The Tree of Life

 

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

A day in the life of:

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

~~

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

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

--Angela Nagle.

~~

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

~~

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

~~

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

--Denise.

~~

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

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

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

Floating Light

 

 

k

It is as if there is only a single hour,& in that hour all the provender must be gathered,..He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it... --Salter.

Broke(n), he remembers the silver coin kept in his deep inner pocket, stored all this time just for a moment like this. & he recalls a word found in no-one's heart, "carried by silver and star and reflection" (Anselm Hollo).

A pale fire

A surprising dust storm in mid-afternoon. The dust whistles through gaps in the windows, rises elegantly from the dried-out playing fields, makes my hair tangled, blows into my eyes. I gather rocket and salad leaves. On the way back, this pale fire fluttering in and out of existence.  Wisps of seeds from a tree around it, ghost-like, perhaps forming the beginnings of a shroud. By evening the flower would have closed and the clam stillness of the evening returned but for the moment the earth is alive. 
 

The days of our lives

 

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

In this last year it seems as if a hundred years have passed by in a flash. What is left of my old life seems like an inscrutable mystery to me. And now the shadows have lengthened and become more distinct I find myself wondering if there are only these islands of the heart that remain...

You find yourself more alone than you could have imagined. So much time has flowed under the bridge..the old stone bridge itself, Tu Fu might say, is nothing but a dazzling moment under the eye of heaven, a dim reflection of some other place and time that we witness darkly. The days of our lives like the days of the world now...

And so now your relationship is to one of absences. The past has not disappeared but changed shape and lives within you now in a different way... 

Loss: the point becomes a circle, the line a square; what grows in me day by day is my own diminishment. A part of me wants to cling on to the idol of the old days since the path that has now opened up before me leads who knows where? And who would this "you" be then? I have become a question to myself...

I need to weave fragments of texts, sentences that spontaneously emerge, into my thoughts as a way of establishing some kind of continuity; either that or face the prospect of silence, of coming to terms with the lack of words for the way I'm feeling. What kind of place is this...

There's that scene from Offshore where the tide turns and objects slide, move about, swap positions. Nothing's steady anymore against these interruptions that weave their way into a life. Thinking understands the limits of thinking and ceases to be 'thinking'. Like Drummer Hodge you're now a northerner living under a strange southern star. Or maybe that star, north by northwest, continues to flow glistening darkly like the Roding in its season of despair. How to find a sense of being at home in your homelessness...

This song reminds you so much of a time of your life that is so distant and yet, weirdly, all the more real for existing on the borders of your consciousness. You can't name it but it drifts your way...

You've been drifting for so long. Perhaps you need to be truer to this de-centering before "the drift find the drifter"?

When told by the doctors that nothing more could be done the swami, citing Knulp, said: "The desire to sleep overcomes all other desires." Only she could have said that, half wanting to communicate her feelings and half wanting to remain a mystery. 

One of those 'strange reversals' (Rumi). For so long you'd asked not to become religious and now you find yourself willing but unable! Taste and see!, said the poet. And yet the words of poets and novelists mean much less to me, strangely superficial..a shallow form of intelligence. Was I the only one who didn't grow up? 

These lines by Hadot deeply affected me: Cut out everything; welcome everything. Familiar -at one level-to any Muslim. The question, as always, at what level?

Too try and grow into simplicity. To be less, to speak less in the time that remains. But to speak is to allow stilled time to flow again. 'Allow' suggests too much agency when you know it's otherwise. Does it make any sense now to ask where?

There is just one thing I can say- and maybe it's all I've got left:

Nothing lasts forever

But I will always love you.

Long Road

k


Today, in the late evening never have the streets seemed so empty, never the world so paper thin. It's like you can see only the polish on the table and not the table itself...

So many journeys together in the 275- and now I make it alone. You'd always ask at least five times for me to sit down so that my legs wouldn't get tired. I'm sure you remember that. Or try and pick up all the bags yourself. Well, not today, Ubo.

Why does this light remind me of so many other summers? Like the time we stayed in a caravan. There is no more time, not even hours and minutes, just these memories that go around and around.

