not how I should live. Knowledge is not understanding.

Beginning of the Road.
Now I think back to it, Mark had asked: Do you want some tea? Does the world come after language, after a question?

Do I sit there thinking whether the tea exists or not, that if I turn my face the other way it will no longer be? How self-centred! How mistrustful!

Is the relation to what is 'not- I' that which constitutes the 'I'? One could map the self by what it desires, by a series of absences. What would we be without that reaching out? Not: would we be the same person, but would we be a person at all? The tea, I note, has no such thoughts. But if I just reach out, thoughtlessly, mechanically, does this mean that I am just matter coming into contact with other matter or that I have no inner life? Everything, it might be argued, lies in having the right approach to the world.

I-It and I-Thou
Here I am; here it is. The chasm can be bridged; but other distances remain: It is not boundless space that separates us but Time..Time is the Space between me and You. And time yet for a hundred indecisions...

I reach for the cup of tea
Hand touches cup
Remembers it is hot.

~~~~

Celia writes:

Oh, Billo, This will seem facetious, but your post reminded me irresistibly of the following, which I'm sure you'll also remember:

There was a young man who said "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
If he finds that this tree
Continues to be
W hen there's no one about in the Quad."
"Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the Quad
And that's why this tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by Yours faithfully, God."

(Attributed to Ronald Knox, who was referring to the philosophy of George Berkley - 1685 -1753. I also seem to recall that E.MForster quotes it at the beginning of A Passage to India. Or was it Howard's End? Or? Somewhere, anyway.)

anton writes:

hi b, each time i come here i think one day i sit down and read all the stuff here. you'll see, one day i will really do that. have not read the april book by kadare but have another one here at home whose name i have forgotten and not yet read either....

"I am in no way interested in immortality,
but only in the taste of tea."
-Lu Tung

have a fine day

7:58 AM

old man

It now transpires that this, my favourite painting, is not by Rembrandt after all! The hands, so crudely done, cannot be the work of the master. It must be wonderful to have that skill and insight: the ability to discern that something isn't quite right, through the patient accumulation of learning but also through instinct. To be able to tell that the spirit doesn't belong here but is derivative.

And yet, does it make a difference? Isn't the worried look on the face, the furrowed brow, enough to convince us? Must there be a unity between hand and mind? There is something deeply satisfying, reassuring even, about a pre-existing harmony of hand-eye-mind; as the poet said:

My eyes have seen
what my hand did

It is said of the hands in The Jewish Bride that nothing more delicate has been painted in the history of art, and that nothing better depicts the deep strain of humanism in western sensibilites.

And yet, if this is Rembrandt is it possible to imagine that his wavering hands have lost something of their precision, their magical ability to conjure something out of the dark? If the hand registers our presence-as in the earliest Cave Art-then perhaps we are being drawn to a truth that Berger explains as: the human is no longer self-evident. Is he, then, painting the sentinet body's awareness of itself? If so, one can afford to forego attention to 'the whole' and can focus on the essential, as if a few details of a life illustrates what we fundamentally are. Under such circumstances proportion or fidelity to reality is not important throughout the composition. Meaning is not a pattern, not something that permeates each and every instant of our lives. It is a moment, a naked moment, in which we reveal to ourselves our secret...

Instead, the aim is to deliver us to the sense that here is a man doubled up by time, utterly withdrawn from the spectator's gaze, alone in his finitude.

Pain sharpens our awareness of such space. It is the space of our first vulnerability and solitude.

On a painting by Degas, Berger has this to say:

Watching the woman standing on one leg and drying her foot, we are happy for what has been recognized and admitted. We feel the existent recalling its own Creation, before there was any fatigue, before the first brothel, or the first spa, before the solitude of narcissism, at the moment when the constellations were given names. Yes, this is what we sense watching her keeping her balance...do we not all dream of being known, known by our backs, our legs, shoulders, elbows and hair? Not psychologically recognised, not socially acclaimed, not praised, just nakedly known?

Naked, Cuban blue midnight is your color,
Naked, I trace the stars and vines in your hair;
Naked, you are spacious and yellow
As a summer's wholeness in a golden church.

11/11

Colour seems to be a little exhausted just right now.
---Klee.

As you look out over No Man's Land there is literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness...No one can describe it. You might as well as describe the ocean.
--From , 'The Missing of the Somme'

Perhaps we will look back on these times as a sort of interlude, as a time when the relative stable world of the bourgeoisie wasn't such a bad option after all...

What is there left to see? Life here in the West has exhausted itself, played itself out, is done for.

Agony stares from each grey face.

What they take to be the most serious of matters is, for us, a mere trifle. We live in a time when the carnival is the norm. And each one is taught (taught..the irony!) to revolt. But the shock of the new doesn't shock any more and, increasingly, the desperate attempt to escape reality hides a profound disillusionment. Life is reduced to a game or to matter of utility or power. Is there anyone who can still think like a human being?

We are on a raft, a raft in vast and strange ocean. The memory of the ancients lingers on-but only just-in a turn of phrase, an occasional fragment of a story. Memory but a trace, as ephemeral as the breaking waves, as fickle to be summoned up by the most insignificant of things..a particular slant of the light, the smell of burning leaves..With one hand held to the forehead we protect ourselves from the glaring , blinding, sun; with the other, we jot down what we can see. One hand points to distant horizons, the Atlantic of Time stretching before us; the other brings us back to what is close at hand...the black and the white. One hand is hopeful, optimistic, open; the other hand, crab-like and pessimistic, writes of home.

The Allama would say that only Wordsworth saved him from losing his faith. And with us? Neither poetry nor small words will do; only the gaze of the beloved, the love of family and friends comes our way, as if like a silent breath from the Western Front...


For a long time I dwelt under vast porticoes
Which the ocean suns lit with a thousand colors,
The pillars of which, tall, straight, and majestic,
Made them, in the evening, like basaltic grottoes.
The billows which cradled the image of the sky
Mingled, in a solemn, mystical way,
The omnipotent chords of their rich harmonies
With the sunsets' colors reflected in my eyes;
It was there that I lived in voluptuous calm,
In splendor, between the azure and the sea.
-----Baudelaire