How I have longed for you today.
How I have wished you to stay.

~~~

I won’t write much more.I know everyone has their own life and grief to carry on with so I won’t burden you but..

Do you believe in signs? I think the distracted mind will always look for coincidences and patterns. We always “ intuit unity”, join the dots. On the other hand, Over the last few years I’ve come to believe that there are signs, it’s just that we don’t know how to read them.

Last night I wrote something ( for myself, about my father) called the ‘long road’. In the morning I woke up with the ( ridiculous?) longing for some sort of sign to try and ease- is that the right word?- the emptiness.

I picked up a book at random ( only read bits of it before) and turned to an unread poem at random.

It says something about driving in the late afternoon on the 19 th of June, passing a dark cloud from a freight truck from Budapest ( I’ve been in regular contact with a dear student whose brother died in Hungary just now). 

Even if you don’t believe it, it’s okay..the poem itself is beautiful..it goes on..

Hours after your death you seemed

Everywhere at once like the swifts at twighlight

Now your moments are clouds

In a photograph of swifts.

It concludes with:

Dead, you whispered, ‘where is the road?’

There, through the last of the sentences, just there-

through the last of the sentences, the road

A letter, in case you're reading this (I've made the font size bigger for you)

You said, “There is a time and place for everything.”

Already this ‘you said’ sounds false, a way of creating a distance from you when your actual voice was always close by. When your spoken words, however plain, were real in comparison to the ghostly memory-voice. Moocha phoned and the way he abruptly and half-quizzically says ‘yes’ at the end of his sentences reminds me of you.

Did you even really say that? What if my memory fades, falsifies? How many false notes before it becomes a different tune? Or is that just another way of living: through stray words, images, the things you once held or wore?

I half expected to see you cleaning the kitchen when I woke up. In the park I catch myself looking for you.

What a mystery. Today I thought, for some reason, of the moment you were born, how you must have played as a kid. And this I remember clearly because the image is deeply lodged in my memory. Do only jokes and tears remain after all? You had dressed up as a fakir and, as a lark, went about with your friend collecting money, from street to street. You went to your own house and even nearly got some money from your poor old mother. But at the last moment she recognised you and then beat you proper!

What a mystery. A bird flying through one window and out the other. Is that it, then, the time and place? But you would never have settled for such an ascetic view, never held it to be the whole truth. It is true-and I have to agree with you here- that life on earth will always have some kind of imperfection and that it will never be complete. But that’s only the half of it for there is so much wonder in life.

I think you would have liked this:


"In an orchard there should be enough to eat, enough to lay up, enough to be stolen and enough to rot upon the ground."

I know you would have appropriated it and pretended they were your own words!

Nothing happens all day. Some letters are still arriving for you. I hate to think what will happen when they dry up. Well, what time would you call this now? I think you’d have been amazed yourself to see it. But even this no-time you would have passed through, worked out. Even this rotten time is part of the whole of time you would say and that it has its place. But more than anything you would have shielded me from it, negated the negation, and let time flow again for me.

It won’t last. Everything must fade. Perhaps even our memories.

Maybe that’s true. Let’s see. Right now, all I can say is that I know that nothing lasts forever, but I will always love you.

R.I.P. Ubo

k

You said that when a person's gone they're gone- and that's it. A wahabi till the very end! But you were wrong on that, old man!

You made me promise you not to get old. Well, I've tried. Now I won't see you get older, but it's okay. Guess it was your time. But we had so many good years- and for that I'm grateful. Well, on your way then. I know that since you always looked out for us even now you're trying to find a good place for us. 

I know your heart is true.
My heart is still, as time will tell.

'But your dance is ended
so sleep on and take your rest, my father, my Jew.'

No, not even Denise gets it.

I will always remember you dancing, almost hopping on one leg, arms outstretched, about to fall, free, not knowing beginning or end, with those deep sorrowful eyes. So, dance or rest in your own way, as you pass down that sorrow to me.

Solian

The heart's roots
are here under this black soil.

Every right word on your tongue 
Has a green taste.

The truth's here
Closer than the world will confess.

--R.S. Thomas.

¬¬¬

The sullying of the mind, the heart, in this late hour. Bewildered. A time for sheltering, for gathering and taking stock. But what if nothing has accumulated over all these years? We're haunted by old ways of speaking, older notions of time from our distant past and so we still talk about 'conserving' and the 'web of life'. As if we still retained some deep connection to cyclical time, the cycles of life.

The seeds of time. Where will you plant them now? Which filed will be allowed to lie fallow? The soil, turned over with love, will bring forth what new things, which green words?

What will be lost?

Lots of speculation about what a post-C19 world will look like. Lots of uncertainty, for sure, and probably lots of suffering (economic, mental and otherwise). The simple pleasures of social interaction, going to a restaurant with friends or family, reading in a bookshop..maybe they'll all be effected. 

Will reading, music or art be as important to us in these troubled times? How will we think of nature? Will our relation to time itself be restructured as we stop investing so much time and energy in future-oriented projects (a theme from Scheffler's great book, Death and the Afterlife).

What will you miss (or mourn) most in the bleak near-future? That was a question posed by someone on the internet.

Not sure if I’d use the word ‘mourn’ given the real suffering other people are going through right now- and that lots will probably face in the future. Beyond financial concerns, if I lose my job I think I will be sad because I will have lost a big part of my identity ( which makes me think, what exactly is my identity?).

But I still think it’s important for those who of us have lived a privileged life to be thankful for all the good things that have come our way over the years. I’ve travelled, had some great food, seen some great art but I live a pretty basic life anyway so as long as I have my family, friends and books close by I don’t know what I’ll really miss. If we are what we love then who am I?

In any case, I wouldn’t want to think just about my own life; what I’d be really sad about above all else is that my children might grow up in a much harsher climate. But let’s see. I know a lot of religious people would say ( and genuinely believe): if that’s what’s meant to be then that’s what it is ( even if though that doesn’t exclude regret).

There’s this amazing line in ‘Radical Hope’ where Plenty Coups, a Crow Indian, says:

My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

modern life

2010 - 2020

Dear Reader,

the other day someone asked this fascinating question: what has happened to you, what have you learned, over the last decade. I've got my own thoughts and will share them later but if any of you want to post (anonymously or otherwise), please do and I'll put the comments up here. Would be very interested to know.

~~

Solitude is like a tea ceremony, the celebration of life in all its homely movements taken out of time -- the wonder of the commonplace, the mystery of ordinary life ... Solitude is being poured-out-through. We evolve toward simplicity. We dwell in the Word.

--Maggie Ross.

Otto

in the forest, in the heart of the forest, so deep that you don't know if it is the heart. you see trees. today. 'the forest' is a concept. you don't live here. but you might die. maybe you already did that and are just wandering. no, not that. how do you make your way back. there is a something to go back to, you're sure. or maybe you just want to believe it so much that you can't bear the thought of it not being true. 

okay. now. what. what if there is no way. or what if there is a way but you don't know it. if someone just told you there wasn't then maybe you could sort of get by and your old face wouldn't matter. or if you god forbid. lost your memory. this isn't a question of theory. idle speculation. this is where you are, in the midst of it. some line in a book, firmly closed now..will that help. i don't know. go your own way. time. essence of. reason don't matter don't much don't expect. then. something else. auxillary. the old ways. love the only. now. where is this other room. 

your true heart.

k.

Celia says,

"I walk in a forest every day. Actually, it's only a wood. It even has a name, just to confirm: F_ Great Wood.I know its tracks and paths by heart. I shan't get lost. Because here I walk with ghosts who'll guide me back. Beneath my feet a maze of long-abandoned mineworks. Folk who died there, men and women, never got to have old faces. Being old, I think now, is an acquired skill - which I'm working on."

Love that- especially the use of the word 'shan't'. Will try and and say something about it soon.

winterground

S crushes some garlic in a pestle and mortar, the rhythm of her hand movements carrying something from another place, a long time ago. Awareness of mortality rises to the surface, heightened by the dim artificial lamplight that burns futilely in the morning light that moves to fill the house. Like the moon in the late morning, unreal, undecided, out of place. 

It feels like Spring. Your frame of reference is the hour-by-hour but the seasons seem out of joint. Perhaps it's only a global imbalance in the cosmos and not you.

There is a kind of silence here. Other places and times have words, sounds. 11 and the light has become more even, entering its long phase. Still, you carry within you last night's dream where you were there, though I can't recall your face. In this late stage of the day one must do without images. 'And then, face to face...'.

I note the hours by the pages turned. Time has passed without any sentences being marked by/with the lead pencil, whose blunt tip makes double lines, as if to emphasize something. There are whole stretches where nothing has happened- or, you just haven't been in tune. You've been reading the book for years, so it's almost become personal- not because anything inheres in you but simply because of the passage of time. So it is.

And the old distances remain old, even now.

The light is so frail, I'm sure I've lived through this life before.

How far away my old hearts seem. Was I ever alive?

Now it's as if my heart has moved many miles away. While I've been here all the time, South, adrift.

I've forgotten how to speak (don't flatter yourself, kid, it's a general ailment). Some words passed down, unknown. That's the way it goes. The books, words, people, and images falling back into mystery. The light is brief, carries with it its own darkness, waiting to reverse, faltering under its own weight.

What is not gathered is far more- perhaps the main thing.

Why, then, speak of your heart instead of absences if not out of an old habit? As the heart no longer nourishes the heart it hoped to nourish. As I write this clouds gather, making the letters on the keyboard hard to see. Acknowledge your own faults, mistakes.

I must have lived many days like this once, my face darkening in the backyard sun, my hands shielding me from its glare. The kitchen doors flung open, bits of broken conversation and laughter from long ago floating though the smoke while all the time you concentrated on the flowers making their way through the cement floor. Now, I grown dark, is it so very different? Except the voices have fallen away..

As winter comes on
our fate to have the colder moon born in us.

Lines from K. Irby and yourself.

The wave

It was on the inside
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple,
About to be whole.

--H. Dunmore.

You make a single wave. It moves away from your hands and extended arms, slowly and gently curling away from you, held in your eye's gaze for a few seconds more..and then it becomes indistinct, not even a murmur, rejoins the still water. 

What would it be to think only of the moment from the perspective of the moment? To be in it as it unfurls itself.

You see an attractive woman reading a book, lost. On the opposite side of her is a small tree whose every leaf shimmers in resplendent beauty. Not easy to know at what to marvel at.

The morning silence. An espresso. Try to make some notes. Mounier's incredible Personalism up next- not that you know 'what's next'. 

Last evening, before your run, you witnessed the last dregs of the day ebbing away, the last few notes of the day finding their equilibrium. The mysterious light just hanging there, on a few trees, the tops of buildings, already darkened, already suggesting infinite distances.

You noticed the ground for some reason. While you run you try not to think of any negative thoughts-and just let them flow away from you. You notice the earth beneath your feet, wrinkled, dusty and soft in places and hard in others. 

While you run there's something in the air, or maybe it's the quality of the fading light, that reminds you of some former time. How many thousands of years do we carry with us? What was my face like then? So many of those years washed away, but sometimes a wave returns your way...  

  

A kind of silence

There are many kinds of silence. Which holds me now?

I spend a lot of time in silence. Reading by the window, sipping my coffee or tea, looking out at the trees, the runners, the kids playing in their carefree way on the swings though it will abruptly end one day; a man digging a hole, a colleague returning from the gym. 

There are flashes of insight; something deep is remembered. I can't pull it all together. There is no 'together'.   

At times I do wonder. Wouldn't say that I'm gripped by panic but there is a sense of a constraint, a closing off. Silent words. Time is passing sentence on me.

At other times I feel I'm living a charmed life. Here I am, reading whatever I want, not knowing how things will turn out or how any of this will-if at all- settle into a pattern. What will come of this aimless reading? 

I have always greatly enjoyed people's company and have also loved to joke around-as befits a clown of the very first order. It's not that other people irritate me. No, it's not that at all. Nor am I on any high horse. I'm not any horse at all! But I can't engage in conversations about money or property or even academic ones since I find all of that unreal (not boring or pointless, but vacuous).

My silence is not something that one could call religious in any way. It is not connected to any 'practice' and nor does it deliberately seek some 'end'. It's just the way it is. This blog, too, is a silent space now that I think of it. 

Is it connected to a general slowing down in your life? It seems like a plausible explanation (not that you're overly concerned by such questions because you're not really interested in yourself that way). 

I don't think it's depression either. Sadness? Perhaps that's closer? But then there's nothing new there.

On the whole the overriding sentiment is: let it be. See what happens, what it does to you.              

The strawness of straw.

You remember to take a pencil with you. So that you can mark the words in the book on Spaemann.  Two hours of peace, sitting by the window, an espresso..

Before you get there you see a fetching young woman, moving at great speed, her hair tied to one side. You drop the pencil. There are no more words.

~~~

Rosenzweig continues to fascinate, though you're not really reading him, just plucking out sentences from a book. Deal with the demands of the day. Look around, small glances, towards the world, towards yourself but nothing more. Small steps. Don't look for some big truth or something too far away from your own life. At best, you're only on the first lap. Low-level, low key. Which means you're still on it, which is to say a lot. 

Mid-morning is a great time since nothing happens. Find yourself where you are. What do you say? The small space that has been allotted to you can, perhaps, open up if you allow it to..or, if you are granted permission. Apperception of Being is the humanness of the human. 

Denise: The strawness of straw. 

I grew up in a dark country, originally, sort of. Wales, my whore, with your old-time piers and last breath, made up of old forms and forgotten words. You arrived after so many detours and brief stints in old cities, hurtling to a stop in a second-hand maroon Anglia that cost 15 pounds back in the day. And witnessed, for what it was worth, the last remnants of a way of living that was about to disappear before everyone's weary eyes, a life whose key and timbre would enter no history book or official record. File under: 'Without Title' or 'Missing Persons'.

No-one arrived (or at least no-one left). Objectively speaking it was run down from day one and all the people seemed to be permanently tired. Borrowed time. The thriving port now a distant memory. Sunday roast and the obligatory ritual of boredom thereafter. Piece it all together and it doesn't amount to much, but what does? A few sharp memories, the dread of first days, but much else has sunk into oblivion. Wandering tribes have such fantastic features, Bellow wrote. Perhaps.

The familiarity of being a stranger to oneself, to the life you're living. First seeds sown in the dark right then. 

All cities look the same at dusk. Your hands stained with ink. Some of it smudges on the tightly arranged words in Anglican Identities. Perhaps that should be angular. Tyndale sounds like a wahabi. There must be patience, dry spells, an acceptance of absence- Lord help us. Nothing finds perfection; that's just the way it is. Speak, even though there's silence in your words, the silence that recalls other times.      

There is darkness in the morning. I don't know why. My books are scattered on the floor, on the desk. Why even bother with 'my'? The window is open. I hear birds chirping, a few stray notes from a guitar, distant but also close up if you know... I hear the silence of my own life and record it here, for you, as if you could tell it or you could hear it. 

There is darkness at eleven o'clock and I don't know why any more. The coffee was too bitter. Danish blue and walnuts. A quiet hour spent noting the thoughts of Finnis's Natural Law. Copy the words down in your hand until they're real. Old ways staying down below the lights keep the song of the world going, no matter how faint.

Eight hundred years of thought and commentaries, almost unbroken. The sky is older by a couple of billion. But the thought and not the theoretical formulation is older still. There is no time. 

The door to this phase of the year is closing. You'd take stock but all you got is a blank page and a blunt pencil. Why expend any effort. The birds are chirping in this mysterious darkening and there is laughter far away. Things roll by. Same as it ever.      

  

They do not see that the streets shine beautifully, that they themselves are walking on stars and water, that they are running in skies to catch a bus or taxi, to shelter somewhere in the press of irritated humans...

--Merton.